More tree talk

Popped over to wattsupwithat earlier today to see the defence of the 'hockey stick' data underway. To be honest I'd have been amazed if those pushing the now discredited climate change science didn't try to do so. However, like a soccer team that is fifteen nil down with five minutes to play, the developers of the offending graph are not doing awfully well. If asked to describe their defence, I'd describe it best as a spirited but futile effort. Courageous but doomed.

The floodgates of scrutiny are opened and even the source data for their proxies are coming under the arboreal microscope. My question is; how can trees act as thermometers or even proxies for same when their optimum growth (and thus tree ring width) cuts across a fair range of rainfall / environmental / temperature? Especially (As I think I've posted before) to values with an accuracy of 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius? No one has really come up with a satisfactory answer to that one as of yet. All I've seen so far is obfuscation, jargon and mucking around with source data to meet a preconceived conclusion. It's almost as if a certain group of 'climate scientists' are stuck so deeply in a mental rut they can't see their way out.

In the world of finance, the much vaunted 'carbon credits' are down to ten cents a tonne on the Chicago exchange from a high of seven dollars in May 2008, which shows how much confidence the brokers have. One might even hope that the chief promoter of this climate change malarkey is destroyed financially by this market crunch, but no, if he can afford a luxury oceanview condo in San Francisco, I think he's already bailed out of the carbon trading market having sold out at or near the peak. Mind you, at the time I thought said gentleman didn't seem too bothered about the catastrophic sea level rises he and his fellow travellers were predicting not so long back.

Now bag is cat the out of and some investors will be looking for people to blame. I wonder who that will be?