Check out the story from Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit. (H/T Commenters ECM and James)

Basically, the story has to do with a data set that has been used to support the alarming hockey stick graph that shows temperatures rising abnormally in the last decade or so. Well, it turns out that the hockey stick is only possible because the sample size was reduced from 65 samples to 10 samples. When a different set of 34 samples is used from the same general area, the hockey stick disappears!

The cherry-picked data is in red. The larger sample is in black.

1) Notice how the the number of samples in the cherry-picked set in red normally has the same number of samples as the black data set, then suddenly the red set has a greatly reduced number of samples. Why were some samples excluded from the red data set?

2) Normally, the red and black data sets track together perfectly – but in the last few years, the cherry-picked set with fewer samples starts to diverge from the larger sample shown in black. So the red cherry-picked data set is useful in order to make the hockey-stick that the environmentalists prefer to use when arguing for more research money and government regulation of commercial and individual activities. The black data set with more samples doesn’t show a hockey stick graph, so it is no good to global warming alarmists.

Unbelievable. And this folly is symptomatic of the delusions that animate the left in their moral crusading. First overpopulation, then peak oil, then global cooling in the 1970s, and now global warming. Is there any limit to their insanity? Do the facts have no relevance at all to their worldviews?

Watts Up With That has more here.

I don’t see how this is different than refusing to look through a telescope to see that the earth goes around the Sun. This is just religious dogma on the left being embraced in order to feel morally superior to others, to have a sense of meaning in an otherwise meaningless life of selfishness, and to delude your neighbors into thinking that they should be controlled by their betters. It’s childish.

UPDATE: Al Gore is laughing all the way to the bank.

Story from the Wall Street Journal.

A tiny car company backed by former Vice President Al Gore has just gotten a $529 million U.S. government loan to help build a hybrid sports car in Finland that will sell for about $89,000.

The award this week to California startup Fisker Automotive Inc. follows a $465 million government loan to Tesla Motors Inc., purveyors of a $109,000 British-built electric Roadster. Tesla is a California startup focusing on all-electric vehicles, with a number of celebrity endorsements that is backed by investors that have contributed to Democratic campaigns.

[…]Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, confirmed that the former vice president backs Fisker and purchased a Karma.

[…]Fisker’s top investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a veteran Silicon Valley venture-capital firm of which Gore is a partner. Employees of KPCB have donated more than $2.2 million to political campaigns, mostly for Democrats, including President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign contributions.

See even though Al Gore knows less about science than my keyboard, he still understands profit and greed. Now may be a good time to review Marsha Blackburn’s efforts to get him to come clean about the relationship between greed and global warming alarmism.