Pat Michaels loses his audience....

From the comments in the Washington Post Blog:

The class at VA Tech was cancelled this semester due to low enrollment.
Posted by: Jessica Brown | August 28, 2006 02:22 PM

Those interested can find the syllabus on the va tech web site. The aim of the course was supposedly to

Goal: To provide students with a foundation for future learning that will able them to integrate knowledge of the natural resource disciplines and generate innovative approaches that enhances environmental conditions and sustains ecosystem service for future generations.

In this regard it is interesting to look at what is NOT in the reading list for the hockey stick case study:

• Esper J., D.C. Frank, and J.S. Wilson, 2004. Climate reconstructions: Low-frequency ambition and high-frequency ratification. Eos, 85, 133,120.
• Esper, J., E.R. Cook, and F.H. Schweingruber, 2002. Low frequency signals in long treering chronologies for reconstructing past temperature variability, Science, 295, 2250-2253.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2001. Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. Houghton, J.T., et al., (eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K, pp 881, http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm.
• Mann, M.E. R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes, 1998. Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries. Nature, 392, 779-787.
• Mann, M.E., R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes, 1999. Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties, and limitations. Geophysical Research Letters, 26, 759–762.
• McIntyre, S., and R. McKitrick, 2003. Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy database and Northern Hemispheric average temperature series. Energy & Environment,14, 751-771.
• McIntyre, S., and R. McKitrick, 2005. Hockey sticks, principal components, and spurious significance. Geophysical Research Letters, 32, doi:10.1029/2004GL021750.
• Moberg, A., et al., 2005. Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data. Nature, 433, 613-617.
• Soon, W., and S. Baliunas, 2003. Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1,000 years. Climate Research, 23, 89–110.
• Von Storch, H., et al., 2004. Reconstructing past climate from noisy data. Science, 306, 679-682.

I am sure the Wegman report would have made it in there. The North one, I don't know. You can have just as much fun with the other sections. In magic, this is called forcing a card.

However the AASC/non official State Climatologist himself joins the fray with this comment:

I don't know why you refer to my older (2000) Satanic Gases, even though that book repeatedly argues that humans are warming the surface temperature. My newer book, Meltdown (2004) begins with the following statement (after the Foreward)

"Global warming is real and human beings have something to do with it..."

Any statement that I believe warming is not caused by humans in recent decades is simply not supported by anything I have written or said for a very long time.

However, in recent years, computer models have improved to the point that we can interface them with observed rates of warming to come up with a confident prediction of future warming. The math works it out to near the low end of projections made by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of which I have been a member for over ten years.

Having said that, there is no extant policy that can significantly alter the rate of observed warming for at least the next half-century. No one conversant with the scientific literature disputes that.

At the same time, humans are adapting. Heat-related death rates have declined significantly in almost all North American cities as they (and the surface) have warmed. I was an author on that work, which was awarded climate "Paper of the Year" by the Association of American Geographers in 2004.

Well, the Post is still open for comments, and I put up one, but feel free to go at it here too

(I am picking up these unhealthy obsessions, I know, I know)