Some Historical Perspective
...I’m looking at the temperature record as read from this central Greenland ice core. It gives us about as close as we can come to a direct, experimental measurement of temperature at that one spot for the past 50,000 years. As far as I know, the data are not adjusted according to any fancy computer climate model or anything else like that....
...Well, no — over the period of recorded history, the average temperature was about equal to the height of the MWP. Rises not only as high, but as rapid, as the current hockey stick blade have been the rule, not the exception.
In fact for the entire Holocene — the period over which, by some odd coincidence, humanity developed agriculture and civilization — the temperature has been higher than now, and the trend over the past 4000 years is a marked decline. From this perspective, it’s the LIA that was unusual, and the current warming trend simply represents a return to the mean. If it lasts....
Chevron takes shakedown lawyers to court in RICO trial
...A former expert for the plaintiffs, David Russell, testified yesterday that he provided a $6.114 billion damages estimate based “largely on assumptions Donziger told me to use.”
“Within a year of working for Donziger, I came to learn that my cost estimate was wildly inaccurate and had no scientific data to back it up,” he said in written testimony submitted to the judge.
After drawing up his observations in the Hotel Lago, he arrived at a cost-estimate of more than $6 billion. He called the figure Wednesday a S.W.A.G., or a “Scientific Wild Ass Guess.” Two years after his falling out with Steven Donziger, who was then the lead attorney on the lawsuit representing residents of the Ecuadorean rainforest, Russell quit the case and publicly disavowed the estimate.
“While I was working on the estimate in the Hotel Lago, Donziger told me that he wanted a ‘really big number,’ and he needed a ‘really big number’ for purposes of ‘putting pressure’ on Chevron to settle the litigation,” the deposition states. “In response, I told him that I would try to come up with the biggest possible cost estimate I could.”...
