by Steve McIntyre
For the benefit of new readers, we discussed some aspects of the “trick” at Climate Audit in the past. Obviously, the Climategate Letters clarify many things that were murky in the past. On the left is a blowup of IPCC 2001 Fig 2.21 showing where the Briffa reconstruction (green) ends. More on this below.
Figure 1 below is the original graphic showing the MBH98-99, Jones et al 1998 and Briffa 2000 temperature reconstructions. I think that it’s fair to say that this graphic gives a strong rhetorical impression of the proxy reconstructions all going up throughout the 20th century, lending credibility to the idea that the “proxy” reconstructions would also be responsive to past warm periods – and obviously not giving any “fodder to the skeptics” by revealing the divergence between the Briffa reconstruction and temperatures.
Figure 1. IPCC 2001 Comparison of warm-season (Jones et al., 1998) and annual mean (Mann et al., 1998, 1999) multi-proxy-based and warm season tree-ring-based (Briffa, 2000) millennial Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions. The recent instrumental annual mean Northern Hemisphere temperature record to 1999 is shown for comparison.
While the digital version of the Briffa reconstruction has only become available in the past few days, Briffa 2000 (cited in the caption to IPCC Fig 2.21) did show the decline as shown in Briffa 2000 Figure 5 shown below (with its original caption). This series obviously goes down at the end (as does a related series in Briffa et al 1998, referred to by Gavin Schmidt.) What Gavin didn’t discuss is how you get from the version below to the IPCC version.
Figure 2. Briffa 2000 Figure 5 An indication of growing season temperature changes across the whole of the northern boreal forest. The histogram indicates yearly averages of maximum ring density at nearly 400 sites around the globe, with the upper curve highlighting multidecadal temperature changes… The LFD curve indicates low-frequency density changes produced by processing the original data in a manner designed to preserve long-timescale temperature signals (Briffa et al., 1998c). Note the recent disparity in density and measured temperatures discussed in Briffa et al., 1998a, 1999b). Note that the right hand axis scale refers only to the high-frequency density data.
Gavin Schmidt stated that everything was “in plain sight”. Regular CA readers are used to watching the pea under the thimble. There is no mention in the IPCC report of the deletion of Briffa reconstruction data after 1960. Nor is there any mention of the deletion in the IPCC reference (Briffa 2000) nor, for that matter, in the article cited by Gavin Schmidt (Briffa et al 1998). These articles report the divergence, but do not delete it. (Briffa et al 2001 does delete the post-1960 values.)
Not only was the deletion of post-1960 values not reported by IPCC, as Gavin Schmidt implies, it is not all that easy to notice that the Briffa reconstruction ends around 1960. As the figure is drawn, the 1960 endpoint of the Briffa reconstruction is located underneath other series; even an attentive reader easily missed the fact that no values are shown after 1960. The decline is not “hidden in plain view”; it is “hidden” plain and simple.
Figure 3. Blowup of IPCC Figure 2-21.
Previous discussion of these issues is at Climate Audit here here here and more recently by Jean S here. Jean S and UC report at CA that the puzzling end point properties can be replicated by replacing actual proxy data after 1960 with instrumental data and then smoothing (truncating back to 1960) – exacerbating the problem. (I haven’t personally confirmed this, but Jean S and UC are extraordinarily skilled analysts and know this material as well as I do.) Jean S:
In order to smooth those time series one needs to “pad” the series beyond the end time, and no matter what method one uses, this leads to a smoothed graph pointing downwards in the end whereas the smoothed instrumental series is pointing upwards — a divergence. So Mann’s solution was to use the instrumental record for padding, which changes the smoothed series to point upwards as clearly seen in UC’s figure (violet original, green without “Mike’s Nature trick”).
Jean S then drolly quoted Mann:
No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.
The Climategate Letters contain a very interesting discussion between Mann, Jones, Briffa, Karl and Folland worrying that showing the discrepancy would provide “fodder to the skeptics”. More on this tomorrow.
“Briffa 2000 Figure 5 An indication of growing season temperature changes across the whole of the northern boreal forest. The histogram indicates yearly averages of maximum ring density at nearly 400 sites around the globe, with the upper curve highlighting multidecadal temperature changes…”
They selected 1-3 trees that fit the dogma. No random sample technique in this shoddy experiment. They also loaded or weighted the correlations in their fortran formula. Enron style reporting. Enron did not report liabilities. These people didn’t report warm temps.
They “padded” the numbers
Am I just a purist, or is all this Climate “science” absolute pure junk? It’s like plotting everyone’s social security number or driver’s license numbers, averaging them and adding colors to the graph at the end. (And being paid trillions of dollars for the effort!)
I strongly recommend the book The Long Summer by Brian Fagan to anyone who wants a qualitative reality check on past temperature changes. Global temperatures may or may not have remained largely constant but climate has undergone gross changes over large areas for centuries at a time – changes that would affect any tree rings.
I particularly like the picture on page 193 of the book which I can only describe. It shows the position of the northern edge (ecotone) of the Mediterranean climate zone in Europe/North Africa from 1200 BC to 900 AD. North of this zone has UK style temperatures – cool and wet. The ecotone changed position, running through Sicily and the middle of the Mediterranean from 1200 to 300 BC, as far north as the north coast of France and Germany from 300 BC to 300 AD, and then as far south as the north coast of Africa from 500 AD to 900 AD. The Roman Empire waxed and waned with extent of the Mediterranean climate zone and ended in the Dark Ages.
The hockey stick gang have never shown any apparent awareness of the huge amount of archaeological and other evidence in favor of a constantly changing climate.
dfbaskwill (07:04:40) :
Am I just a purist, or is all this Climate “science” absolute pure junk?
Is it junk?
Using tree rings is more like palm reading and astrology. The African Deserts and the massive asian deserts are excluded. Antartica offers no tree ring data. We know there are several variables that influence tree growth. Why not use whale blubber thickness instead of temp readings for the Pacific Decadal Osscilation readings?
What I see in this mess-we have thrown Billions at a non-problem, or at the very least a minor one, when there are other more pressing problems. People and Children dying due to disease, lack of sanitation etc. Yet the Kleptocrats of the U.N. want US to be poorer and colder too….
dfbaskwill (07:04:40) :
Am I just a purist, or is all this Climate “science” absolute pure junk?
YES.
In plain sight?
In some places such tricks are called false advertising.
OT
Here we go again.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/6672631/British-winter-to-be-milder-says-Met.html
dfbaskwill: “Pure junk” … all of this work is an attempt to create a mathematical model that “matches” the observed data in such a way that it has predictive power into the future. That is the idea at least. What actually happened is that these folks are paid through grant funding to come up with a pre-determined conclusion. You see, grants are awarded to accomplish certain things. I have written grants and won grant funding so I have experience with them. The predetermined conclusion is “Show evidence of human-caused global warming”. So, off they go. It’s not “trillions” of dollars however, but enough for a comfortable living.
Anthropogenic Global Warming Virus Alert
http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s5i64103
The errors introduced from all of these “reconstructions” indicate such a large range how could any conclusion be drawn from the large amount of data attempted to show the entirety of the earth’s system or systems?
The scientific community needs to air their dirty laundry and expose this fraud for what it is. The IPCC should take responsibility and push the reset button for the world has been scammed by the political class.
I’ve been following with great interest this last week since FOI2009 was set free and I’ve read many opinions and comments re the whole sorry affair. I won’t even begin to properly understand it all in the scientific sense but I wonder will anything change or is the AGW super tanker going to be too far advanced to be stopped? What’s likely to actually happen?
OT but important:
The science museum poll: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/proveit.aspx
It was 5360 for, 7831 against three hours ago
it is 5370 for 7833 against now
Seems that skeptics have stopped taking the poll, or that schoolchildren are urged to enthusiastically support it. With the hits this blog is getting nowadays, maybe some people who were not aware of the poll would like to go and vote.
But we’re told “trick” was just a colloquialism used between scientists exchanging views. I’m very confused. Why do the facts disagree with what these climate scientists say?
I see the Met Office are pinning their hopes on another mild winter for the UK. Best go get myself an extra thick winter coat then.
As requested, I’ve put together a YouTube version of the ClimateGate Who’s Who video. You can find it here:
I suspect Steve M has missed part of the trick.
The full caption in IPCC is and note very carefully the last sentence which should be read whilst keeping in mind Prof. Jones public statement after the leak.
“Figure 2.21: Comparison of warm-season (Jones et al., 1998) and annual mean (Mann et al., 1998, 1999) multi-proxy-based and warm season tree-ring-based (Briffa, 2000) millennial Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions. The recent instrumental annual mean Northern Hemisphere temperature record to 1999 is shown for comparison. Also shown is an extra-tropical sampling of the Mann et al. (1999) temperature pattern reconstructions more directly comparable in its latitudinal sampling to the Jones et al. series. The self-consistently estimated two standard error limits (shaded region) for the smoothed Mann et al. (1999) series are shown. The horizontal zero line denotes the 1961 to 1990 reference period mean temperature. All series were smoothed with a 40-year Hamming-weights lowpass filter, with boundary constraints imposed by padding the series with its mean values during the first and last 25 years.”
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/069.htm
That last sentence grossly under-specifies the data processing method and leaves large questions on what precisely was done and to what. This includes the short dataset problem.
According to the Jones statement (in WUWT article) after being caught red handed, it was a 50 year filter on the 1000 year data series but he omitted to say what was done to the instrumental data. Was it processed the same or wasn’t it?
Was the 25 years mentioned above applied to 1961 – 1998 or to 1880 – 1998 or not at all, what zero, how long a filter and so on.
Is this critical? Yes very.
I cannot see how sensible filtering of the instrumental temperature data can lead to such a high data point for 1998 based on data up to 1998.
The effect of fully working low pass filtering is a massive reduction in the amplitude of fast data movement.
Honesty demands the same processing on all data.
Try it. It’s worse than we thought.
It might help to create an illustration of the trick “in action”, with both the padded data and the original data at the end, and the smoothing window centered on the truncation point, and the two different smoothed graphs produced. No need to show it for all the graphs in Figure 1, a single one will suffice. Also, it would be better to just show the 20th century only.
The point to get across is that smoothing caused the false data to spill over into the real proxy data before the truncation point.
Don’t mean to order anyone around, would do it myself if I had the data…
Re: the choice of green as the colour representing the “amended” data. A chance this is deliberate? A fair number of people are red-green colour blind and would thus be unable to distinguish this line from the red one. Just a thought.
There was a letter to the editor (Nature, I think) a few years ago lamenting the choice of colours used in conference presentation graphics that made it really difficult for people with colour-blinded to tell what was going on. They also provided a link to a site with a pdf and a PowerPoint presentation that demonstrates how to get around it (what kinds of colours are best). It opened my eyes to this issue.
The Mann’s image comes to mind where he is hugging the tree ring. Except this time he is chewing the edges of the tree ring, “hide the decline”.
Mann said that during the Medieval Warm Period some parts of the world are as warm as today while other parts are cooler. Yet tree rings in an area like Yamal are used as a proxy to help calculate past temperatures.
Am I seeing this correctly? What gives?
From the UK Daily Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6672875/Whos-to-blame-for-Climategate.html
I’m happy to go with the Met Office forecast of a “milder than average” winter which, readers will note, they are ascribing to an El NIno event. Let’s wait and see, shall we? If El Nino does develop and the European winter does turn out to be above average, am I allowed to shoot the first warm-monger who tells me it is due to “climate change”, please?
The science museum poll: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/proveit.aspx
It was 5360 for, 7831 against three hours ago
it is 5370 for 7833 against now
– Anna I suspect the votes for have been adjusted to show the variance that should be there, say fudge it by artificially adding an extra vote for every real vote based on what they assume should be happening. They have to hide the decline! after all it would be a travisty if the real results didn’t back them up!
” is the AGW super tanker going to be too far advanced to be stopped?”
Years ago there was a huge passenger ship that was deemed to be unsinkable. It was named the Titanic.
@David S
I hope in my heart that the truth will out but twenty years have gone into this AGW theory….
The Titanic DID sink and I hope this leak has holed the vessel terminally……..
@ Lee (07:31:24)
I think you are on to a very good political question. We cannot hope to get satisfaction in this area because politics is not about truth, but persuasion. However, science is supposed to be a search for truth, and I will be satisfied if this perversion of science by Mann, Jones, et al is exposed and prosecuted within the scientific community. For the sake of the integrity of science, these charlatans should have their reputations and credibility decisively revoked.
Politically speaking, the AGW train left the station years ago with science playing the role of a useful fool. Science will not derail this train. Only politics will, in my view.
Lee
I didn’t mean to discount your idea. In fact I’m concerned that you may well be right, and that politics will win out over science. But I take heart in knowing that the AGW tanker seems to have hit an iceberg and is now listing badly to one side.
Those who wish to see an end to the AGW religion expect a speedy end to the political debate in light of the academic misconduct uncovered. I would caution you to think of the long game, which is death by a thousand cuts. Each democratic country that attends Copenhagen will eventually have to answer to the citizens who don’t believe in the AGW religion.
It is our job to increase the volume (both in numbers and voice) of the non-believers so that politicians who ignore them will find themselves considering an existence that does not include elected office.
The LFD curve indicates the world was warmer in the 1930’s than currently. There’s a lot of material that indicates the Arctic was very warm in the 1930’s. Is there any other evidence supporting the fact that the 1930’s may have been warmer than now ?
Quick quick
Thermometer’s sick
Hide the downtick
Span and spick
The Hockeystick Trick
@ David S (11:09:47)
I know you weren’t discounting my thought David. We’ll see what the next few weeks bring.
Interesting times………
Go vote – & leave a comment !
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/proveit.aspx
quote my comment :
the release of the CRU data into public domain indicates some very very serious problems with teh use of the scientific method.
How can anyone take any of the claims made by AGW seriously ?
As an absolute minimum a complete un-biased review of all the data and models used needs to be undertaken urgently.
Copenhagen should at the very least be postponed while independent scientists carry out this review
end quote
@peter_dtm, Copenhagen will proceed with or without the science, but Copenhagen is merely a way station. In the aftermath of the Copenhagen farce, the citizens of the U.S. will be our best hope to put an end to the fraud. Talk about hope and change!
this made me want to throw up:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_froma_harrop/whom_can_you_trust_on_climate_change
In 1960 Edward Lorenz asked, “Does the Earth have a climate? The answer, at first glance obvious, improves on acquaintance.” About 1975 Benoit Mandelbrot expanded on Lorenz’s Chaos Theory –positing a “butterfly effect” with “strange attractors” etc.– by formulating Fractal Geometry, a depiction of natural reality as non-random but strictly indeterminate, self-similar on every scale. Together, Lorenz and Mandelbrot determined that extrapolating phenomena of suitably complex systems (those where three or more variables interact) is mathematically as well as physically impossible.
Earth’s atmosphere is such a “complex system”. Therefore analysis in detail, leading to meaningful forecasts or projections, is fundamentally impossible in principle. Climatologists adducing ambiguous historical data, necessarily incomplete and inconsistent, to plot not merely local but global temperatures decades in advance are either ignorant of mathematics, fools, or mendacious charlatans. On recent evidence, Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann et al. stand self-convicted on every count.
Since the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) Boundary 65 million years-before-present (YBP), geological eras have averaged a highly variable 12 – 15 million years. At 1.8 million years to date, our current Pleistocene Era is no more than one-sixth past. This present period is characterized by regularly recurring ice ages averaging 102,000 years, interspersed with intermittent Interglacial Epochs of median 12,250-years duration. The latest glacial episode began about 116,400 YBP and ebbed from c. 14,400 YBP, set back 1,500 years by the Younger Dryas “cold shock”, a glacial rebound precipitated by a rain of cometary/meteorite debris impacting Earth from Sol’s enveloping Oort Cloud. On this basis, the present Holocene Interglacial Epoch was imprecisely due to end in AD 2000 + (12,250 – 12,300) = AD 1950.
As Lorenz suspected, atmosphere does not drive “climate change”. From 1964, geophysicists have known that plate tectonics, Alfred Wegener’s “continental drift” hypothesized in 1912, constantly reconfigures continental dispositions on geologic time-scales. Cyclical Pleistocene glaciations began when North and South America walled off Earth’s eastern and western hemispheres, blocking circulation of deep-ocean (bathymetric) currents, regularly resetting global thermostats. This phenomenon will only end 12 – 15 million years from now, when hemispheric landmasses shift sufficiently to re-establish oceanic circulation patterns.
There is no global warming, nevermind “anthropogenic” warming due to civilization’s emission of beneficent CO2. “Greenhouse gases” are in fact a myth: Basic physics, whereby evaporating hot air rises to draw cooler northern currents underneath, cites convection currents rather than any micro-pollutant as symptom, not cause, of long-term cyclical “climatic” shifts. Precipitation becomes key– flooding rains in summer, blizzard snows in winter. “Weather”, yes, but inextricably a part of Lorenz’s and Mandelbrot’s “complex system”, what in 1974 Dr. Lewis Thomas aptly called “Lives of a Cell”.
The idea that a tight-knit cabal of grossly self-interested ideologues could set themselves to purposefully destroy post-Enlightenment civilization, sabotage global energy economies, subvert Borlaug’s seminal Green Revolution, is an unbearable insult not only to our forebears but to that posterity for which we act as stewards. When it emerges that these same blighted psyches, Luddite sociopaths in league with singularly atavistic, regressive Statist demagogues, have violated not only ethical and legal norms but perverted the very cause of Science itself, indictment for Crimes Against Humanity should be the least result.
As of AD 2010, Sol seems poised to enter a 70-year “dead sun” phase known as a Maunder Minimum (the last such doldrums lasted from AD 1645 to 1715, when wolves froze to death in Rhineland forests and Louis XIV’s goblet glazed with ice in his Palace of Versailles).
A disturbing thing is Obama’s Energy “Czar” Carol “Brownshirt” Browner doesn’t care about anything but her radical agenda: http://bit.ly/513De4
How is it that we have “Czars” in America creating policies behind the scenes without Congressional oversight? These Czars are blatant Maoists, Leninists, and Marxists. I’ve heard these Czars declaring their admiration for Mao and that sometimes guns must be used to implement policies.
We must get rid of the “Czars.”
Oh the “Trick”………………..
I see that Gavin over at RC is spinning like crazy about the “Trick”.
If you have any wet clothes; just toss them on him and they will be dry in no time…………
Serenity now………..
I have refrained from weighing in on this since it began, since my time has been required elsewhere and what brief time I could allot has been spent trying vainly to catch up to the wave of developments and comments. With a little more time to review this morning I am struck by how everyone seems to be studiously avoiding the 800 pound gorilla in the room on this “mike’s trick” or “neat technique” situation. As I understand “the divergence problem”, when attempts have been made to reconstruct the paleo temperature record using tree ring proxies some, for reasons no one seems able to explain, fail miserably when trying to model the present temperature record, others supposedly do not.
To my mind there are only a couple of rational ways of dealing with such a development. The diverging reconstructions would either be sent immediately to the round file or, at a minimum, be set aside until a reasonable explanation of the divergence could be provided. Instead we have the application MM’s “trick” to conceal the proxy’s unreliability. BTW, given MM’s role as putative innovator of this “neat technique”, one has to wonder what role it has played in his own work over the years. From my, admittedly limited, reading of the discussion that is not altogether clear.
At any rate, the fact that they have consciously and consistently attempted to use these dubiously reliable divergent proxies as either primary or secondary data for their paleoclimate reconstructions alone provides a more ringing condemnation of their scientific standards than any discussion of the “trick” they used to accomplish it could hope to offer.
The IPCC mentions this with a specific disclaimer:
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/504.htm
Is anyone aware of a paper or mathematical proof that shows the calculations involved in GCM’s inherently meet the definition of a chaotic system and cannot be predicted far into the future?
It would be nice to reference an authoritative paper that shows the assertion that long term climate can be predicted is inherently impossible according to current Chaos theory.
If none exists perhaps one of our statistical/mathematics contributors could sketch out such a logical attack on the AGW thesis that long term climate is predictable.
I understand that the AGW proponents will, probably respond that they do not make predictions, but run scenarios and draw conclusions from the results. My gut instinct is like, Dr. Richard Lindzen has said, doing the same faulty calculation multiple times and then averaging the results is not a method that has merit.
Larry
I did find this interesting history of GCM development while I was searching.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/GCM.htm
Larry
If you think it’s all over check this site: http://www.globeinternational.org/content.php?id=1:1:0:0:0
The final G8 + 5 Climate Change Dialogue Legislators Forum was held in Tokyo, Japan in June 2008. One hundred senior legislators from across the G8 and +5 made a historic breakthrough agreement on Lord Michael Jay’s Post 2012 Framework Paper. This document, enjoying full consensus of all legislators, showed world leaders that agreement is possible on the core elements of a post 2012 agreement. The Agreement was a major statement ahead of the Hokkaido G8 Summit and was presented to Prime Minister Fukuda by the fifteen heads of the GLOBE G8 and +5 delegations on Monday 30th June. The agreement follows high level speeches to the GLOBE Tokyo Forum by Prime Minister Fukuda, US Presidential Candidates Senator John McCain and Senator Barak Obama, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and the former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
http://www.globeinternational.org/news.php
29/06/09
GLOBE Rome G8 +5 Legislators Forum Speeches
Keynotes speeches in Rome were delivered by Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rassmussen the Danish Prime Minister, President Fini, President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Stephen Byers MP, President of the Global Legislators Organisation (GLOBE), Congressman Wang Guangtao, Chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee on Environment Protection & Resources Conservation, Congressman Edward Markey, Chairman of the US House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and Chairman of the US House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, Deputy Jose Luis Espinosa Pina, Vice-President of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, Senadora Serys Slhessarenko, Deputy President of the Senate of Brazil, Representative Takashi Kosugi, former Cabinet Minister for Education & Science and current Chairman of the LDP’s Environment Research Council.
They will push ahead regardless.
This stuff is based on just one more pseudoscientific fad, destined to be put away in the dusty attic of science. Piltdown Person, phlogiston, phrenology, spontaneous generation, Lysenkoism, geocentrism, medicinal leeches, Kirlian photography, astrology, spiritualism, dildoclimatology, and all the others.
Even with my very limited scientific knowledge I have been able — thanks to many good articles — to understand a lot of the email summaries and computer code notations, but one exception is this business about the “trick”. Even after reading this article and the comments, I still do not understand what the trick was. Can someone explain this in very simple terms? It sounds like they were having trouble coming up with a model that accurately reflected recent and current temperatures, yet would still give them the projections of unprecedented global warming that they wanted. Even if I’ve got that part right (and I probably don’t), I still don’t know what the “trick” was. Would someone please give me the “Climategate For Dummies” version? I’ll check back here tomorrow.
BTW, I’d never heard of Mr. McIntyre, CRU, or hockey stick charts until this week. It’s all very interesting, also depressing.
Josh
“A disturbing thing is Obama’s Energy “Czar” Carol “Brownshirt” Browner doesn’t care about anything but her radical agenda: http://bit.ly”
She was under court order not to destroy data as she left the EPA as director. The EPA was caught funneling money to non-profits for obvious political gain. She ordered all the hard drives be reformatted. Their is no way she was going to be appointed to something needing congressional approval. So now she is a bama CZAR
Peewit (07:38:58) “The effect of fully working low pass filtering is a massive reduction in the amplitude of fast data movement” and dfbaskwill (07:04:58)
I was blown away last week when I first learned about the Slutsky-Yule effect, when random numbers are subject to low pass filtering and produce a lovely, very believable, smooth gently oscillating line. Yes random numbers, I found this in a book ‘Climate Cycles, Real or Imaginary’, Steve Mc Intyre has mentioned this effect in 2008.
But this very real effect must, must, be removed from every chart before they can be further analysed.
Steve,
Thank you for this and all of your efforts!!
Much appreciated by all.
Stay the course.
Thanks,
Clive
Alberta
Lee (10:13:26) :
@David S
Mike Tyson was unbeatable too. Then Buster Douglas punched his mouthpiece out.
Lucy Skywalker (12:23:37) :
How the the Hockey Stick trick hold up under oath heated by Senate camera lights?
Brenda (18:01:58) :
If I have it right–the tree ring proxy data began to show a downward turn on the graph at 1960. But, they needed there to be a continued upward movement in the graph for their global warming theory to be right; they needed to “hide the decline” that began at 1960. So, at the 1960 point in the data they stopped using the tree ring proxy data. And in its place they took a different data set that showed upward movement at 1960, spiced it on to the tree ring data, and
Voilà! “Mike’s Nature trick”.
Two things need to be done at this point:
1. Perform forensic analysis on the CRU models that were just released and come to some conclusions. Were the models completely tainted by fraud or not? (I have a feeling I know what the answer will be) If the fraudulent data and formulaic work is backed out, what results do the models show? (assuming completely worthless, garbage in, garbage model, garbage out, but you have to check this out)
2. Analyze the number of studies that cited this work and those articles that cited the work that cited the fraudulent work and so on. Assuming the answer to #1 is fraud, they are all now suspect. This is one I can tackle or with the assistance of anyone with access to the “Scientific Citation Index”. It may be possible to knock out a whole swath of junk in one swoop.
We will publicize these results.
Speaking of good proxies for cooling, isn’t the location of the citrus line (the latitude above which citrus fruit can’t grow) a good one? As I recall the citrus line used to be as far north as Atlanta, but is now all the way down to about Orlando.
enough (18:37:56) :
Josh
“A disturbing thing is Obama’s Energy “Czar” Carol “Brownshirt” Browner doesn’t care about anything but her radical agenda: http://bit.ly”
She was under court order not to destroy data as she left the EPA as director. The EPA was caught funneling money to non-profits for obvious political gain. She ordered all the hard drives be reformatted. Their is no way she was going to be appointed to something needing congressional approval. So now she is a bama CZAR
This sort of thing is not mentioned by indignant warmists in their moralistic frenzies. Why not? They’re hypocrites. And it doesn’t appear in MSM articles in which it is OK to quote alarmists impugning the bona fides of critical scientists. Why not?
An Anonymous Coward at Slashdot just submitted an article with a link to a blog on blogspot, whose first post is today, that analyzes portions of the code in the CRU files. Maybe the info or the blogger could be useful.
http://codeincontext.blogspot.com/
Gene, Thank you for responding, but what was the different data they inserted in place of the proxy data ? — and what is “proxy” data? Sorry to be a bother, but I would like to understand well enough to explain it to friends and family.
Brenda (13:01:51) :
Here’s a quote from the emails that shows what they used :
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.”
You might not understand what they are saying. But, simply put, they took portions of actual thermometer readings (not proxies, ‘the real temps’), portions that would show continued warming. They were careful to use the portions of the temperature data set that would work for them—i.e., they cherry picked—to show continued warming.
————————–
the quote from the email is from here :
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/20/mikes-nature-trick/
—————-
p.s. I hope I don’t sound redundant. I’m a bit punchy from all the long days of reading since this story broke.
Brenda (13:01:51) :
Here’s the Briffa graph with the red showing when the decline that was hidden began. The red is the part what was taken out and replaced with cherry picked temperature data.
http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/briffa_recon.gif
Brenda (13:01:51) :
A definition of ‘proxy’ found online from The Exploratorium
Proxy Data.—Because climate involves long-term patterns, climate researchers often seek data about what the climate was like thousands or millions of years ago. But such data are difficult to find (ice cores provide one source of actual prehistoric climate data). Researchers may therefore use other kinds of data that tell them about something related to climate. Non-climate data analyzed for clues to climate is called proxy data. For example, information about the past strength of ocean currents might be gained by studying fossil microorganisms deposited in sediments—the ages, types, and distributions of these organisms could reflect the nature of the currents that existed at the time they were deposited.
Brenda (13:01:51) :
more on “proxies” at this link, not perfect but you’ll get the idea
http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/proxies/paleoclimate.html
Brenda (13:01:51) :
If you have any friends that know computer code, even if just a little, you might get a lot out of going to this link with them and reading.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/climategate-hide-the-decline-codified/
What was done by the scientists is revealed in the computer code. The computer code verifies that what was communicated between the scientists in their emails was the reality of what they did and not, as they are now claiming, ‘robust discussion’ between scientists that is now being ‘taken out of context’.
Brenda (13:01:51) :
One last thing,
anyone can go to this link and get a beginners handle on things :
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/climategate-men-bahaving-badly-a-short-summary-for-laymen/
Gene, Thanks so much. You cleared it up for me. I went to all the articles you linked. I’ve been sending articles to friends and family, but “men behaving badly” (love the title) is the simplest to understand, so I’ll use it a lot from now on. Regarding computer code, I read someone’s explanation of the code notations and understood a lot of it, but I don’t know anyone who does that kind of work — probably because of my age and pre-computer era education. However, there’s so much commentary out there that even someone like me can pick up quite a bit of understandable information. Again, thanks for helping me out — I appreciate it.
Brenda:
I don’t know if it’s been made clear to you that the “trick” SteveM is pointing out is that the blow-up shows the green ‘proxy’ curve ending significanly prior to where the other curves end, while in the graph just a little below it’s hard to see the green curve ending where it really ends. It instead look like it goes on to ascend, because it merges with another strand of spagetti curve which is actually what is going up and leaving the green curve behind. To me it even looks a little green, probably due to some feature of our/my sight apparatus.
I think the “padding” of the green tree ring proxy curve data with “real”, instrumental data only made the end of the green curve flatten around 1960, whereas in the lowest graph shown the curve is still heading downward in 1960, as it continues to “diverge” from the temperature curve.
J. Peden, Thanks. I had read something along that line somewhere else, but you explained it better. I just can’t get over this whole story. How did they get away with this for so long? When I think of all the school kids being brainwashed and frightened with this nonsense, all the corrupted text books, the college kids who have spent years working to get useless degrees to study “climate change”, the billions of tax dollars wasted . . . no matter how much we wish otherwise, real science will suffer from this scandal, and clearly has already suffered.
Climate change does not happen because of humans! BBC docu:
http://www.garagetv.nl/video-galerij/blancostemrecht/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle_Documentary
The next election.. we have to clean house and enact laws to protect the public from such fraud..
I’m a denier, a skeptic, a non-believer but I found a NASA reference to “trick” that may soften the e-mail criticism. Of course NASA’s use may also be to hide the decline…
“The trick was to find the anomalies first and then compute the absolute values from the anomalies: Whereas the absolute monthly and seasonal temperatures may have a definite seasonal cycle, the monthly and seasonal anomalies do not; hence whereas a seasonal mean may be totally distorted if we leave out the warmest or coldest month, seasonal anomalies are less impacted by dropping any monthly anomaly.”
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/seas_ann_means.html
Steve