Readers may recall this posting A detailed review of Mann’s book: The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars as it relates to the Wegman report to Congress. This post today is a continuation of that review, with more in-depth technical detail.
By Brandon Shollenberger
The Beginning
Earth Day, April 22, 1998, was the day the hockey stick was born. On that day, Michael Mann, and co-authors Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes published a paper in the scientific journal Nature (referred to as MBH98). This paper claimed to reconstruct northern hemispheric temperatures from the past 600 years by examining temperature “proxies” found in nature. The most important of these proxies were tree rings, the size (and density) of which can be influenced by temperatures.
The results of this paper were dramatic. The temperature reconstruction it contained showed relatively flat temperatures for approximately 500 years followed by a sharp increase in temperatures over the last hundred years. The sharp increase formed a curve, which when attached to the end of a relatively flat line created the image of a “hockey stick.” It told the viewer current temperatures were higher than anything seen in hundreds of years. Looking at it, it was almost impossible to think anything other than, “Humans are causing a dramatic change in temperature.”
Not only was the resulting image powerful, it was also extremely definitive. MBH98 claimed modern warmth was unprecedented in 600 years with “roughly a 99.7% level of certainty.” This high degree of confidence was only reinforced by the paper saying it’s conclusions weren’t based on a single type of proxy (such as tree rings), but rather:
the long-term trend in NH is relatively robust to the inclusion of dendroclimatic indicators in the network, suggesting that potential tree growth trend biases are not influential in the multiproxy climate reconstructions.
The authors said their conclusions were almost absolutely certain. They said their results were so certain, you could throw out tree ring data (dendroclimatic indicators), their largest source of data, and they’d still get the same results. The authors were full of it. On page 51 of Michael Mann’s book, he discusses an analysis he performed shortly after MBH98 was published:
The tests revealed that not all of the records were playing an equal role in our reconstructions. Certain proxy data appeared to be of critical importance in establishing the reliability of the reconstruction–in particular, one set of tree ring records spanning the boreal tree line of North America published by dendroclimatologists Gordon Jacoby and Rosanne D’Arrigo.
If “one set of tree ring records” was “of critical importance in establishing the reliability of the reconstruction,” the reconstruction could not have been “relatively robust to the inclusion of dendroclimatic indicators.” While Mann now casually admits the importance of such a small amount of data, neither he nor his co-authors ever made any effort to correct their paper on the point.
The next year, these authors published a new paper (MBH99), extending their hockey stick back another 400 years. In it, they concluded:
The 1990s was the warmest decade [of the last millennium], and 1998 the warmest year, at moderately high levels of confidence.
These two papers, collectively referred to as MBH, formed the basis for what is the most memorable image used in discussions of global warming. In 2000, Bill Clinton referenced it in his State of the Union Address. More importantly, in 2001, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization created by the United Nations to periodically release “assessments” of the state of knowledge on global warming, gave it prominent display. A summary made for government officials of its Third Assessment Report (TAR) even used MBH to conclude it likely “the 1990s has been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium.” Out of hundreds of pages of documents, this image was selected to be the “public face” of global warming.
Controversy
Controversy began when Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick collaborated on a paper published in the journal Energy & Environment in 2003. They concluded:
The particular “hockey stick” shape… is primarily an artefact of poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components.
In response to this conclusion, Mann fabricated a story about McIntyre and McKitrick’s results being based upon a faulty spreadsheet. However, he also said (page 123):
The paper’s dramatically different result from ours… was instead an artifact of the authors’ having inexplicably removed from our network two-thirds of the proxy data we had used for the critical fifteenth-sixteenth century period.46
This is untrue. McIntyre and McKitrick were forced to omit some data (but not two-thirds) because they couldn’t figure out certain undisclosed methodological choices Mann had made. When McIntyre asked Mann to disclose what he had done, Mann refused. Because it was impossible to know what Mann had actually done, McIntyre simply emulated the process as best he could. Despite what Mann claims, the difference in methodology didn’t affect any conclusions.
Peculiarly, the reference Mann gives says nothing about this claim. It says McIntyre and McKitrick were wrong, but gives totally different reasons.
This is especially strange as Mann wrote the article he references.
The Follow-Up
In this book, I attempt to tell the real story behind the hockey stick.
Michael Mann – Prologue
Over the next two years, both “sides” of the controversy tried to support their position. Most notably, Mann was forced to publish a corrigendum by Nature in order to correct errors pointed out in his work, though he claimed, “None of these errors affect our previously published results.”
During this period, Mann and some of his colleagues started a blog, RealClimate. McIntyre started a blog of his own, ClimateAudit, to respond to things posted on RealClimate. Many discussions and arguments were made on these two web sites, eventually leading McIntyre and McKitrick to publish another paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). Mann says of it (page 130):
McIntyre and McKitrick had quietly dropped their erroneous original assertion (in their 2003 paper discussed in chapter 8 that the hockey stick was an artifact of bad data. Their new, albeit equally erroneous, assertion was that the hockey stick was an artifact of the conventions used in applying principal component analysis (PCA) to certain tree ring networks…
While Mann claims the argument by McIntyre and McKitrick was new, it was one they had made in their first paper. The abstract of that paper states (emphasis added):
The particular “hockey stick” shape… is primarily an artefact of poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components.
This fact is even acknowledged by Mann in his book (emphasis added – note #45)
To be specific, they claimed that the hockey stick was an artifact of four supposed “categories of errors”: “collation errors,” “unjustified truncation and extrapolation,” “obsolete data,” and “calculation mistakes.”
McIntyre and McKitrick had always been aware there was a problem with how Mann did PC calculations, so this was not a “new” issue. All that was new was McIntyre and McKitrick had realized the data errors they had found were mostly irrelevant to the MBH results. Having realized that, they began to focus more on the main issue, the PC calculations. In regard to this, Mann says (page 137):
McIntyre and McKitrick used a different PCA convention in their 2005 paper. They centered the tree ring data over the long term (1400—1980). That’s fine—in fact, long-term centering is actually the traditional convention…
Clearly, Mann does not think they calculated their PCs incorrectly. Instead, he claims:
Applying our selection rule to these data, using a modern centering convention indicated that the leading two PC series should be retained…. By misapplying a selection rule derived for one convention (modern centering) to PCA results based on a different convention (long-term centering) [they] end up erroneously throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.
Both groups kept two PCs for the North America tree ring network (NOAMER). Mann claims this is wrong, that McIntyre and McKitrick should have kept more. This fairly simple claim is Mann’s basis for dismissing the GRL paper:
In effect, McIntyre and McKitrick had “buried” or “hidden” the hockey stick. They had chosen to throw out a critical pattern in the data as if it were noise
In their GRL paper, McIntyre and McKitrick never said anything about how many PCs to keep. Instead, the paper is a discussion about how PCs were calculated with NOAMER being used as an example. Given Mann’s claim has no possible connection to this paper, it’s natural to try looking at another paper published by McIntyre and McKitrick that year. That paper was published in Energy and Environment (EE), and it did discuss how many PCs get kept:
If a centered PC calculation on the North American network is carried out (as we advocate), then MM-type results occur if the first 2 NOAMER PCs are used in the AD1400 network (the number as used in MBH98), while MBH-type results occur if the NOAMER network is expanded to 5 PCs in the AD1400 segment (as proposed in Mann et al., 2004b, 2004d). Specifically, MBH-type results occur as long as the PC4 is retained, while MM-type results occur in any combination which excludes the PC4. Hence their conclusion about the uniqueness of the late 20th century climate hinges on the inclusion of a low-order PC series that only accounts for 8 percent of the variance of one proxy roster.
Rather than simply “throw out” data based upon a “selection rule,” McIntyre and McKitrick carefully considered what happens based on how much data is used. Mann’s claim is exactly the opposite of the truth in relation to the EE paper (and is completely nonsensical in relation to the GRL paper). He continues this sort of misrepresentation (page 136):
We employed a standard, objective criterion for determining how many PCs should be kept for each region.
In the note he provides, he says the rule he used is called Preisendorfer’s Rule N. There is no evidence this rule was actually used on the tree ring networks. This claim first appeared years after the hockey stick was made, it wasn’t supported by any of the program code released my Mann, and the evidence says it couldn’t have been used.
Mann Seeks Support
During any controversy, people are bound to join in on the arguments. The hockey stick controversy is no different. Mann refers to one example of this when he discusses work by Eugene Wahl and Caspar Ammann (page 138):
Wahl and Ammann demonstrated that the hockey stick was not an artifact of PCA conventions and that the basic result is robust as long as key proxy records are not thrown out (either explicitly as in the original 2003 McIntyre and McKitrick paper, or implicitly through the use of erroneous selection rules, as in their 2005 paper).
Again, Mann repeats his misrepresentations of McIntyre and McKitrick’s work. More importantly, he says Wahl and Ammann find the MBH “result is robust as long as key proxy records are not thrown out.” This is the exact result observed by McIntyre and McKitrick. It is the exact result Mann admits in his book. Everyone agrees if you keep that particular set of tree ring records, you get a hockey stick. If you remove it, you don’t get a hockey stick.
Mann goes on to say Wahl and Ammann:
showed that, had McIntyre and McKitrick subjected their alternative reconstruction to the statistical validation tests stressed in MBH98 and MBH99 (and nearly all related studies), it would have failed these critical tests.
This is problematic in a number of ways. First, McIntyre and McKitrick never claimed to be offering an “alternative reconstruction.” They were merely testing what happened if certain changes were made. This serves the same purpose as running statistical validation tests. Both are ways of seeing how robust a paper’s results are.
Second, Mann raises the issue of statistical validation tests. There are a variety of such tests, the two most important of which are RE and r2. The closer the results of these tests are to one, the better the conclusion is. The problem is McIntyre had long criticized Mann for not publishing r2 verification scores which were practically 0 (very bad). Mann calculated these scores, but he never published the adverse results. When a committee formed by the United States House of Representatives asked Mann:
Did you calculate the R2 statistic for the temperature reconstruction, particularly for the 15th Century proxy record calculations and what were the results?
Mann simply avoided answering the question:
I assume that what is meant by the “R2” statistic is the squared Pearson dot-moment correlation, or r2 (i.e., the square of the simple linear correlation coefficient between two time series) over the 1856-1901 “verification” interval for our reconstruction. My colleagues and I did not rely on this statistic in our assessments of “skill”
He doesn’t admit or deny calculating the scores. He simply says he and his coauthors didn’t “rely” upon them. Whether or not they relied upon the scores, those scores are obviously relevant to anyone looking at the hockey stick. It would especially have been relevant to the IPCC which claimed Mann and co-authors (emphasis added):
estimated the Northern Hemisphere mean temperature back to AD 1400, a reconstruction which had significant skill in independent cross-validation tests.
Even worse, while the adverse results were hidden, Mann and his co-authors published r2 scores when they were helpful. Figure 3 of MBH98 shows r2 scores:
Figure 3 shows the spatial patterns of calibration b, and verification b and the squared correlation statistic r2, demonstrating highly significant reconstructive skill over widespread regions of the reconstructed spatial domain.
Given all this, it is difficult to understand why Mann would bring up statistical validation tests. He has long hidden the fact his own work fails such tests, and there is no reason failing such tests would matter for McIntyre and McKitrick’s results (they weren’t doing an alternative reconstruction).
To add to the oddness, Wahl and Ammann actually show the failing MBH r2 scores.
Congress
A second flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere
Or a cataclysmic earthquake, I’d accept with some despair
But, no, you sent us Congress, good God, sir, was that fair?
Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve – 1776 (musical)
By this point, the United States Congress had already gotten involved in the hockey stick debate. In 2006, it increased its involvement by commissioning two reports to study the controversy, the National Academy of Science (NAS) Report and the Wegman Report.
The most important conclusion given by both of these reports deals with a methodological choice made by Mann involving principal component analysis (PCA). Mann used a non-standard implementation of PCA. His critics claimed this caused his method to “mine” for hockey sticks. If true, it would mean Mann’s methodology inherently gave undue influence to that particular shape. Both reports acknowledged this criticism. The NAS Report said:
As part of their statistical methods, Mann et al. used a type of principal component analysis that tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions.
The Wegman Report said:
The net effect of this decentering using the proxy data in MBH98 and MBH99 is to produce a “hockey stick” shape.
Both reports agree the original hockey stick was created by a biased methodology. It sought hockey sticks in the data and gave them undue significance. Despite this, Mann says (page 164):
The more extensive and authoritative NAS review, for example, had specifically dismissed the notion that PCA conventions had any substantial impact on our findings. As Bloomfield had put it at the NAS press conference, “the committee, while finding that the issues are real, [found] they had a minimal effect on the final reconstruction.”
Rather than quote the NAS Report, Mann quotes a comment made in a press conference which isn’t supported by the report. He does quote the report on page 161:
The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators
However, this merely supports the conclusion of MBH, not the methodology. Indeed, nothing in the NAS Report actually supports Mann’s work. Instead, it merely says other work reached the same conclusions. This cannot possibly address the merits of Mann’s work, a point expressed by Edward Wegman (the lead author of the report bearing his name):
Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.
Despite this, Mann says:
The NAS report was widely reported to be an affirmation of our work.
Projection
Mann flagrantly misrepresents the NAS report in regards to “bristlecones,” the type of tree the all-important tree ring data was taken from. Mann says of it (emphasis added – page 190):
McIntyre also appealed to the conclusions of the 2006 NAS report to claim that our continued use of the very long bristlecone pine series was inappropriate. Yet this was a misrepresentation of what the NAS had concluded. The NAS panel expressed some concerns about so-called strip-bark tree ring records, which include many of the long-lived bristlecone pines. These trees grow at very high CO2-limited elevations, and there is the possibility that increases in growth over the past two centuries may not be driven entirely by climate, but also by the phenomenon of CO2 fertilization – something that had been called attention to and dealt with in MBH99 (see chapter 4). The NAS report simply recommended efforts to better understand any potential biases by “performing experimental studies on biophysical relationships between temperature and tree-ring parameters”.
This is a gross misrepresentation of the NAS report’s findings. From the very same page as the quote he offers (strip-bark is the type of bristlecones being discussed – page 52):
While “strip-bark” samples should be avoided for temperature reconstructions, attention should also be paid to the confounding effects of anthropogenic nitrogen deposition (Vitousek et al. 1997)…
McIntyre cited a conclusion from the very same page Mann was quoting from, yet Mann claims it was a misrepresentation. Clearly, the reverse is true. More importantly, it is clear bristlecones are a questionable data source. The NAS Report states this. It also acknowledges Mann’s hockey stick was dependent upon bristlecones:
For periods prior to the 16th century, the Mann et al. (1999) reconstruction that uses this particular principal component analysis technique is strongly dependent on data from the Great Basin region in the western United States.
There’s a final oddity to this issue. In a RealClimate post, Mann’s co-author Ray Bradley said:
One final note: bristlecone pines often have an unusual growth form known as “strip bark morphology” in which annual growth layers are restricted to only parts of a tree’s circumference. Some studies have suggested that such trees be avoided for paleoclimatic purposes, a point repeated in a recent National Academy of Sciences report (Surface temperature reconstructions for the last 2,000 years. NRC, 2006).
Mann even commented on that blog post (inline response to comment #7), yet he now completely misrepresents the finding his co-author referred to in it.
His treatment of the Wegman Report is little better (page 164):
The Wegman Report, commissioned by Joe Barton and published several weeks after the NAS report, seemed a transparent effort to further spread the attacks against our work. It uncritically repeated the old and tired McIntyre and McKitrick claim that the hockey stick was an artifact of the conventions used in a statistical (PCA) analysis…
The most important fact about the Wegman Report is not actually found in the Wegman Report. Instead, it was stated by Gerald North, the chair of the panel which wrote the NAS report:
CHAIRMAN BARTON. I understand that. It looks like my time is expired, so I want to ask one more question. Dr. North, do you dispute the conclusions or the methodology of Dr. Wegman’s report?
DR. NORTH. No, we don’t. We don’t disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report.
The same point was reiterated by another member of the panel, Peter Bloomfield:
MR. BLOOMFIELD. Thank you. Yes, Peter Bloomfield. Our committee reviewed the methodology used by Dr. Mann and his coworkers and we felt that some of the choices they made were inappropriate. We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr. Wegman.
Mann claims the Wegman Report was just a repetition of McIntyre and McKitrick’s arguments. The NAS panel agreed with the criticisms found in the Wegman Report…
The Hockey Stick, Redux
“Second verse, same as the first!”
I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am(song)
In 2008, Mann published a new hockey stick. Mann describes it (page 190):
With far more ice core and sediment records now available, we were able to obtain a meaningful reconstruction of the Northern Hemisphere average temperature for the past thirteen hundred years without using tree ring data at all. If tree ring data were used, the reconstruction could be extended, with some reservations, back over the past seventeen hundred years.
Mann’s critics claimed his original hockey stick was purely a product of a small amount of tree ring data. If his new reconstruction was free from that problem, it would be a major development. However, McIntyre almost immediately claimed to find problems with the new reconstruction:
Stephen McIntyre wasted little time in launching a series of attacks on the PNAS paper, employing–it would seem– the strategy of throwing as much mud against the wall as possible and hoping that some would stick. Teaming up with his former coauthor Ross McKitrick, he submitted a short letter to the editor of PNAS claiming that our reconstruction used “upside down proxy data.”52 That was nonsensical, as we pointed out in our response,53 one of our methods didn’t assume any orientation, while the other used an objective procedure for determining it.54
As Mann explains, two different methodologies were used, Composite Plus Scale (CPS) and Error-in-Variables (EIV). However, there is nothing “nonsensical” about saying data was used upside down. The CPS methodology screens proxy records by directly comparing them to the local instrumental records. If the two records are similar enough, the proxy record gets used. The problem is proxy records can increase without meaning temperatures increased. If one were measuring the accumulation of snow/ice, larger values would be expected for cooling, not warming. This increase would be compared to an increase in instrumental temperatures, and thus the CPS methodology would treat the cooling as warming. This would cause the series to be used upside down.
EIV is similar to this, though it doesn’t screen proxy series. Instead, it compares each proxy series to the temperature record and determines how similar the two are. If it finds a similar trend, but in the opposite direction, it “flips” the series upside down. This means both methodologies used by Mann are capable of using proxy series upside down despite the fact he claims such is “nonsensical.”
McIntyre settled then on a more specific avenue of attack: our use of a small group of sediment records from Lake Korttajarvi in central Finland. But this was quite inconsequential and, ironically, we were the ones who had raised concerns about these particular data in the first place, not McIntyre. We had included them for consideration only to be complete in our survey of proxy records in the public domain.
The records Mann is referring to here are commonly called the Tiljander series. The four series are labeled Thickness, Lightsum, Darksum and XRD. Thickness and XRD are measured, but Lightsum and Darksum are derived from those measurements. This means using using all four series, which Mann did, results in double counting.
More importantly, these series were corrupted by human influence. The lake they were taken from began being influenced by farming and construction tn the 1700s. The impact from human influence completely overwhelmed any temperature signal there may have been in the data. The people who originally published the series noted this and cautioned people not to use the modern portion of the series as a temperature proxy.
Since Mann’s methodologies require calibrating proxy series to the instrumental record (1850-1995). it makes no sense to use series whose data has been corrupted in the modern periods. Any correlation which may be found is spurious, not caused by the proxy actually responding to temperature. Since the correlation is spurious, it could not have any connection to the temperature response the series were supposed to have before being corrupted. This is what caused two of the Tiljander series to be used with the opposite correlation as that suggested by the original authors.
Mann’s Nonsense
In the online supplementary information accompanying publication of our PNAS article, we had both noted the potential problems with these records and showed that eliminating them made absolutely no difference to the resulting reconstruction.57 McIntyre had thus attempted to fabricate yet another false controversy
Mann acknowledged the authors warning not to use the data as he did, yet used it anyway. The reasoning he offers for such makes no sense: he says there is “no difference” if he uses the series. If there is no difference, why include them? The answer is simple. Using them makes a huge difference.
The main temperature reconstruction is barely affected by removing the Tiljander series because it includes the tree-ring data which was essential for Mann’s original hockey stick. Mann’s paper claims not to need that data to get a hockey stick, but that is only true if he includes the Tiljander series. If you remove both the Tiljander and tree ring series, there is no longer a hockey stick.
This point is confirmed by Gavin Schmidt, a coauthor of Mann’s at RealClimate:
Since the no-dendro CPS version only validates until 1500 AD (Mann et al (2008) ), it is hardly likely that the no-dendro/no-Tilj CPS version will validate any further back, so criticising how bad the 1000 AD network is using CPS is hardly germane. Note too that while the EIV no-dendro version does validate to 1000 AD, the no-dendro/no-Tilj only works going back to 1500 AD (Mann et al, 2009, SI).
A commenter at RealClimate noticed this remark and asked:
So just to be clear with regard to your response to 525. Under either method (CPS or EIV) it is not possible to get a validated reconstruction to before 1500 without the use of tree rings, or the Tiljander sediments.
Schmidt responded:
That appears to be the case with the Mann et al 2008 network.
Mann himself has acknowledged this. From the Supplementary Information for a later paper:
Additional significance tests that we have performed indicate that the NH land+ocean Had reconstruction with all tree-ring data and 7 potential “problem” proxies removed (see original Supp Info where this reconstruction is shown) yields a reconstruction that passes RE at just below the 95% level (approximately 94% level) back to AD 1300 and the 90% level back to AD 1100 (they pass CE at similar respective levels).
The test used by Mann required his reconstruction pass at a 95% confidence level, and he acknowledges it can only do so by including either the tree ring data or the (nonsensically used) Tiljander series. The “false controversy” he claims McIntyre raised actually repudiates a central claim of Mann’s paper:
With far more ice core and sediment records now available, we were able to obtain a meaningful reconstruction of the Northern Hemisphere average temperature for the past thirteen hundred years without using tree ring data at all.
Nobody Agrees With Mann
Mann continues to spread disinformation (page 198):
When Science in early September 2009 published an article by Darrell Kaufman and his colleagues showing the most dramatic hockey stick yet–a two-thousand-year reconstruction of Arctic temperature changes19–Stephen McIntyre and his forces went on the attack on the Internet,20 immediately trumpeting the false claim that the work was compromised by bad data, despite the fact that whether or not the authors used the data in question made no difference to the result they obtained.
The “data in question” are the Tiljander series which were once again used upside down. Despite Mann’s claims, McIntyre never said this was the source of the Kaufman hockey stick (he primarily blamed another series, Yamal). Beyond that, a few months after the Kaufman paper came out, a corrigendum was published. Included in it was this line:
Record 20 was corrected to reflect the original interpretation of Tiljander et al. (S32) that X-ray density is related inversely to temperature.
Mann claims McIntyre raised a “false claim” to attack a paper, yet the authors of that paper acknowledged his claim was correct. Even stranger, Ray Bradley was a coauthor on both Mann’s 2008 paper and the Kaufman paper. Both papers made the same mistake, but only the Kaufman group admitted it.
A Simple Point
For all the “technical” issues in Mann’s papers, the controversy is actually very simple. Mann’s papers give undue focus to a small amount of data. Even he and his supporters admit his original hockey stick was based entirely upon a small amount of tree ring data (which the NAS says should not be used to measure temperature). His latest hockey stick was the same, save he added upside down data which he couldn’t possibly calibrate to temperature.
Denouement
“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
Orson Welles
One of the most common defenses offered for Mann’s hockey stick is other papers get the same result. The idea is if Mann got the right answer, criticisms of his work don’t matter. This is a dumbfounding position, and the best response is that given above by Wegman:
Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.
Mann’s work has been highly publicized. If the glaring problems in it are overlooked, how can anyone trust other papers reaching the same conclusions? What is to stop those other papers from being just as flawed? Nothing. They cannot be ignored or dismissed because of flaws in Mann’s work, but they should all be carefully examined rather than accepted on faith. Unfortunately, the same basic criticisms are leveled against practically every one of those reconstructions.
General Issues
It would be impossible to discuss every paper showing a hockey stick. However, two general problems found in them can be covered. The first problem has already been shown, namely, mistakes don’t get admitted. Mann’s PC1 (the source of his hockey stick) was created with a biased methodology, and it was made up of data the National Academy of Scientists said should be avoided. Despite this, it was included in the latest IPCC report.
Related to the above, papers with hockey sticks tend to rely on the same data. In addition to bristlecones, a commonly used series is called Yamal. Mann discusses it (page 198):
A more vicious attack was reserved for later that month. The matter concerned a tree ring temperature reconstruction for Russia’s Yamal region that Keith Briffa and colleagues had published some years earlier; it once again showed recent warmth to be anomalous in a two-thousand-year context. At a time when Briffa was known to be seriously ill and not in a position to respond to any allegations, McIntyre publicly accused him of having intentionally cherry-picked tree ring records to get a particular result…
To support his “cherry picking” allegation, McIntyre had produced his own composite reconstruction–which happened to lack the prominent recent warming evident in Briffa’s reconstruction.
McIntyre didn’t accuse Briffa of cherry-picking, and he didn’t make “his own… reconstruction.” He simply did a sensitivity test. Testing to see what happens when you make a change is not the same as saying that change is “right.”
How did he accomplish this? By deleting tree ring records of Briffa’s he didn’t seem to like, and replacing them with other tree ring data he had found on the Internet, which were inappropriate for use in a long-term temperature reconstruction
Mann claims the data added was “inappropriate for use in a long-term temperature reconstruction,” but it was no different than the data McIntyre removed. Mann also claims the data was “data he had found on the Internet.” Surprisingly, that’s true. McIntyre found the data on the internet web page for the International Tree Ring Data Bank, the single largest repository for tree ring records… As for the “tree ring records… he didn’t seem to like,” they were 12 cores (tree rings measurements), a rather low amount. McIntyre removed them to see what would happen if a different site’s data was used instead. This new site had 34 cores, a far better number, and it was from the same area. More importantly, McIntyre then added the 12 cores back in and got the same result.
Put simply, McIntyre showed a series with a prominent hockey stick lost it’s hockey stick shape if a little data from the same area was added. This series has been used in a dozen reconstructions. Is it any surprise those reconstructions got the same result as Mann got? All this shows is if you give a small amount of questionable data undue focus, you can get the same results Mann got by giving a small amount of questionable data undue focus.
The hockey stick was originally accepted without anyone verifying it. That was a mistake. Newer hockey sticks were accepted without anyone verifying them. That was a mistake. Will the same mistake be made with Mann’s book?
To any rationale person, Mann’s work seems not so much science as opinion. I simply find it hard to believe that governments make policy on such ephemeral, ambiguous ‘data’.
A great review that also constitutes a great summary of the “Hockey Stick” controversy.
One of the important things of the controversy is this: why can’t MBH et al produce a temperature reconstruction that lacks the flaws that everyone admits exist but Mann?
Very good summation, Brandon.
The hockey stick won’t go very easily. Just look at cholesterol and saturated fat consumption causing theory… It has been proven wrong many times but the theory is still being used anyway to attack steak, eggs, etc.
Marvelous. Bravo!
Brandon Shollenberger:
Thankyou for this fine assessment of Mann’s assertions in his book.
You end it by asking;
“The hockey stick was originally accepted without anyone verifying it. That was a mistake. Newer hockey sticks were accepted without anyone verifying them. That was a mistake. Will the same mistake be made with Mann’s book?”
Of course, your question is rhetorical. However, newcomers to this subject may not recognise that, so I state the following answer.
Yes, deliberate mistakes are often repeated, and the deliberate mistake of not verifying Mann’s work will certainly be made with Mann’s book by the same people who deliberately failed to verify his work.
Richard
“For all the “technical” issues in Mann’s papers, the controversy is actually very simple. Mann’s papers give undue focus to a small amount of data.”
Yes, and there’s something very odd going on when so many supposed scientists don’t see this.
I knew the paper was bad from day one.It contradicted decades of research in several fields such as Geology,History and Biology.
Why do they keep using the word methodology when the word method will suffice? Methodology sounds ‘scientific’. It actually means the science or study of method. If you see the word methodology in an article or report, it’s pretty fair bet you are reading B*S.
RE: Piddle, Twiddle…. you sent us Congress; was that fair?
How Ironic. Mann compares his plight to John Adams’,
The main character of 1776, who as Jefferson sings:
“Mr. Adams, damn you, Mr. Adams,
You’re obnoxious and disliked, that cannot be denied…..”
tl;dr
Looks like Mann uses a hockey stick like an out of control Detroit Redwings forward
Two ‘usings’ in “The Hockey Stick, Redux” section (Third para from the bottom of the section)
“The records Mann is referring to here are commonly called the Tiljander series. The four series are labeled Thickness, Lightsum, Darksum and XRD. Thickness and XRD are measured, but Lightsum and Darksum are derived from those measurements. This means using using all four series, which Mann did, results in double counting.
More importantly, these series were corrupted by human influence. The lake they were taken from began being influenced by farming and construction tn the 1700s. The impact from human influence completely overwhelmed any temperature signal there may have been in the data. The people who originally published the series noted this and cautioned people not to use the modern portion of the series as a temperature proxy.”
This is a perfect example on how shoddy his work is.He goes out of his way to introduce bias in his paper.A deliberate effort for the purpose of advancing a particular belief that does not exist.
He is a perfect example of a pseudo-scientist.
After reading Shollenberger’s Technical Review of Mann’s recent book, I ask myself: How can anyone in the scientific community put any faith whatsoever in the scientific findings of Dr. Michael Mann? The only answer I came up with was: Fear of repurcussions. Does anyone have a different answer?
Brandon,
I’ve always had a hard time understanding the intricacies of the arguments about the hockey stick, not least because I’m challenged by the maths/stats. This is the clearest exposition for a layman that I have seen. I thank and congratulate you for it.
Thanks Brandon, a very concise and readable summary.
If only a few politicians would read it. I am sure that, among the charlatans, that there are many more who are guilty of ignorance.
I suspect most people would be shocked at how little data was being manipulated to justify the wrecking of economies.
On a related note, I’d love to see a TV channel going out on the street and asking people by how much they think the planet has supposedly warmed over the last century. Given all the hysteria, I am sure that in some cases peoples guesses would be out by ten degrees or more.
Mann, the log balancer.
First off….to believe in the Hockey Stick……someone would have to believe the climate was freakishly stable for 1000 years…………
Mann’s 1998 “hockey stick” eliminated from the historic record both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. This was a bold falsehood, that was then promoted by the IPCC to scare the public about global warming. The IPCC has since quietly dropped the Mann hockey stick.
Furthermore, it took eight more years before the “Divergence Problem” was revealed. Mann grafted modern surface temperature data onto older tree ring temperature proxies to produce his upward-sloping “hockey stick” graph. Grafting together two different datasets is usually NOT good scientific practice.
Why did Mann do this? Because if he had exclusively used tree-ring data, the blade of the hockey stick, instead of showing scary warming in the last decades of the 20th Century, would have shown COOLING.
This was later referred to in the Climategate emails as “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline”. Oops!
The scientific conclusion, in my opinion, is that using tree rings as a proxy for temperatures is not sufficiently accurate for the major conclusions that were drawn from the Mann study.
Mann and the IPCC were clearly wrong about the hockey stick – the only remaining question is not one of scientific error, it is one of deliberate fraud.
For more on the Divergence Problem, see
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1530
and
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=899
Prof Mann knows he is wrong in his theory and the results he finds.
He has made more reconstructions, and all of them lack scientific merit.
What is most sad is that a few of the louder supporters of his theory seem to continue to have opportunity via the press.
Prof Mann is not well respected in the geological nor biologicall fields of science because of his shoddy works.
Keith W:
John W. Garrett:
Michael Larkin:
Thanks guys! I’m happy to see it’s helpful for people.
Dodgy Geezer:
D’oh. That makes two typos people have found in it so far (AMac pointed out I used it’s instead of its at one point). I guess that’s what I get for self-editing. Oh well. Thanks for pointing it out to me.
Grumpy Old Man:
This isn’t true at all. Method and methodology are two different things. In fact, a methodology will generally encompass a number of methods. You can’t just switch the two at will.
Stephen Rasey:
Actually, I was the one who put that quote there. It was more clear in the PDF version, but basically, I put a quote at the start of each section (aside from the first).
More of this insidiously stupid posit that anyone can tell what the temps are with tree rings. This may be tiresome for many, but I’ll keep repeating this until this vapid posit gets removed as a question of science.
The trees in question are samples taken from high latitude or high altitude places. They only grow (tree rings) from about 6 to 8 weeks a year. There is absolutely no way to pick up an annual signal from these rings. They won’t grow in extreme heat, and they don’t grow in the cold. The hockey stick graph which eliminated the MWP and the LIA is because they don’t respond to extremes. The handle is an artifact of the rings themselves.
Even if you can extract a temp signal from the tree rings, (which one can not) it only gives us data for 2 months out of the year. Was it a mild or very cold winter? There is absolutely no way to tell when the ring doesn’t respond to either. So, pretending that we can say the rings tell us it averaged 60° F in the summer for any particular location. So what? Does that mean the winter averaged 10° F or -20°F? The trees don’t grow in either. So what is the average annual temp? Somewhere between 20° and 35° ? That’s tea leaf reading. That’s as stupid as phrenology. What’s the decadal average? More stupidity akin to numerology.
All of the papers regarding temp-dendrochonology particularly from the cores in question needs thrown out of science. It is not a valid concept. It doesn’t matter is one particular core sampling hinged on the results or not. It doesn’t matter what statistical approach was used. It is the same as arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a needle.
Can anyone show the work of science that circumvents the fact that the rings have no cold or extreme hot signal? I’ve looked and I can not find it. Where is the proof that this approach even theoretically works?
Reed Coray says:
March 11, 2012 at 9:54 am
“After reading Shollenberger’s Technical Review of Mann’s recent book, I ask myself: How can anyone in the scientific community put any faith whatsoever in the scientific findings of Dr. Michael Mann? The only answer I came up with was: Fear of repurcussions. Does anyone have a different answer?”
Of course. CO2AGW was a grant-sucking fra*d from day one; all that the CO2AGW consensus scientists want is stay in the sweet spot where their dull incompetent made-up papers enjoy undeserved prominency. Mann is useful for this purpose.
In what other scientific field can you sit back in front of a computer simulation, and the moment one of the curves shows some wiggle, write a paper about how concerned you are about that wiggle, get it published presto and add one more reference to your CV?
About 40 years ago the pop group M Mann had a hit with “Ha, Ha, Said the Clown”.
Prescient, or whar?
Here we have a perfect example of someone (Mann) who believes HIS version of the facts as he remembers them and seems to think that everyone else will too. Does it not occur to him that, like any scientist or author, he is required to check his facts before publication, and that if he doesn’t others will. Talk about “when you are in a hole, stop digging”.
As welcome as the Hockeystick seemed to be for certain circles, the question arises if it was created by sloppy scientific work or by careful work, based on something like “if you could show that …”.
I too am very glad to read this summary, since the whole MBH controversy was well before I ‘saw the light’ on climate stuff, so the details have rather tended to elude me. Thank you Brandon.
This was a difficult review to write, so my thanks to the author. This hockey stick question needs to be elevated to a level that pays people to do the work. This treatise provides enough meat to raise serious technical questions about Mann’s et al hockey sticks. At first blush, it seems to me that a set of data tests could be performed to prove/disprove the impact of including the datasets and statistics at issue. I have lost some faith in the National Academy of Science in recent years so cannot suggest that they supervise the work. I do know that Stephen McIntyre should be involved in the supervision.
Perhaps the work should be done in the UK where they have different treatment of technical issues in legal proceedings. The technical experts for the two sides have to agree on the work and interpretation of the results. I have done enough work in recent years on technical, geological, historical and archeological data sets to have real concern about carbon dioxide being the root cause of the global warming seen from about 1978 to 1998. It is time to take the hockey stick problem away from the scientists and give it to the statisticians, geologists and process engineers who work for money, not power and prestige. That probably means involving the lawyers in a court setting.
JFD
This same hand-waving fakery is rampant throughout the entire AGW movement,
for it is totally hollow, founded on a false premise of IR insulation by CO2.
Though CO2 levels are higher, the CO2 window of the Earth’s IR emission is no colder than 30 years ago. In spite of spectroscopic theory, there has been no CO2 forcing and there will be no AGW. Though Earth may have been CO2-sensitive in its geological past, its current sensitivity is very low, whereas its sensitivity to solar influences is high.
This is why they have to fake all their data — CO2 seems literally to be a paper tiger.
Lets see how many times Mann’s work is mentioned in AR5………..
James Sexton says:
March 11, 2012 at 10:20 am
———————-
100% correct…you can only get temps from splicing actual temps on to the end…. 😉
Also important, trees can’t tell you when that 2 month period was…..was it May/June…because there was a warmer winter, or cold winter started sooner…..or Sept/Oct because it followed a long cold hard winter, or because the following winter started later and was milder………etc
This is starting to look like shooting fish in a barrel. Not much sport to it, but someone’s gotta roll up his sleeves put an end to this misery.
Recommended title for an upcoming Brandon Shollenberger book, The Mannslaughter Diaries or Sticking the Hockey Stick Shtik.
I wonder how many books he has sold thus far?
What a wonder is a sharp mind at work.
The vegetation being revealed by receding ice in the Antarctic Peninsula, northern Canada and Russia all seem to date back to the MWP (and we are still nowhere near the temp necessary for the reformation of such plant life). We also know that Sweden was able to march it’s army straight to Denmark during the LIA. But of course, the Hockey Stick tells me this simply could not have happened
It would be nice to know the exact temperature during these events but that number would not alter these facts.
An interesting and detailed review. This should be posted on Amazon, so potential purchasers know what they are actually looking at buying.
Steve from Rockwood [March 11, 2012 at 10:44 am]
“I wonder how many books he has sold thus far?”
Doesn’t really matter. The books will be gobbled up by a ‘benefactor’ in order to legally shuttle money to him. Then they will either be given away as swag or donated to a library.
Reed Coray:
I think a large part of it is just that people believe the conclusion behind the hockey stick, and thus, they don’t look closely at the things which support it. It’s a common form of confirmation bias.
John Bills:
When some of the Zero Order Drafts were leaked, I downloaded the section on paleoclimatology. Mann’s original hockey stick was used in one of the graphs. The caption for it included the line:
I have no idea what’s in the First Order Draft now, but that line made me expect the worst.
Brandon thanks for an elucidating essay it tells exactly what has occurred in the hockey stick fiasco, unfortunately you are dealing with serial liars and obfuscation of the first order. Mann’s apologists will never argue the facts but will attack your motives.Mann will not reply because he has no argument.They issue statements and op eds always without discussion. Replication is only ever done with their own team, without disclosure of raw data and method, so that no other person can check the veracity of their conclusions. Just keep arguing the scientific method, once enough scientists,physicists, statisticians and engineers enter the fray the argument will be truly explored.
Brandon may be starting an industry. A title for a compendium of critiques: The One-Legged Mann and the Arse-Kicking Contest. Yes, yes, I can all but see the eye-rolling and hear the groans, but I’m on a roll, baby!
Too many unsupported assertions and half truths to list in detail. Here’s just one example of rather selective quotation, from the NAS report:-
“As part of their statistical methods, Mann et al. used a type of principal component analysis that tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions. ”
The next section being carefully ommitted:
“In practice, this method, though not recommended, does not appear to unduly influence reconstructions of hemispheric mean temperature; reconstructions performed without using principal component analysis are qualitatively similar to the original curves presented by Mann et al.”
So despite all the noise expended on it, the whole PCA question is moot, as indeed Wahl and Amman and and von Storch et al (2005) demonstrated.
Clearly, Mr Schollenberg is not being entirely candid with his readers.
[SNIP: Yes, it is OT. Please submit to Tips and Notes. -REP]
Good thing for Mann that books don’t have to be peer reviewed before publication!
The Mann’s entire career is founded on shonky stats. He’ll probably convince himself this steaming pile will be a bestseller with some clever way of counting the sales reciepts.
It’s worth noting the work of Mann’s own graduate student Dr Abadneh.
The fundamental, core claim is that a very limited set of trees (those picked by Mann’s methods) are a very heavy fraction of the entire global temperature reconstruction. Since they line up well with instrumental results for 1900-1960, we assume they line up well outside of that period… and continue constructing a reconstruction into the non-instrumental periods.
Dr. Abadneh remeasured some of the exact same trees, as well as a wide swath of other trees in the vicinity. The basic goal was (obviously) to see if the tree series could be brought up to date.
These same trees – which are enshrined as being reasonable predictors of pre-instrumental period temperatures for wide swaths of time – do not line up with current instrumental readings. This is “the decline”.
It is not shocking that there is a proxy that doesn’t agree – Mann’s reconstruction uses (and essentially discards) -hundreds- of proxies that don’t agree. It’s fundamentally a filtering method that discards everything it doesn’t agree with by the hundreds. Plenty of true proxies are probably discarded already for insufficient agreement with the flawed estimated of surface temperature called ‘the instrumental period’.
But these are the crucial trees. And – they don’t agree. So now, over the period of instrumental measurement, you’ve got a proxy that lines up -well- for half … and not at all for half of the period. The ‘not at all’ half is discarded, yet the claim that these same trees have always been good temperature proxies for the pre-instrumental period remains. Somehow.
Badanov-“Looks like Mann uses a hockey stick like an out of control Detroit Red Wings forward”
Actually looks more like an out of control Toronto Maple Leaf ie. perennial losers
Wegman called it “decentering”, I recall Steve McIntyre called it “short centering” and Mann calls it “modern centering”. As if centering over the full extent of the record is an out of date concept instead of being the proper statistical technique. What a charlatan! Mann’s centering technique should be properly called “post-modern centering”.
Phil:
This, however, goes back to the point that Mann’s work, even if it accidentally got the correct answer (and there is lots of other evidence to suggest that it did not), was poorly conducted. That is the relevant point, and there is nothing in your quote that supports the idea that Mann’s work was correctly conducted. Brandon’s review correctly notes that other, similar studies – many using the same, suspect bristlecone pines – arrived at similar conclusions. That is not an endorsement of Mann’s use his novel, hockey-stick forming PCA. Brandon also notes that each of the subsequent papers needs careful examination as well.
In addition, the phrase from NAS – “qualitatively similar” – is deliberately vague and leaves a gap big enough to take a truckload of bristecone pines through. It was the best North could do to salvage something for Mann.
How, indeed, do you deal with North’s later testimony to Congress and his agreement with Wegman?
Phil Clarke says:
March 11, 2012 at 11:06 am
“So despite all the noise expended on it, the whole PCA question is moot, as indeed Wahl and Amman and and von Storch et al (2005) demonstrated.”
No, far from it, whatever NAS says. Wahl and Amman of Jesus paper fame?
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
von Storch, German proponent of post-normal science?
Some fine fellows you have selected there.
In reply to JFD’s comment:
“JFD says:
March 11, 2012 at 10:38 am
It is time to take the hockey stick problem away from the scientists and give it to the statisticians, geologists and process engineers who work for money, not power and prestige. That probably means involving the lawyers in a court setting.”
I would hope eventually this issue will be settled definitively at a scientific level, rather than in a court.
The paleoclimatic record shows cycles of warming and cooling that correlate changes of cosmogenic isotopes. The cosmogenic isotope changes are known to have been caused by changes to the solar magnetic cycle.
Mann’s paper removed the cycles of warming and cooling to create the hockey stick. Truth is truth. The past cycles and abrupt climate change events occurred for a reason. Mann’s paper only affected people beliefs.
There has been no warming for 17 years. A significant interruption to the solar magnetic cycle is underway. There have been roughly a hundred published papers which try to explain the mechanisms by which solar changes and geomagnetic field changes cause cyclic and abrupt climate change.
Based on the paleoclimatic record the planet is about to cool. One would assume there will be public requests for an explanation as to physical cause when there is cooling.
There are quite obvious cycles of warming and cooling in this graph (See this link figure 3.) which is an analysis of the Greenland Ice sheet core to determine ice sheet temperature over the last 12,000 year. Note the ice sheet temperature warms and cools cyclically. Interesting there is no correlation of the cyclic warming and cooling with CO2 changes and there is no correlation of the temperature changes with changes to ocean currents.
“Fig.3. The upper panel shows the air temperature at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, reconstructed by Alley (2000) from GISP2 ice core data. The time scale shows years before modern time, which is shown at the right hand side of the diagram. The rapid temperature rise to the left indicate the final part of the even more pronounced temperature increase following the last ice age. The temperature scale at the right hand side of the upper panel suggests a very approximate comparison with the global average temperature (see comment below).”
http://www.climate4you.com/
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1
Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope. Corresponding changes in sunspot brightness and the strength of molecular absorption lines were also seen. This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25.
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/amet/aip/543146.pdf
Solar activity and Svalbard temperatures
The long temperature series at Svalbard (Longyearbyen) show large variations and a positive trend since its start in 1912. During this period solar activity has increased, as indicated by shorter solar cycles. The temperature at Svalbard is negatively correlated with the length of the solar cycle. The strongest negative correlation is found with lags 10–12 years. The relations between the length of a solar cycle and the mean temperature in the following cycle are used to model Svalbard annual mean temperature and seasonal temperature variations.
These models can be applied as forecasting models. We predict an annual mean temperature decrease for Svalbard of 3.5 to 2oC from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24 (2009–‐20) and a decrease in the winter temperature of ≈6 oC.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2000PA000571.shtml
On the 1470-year pacing of Dansgaard-Oeschger warm events
The oxygen isotope record from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core was reanalyzed in the frequency and time domains. The prominent 1470-year spectral peak, which has been associated with the occurrence of Dansgaard-Oeschger interstadial events, is solely caused by Dansgaard-Oeschger events 5, 6, and 7. This result emphasizes the nonstationary character of the oxygen isotope time series. Nevertheless, a fundamental pacing period of ∼1470 years seems to control the timing of the onset of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. A trapezoidal time series model is introduced which provides a template for the pacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Statistical analysis indicates only a ≤3% probability that the number of matches between observed and template-derived onsets of Dansgaard-Oeschger events between 13 and 46 kyr B.P. resulted by chance. During this interval the spacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger onsets varied by ±20% around the fundamental 1470-year period and multiples thereof. The pacing seems unaffected by variations in the strength of North Atlantic Deep Water formation, suggesting that the thermohaline circulation was not the primary controlling factor of the pacing period.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003GL017115.shtml
Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock by Stefan Rahmstorf
Many paleoclimatic data reveal a approx. 1,500 year cyclicity of unknown origin. A crucial question is how stable and regular this cycle is. An analysis of the GISP2 ice core record from Greenland reveals that abrupt climate events appear to be paced by a 1,470-year cycle with a period that is probably stable to within a few percent; with 95% confidence the period is maintained to better than 12% over at least 23 cycles. This highly precise clock points to an origin outside the Earth system; oscillatory modes within the Earth system can be expected to be far more irregular in period.
Mann’s Hockey Stick work is not a piece of research that is open to challenge and review as would be normal scientific prat ice, but an icon of ‘the cause’ that like all religions icons cannot be challenge nor reviewed. And for Mann its been the passport to fame and fortune , the IPCC adoption of this for its political purposes made Mann and without it his effectively gone. So he has no choice but to defended to his last breath. It that means lying , then so be it .
I can envision a future college history/philosophy of science course with Mann’s book and “The Hockey Stick Illusion” as prime texts.
Excellent synopsis, it brings back fond memories of that post at BishopsHill “Casper and the Jesus paper”.
This whole affair reminds me of that 1981 Kit-Kat advert, some new band sat with and A&R man while the terrible song plays. A&R man switches it off to have a break, snapping the Kit-Kat, the band asks, “what do you think”?
A&R man says “you can’t sing, you can’t play… you look awful….. you’ll go a long way”
Will we ever “get a break” from Mann?
Mann:
I sat here thinking…. “Steve McIntyre has forces??”
Only in Mann’s faulty reconstruction of recent history, which occurs only in his tiny mind, does Steve McIntyre have “forces”.
Mann is clearly projecting his paranoia that someone is checking his work and refusing to back down.
What an ugly mess Mann has made.
I believe the only thing that has kept his career afloat until now is his incredible ability to write in the most advanced form of scientific obfuscatory phrasing.
I guess he figured if it remains relatively incomprehensible, there is less chance he will be queried on it.
Clearly, it was another retro-historical Mannian Miracle: they marched on water!
Phil Clarke levels an accusation against me:
First, I understand why people tend to put a “c” in my last name. That typo I get. However, I have no idea how somebody could manage to leave off the last two letters of my name.
Second, and far more importantly, the text Phil Clarke shows I didn’t quote expresses the exact same idea covered in the “Denouement” section of what I wrote. I don’t see how anyone could possible have been misled by that.
> publish a corrigendum by Nature in order to correct errors pointed out in his work, though he claimed, “None of these errors affect our previously published results.”
You can read the corrigendum (instead of just linking to it). There is no need for the “claimed”; you can just read the thing, and find out for yourself. Its a correction of listing of data sources (not a correction of “errors pointed out in his work”). It doesn’t affect the results, as you can tell by reading it.
> Mann’s work seems not so much science as opinion
How would you know? You’ve never read it.
> The IPCC has since quietly dropped the Mann hockey stick.
Of course it hasn’t. Here is is, cunningly hidden in plain sight.
The rest of all this stuff is broken, too, but its all just a re-hashing of stuff that everyone has already made their minds up about. None of you are actually thinking about this.
It’s better to be useful than right. In the government game, what is right is relative after all.
And how many GCMs need to be averaged to make an ensemble prediction? Wrong method + right answer…. Oops, didn’t even get the right answer.
The error and stupidity lies in thinking they’ll go unchallenged. Anent which:
Power tends to stupefy, and absolute power stupefies absolutely.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/03/06/study-finds-that-having-power-can-make-you-stupid/
This is an excellent review. However nearly all these points have been covered in detail at Climate Audit and in Andrew Montford’s excellent book, The Hockey Stick Illusion. Note this was all before the publication of Mann’s book. What is really astonishing is that Mann can publish a book repeating all these long exploded points. Just one point to add: “modern” centering is not centering at all. It may well have been Mann’s own innovation in PCA, and its not a good one!
Earth Day, April 22, 1998, was the day the hockey stick was born. On that day, Michael Mann, and co-authors Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes published a paper in the scientific journal Nature (referred to as MBH98). This paper claimed to reconstruct northern hemispheric temperatures from the past 600 years by examining temperature “proxies” found in nature.
Northern Hemispheric temperatures –
so how/when/why did this NH data come to represent the Global Hemispheric temperatures of the past 600 years?
We don’t even get started in the review process and this question arises.
From here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/11/shollenbergers-technical-review-of-manns-recent-book/#comment-919590
“Mann’s 1998 “hockey stick” eliminated from the historic record both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. This was a bold falsehood, that was then promoted by the IPCC to scare the public about global warming. The IPCC has since quietly dropped the Mann hockey stick.”
It was originally a NORTHERN HEMISPHERE reconstruction paper.The chart shows NO MWP and LIA in it.That alone was preposterous because those two climate periods were very obvious and well documented to have existed.This absurdity was in the 2001 IPCC report.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/ed/Hockey_stick_chart_ipcc_large.jpg/350px-Hockey_stick_chart_ipcc_large.jpg
Dr. Mann must be crazy to think his pseudo-science paper can wish away those well documented climate events that have a lot of science papers published over the decades in several fields of study.It is crazy that in this day and age where such information is so easy to find we still have people who fall for such baloney the H.S. paper is.
A simple perusal of the Vikings settlements in Greenland around 1,000 years ago should suffice that it was MUCH warmer at that time.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/regions/northamerica.php
And in response to Phil Clarke, the reason non PCA analysis get the same answer is that they use the same flawed bristlecone and/or Yamal data. Mannian PCA analysis picked out the bristlecones and gave them a big weight in MBH. but it s possible to do it with much simpler methods, as Wegman shows.
“In addition to bristlecones, a commonly used series is called Yamal.”
Heh heh. I remember reading some of Steve M’s blog articles on Yamal. One issue, as I recall, is that the Yamal series has some correlation to “global” temperatures, but poor correlation to locally measured temperatures. WUWT?
I also recall that it’s not necessary to delete the entire Yamal series to break the hockey stick. You can do most of the damage by deleting one lousy tree, YAD06, the most influential tree in the world. It’s a sad commentary on modern government-funded science that Mann and his “mannions” continue to get away with this stuff.
Has anyone checked Mann’s ears.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_%28hypothetical_planet%29
” In an attempt to explain peculiarities of Mercury’s orbit, in the 19th-century French mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier hypothesized that they were the result of another planet, which he named Vulcan…By 1843, Le Verrier published his provisional theory on the subject, which would be tested during a transit of Mercury across the face of the Sun in 1843.
“As it turned out, predictions from Le Verrier’s theory failed to match the observations.
“Numerous reports — all of them unreliable — began to reach Le Verrier from other amateurs who claimed to have seen unexplained transits…He frequently announced dates of future Vulcan transits, and when these failed to materialize, he tinkered with the parameters some more.
“In 1877 Le Verrier died, convinced to the end of having discovered another planet. With the loss of its principal proponent, however, the search for Vulcan abated. After many years of searching, astronomers were seriously doubting the planet’s existence.
“In 1915 Einstein’s theory of relativity, an entirely different approach to understanding gravity than classical mechanics, solved the problem. His equations predicted exactly the observed amount of advance of Mercury’s perihelion without any recourse to the existence of a hypothetical Vulcan.”
Connolley, Wikipedia’s Censoring Propagandist, wants everyone to believe that the UN/IPCC still publishes Mann’s original [and thoroughly debunked] MBH98/99 chart.
But try to find that chart in any current IPCC publication, from 2008 on. It isn’t there.
And the IPCC LOVED Mann’s original chart! It was the scariest one ever. But now, they can only post [equally wrong] imitations, which lack the alarmism of Mann’s original chart, thus exposing Mann as a scientific charlatan.
As we now know, Mann hid inconvenient data in an ftp file labeled “censored“. After much questioning and searching, Steve McIntyre found the MBH “censored” file.
If Mann had used the correct data, there would have been no hockey stick shape. And as Brandon Shollenberger correctly points out, Mann has continued to play mendacious games with cherry-picked proxies. There is no honesty in the Mann, he is a scientific scoundrel, and Connolley is just being his water boy.
William M. Connolley responds to me by posting garbage:
Here is falsely accuses me of having not read the corrigendum.
Here he says something nonsensical. He says there is no need to say Mann “claimed” nothing in his corrigendum affected his results as you can read it and see “for yourself.” I have no idea how reading something which is less than one page long and doesn’t show how it got its conclusion is enough to allow someone to know a claim is true, yet he says it is.
He he just makes things up. If it were just “a correction of listing of data sources,” no data would be changed. However, this can easily be seen as untrue. An example from the corrigendum:
That data was inappropriately extended back a few years (allowing it to be used in the 1400 step of Mann’s reconstruction) when it shouldn’t have been. Mann’s corrigendum removed this inappropriate extension. Connolley apparently claims this is just “a correction of listing of data sources.” He then concludes his comment by saying:
I see no indication anything of value could come from an exchange with him.
REPLY: I tend to agree. Like Mann, Connolley has an ego so large that the transportation department has to put out orange road cones ahead of him when he travels. Mostly his purpose here is to post comments, then quote mine responses to post on his stoat blog to say “see I told you so”. It is rather amusing to watch – Anthony
“In the note he provides, he says the rule he used is called Preisendorfer’s Rule N.”
Where was this standard rule published?
No. The denouement section says
“One of the most common defenses offered for Mann’s hockey stick is other papers get the same result. The idea is if Mann got the right answer, criticisms of his work don’t matter. ”
and
“Mann’s work has been highly publicized. If the glaring problems in it are overlooked, how can anyone trust other papers reaching the same conclusions?”
The NAS paragraph that was very carefully excluded was making a different point, that the flaws in the MBH papers – and they were the first of their kind – have no significant effect on the conclusions..
You might also want to revise what the NAS said about the usefulness of r-squared as a diagnostic. Despite the further noise expended there, not least by Montford in his ‘Jesus paper’ nonsense, the NAS described the metric as ‘not in itself a useful indication of merit (Page 93).’
So the PCA and r2 are non-issues, according to the NAS. Information carefully omitted from the above review.
MikeP – The Yamal series are not in the hockey stick papers, and the NAS only indicated problems with strip bark samples after 1850.
“Hence, in context, what the clause “strip-bark samples should be avoided
for temperature reconstructions” was intended to convey is that
strip-bark samples from the mid-19th century to the present are
very difficult to calibrate against instrumental records of
temperature, and the easiest solution is therefore not to use
them. However, strip-bark data are considered suspect only after
the modern increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
This is why other studies that rely on strip-bark pine records
only use them to infer past temperatures prior to 1850 (e.g.,
Biondi et al. 1999). This reference, and all of those cited in
the above quote, can be found in the reference section of our
report.”
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_house_hearings&docid=f:31362.wais
William M. Connolley says:
March 11, 2012 at 11:43 am
None of you are actually thinking about this.
===========================================
That’s entirely incorrect. Many of us are asking others to think about this. I’ll ask again…… Where is the science that allows for a temp signal to be derived from the lack of ring growth?
Where, in any established science, does it say we can estimate an annual or decadal mean from ring growth 2 months out of the year? It is an inane posit and insanity that it never gets visited by any science or scientist. All of the discussion about sampling and methodologies is entirely academic when one considers that even the premise is not established.
Why don’t you give this some thought?
And our member of the rapid response team is here again.
Connolley, astounding that you still believe [SNIP: John, this is not helpful. Please address Dr. Connolley substantively. Thanks. -REP]
“The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators”
If the 20th century warming were unprecedented then why do just about all cultures have some form of ceremony to either be thankful for a good harvest, food etc or a ceremony to bring about a good harvest, etc? If the weather was that stable then such the above customs would have died out as each year would have been exactly like the last and there would have been no variation in the availability of food?
“Certain proxy data appeared to be of critical importance in establishing the reliability of the reconstruction–in particular, one set of tree ring records spanning the boreal tree line of North America…”
Even that’s a lie. “One set of … records spanning the boreal tree line of North America…” makes it sound like a record that included hundreds of trees running thousands of miles all across the Canadian northern treeline. It was nothing like that. It was the strip-bark bristlecone records from the White Mountains in the desert south of California. Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick proved pdf that truth beyond any shadow of any possible reasonable doubt, discussed further by Steve M. here.
Not only that, but writing about “establishing … reliability” is an abuse of meaning. The bristlecone record didn’t establish any reliability. Reliability implies physical concordance. The bristlecone record established a statistical correlation with 20th century temperatures, and that’s all. There was no demonstrable physical concordance. Even the statistical confidence of MBH98 was false. And we know from the contents of Michael Mann’s own ‘back to 1400 CENSORED’ directory, that Michael Mann knew the MBH98 reconstruction was false. Before he submitted it for publication. Only Malcolm Hughes and Raymond Bradley know whether they knew beforehand, too, that the analysis under their names was false.
Michael Mann’s acquaintance with the truth is through its studied inversion.
GM, “methodology” means the method is based in logic. A “method” need not be. When doing science, the “-ology” part is important.
Phil Clarke, another Mann apologist, says:
“You might also want to revise what the NAS said about the usefulness of r-squared as a diagnostic. Despite the further noise expended there, not least by Montford in his ‘Jesus paper’ nonsense…”
R-squared is used by just about everyone exactly because it is a very useful tool. And if Clarke ever decides to read A.W. Montford’s paper, which he obviously has not, he would see that it is a scathing critique of the gaming of the climate pal review system, which has been hijacked by Mann and his clique — as has the NAS and many other formerly professional organizations.
In Section 2 here Prof Richard Lindzen points out some of the shenanigans used to co-opt these formerly ethical organizations. Now they can no longer be trusted; their boards receive immense benefits for perpetuating CAGW alarmism. They are far from being impartial, or honest.
Noted the Stoat defending the Hockey Stick above.
Talk about nailing your colors to the mast of a sinking ship!
Phil Clarke:
The NAS paragraph that was very carefully excluded was making a different point, that the flaws in the MBH papers – and they were the first of their kind – have no significant effect on the conclusions..
No, that is NOT what that NAS paragraph says. NAS didn’t say that Mann’s screwy data and methods didn’t effect his conclusions. They said that Mann’s screwy data and methods gave similar results as other papers. Not the same thing, or even remotely close.
You need to read this part of Shollenberger. Aloud. Preferebly in front of a mirror. That way you can visualize who he is talking about:
“One of the most common defenses offered for Mann’s hockey stick is other papers get the same result. The idea is if Mann got the right answer, criticisms of his work don’t matter.”
This is the ultimate expression of the “Consensus Science” fallacy – it doesn’t matter whether or not we are correct. It only matters that we agree.
That is not science. It is simply politics.
> For one of the 12 ‘Northern Treeline’ records of Jacoby et al. used in ref. 1 (the
‘St Anne River’ series), the values used for AD 1400–03 were equal to the value for the
first available year (AD 1404).
Well done, you have finally read it. And I was partially wrong. But that is, as you know, listed under “Additional minor corrections”. And no, it doesn’t affect the results
>>None of you are actually thinking about this.
> That’s entirely incorrect. Many of us are asking others to think about this.
Hey, that’s what I said. You’re not thinking about this. Asking others to do your thinking for you isn’t thinking.
> does it say we can estimate an annual or decadal mean from ring growth 2 months out of the year?
Well, you could read the papers I suppose. Or you could think for yourself. Or you could ask someone else to do your thinking for you. You’ve done the last and worst of the three options.
The answer is in the word “estimate”. Annual temperature is correlated with, though not identical to, temperature in limited portions of the year. This can be experimentally determined, say from the instrumental data if you like. So knowing the temperature during a portion of the year allows you to reconstruct a portion of the variance.
This, “None of you are actually thinking about this.” coming from William M. Connolley, might be the best inadvertent auto-injurious irony ever to hit any climate blog.
Phil Clarke:
Perhaps I should have discussed this point in my write-up. I considered doing so, but I thought the inanity of it was obvious enough that I needn’t bother. Read what the NAS panel said:
The NAS panel said other papers got the same results, so it appears errors in Mann’s work didn’t affect his conclusions. This isn’t what Phil Clarke tries to portray it as. It’s not a finding. It’s not a demonstration. It’s not even an analysis. The NAS panel didn’t conclude the errors were irrelevant. They merely said those errors appear irrelevant.
And they base it on such stupid logic. The fact other papers get the same result in no way indicates errors didn’t impact Mann’s original hockey stick. It’s a complete non-sequitur.
I thought this was obvious enough that I didn’t need to point it out.
“So knowing the temperature during a portion of the year allows you to reconstruct a portion of the variance.”
Unless, of course, your trees happen to be post-1960 trees.
William M. Connolley kind of amuses me:
Nothing I said about the corrigendum was wrong. What Connolley said about the corrigendum was wrong. Despite this, he claims I “finally read it.”
You’ve got to give him credit for being ballsy.
James Sexton says:
March 11, 2012 at 10:20 am
More of this insidiously stupid posit that anyone can tell what the temps are with tree rings. This may be tiresome for many, but I’ll keep repeating this until this vapid posit gets removed as a question of science.
The trees in question are samples taken from high latitude or high altitude places. They only grow (tree rings) from about 6 to 8 weeks a year. There is absolutely no way to pick up an annual signal from these rings. They won’t grow in extreme heat, and they don’t grow in the cold…..
_____________________________________
Bingo, Tree rings only tell you if all the parameters for growth were decent for a short period of time in the summer. And we are supposed to believe that Mann can back out information about tenths of a degree temperature rise with all the confounding from other parameters of growth??
The fact that the tree ring analysis diverges from the known temperature during the last decades is a big CLUE about how useless the data is especially since the additional CO2 would have increased growth all other factors being the same.
Brandon has now posted a brief “review” on Amazon pointing back to his two posts on WUWT. See http://www.amazon.com/review/R3RHUNIF8JR6PT and discussion there.
Latitude says:
March 11, 2012 at 10:14 am
It was–in Camelot.
William M. Connolley says:
March 11, 2012 at 12:42 pm
You are simply a nasty little man, are you not, William?
Nobody around here thinks you’re cute, smart, or indispensible. Especially indispensible.
Getting a meaningful comment from ConNolley about PCA is like pressing blood from a stone. I pity Jimbo Wales for the company he attracts.
William M. Connolley says:
March 11, 2012 at 12:42 pm
Hey, that’s what I said. You’re not thinking about this. Asking others to do your thinking for you isn’t thinking.
========================================
I hope you’re not referring to Wikipedia…………..
William, you know Anthony’s blog is the most read and most popular…..
…why are you making yourself look like this is public?…for the whole world to see?
Brandon Shollenberger says (March 11, 2012 at 12:56 pm): “Nothing I said about the corrigendum was wrong. What Connolley said about the corrigendum was wrong. Despite this, he claims I ‘finally read it.'”
Pwned! 🙂
William M. Connolley says:
March 11, 2012 at 12:42 pm
Well, you could read the papers I suppose. Or you could think for yourself. Or you could ask someone else to do your thinking for you. You’ve done the last and worst of the three options.
==========================================================
Sigh…. I guess I didn’t expect anything better than this, so I can’t claim disappointment. Of course, your assumptions, again, are entirely incorrect. What makes you think I haven’t read the papers?
Are you (and Mann and many others) substituting statistical acrobatics (to generate a brief correlation) for science? Maths are used for proofs of the science, it isn’t the science itself. One should have a reasonable hypothesis prior to the application of the numbers. In this particular case, it isn’t reasonable, that is to say it is entirely without reason, to assume one can gain a temperature from the lack of ring growth. I ask again, where is the science which says one can gain information from no information? How is it known what temps occurred when outside the growing season?
Dr. Connolley, I asked you for a reasoned answer to the question I posed and I get a snide and vapid response. Thanks for the reply, but, you’ve only advanced the notion that you are the one unwilling to think or reason. Tell me, is this a class that is taught to alarmists or is a poor, unthinking dismissive attitude a trait requisite before someone can engage in carbonphobia?
If you don’t know the answer, simply stating such suffices. Or, you can choose not to respond at all. But, a war of words, dripping with sarcasm, irrational assumptions, and hand waving isn’t a war you should be eagerly wanting to engage in with me. It serves no purpose.
Re Grumpy Old Man and ‘methodology’
As one who has for years made a nuisance of himself lecturing colleagues on the method v methodology question, I was belatedly driven by GOM’s comment to consult the ultimate authority…
From OED
‘Originally: the branch of knowledge that deals with method generally or with the methods of a particular discipline or field of study; (arch.) a treatise or dissertation on method; (Bot.) †systematic classification (obs. rare). Subsequently also: the study of the direction and implications of empirical research, or of the suitability of the techniques employed in it; (more generally) a method or body of methods used in a particular field of study or activity.’
So it seems that, original meaning notwithstanding, its meaning now extends to include ‘a method’.
(Still sounds a touch pseudo to me though.)
Using tree-ring spreads as a proxy for temperature is entirely fallacious from the start. What happens to the rings in one particular tree growing at close to the limit of survivability if a pack of wolves decides to use it as a signing post, where all the males regularly pee on it, thus introducing extra nitrogen into the soil? Or if a bear or reindeer dies under that particular tree does the extra load of nutrients have any effect?
The ambient temperature in which a tree grows is not a major factor in the production of growth-rings of differing dimensions.
No definitive deductions of pre-instrumental temperatures can be drawn from the study of dendrochronology. Mann’s basic premise falsifies all of his subsequent work.
“The NAS panel said other papers got the same results, so it appears errors in Mann’s work didn’t affect his conclusions. This isn’t what Phil Clarke tries to portray it as. It’s not a finding. It’s not a demonstration. It’s not even an analysis. The NAS panel didn’t conclude the errors were irrelevant. They merely said those errors appear irrelevant.
And they base it on such stupid logic. The fact other papers get the same result in no way indicates errors didn’t impact Mann’s original hockey stick. It’s a complete non-sequitur.”
Yes. And black is white. Whoa. Baldly saying ‘The NAS panel said other papers got the same results’ is a bit like saying ‘NAS said you shouldn’t use Bristlecones in temperature reconstructions.’. Yes they did, but it’s a quote so selective as to shave away almost all of what the NAS actually found or said.
The ‘other papers’ concerned were designed specifically to test the robustness of Mann’s results to methodological and data choices and they both found that the choice of PCA selection and other criticisms have no significant effect on the conclusions of the MBH studies. The clue can be found in the title of Wahl and Ammann (for example),
Robustness of the Mann, Bradley, Hughes reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures: Examination of criticisms based on the nature and processing of proxy climate evidence
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/refs/Wahl_ClimChange2007.pdf
I recommend interested people read it – at least the abstract.
James Sexton says:
March 11, 2012 at 1:25 pm
. I ask again, where is the science which says one can gain information from no information?
=========================================
James, William is used to running Wikipedia…………..
Charles Gerard Nelson says:
“Noted the Stoat defending the Hockey Stick above.
Talk about nailing your colors to the mast of a sinking ship!”
Notice that he like so many other H.S. apologists avoid discussing the thousand plus published research papers and book publications attesting to the existence of the MWP and LIA.
It has been well known for decades that the WMP and LIA was real and significant.Long before the stupid and proven junk science was published.
History will be unkind to people like William Connolley because are being exposed as a single paper fanatic.
I see mostly positive comments on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Hockey-Stick-Climate-Wars/dp/023115254X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331501509&sr=1-2
It seems to me the best test of the Mann graph is whether it has turned out to be predictive. It did not do a good job of “predicting” the past as it eliminated the little ice age and the Medieval warming but at this point we can skip the details of methodology and start evaluating how good a job it did of predicting global temperatures in 2012 and beyond? It seems it failed there as well. Shouldn’t that be the “bottom line” on its value?
If “one set of tree ring records” was “of critical importance in establishing the reliability of the reconstruction,” the reconstruction could not have been “relatively robust to the inclusion of dendroclimatic indicators.”
—————
To state the obvious:
“establish the reliability of” is not the same as “relatively robust”.
Claiming they are the same is not justified unless it can be supported with further evidence.
Sorry guys, but taking ambiguous wording and attaching an interpretation to suit yourselves is just not on. And you do it a lot.
Michael Mann has responded to me, in a sense. From Twitter:
I find it hard to believe anyone could actually read o’Dwyer’s posts and think he was right, but it seems they may become an official team position.
William M. Connolley, I suggest you look at what other scientist including Mann’s own hockey team members think of his work, and of all the reconstructions in general.
Bradley:
I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstruction”.
Cook:
I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.”
Concerning the proxy reconstructions in general, and the last 100 years in particular, even if they did their best work, combining the best method from all the data, they thought they would no “fuck all” about the past.
You may recall that Dr. Gerry North, who was head of an NAS panel reviewing climate reconstructions testified under oath that he agreed with the conclusion of the Wegman report). Their conclusion was that Mann’s work was not statistically valid.
Dr. Jonathan Jones, Professor of Physics, Brasenose College, Oxford University made on the Bishop Hill blog ( http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/12/2/tim-barnett-on-the-hockey-stick.html ) at December 3, 2011 at 6:11 PM. Professor Jones makes an unequivocal condemnation of the “Hockey Stick” and much of climatology.
Which of the folowing has Mann not done?
From the National Association of Scholars website:
“How to detect an obvious fraud:”
If a researcher will not show their raw data.
If a researcher will not show the “adjustments” they have made to their raw data.
If the researchers historical “adjusted data” conflict rather dramatically with other generally accepted data sets without any rational explanation.
If a researcher will not show the internals of the model that processes their adjusted data to produce their results.
If a researcher attempts to destroy anybody who disagrees with them, instead of attempting to refute their position.
If a researcher attempts to destroy their raw data/adjustments/models rather than have them released.
If a researcher attempts to destroy their communications with other researchers rather than have them released.”
Ay this point the “fraud” word is logical, incompetent is a given, and those that defend can rationally be called mendacious themselves.
This is really too funny. We’ve apologists and advocates here actually believing that many of us here haven’t read the Mann papers or the others.
Any skeptic, who has been one for any length of time has visited the hockey stick. For me, as with countless other skeptics, my engagement in the climate discussion started with me reading a blog written by a Canadian statistician with the temerity to challenge the orthodoxy and state, “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!!! What was he discussing? Oh, yeh, dendrochronology……
Read the papers? Which papers, and which parts would anybody like us to quote?
> where is the science which says one can gain information from no information?
You can’t. But that isn’t what I said, and it isn’t what the proxy reconstructions do. Annual temperatures can be (partially) reconstructed from more restricted temperatures, for example from growing season temperatures. This can be empirically verified, by examining the instrumental record – as I pointed out before, and as you failed to read. If you want to know the details, you’ll need to read the papers. Or RealClimate. But you certainly won’t find any of that information over here.
Brandon Shollenberger says:
March 11, 2012 at 12:56 pm
…You’ve got to give him credit for being ballsy.”
——————————————————————–
Not really, you’re seeing the bravado of the doomed. Connolley’s MO is to avoid the elephant in the room (e.g., that Mann’s credibility is a hopelessly singed toast) and to instead pedantically nitpick at minutiae, knowing that it takes a while for people to check his facts, find his bull and nonsequiturs and blow them away. Before he runs off, though, he always plays the schoolmarm, telling people to read and “think for themselves.” SSDD: Same Shit, Different Day.
James Sexton:
“If you don’t know the answer, simply stating such suffices. Or, you can choose not to respond at all. But, a war of words, dripping with sarcasm, irrational assumptions, and hand waving isn’t a war you should be eagerly wanting to engage in with me. It serves no purpose.”
Unfortunately, one shouldn’t expect reasoned responses from a cult member.
James Sexton – Just to let you know, you are not alone in your opinion. Where indeed is there any proof that tree rings analysis can be anything other than an indicator of what’s good for trees, temperature being but one of many factors. As for the claim that it can provide a global proxy from a single location – well words fail me.
As for Connolly, has he done anything original or is he just an echo-chamber for his heroes?
Back in October 2009, Roger Pielke Jr. weighed in on Mann08’s incorrect use of the Tiljander data series as temperature proxies (“incorrect” because these data series cannot be calibrated by the methods used by Mann and co-authors, as Brandon Shollenberger discusses in his review).
At the time, Dr Connolley did not take kindly to Dr Pielke’s view of the affair, and highlighted his view at his blog, Stoat.
The defenses of Mann08’s use of the Tiljander data series that were offered by Dr Connolley and the Stoat regulars have not aged well.
I reformatted the first such thread at my blog (link); the original posts can be accessed there. Here is the most memorable exchange.
– – – – – – – – – –
AMac 12/7/09: WMC’s response is again nonsensical. Kaufman followed Mann’s lead and read a thermometer upside-down. When this was brought to his attention, he corrected the error. Kaufman and Mann cannot both be correct.
– – – – – – – – – –
Some commenters at WUWT take things very personally, and get very angry. I hope it is possible to avoid the personal — even if, seemingly, “provoked” — and stick to the issues that Shollenberger has raised.
@ Connolly: “Highly uncertain estimate” would be a better way to characterize Mann’s hockey stick. “Absurdly uncertain” would be better still. Mann admitted as much when he was being investigated for scientific fraud after the climategate fiasco. In 2010 Mann told the BBC that his hockey stick was so uncertain that he had, “[A]lways thought it was somewhat misplaced to make [the hockey stick] a central icon of the climate change debate.” If Mann had always thought that, why did he never say it? Why wait until the eve of an investigation? And does his new book address this issue? Does he still admit that the IPCC erred when they elevated his uncertain graph to icon status? Or does Mann only admit to uncertainty when he’s facing imminent investigation?
Furthermore, your “answer” to Sexton’s comments is not an answer. Sexton makes the highly-logical point that the tree-ring recorded damps out the highs and lows (like MWP and LIA). And you don’t have to look at Mann’s hockey stick for very long to realize that it get’s its definitive shape only from the appended instrument record. If tree-ring temperature reconstructions have the effect of ironing out peaks and valleys — and you seem to agree they do — then appending an instrument record that happens to correspond to a peak, will always yield a hockey stick shape.
Excellent summary, thanks.
Brandon Shollenberger says:
The NAS panel said other papers got the same results, so it appears errors in Mann’s work didn’t affect his conclusions. This isn’t what Phil Clarke tries to portray it as. It’s not a finding. It’s not a demonstration. It’s not even an analysis. The NAS panel didn’t conclude the errors were irrelevant. They merely said those errors appear irrelevant.
Exactly.
And they base it on such stupid logic. The fact other papers get the same result in no way indicates errors didn’t impact Mann’s original hockey stick. It’s a complete non-sequitur.
It isn’t just stupid logic. It is a particular brand of stupid logic: consensus logic. According to consensus logic, Mann is correct because his results agree with Wahl, and Wahl is correct because his results agree with Mann. They are both correct, because they agree. This bootstrap loop can be expanded to include anyone who agrees, and the number who agree becomes further “proof” of correctness, to be used to obtain yet more agreement. Rinse, repeat.
I thought this was obvious enough that I didn’t need to point it out.
It was. But denying the obvious is a prime tactic amongst climate change deniers like Clarke.
REPLY: Please note that the slash goes BEFORE the “i” when trying to end italics, not after – Anthony
[Re-posted — apologies if this is turns into a duplicate.]
Back in October 2009, Roger Pielke Jr. weighed in on Mann08’s incorrect use of the Tiljander data series as temperature proxies (“incorrect” because these data series cannot be calibrated by the methods used by Mann and co-authors, as Brandon Shollenberger discusses in his review).
At the time, Dr Connolley did not take kindly to Dr Pielke’s view of the affair, and highlighted his view at his blog, Stoat.
The defenses of Mann08’s use of the Tiljander data series that were offered by Dr Connolley and the Stoat regulars have not aged well.
I reformatted the first such thread at my blog (link); the original posts can be accessed there. Here is the most memorable exchange.
– – – – – – – – – –
AMac 12/7/09: WMC’s response is again nonsensical. Kaufman followed Mann’s lead and read a thermometer upside-down. When this was brought to his attention, he corrected the error. Kaufman and Mann cannot both be correct.
– – – – – – – – – –
Some commenters at WUWT take things very personally, and get very angry. I hope it is possible to avoid the personal — even if, seemingly, “provoked” — and stick to the issues that Shollenberger has raised.
I bet the hockey stick is something that was actually requested from Mann & co by the policymakers so the mantra that policymakers make decisions based on the report may have the causality backwards.
Mann is just a muppet 🙂
Phil Clarke,
While the MBH papers may not use Yamal, some of the other studies which reach the same conclusions (which was what you were talking about) do. There are just a small subset of “magic” proxies which are necessary if you want a hockey stick. Upside down Tiljander is the latest addition tot his club.
It’s interesting that Dr Connolly who attended St Edmund Hall does not feature amongst their ‘Notable Alumni’ even though the list includes three comedians.
http://www.seh.ox.ac.uk/about-college/notable-alumni
Friends:
Several here have responded with distaste at the contributions from William Connolley. I write ask that his contributions be encouraged. I have three reasons for this request.
Firstly, this is a ‘heavy’ thread. It benefits by ‘lightening’ from comic relief which Connolly’s posts provide.
Secondly, the nature of Connolly’s arguments is plain to anyone with intelligence which is average or above average. Hence, his posts draw attention to the difficulty of defending the flaws in the MBH papers.
Thirdly, and most importantly, time Connolley spends here is time he cannot spend distorting information on Wikipedia.
Richard
Stephen Brown says:
March 11, 2012 at 1:34 pm
Using tree-ring spreads as a proxy for temperature is entirely fallacious from the start. What happens to the rings in one particular tree growing at close to the limit of survivability if a pack of wolves decides to use it as a signing post, where all the males regularly pee on it, thus introducing extra nitrogen into the soil?……
_____________________________________________________________
Only someone who has never grown anything could believe that temperature is the only parameter effecting plant life.
The geographic location of different types of plant life is an entirely different story. Growing grapes in Scotland is the classic example used. This is a paper by a guy with the usual get out of jail free card:
“Note to general public:
My position on the current global warming is the same as the overwhelming majority of international climate scientists: the current rate of global warming is unprecedented and is being caused by humans. In no way can my summary of the research regarding the impact of regional climate change on the Viking civilization and Europe during the Little Ice Age be used to “prove” the current global warming is due to a natural cycle.”
THE LITTLE ICE AGE IN EUROPE: http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/little_ice_age.html
JJ’s response to me had malformed HTML that is causing everything after it to become italicized. The offending tag can be found at the end of the first paragraph of his comment.
Just a heads up to any moderator who might see it.
REPLY: On it, Anthony
Other than saying “my Mann” near the top (last sentence of The Follow-Up section), I appreciate this well written detail of the controversy. One item I enjoyed was Mann’s claim that high elevation has limited CO2 as the usual meme is that CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere.
John M Reynolds
This is a interesting summary of the Hockey Stick debate.
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf
What is the ‘Hockey Stick’ Debate About?
The hockey stick debate is about two things. At a technical level it concerns a well-known study that characterized the state of the Earth’s climate over the past thousand years and seemed to prove a recent and unprecedented global warming. I will explain how the study got the results it did, examine some key flaws in the methodology and explain why the conclusions are unsupported by the data. At the political level the emerging debate is about whether the enormous international trust that has been placed in the IPCC was betrayed. The hockey stick story reveals that the IPCC allowed a deeply flawed study to dominate the Third Assessment Report, which suggests the possibility of bias in the Report-writing process. In view of the massive global influence of IPCC Reports, there is an urgent need to bias-proof future assessments in order to put climate policy onto a new foundation that will better serve the public interest
Figure 4. World Climate History after AD1,000 according to ground borehole evidence. Vertical axis: average anomalies in oC, with range indicating Bayesian probability boundaries. Source: Huang et al. (1998); data supplied by Huang. Huang
Connolley and Clark are doing what generation of university and seminary-trained witch hunters did amidst piles of literature, official approval and universal agreement. They are nitpicking over issues analogous to the pressing questions of the times, such as whether witches actually fly or imagine that they fly, whether they fly on broomsticks or on wilow branches, and whether they consort with the Devil or only think they do.Their predecessors, they declared the science settled, i.e., witches exist and cause disease and cold weather, but assumed the “danger” still exists and posed faux disagreements over irrelevant “data” and “mysteries” to provide themselves with jobs. It took a few hundred years for people to start pointing out the obvious, that there are no witches and that the scam was all about positions, authority and revenue for Church and State from property confiscated from victims. Hopefully, this scam won’t last as long.
The problem is that if random brownian noise is used as input in the principal component component analysis one ALWAYS gets a hockey stick. It is a characteristic signature of using uncorrelated random data (or really really bad temperature proxies).
I propose creating a metric and applying it to all temperature reconstructions that will give an indication of the ‘goodness of fit’, or if its really ‘garbage in/garbage out’. It is basically a measure of the expected deviation of all the runs used against the reconstructed average:
Take a running ‘window’ average over a ‘straight’ portion of the temperature reference, so that the local deviation against the local mean is calculated (for our temperature record one could simplify by detrending the record from 1940’s to 2000’s and calculating a deviation). Lets call that the expected deviation from a ‘true’ temperature record. Now, perform your temperature reconstruction with the proxies of your choice (tree rings, stalagmites, bore holes etc.) use the analysis of choice (principal component analysis, weighted average, etc) and reconstruct a mean value that extrapolates temperatures backwards. Then take the running window deviation method to calculate the deviation of all the weighted proxies runs from the mean and compare it to the one from the reference temperature series. The expectation would be that if the proxies were ‘perfect’, the running deviation would be the same or slightly larger than the temperature record. When the proxies give the same running deviation as the reference temperature lets give it a score of 1.0
Now take large number of gaussian random number runs. Integrate each series to create ‘red’ or brownian uncorrelated noise runs. Call them tree rings or whatever, scale them so they are in the appropriate range, and run them through the same exact analysis as the actual temperature proxies. The result will be the typical hockey stick where the stick portion is constant by being the average of random variation. The blade will match very well the temperature reference (of course, since principal component analysis gives a weighted average, weighing more those that most closely resemble the temperature record).
Then after creating a mean calculate the running window deviation of all the weighted ‘fake proxy’ runs. That deviation is the one expected from completely random, uncorrelated data, garbage. Lets give it a score of zero, 0.0
The running deviation of the real proxies is expected to be much lower than this, in fact it should be bracketed by it, and it it starts approaching the deviation of the random data it should be given a score of zero and discarded as not useful data.
Notice the the real proxies and the random data runs probably match the temperature reference record pretty well for the reference temperature time period and are not very distinguishable form one another. Where the difference lies, and where one can segregate the wheat from the caff is in the extrapolated portion of the data. As a rule of thumb the deviation of random garbage data should be 1/3 the range of temperature anomalies or 1/3(0.4- -0.2) ~ 0.2 degrees.
Any body with the skills is up for it? Willis Eisenbach, does this interest you as an intellectual challenge?
How else could we determine if a hockey stick is true or bad data or bad analysis?
The instrumental record does not ‘empirically verify‘ a tree ring record. It merely either statistically correlates with a tree ring record, or it does not. Neither case provides any physical insight.
In 1925, G. Udny Yule showed a positive 0.95 correlation between Church of England marriages and the death rate. In William M. Connolley-land, physical truth is empirically verified by this high correlation. Marriage would be forbidden by WMC-global international treaty along with Anglican membership because, think of the children.
It is alleged that there may be some biased science associated with the IPCC reports.
Alleged manipulation and cherry picking of data to push an agenda. Shocking!!!
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf
What is the ‘Hockey Stick’ Debate About?
… At the political level the emerging debate is about whether the enormous international trust that has been placed in the IPCC was betrayed. The hockey stick story reveals that the IPCC allowed a deeply flawed study to dominate the Third Assessment Report, which suggests the possibility of bias in the Report-writing…
…The result is in the bottom panel of Figure 6 (“Censored”). It shows what happens when Mann’s PC algorithm is applied to the NOAMER data after removing 20 bristlecone pine series. Without these hockey stick shapes to mine for, the Mann method generates a result just like that from a conventional PC algorithm, and shows the dominant pattern is not hockey stick-shaped at all. Without the bristlecone pines the overall MBH98 results would not have a hockey stick shape, instead it would have a pronounced peak in the 15th century.
Of crucial importance here: the data for the bottom panel of Figure 6 is from a folder called CENSORED on Mann’s FTP site. He did this very experiment himself and discovered that the PCs lose their hockey stick shape when the Graybill-Idso series are removed. In so doing he discovered that the hockey stick is not a global pattern, it is driven by a flawed group of US proxies that experts do not consider valid as climate indicators. But he did not disclose this fatal weakness of his results, and it only came to light because of Stephen McIntyre’s laborious efforts. …
…Another extension to our analysis concerned the claims of statistical significance in Mann’s papers. We found that meaningless red noise could yield hockey stick-like proxy PCs. This allowed us to generate a “Monte Carlo” benchmark for statistical significance. The idea is that if you fit a model using random numbers you can see how well they do at “explaining” the data. Then the “real world” data, if they are actually informative about the climate, have to outperform the random numbers. We calculated significance benchmarks for the hockey stick algorithm and showed that the hockey stick did not achieve statistical significance, at least in the pre-1450 segment where all the controversy is. In other words, MBH98 and MBH99 present results that are no more informative about the millennial climate history than random numbers. …
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm
After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns….
Shortly after Dr. Trenberth requested that I draft the Atlantic hurricane section for the AR4’s Observations chapter, Dr. Trenberth participated in a press conference organized by scientists at Harvard on the topic “Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity” along with other media interviews on the topic. The result of this media interaction was widespread coverage that directly connected the very busy 2004 Atlantic hurricane season as being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming occurring today. Listening to and reading transcripts of this press conference and media interviews, it is apparent that Dr. Trenberth was being accurately quoted and summarized in such statements and was not being misrepresented in the media. These media sessions have potential to result in a widespread perception that global warming has made recent hurricane activity much more severe.
Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate, 2005, submitted).
It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. …
jmrsudbury:
Thanks for finding that. I proofread my writing, but when you know what words you mean, it can be easy to miss the fact you didn’t use them.
I think most of you nasty skeptics here misunderstand Dr Michael Mann and his Hockeystick.
One just has to look at the impressive book reviewers over at Amazon will prove just how saintly Mann is, just look at the the company he keeps. With these people on your side how can the warmist be losing the climate adjustment battle and the hearts of minds of the fuel poverty peons. Mike is indeed a fine up standing scientist, His book is worth at least a dollar for reading, wiping and flushing down the crapper where it belongs!
http://www.amazon.com/The-Hockey-Stick-Climate-Wars/dp/023115254X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331501509&sr=1-2
Fine Men like:
Bill McKibben.
Michael Mann is a hero, and this book is a remarkable account of the science and politics of the defining issue of our time….
Chris Mooney.
Michael Mann has been the most important, resilient, and outspoken warrior in the climate battle–responding to threats and persecution with courage and resolve every step of the way…
Henry Waxman.
documenting the lies and distortions about his work and his heroic efforts to stand up for scientific truth.
Bill Nye the Science Guy.
If you don’t believe our climate is changing, read this book. Dr. Mann will change your mind. For us, it’s a war of words. Preserve the Earth, and pass the ammunition.
Paul R. Ehrlich.
The brilliant and courageous climatologist Michael Mann….
James Lovelock.
Mann defends his now famous “Hockey Stick Graph.”
Sherwood Boehlert.
A must read to appreciate the endless disinformation campaign by climate change deniers…
Al Gore, David fruit fly Suzuki and good old Prince Charles also endorse this marvelous book!
What can go wrong???
[REPLY: How often do we gotta tell you to add a /sarc tag to your work? Too often art is indistinguishable from reality. -REP]
For those who are not aware of it Mr Connolley has a vested interest in CAGW. He is “a climate modeller serving as Senior Scientific Officer in the Physical Sciences Division of the British Antarctic Survey.” (Wiki)
If voters finally toss the corrupt politicians out on their ear and say NO! to further funding of Scientific Research then he is out of a job with little hope of finding another.
Personally after seeing all the corruption going on in Scientific Research, not only in Climate but in other fields, I am not at all interested in having one thin dime of my tax money go to another university or researcher. I think it is time for ALL Government Grant money to dry up completely. All that tax money does is buy deceitful scientists with no accountability from what I can see.
If Universities have immunity to “Fraud Against Taxpayers Acts” then they should be barred from getting any funds in the first place!
William M. Connolley says:
March 11, 2012 at 2:01 pm
> where is the science which says one can gain information from no information?
You can’t. But that isn’t what I said, and it isn’t what the proxy reconstructions do. Annual temperatures can be (partially) reconstructed from more restricted temperatures, for example from growing season temperatures.
==================================================
lol, that’s what I thought. The answer is because they said they could. Thanks for your thoughtful response.
Faith is a wonderful thing, William, but, not when it is misplaced. You should do yourself a favor and read my post, http://suyts.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/dividing-by-zero/ .
It is unfathomable that you believe one can reconstruct an annual or decadal temp from no more than 2 months of very suspect proxy data. Maybe Hansen was right about some believing in the Easter Bunny. Tell me, if the summer temps in norther Canada averaged 56° F for one summer, what were the temps of the rest of the year and what were the temps prior to it?
Ted G says:
March 11, 2012 at 3:53 pm
I think most of you nasty skeptics here misunderstand Dr Michael Mann and his Hockeystick.
…
[REPLY: How often do we gotta tell you to add a /sarc tag to your work? Too often art is indistinguishable from reality. -REP]
….
Perhaps we also need a “/cyn” tag for cynicism too?
Dang, I believe I misplaced my “close italics” tag above.
Maybe I could use an “/opps” tag?
William Connelly wrote:
“Annual temperatures can be (partially) reconstructed from more restricted temperatures, for example from growing season temperatures. This can be empirically verified, by examining the instrumental record”
I’m a little confused by this statement. It is my understanding that trees are selected as “proxy thermometers” based on how well they match the instrumental record. Many tree cores are rejected/discarded because they don’t match the instrumental record. Having used the instrumental record as a way of selecting “appropriate” trees, it is rather confused logic to claim that the instrumental record verifies the usefulness of tree proxies.
Sorry I thought my comment spoke for it self, is it to late to add the Sarc/cyn tag??
[REPLY: Ted, the mods got it… but as I said, too often in this place reality imitates art. -REP]
Brandon Shollenberger has contested a number of the explanations that Dr Mann has offered in his new book. This is a very helpful exercise, made even more useful by frank exchanges amongst people with differing points of view. A priori, I wouldn’t expect any one person’s perspective to be unambiguously correct*, or anyone else’s to be 100%, entirely wrong.
I hope the focus is on issues to the extent possible, rather than shifting to personalities.
[sarc] * Myself excluded, of course. [/sarc]
Mr. Schollenberger, nice review. But I’ll have to take your word for what’s in Mann’s book. There’s no way I would buy it. Nor would I read it if it was given to me.
William Connelly wrote:
“Annual temperatures can be (partially) reconstructed from more restricted temperatures, for example from growing season temperatures. This can be empirically verified, by examining the instrumental record”
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Which instrumental record? The raw data from the instruments? Or the “adjusted”data? If adjusted, which version? Before the MWP disapeared? Or after? And is that with UHI in? or out?
After you get done answering that, could you advise as to how the tree ring data, which represents growing season only, is adjusted to account for variations in precipitation? Late frosts? Insect infestations? Disease? Changes in migratory patterns of birds and animals that eat leaves? Or fertilize the soil with excrement? Neutralize acidic soil? Excacerbate basic soil? What about bee populations fluctuating forcing the trees to put more or less energy into fruit production?
Looking forward to your response as I would truly like to understand how these and other factors are dealt with to arrive at an accurate temperature reconstruction from tree rings.
open italic tags mods i think. Someone needs a
[REPLY: I think we finally got it. -REP]
Harry, your problem is that you don’t seem to understand or appreciate post-normal science or the sublime mysteries of paranormal climatology. Cause and effect are no longer what they used to be in your father’s time. Today you can have contradictory statements which are both right, the alchemy of fake data supporting fraudulent methods yields sound evidence and even “empirically verifies” it, forged documents reflect deeper truths and if you are still confused, doubtful or depressed, just take Connolley’s word on faith, delve into the ScepticalScience blog and rest assured that soon all this troublesome strife will be over when David Suzuki bans anything that contradicts the consensus.
Peter Kovachev;
rest assured that soon all this troublesome strife will be over when David Suzuki bans anything that contradicts the consensus.>>>
Suzuki has the power to ban Mother Nature? Wow!
WARNING TO MOTHER NATURE
START RAISING TEMPS IN ACCORDANCE WITH IPCC PREDICTIONS OR YOU WILL BE BANNED BY DAVID SUZUKI
Sorry for the yelling, but sometimes she doesn’t listen very well. I’d have used italics, but why use italics when yelling works just as well and cannot mess up the next post in the thread if you end it wrong?
Note to William Astley-
Part of your informative posting came through with “2oC” and “≈6 oC” with the degree symbols showing up in the main post as either “O” or “0”. I don’t know what to suggest. Are you forming the degree symbol using Alt+2+4+8?
IanM
davidmhoffer, I’m not sure I like your levity, and now look at what you’ve done with your gratuitous yelling just moments after the mods stopped goofing around with the italics. The 20 Hz subsonic ELFs generated by your selfish, “if it feels good, do it” splurge just loosened the friction bond between tectonic strata where, unbeknownst to all you clowns here, the missing heat has been “hiding in plain sight,” to borrow Connolley’s fave expression. I can validate that my butt just got warmer by 3.5 C, and that’s before adjustments and with my trousers on. We’re all going to die soon. I hope you feel better now, though.
PS: Re your questions for Connolley (March 11, 2012 at 5:34 pm), allow me to supply a proxy response on his behalf: Read The Documents and go to ScepticalScience Blog. Better to hear it from a friend.
As of 10:50 PM, there are 97 reviews on Mann’s book at Amazon- mostly 5 stars. A agree that
Shollenberger’s review should be added.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Hockey-Stick-Climate-Wars/product-reviews/023115254X/ref=sr_1_1_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
@WMC:
“Annual temperature is correlated with, though not identical to, temperature in limited portions of the year.”
Um, no. That’s like saying average basketball game scores are correlated with, though not identical to, the scoring averages of a limited number of players.
Knowing that Lakers #8 had an average score of 12 points a game last season tells me nothing about what the average score the Lakers had last season. A proxy for which you cannot tell what portion of the year created what response is a useless proxy.
I hope nobody spends money on a book from a person disseminating to be participant in a war and having shown a corresponding, depressing record of behaviour at least since 2003.
I’d be very interested in reading what Mann’s conclusions might be if he repeated the work of the Chinese tree ring study from the Tibetan plain.
Verity Jones says:
March 11, 2012 at 10:33 am
Here we have a perfect example of someone (Mann) who believes HIS version of the facts as he remembers them and seems to think that everyone else will too. Does it not occur to him that, like any scientist or author, he is required to check his facts before publication,
Yeah, but where’s the money in that?
tallbloke says:
March 11, 2012 at 11:11 am
The Mann’s entire career is founded on shonky stats. He’ll probably convince himself this steaming pile will be a bestseller with some clever way of counting the sales reciepts.
Michael Mann has never struck me as clever.
James Sexton asks William M. Connolley a legitimate scientific question (paraphrased): “can we estimate an annual or decadal (temperature) mean from ring growth (from ony) 2 months out of the year?”
To which Connolley replies:
The answer is in the word “estimate”. Annual temperature is correlated with, though not identical to, temperature in limited portions of the year… So knowing the temperature during a portion of the year allows you to reconstruct…
Bullshit. The answer is “No!” An “estimate” and/or “reconstruction” of an annual or decadal temperature mean from data recorded only in June and July is just a ‘swag’ (a scientific wild-ass guess). Climatologists do this all the time, which is the crux of the problem. Way too much of their research is based on ‘scientific wild-ass guesses’.
Some readers may not know William M. Connolley is a green movement activist.
[Moderator’s Note: I’m sure some readers will be grateful for that information, but don’t you think it sounds a bit like an ad hominem argument, not to mention an undocumented assertion? Please supply more information. -REP]
Thanks Brandon, I have linked to this review from my climate pages.
Where do you read that?
Can I get a cite, a weblink etc. ?
.
Gail, your prescription would toss me out as well, and all my DOE funded colleagues at SLAC, where everyone I know pays enormous attention to exquisite detail, achieves technological miracles under budget, and does honest, verifiable, science; cutting-edge experimental today, providing tax revenues in 20 years.
Do you really want to wreck the huge majority honest to get at the minority corrupt, or is some rational discrimination preferable?
In my view, the review process at NIH, NSF, and other government agencies has been corrupted with a politicized “is it socially good?” standard. Saving the children from a specious heat death is part of the “socially good” enterprise. There was none of this before 1970, because science review panels opted to judge proposals dispassionately in terms of curiosity-based science, not social goodness science. No one knows from where advances come, and the only valid search pattern is curiosity. It has paid off big-time, and rests on trust that curious scientists and engineers will indeed follow where their curiosity leads. The benefits follow automatically, but only materialize out of the blue.
Agency review panels have lost this perspective in favor of politicized research goals (starting with the 1970’s “War on Cancer”), mostly because of Congressional interference. They couldn’t leave excellence alone. What corruption there is in science has followed directly from that political interference. Back to scientific dispassion in funding agencies, I say, and watch the corruption dry up and blow away.
Great new review by Robert Tamaki over at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Hockey-Stick-Climate-Wars-ebook/product-reviews/B0072N4U6S/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending
I too would like to extend my appreciation to Brandon Shollenberger for doing the work that few people had the stomach to do. Getting down in the sewer one more time with Dr. Mann must be exceedingly distasteful. It’s hard work and, in truth, no one had to do it, since Mann’s work has been largely discredited. When a commenter asked Steve McIntyre on his blog whether he was planning to review the book, I told him I thought Steve would be wasting his time, that he had better things to do. You’ve saved him the trouble and the effort with this very informative analysis.
I’m beginning to see what might be labeled “Alger Hiss syndrome” in Michael Mann. He’s condemned to defend a lie for the rest of his life. His resentments against those who have brought him down are so acute, he will forever be unable to give his opponents the satisfaction of an admission that his scientific work is lacking. Furthermore, too many people have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that he is innocent of sloppy and agenda-driven science so he’s condemned to cater to them until the bitter end. They call us “deniers,” but the true denial machine is working over time in the warmist camp defending that which is increasingly indefensible. Even if it turns out that the warming is mostly human-caused, it still doesn’t excuse Mann’s unwavering defense of his dubious scientific findings.
As Wegman famously said, “Right answer, wrong method equals bad science.”
“Please supply more information. -REP]”
Could I know the name of who “REP” is?
[REPLY: Sorry, no. I trust you are not objecting to efforts to keep the tone of WUWT above that of certain other sites which shall remain namless? Engage the greenies. It’s a target rich environment. -REP]
To learn about William Connolley you could start here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/19/wikibullies-at-work-the-national-post-exposes-broad-trust-issues-over-wikipedia-climate-information/
The reason I ask for the name of “REP” is because I figure he/she must be new to the work here to not know about this post.
[REPLY: Not that new, but every once in awhile the Irish Alzheimer’s kicks in: we forget everything but the grudges. Thanks for pointing to the link. -REP]
Peter Kovachev;
PS: Re your questions for Connolley (March 11, 2012 at 5:34 pm), allow me to supply a proxy response on his behalf: Read The Documents and go to ScepticalScience Blog. Better to hear it from a friend.>>>>
Ah, well, then am I allowed a proxy rebuttal?
Mr. Connolley, on the proviso that you were about to respond to me along the lines suggested by Mr. Kovachev, may I please advise:
o I have read the documents already
o I have visited scepticalscience blog many times
Now, may I please have answers to the questions that I asked?
PREDICTION – Mr Connolley will not respond to my questions with direct answers for the simple reason that he has no credible answers to supply. He will either respond with misdirection and obfuscation, or ignore me altogether.
Ted G makes a valid point concerning the political mind set of those who support the very political non-scientist Mann and his mendacious book. Paul Ehrlich, who, believe it or not, has made more false predictions of disaster, and is a mentor to Obama’s political czar John Holdren.
You cannot talk about sustainability without talking about people, about politics, about power and control.” John Holdren* A more honest definition I have yet to read- He who controls the sustainable definition- controls the power and the people.
*from a 1995 World Bank speech-The Meaning of Sustainability: Biogeophysical Aspects by John P. Holdren, Gretchen C. Daily, and Paul R. Ehrlich
”Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
Paul Ehrlich,
Professor of Population Studies,
Author: “Population Bomb”, “Ecoscience
”A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-Development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
Paul Ehrlich,
Professor of Population Studies,
Author: “Population Bomb”, “Ecoscience”
”If I were reincarnated I would wish to return to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh,
husband of Queen Elizabeth II,
Patron of the Patron of the World Wildlife Foundation
”The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.”
Sir James Lovelock,
BBC Interview
A cruel crowd of failed, but well paid, profits of ever impending doom.
we forget everything but the grudges….
LOL
Pat Frank;
Do you really want to wreck the huge majority honest to get at the minority corrupt, or is some rational discrimination preferable?>>>
Pat, I did not read Gail’s “prescription” but… yes. Rational discrimination is, history tells us, not possible. The corrupt minority seize power, and once they have it, they will not relinquish it lightly. For anyone who follows the climate debate with any kind of serious effort, this is precisely what has happened, and the damage to the global economy is staggering. Real people are really starving because we’re burning the food in the name of protecting the ecosystem to keep them from starving.
Government should be regulator and watchdog. The moment that government steps into the arena of “real work”, corruption follows.
Given that tree growth is typically parabolic in response to temperature, how do you know a priori which side of the maximum you might be on when attempting a reconstruction?
Thanks for the endorsement, Hu.
Getting a thumbs up from you is high praise indeed.
Rob Tamaki
harry says:
March 11, 2012 at 5:05 pm
William Connelly wrote:
Having used the instrumental record as a way of selecting “appropriate” trees, it is rather confused logic to claim that the instrumental record verifies the usefulness of tree proxies.
The correct statement is “usefulness of tree proxies in obtaining political influence and continued funding”.
The mistake is to assume that this has anything to do with temperature. The Judas’s of the world will earn their 40 pieces of silver, the Kings will rule and the public will be crucified, all in the name of salvation.
davidmhoffer,
I concur. I was thinking of running a simple non-linear model of complex processes or our Prof Scafetta’s Diffusion Entropy Analysis to decide whether Connolley will either a) try to wing a short and glib response perhaps even with the assistance of the Suzuki Fruit Fly or, b) ignore your questions by splitting for a few days. I went for the ignoring hypothesis. I’d keep a copy of those great questions handy for when he next makes his appearance, though. Imagine plotting the freaky hockey stick line of his anxiety levels as you chase him all over the blog with that bundle of pain. Hours of wholesome entertainment for the entire family. Great for home, school or the office, as they say.
I suppose there had to be someone out there – William Connolley – who believes:
1. Tree rings are an accurate proxy for historic temperatures – they are of course, but only if you filter out all the trees (the other 99%) which don’t provide you with the results required to demonstrate your model is correct.
2. The Hockey Stick is an accurate reflection of historic global temperature – it is of course, but only if you splice together different time series, ignore inconvenient facts and cherry pick the data.
3. Michael Mann is an honourable scientist – he is of course, but only by the abysmal standards of the ‘climate science’ industry, which would not be tolerated in any real field of science.
davidmhoffer says:
March 11, 2012 at 9:03 pm
PREDICTION – Mr Connolley will not respond to my questions with direct answers for the simple reason that he has no credible answers to supply. He will either respond with misdirection and obfuscation, or ignore me altogether.
=======================================
lol, given his lame responses to those of us that asked about determining the annual temps from a 2 month window, I’d say he’s best off simply ignoring.
Rob Tamaki,
Hu’s post led me to check out your Amazon review. I nearly dropped my cup of tea when you pointed out that “the name ‘Montford’ does not appear anywhere in Mann’s book – not in the main body, not in the footnotes, and not in the index.” What the…? To actually ignore even a mention in passing the main critique of one’s life’s work? Tells us a lot about about Mann the man, although not whether this glaring omission is a mark of juvenile churlishness, incomprehensible stupidity or the white feather mark of the cowering poltroon. I chortled through your enjoyable review, which not only a slam-dunked Mann’s book into the trash bin…very politely and even respectfully, though… but flogged a brazen endorsement of Montford’s Hockey Stick Illusion! LOL, what hutzbah you have, Sir! Bravo, I love it!
Go check out Rob’s nail in the coffin, everyone: http://www.amazon.com/Hockey-Stick-Climate-Wars-ebook/product-reviews/B0072N4U6S/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending
Frank O’Dwyer is doing a detailed job of demonstrating an embarrassing litany of errors in Shollenberger’s ‘review’. Shollenberger misunderstands a lot of what he reads. Probably due to bias…
http://frankodwyer.com/blog/2012/03/11/yet-more-shollenberger/
For something like five years now I’ve argued with fellows who like to insist that Mann’s work has been replicated by other scientists, and also verified by using different proxies. I feel the “other scientists” really should wear a badge of dishonor for contributing to a fraud. They should have known better.
To switch from tree-ring proxies to lake-sediment proxies in the manner that Mann did is a bit like getting caught red handed not once, but twice.
It is as if, once the Piltdown skull was shown to be a human cranium with an orangutan jaw, someone switched the orangutan jaw with a chimpanzee jaw, and said, “There! Now do you believe me?”
markx hits the nail on the head when he says,
(on March 11, 2012 at 11:40 am,)
“……I believe the only thing that has kept his career afloat until now is his incredible ability to write in the most advanced form of scientific obfuscatory phrasing. I guess he figured if it remains relatively incomprehensible, there is less chance he will be queried on it.”
The people who I’ve argued with for five years are in awe of Mann’s gobble-de-gook . Mann could say, “Flibblebot zimmerzee on the quockertop approach to cuttlesnark,” and they would nod, because they don’t want to look like they don’t understand.
Of course, to a true statistician like McIntyre, there is no such awe. What amazes me is that McIntyre has managed to be so polite, all these years.
Test. Did my last comment wind up in the spam bin?
By the way, Connolley’s skill can be tested. Just give him the June and July temperatures for various places, and ask him to produce the Spring, Winter and Fall temperatures. No need to involve tree-rings at all. Let him put his money where his mouth is.
Gillian:
At March 12, 2012 at 12:29 am you write:
“Frank O’Dwyer is doing a detailed job of demonstrating an embarrassing litany of errors in Shollenberger’s ‘review’. Shollenberger misunderstands a lot of what he reads. Probably due to bias…”
Thankyou, I do enjoy a good joke. I suppose you laughed writing it, and I laughed reading it, but it is not quite as funny as Connolly’s contributions.
You state no error in Shollenberger’s polite and accurate review but say we must trust that the masterful Frank O’Dwyer has found and will find some.
And you link to a site where O’Dwyer demonstrates his genius. His first assertion in that link is “Incorrect claim that Mann misrepresents Roy Spencer”. I read that longwinded diatribe and it proves Mann DID misrepresent Spencer: so, I did not bother to read more of the link.
I appreciate your joke in pretending there is a reasonable defence of Mann by attacking his critics.
And I appreciate the jokes of pretending Mann is reputable, is honest, and is a scientist. But any joke loses its effect when taken too far.
Richard
Amino Acids in Meteorites on March 11, 2012 at 8:09 pm:
From Amino Acids in Meteorites on March 11, 2012 at 8:49 pm
The link to the National Post blogs in the first paragraph and the one to “The Opinionator” also at the National Post blogs, linking to pieces by Lawrence Solomon, have gone 404.
Heartland pegged him as a “Green Party activist” in 2010 here, and linked to two Lawrence Solomon National Post pieces reposted at probeinternational.org. Those links report a strange “parse error” in the php code, the pieces are unavailable. Solomon used the same links here in a 2010 short piece that does not refer to Connolley as an activist, Green or otherwise.
But the Wayback Machine has the first piece, from 2008, here. Relevant part:
This is confirmed in Connolley’s Wikipedia entry (given reference directly linked by me):
Reference says:
From their “People” list, giving his policy specialty:
The Wayback Machine also has the second piece here but that has more examples of Connolley’s Wiki-bullying without referring to Green activism by Connolley, although the noted petty serial denying by Connolley of published established facts is humorous to read and indicative of activism.
The two mentioned 404 links in the WUWT piece are not findable by the Wayback Machine as the National Post has disabled web crawling by using the robots.txt protocol thus their pages are not archived. However, for any moderators that wish to update the links, the first piece is now here at the NP.
Google did find a copy of the second one saved here, a better one is here. I have been unable to locate a more “official” copy of this older May 2008 post.
He is in the Green Party, has engaged in activism. Indeed, one would have to be willfully ignorant to not acknowledge his Wiki-bullying as partisan activism. His Wikipedia User page says, presumably self-selected, take it as you will: This user’s alignment is Lawful Good: the “Crusader.” Specifically referring to him as a “green movement activist” is however somewhat of a stretch without evidence of direct activism to advance uniquely “green movement” objectives, “Green Party activist” per Heartland is a somewhat better description.
By my analysis he’s just a know-it-all wannabe-politician who claims the natural right of leadership due to self-determined intellectual superiority. Lord knows we enough of that sort running around.
Gillian (March 12, 2012 at 12:29 am) points to Frank O’Dwyer’s continuing critique of Brandon Shollenberger’s reviews.
He doesn’t seem to have comments enabled. Here’s a repost of a comment left last week at Climate, Etc. It refers to Shollenberger’s preliminary tacking of Tiljander, and is even more apt given his added attention to this subject in the “Technical Review.”
Too much brokenness to answer it all, but:
>> Annual temperatures can be (partially) reconstructed from more restricted temperatures, for example from growing season temperatures. This can be empirically verified, by examining the instrumental record
> Which instrumental record? The raw data from the instruments? Or the “adjusted”data? If adjusted, which version?
You’ve failed to understand. I’ll try again. We have an idea: maybe it is possible to retrieve useful information about past temperatures even if you don’t know the entire annual temperature record. Perhaps there is a correlation between parts of the year and the annual value. Its a reasonable idea, but it should be tested. How might we test it? Well, we could just construct synthetic series with roughly the expected statistical properties and try that. Or we could use climate model output. Or we could look at the instrumental record. You could use any version of it you like. Of course you don’t actually need to do any of this yourself – because it has already been done. Its in those papers that you’re pretending to have read.
> Before the MWP disapeared [sic]?
Sorry guv, you’ve got the wrong strawman. The MWP preceeedes the instrumental record by a fair while.
> After you get done answering that, could you advise as to how the tree ring data, which represents growing season only, is adjusted to account for variations in precipitation?
Again, its in the papers you’re pretending to have read. If WUWT was indeed the useful scientific resource you think it is, there would be a post here explaining this point, since it seems to confuse some.
> Sexton makes the highly-logical point that the tree-ring recorded damps out the highs and lows (like MWP and LIA)
But Sexton, like so many others, treats the MWP and LIA as givens. By some magical means not available to ordinary mortals, he “knows” the hemispheric average temperatures of these periods, and so he “knows” that the reconstructions must be wrong.
Normal scientists don’t have this magical knowledge, so they have to use the observations available instead.
> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/19/wikibullies-at-work-the-national-post-exposes-broad-trust-issues-over-wikipedia-climate-information/
That post is laughably inaccurate, as anyone who has a clue about wikipedia and how it works will realise. I attempt to explain the grosser errors at http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/01/a_childs_garden_of_wikipedia_p.php
Ignoring all the well-known problems with MBH98 etc, there is another reason why the whole thing may be fraudulent.
Here’s a basic question: why did Mann use PCA to derive his reconstruction? In his excellent book ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’, Montford quoted a world authority on statistics, saying that the use of PCA may not have been appropriate.
.
When most people, including politicians, look at the hockey stick graph they will assume it represents the average temperature derived from the proxies. But it doesn’t. Whatever PCA generates, it isn’t an average. If it did generate an average there would be no point in using PCA, anyway.
As Steve McIntyre noted, if you take a simple average of all the proxy data there’s no sign of a hockey stick, and there is a pronounced MWP signal. Of course, this wouldn’t be scary enough.
.
If Mann had used a simple averaging process (as used by Loehle) there would be few opportunities to get the answer he wanted. But with PCA there are almost limitless opportunities to torture the data into submission.
.
When people see the hockey stick they assume it is an attempt to derive the average temperatures over the last thousand years or so. But it isn’t. It’s something else, a complex construct whose significance is only understood by statisticians. This is another reason why the hockey stick is, in a sense, a fraud.
Chris
William M. Connolley says:
March 11, 2012 at 2:01 pm
> where is the science which says one can gain information from no information?
You can’t. But that isn’t what I said, and it isn’t what the proxy reconstructions do. Annual temperatures can be (partially) reconstructed from more restricted temperatures, for example from growing season temperatures. This can be empirically verified, by examining the instrumental record – as I pointed out before, and as you failed to read. If you want to know the details, you’ll need to read the papers. Or RealClimate. But you certainly won’t find any of that information over here.
================================================================
I’ll take one last run at this, because you don’t seem to understand my question. My question wasn’t if we can gain temps from the rings. That’s a separate issue which is also worthy of a great deal of scrutiny.
You mention the growing season….. yes, the growing season for these particular trees in the particular locations are typically only 6 to 8 weeks out of the year. So, let’s pretend we can actually gain temps from the tree rings with decent accuracy. Where has it been demonstrated that if we know the temps for a 2 month period of time that we then know even in a general sense what the annual or decadal temperature mean will be? Forget the rings for a moment and say that we have actual thermometers measuring the temps in these locations for the time period of the growing season. You are stating if these temps are known, we can then know the mean temperature for the northern hemisphere on an annual or decadal basis. This is easy enough to prove. Please get back with us this summer and let us know how the rest of the year will turn out after the growing season in northern Canada or Yamal is done. Never mind, I’ve been looking for a debunking project anyway.
From William M. Connolley on March 12, 2012 at 4:43 am:
But we already know how Wikipedia is supposed to work, and how you work Wikipedia. Why must we give your blog a hit at an old post to read self-justifications you can’t be bothered to present here?
Richard S Courtney:
I found that one rather confusing. I pointed out Mann misrepresented a source. Frank o’Dwyer responded by saying Mann didn’t misrepresent that source because other sources said what Mann claimed while offering another source which doesn’t say it either (saying there are other possibilities doesn’t mean you’re claiming those other possibilities are true).
But to be fair, he did raise a meaningful issue in regard to the Wegman situation. I discuss it here. Long story short, one can argue Wegman didn’t admit there was any “substantial collaboration,” and thus, what I said was “wrong.” However, as I explain in that link, if you don’t consider what Wegman admitted to to be substantial collaboration, then you have to accept the fact Wegman didn’t say one way or the other about substantial collaboration.
So you can say I was wrong with my criticism of Mann, but if you “correct” it, the exact same point remains. No matter how you look at it, Mann falsely claims Wegman denied something under oath that was (apparently) true.
Delighted to see WMC once again put on the dancing shoes…
Instrument record is the equivalent of random statistical noise is the equivalent of computer models as far as checking for proxies mirroring the period temperature. Wow! Just wow!
It literally boggles the mind!
Oh, not really equivalent, just throwing out ideas… GIGO
> Where has it been demonstrated that if we know the temps for a 2 month period of time that we then know even in a general sense what the annual or decadal temperature mean will be?
I’ve already answered that in general. If you want the details, you’ll have to follow the literature. For example, http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/mbh98.pdf cites http://seaice.apl.washington.edu/Papers/JonesEtal99-SAT150.pdf, from which you should examine figure 1.
> Forget the rings for a moment and say that we have actual thermometers measuring the temps in these locations for the time period of the growing season. You are stating if these temps are known, we can then know the mean temperature for the northern hemisphere on an annual or decadal basis.
No, not quite. I’m stating that the two are related, they are correlated, to some degree. That correlation gets folded into the reconstructions.
> This is easy enough to prove. Please get back with us this summer and let us know how the rest of the year will turn out
You’ve misunderstood; the relationship isn’t directly causal, but probabilistic. If you know the temperature today you can make a reasonable guess at tomorrows temperature (the same as today). But there is no guarantee this guess will be correct.
> But we already know how Wikipedia is supposed to work, and how you work Wikipedia.
No. You think you know, but actually you haven’t got a clue.
> Why must we give your blog a hit at an old post to read self-justifications you can’t be bothered to present here?
I took the trouble to read, and point out the errors in, a laughably inaccurate blog post. I could just copy-n-paste all the text over here, but that would be pointless. If you aren’t brave enough to read text that hasn’t been Officially Sanctioned, or not brave enough to comment in an area where you won’t get backup from the others here, then don’t follow the link.
As readers can see William M. Connolley doesn’t contest that he is a green activist. Not a word of contention disputing it.
William M. Connolley says: March 12, 2012 at 4:43 am
“Sorry guv, you’ve got the wrong strawman. The MWP preceeedes the instrumental record by a fair while.”
“But Sexton, like so many others, treats the MWP and LIA as givens. By some magical means not available to ordinary mortals, he “knows” the hemispheric average temperatures of these periods, and so he “knows” that the reconstructions must be wrong.
Normal scientists don’t have this magical knowledge, so they have to use the observations available instead.”
=============================================================
Yet the IPCC showed it and then they didn’t. By what “magical means not available to ordinary mortals” did MBH arrive at their reconstructions?
And what on earth does any of this have to do with embedded software engineering?
Somebody told me I should respond to Frank o’Dwyer’s supposed “rebuttal” of my work. I’ve already said I don’t think anything of value could come from an exchange with him, and I think people can see through his nonsense on their own. Given that, I see no point in making any lengthy responses. However, I am willing to express my view of the points he raised:
So I go on a hot date, back to0 hers and there on the coffee table is this book, she catches me staring at it and says “It’s such a wonderful book”
Do I just get my coat and walk out?
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
Mann – His own worst enemy?
William M. Connolley says:
March 12, 2012 at 7:16 am
==================================
Thanks William, I hadn’t seen your previous comment prior to me posting my last. Figure one on the Jones paper is a beautiful piece of work which should be labeled, “Fun With Smoothing and Scaling”……. a 10-year Gaussian filter? Ok. This shows that seasons will generally follow an annual trend. I think applying this to the tree ring proxies is a bit of the tail wagging the dog, unless the assertion is the summer temps generally dictate the annual trend.
But, this avoids the question. Can we accurately predict or backcast annual/decadal temps given 2 months of information per year? If this were true, then our forecasting troubles are over! I submit that they are not. BTW, I find figure 6 much more interesting.
From William M. Connolley on March 12, 2012 at 7:16 am:
Very well, I just read the Google cache version.
Your sanctimonious self-righteousness remains unpleasant. Your tactics on Wikipedia are reminiscent of a sleazy TV show lawyer that can’t be prosecuted as they technically follow the laws and regulations yet the slime is evident on all they touch. Your modus operandi remains consistent: You are obviously wrong, I am obviously right, I will point out how wrong you are if I must. As shown in your comments on WUWT, you often stop at the first step.
I will note your own unparalleled act of bravery, as to a James Delingpole post on on December 22, 2009, you waited until January 4, 2010 to courageously drop a link in the comments to your “rebuttal” under the pseudonym “Mr. Stoaty”.
William M. Connolley says:
March 12, 2012 at 4:43 am
Too much brokenness to answer it all, but:>>>
REPLY – avoidance as predicted.
>> Annual temperatures can be (partially) reconstructed from more restricted temperatures, for example from growing season temperatures. This can be empirically verified, by examining the instrumental record
> Which instrumental record? The raw data from the instruments? Or the “adjusted”data? If adjusted, which version?
William M. Connolley says:
You’ve failed to understand. I’ll try again.>>>
REPLY – misdirection as predicted.
William M. Connolley says:
We have an idea: maybe it is possible to retrieve useful information about past temperatures even if you don’t know the entire annual temperature record.>>>
REPLY – midirection. There is no “maybe”. The word you seek is “impossible”.
William M. Connolley says:
Perhaps there is a correlation between parts of the year and the annual value. Its a reasonable idea, but it should be tested. How might we test it? Well, we could just construct synthetic series with roughly the expected statistical properties and try that. Or we could use climate model output. Or we could look at the instrumental record. You could use any version of it you like. Of course you don’t actually need to do any of this yourself – because it has already been done>>>
Reply – obfuscation. It hasn’t been done because is CANNOT be done.
William M. Connolley says:
. Its in those papers that you’re pretending to have read>>>
REPLY – midirection and obfuscation. If it is in those papers, then quote same. Keep in mind when you do that much of what is in those papers that makes these claims is incredibly shoddy work, but go ahead and quote them. You claim the work is there, then produce it.
William M. Connolley says:
> Before the MWP disapeared [sic]?
Sorry guv, you’ve got the wrong strawman. The MWP preceeedes the instrumental record by a fair while
REPLY – while you are correct, you are exploiting a technicality while carefully avoiding the issue that I raise. The instrumental record itself is highly questionable questionable due to lack of accuracy of the weather stations themselves, controversial adjustments to data, and lack of accounting for UHI and land use effects. Given that the instrumental record itself is questionable, it cannot be cited as proof of anything that correlates to it. Worse, since 1960, tree rings in particular have NOT correlated to it. Which is right? The tree rings? Or the intruments? Has it crossed your mind that the answer might be that they are both wrong?
> After you get done answering that, could you advise as to how the tree ring data, which represents growing season only, is adjusted to account for variations in precipitation?
William M. Connolley says:
Again, its in the papers you’re pretending to have read. If WUWT was indeed the useful scientific resource you think it is, there would be a post here explaining this point, since it seems to confuse some.
REPLY – Again, quote your source. you want a post here explaining this point? SO POST IT! You insist is should be on WUWT, what exactly is preventing you from putting it up?
I not also that you snipped the other issues I raised. Yes there is a discussion in SOME papers about precipitation, and in fact SOME papers show that temperature is anti-correlated with temperature and more strongly correlated with precipitation. But what of the other issues I raised? Are you going to claim those are in the papers as you claim as well?
Seems to me that you have not answered a single question directly, not one. You’ve waved your arms with replies like “its in the papers you claim to have read” while complaining that the material from those papers isn’t highlighted on WUWT, but you don’t lift a finger to post the material itself.
Why?
Because you cannot. Those papers take nothing into account regarding disease, pestilence, late frosts, variability in pollination, changing migration patterns of birds and other animals that can have both positive (fertilizer, elimination of pests) and negative (foraging) effects on the growth of the trees.
I became a skeptic in part because I in fact DID read those papers, and many others too, and they are riddled with holes such as the ones I just identified.
If you want to retain a shred of credibility, then respons directly to my questions, point out the specific studies you speak of, and quote from them directly.
You won’t because you can’t
Pat Frank says:
March 11, 2012 at 8:23 pm
Gail, your prescription would toss me out as well, and all my DOE funded colleagues at SLAC, where everyone I know pays enormous attention to exquisite detail, achieves technological miracles under budget, and does honest, verifiable, science; cutting-edge experimental today, providing tax revenues in 20 years.
Do you really want to wreck the huge majority honest to get at the minority corrupt, or is some rational discrimination preferable?
______________________________________
I want to go through the answer to that point by point: (Sorry it is so long)
1. The CAGW Luddites want to send us back to a technological age similar to colonial times. The universities that get grant money are supporting that position and so is John Holdren, who is Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He advocated “De-Development’ of the United States” in the textbook he co-authored with Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich. That book is used in universities to teach the following crap for forty years and thereby influencing generations of students. It is still in print. http://www.amazon.com/Human-Ecology-Paul-Holdren-Ehrlich/dp/B001K571OM
“De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation….The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge,….They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided to every human being.” Human Ecology 1973
More on Holdern here: http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/
2. The Government of the USA is spending money like water. Some say the USA is already bankrupt.
“To those who study the numbers, it is now obvious that America’s fiscal situation is hopeless. … it will be statistically impossible for the United States to pay its obligations … Inferential analysis is now saying that a game-changing trend ….. Stewart Dougherty is a specialist in inferential analysis….” http://www.kitco.com/ind/Dougherty/aug262009.html
“The U.S. is bankrupt. Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills…”The IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires… an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as [the Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes]…” http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/inq-phillydeals/Is_US_already_bankrupt_.html
Yet another article says “The recession killed off 7.9 million jobs. It’s increasingly likely that many will never come back.” http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/02/news/economy/jobs_gone_forever/index.htm?postversion=2010070223&iid=EAL
In other words the US government does not HAVE the money to give away as grants they have to BORROW IT. Continuing to borrow is insane because the US dollar has already lost its “glamour” and if it is replaced by another as the “World Reserve Currency” The USA is looking at Hyperinflation when the USD loses its “World Reserve Currency” status. Pascal Lamy, head of the WTO is already advocating …“reform of the international currency system” http://theglobaljournal.net/article/view/256/
China and Russia have already deserted the US dollar: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/85424/20101124/china-russia-drop-dollar.htm
Hyperinflation analysis: http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2011/04/on-hyperinflation.html
3. Have you ever even looked at the grants given by the USA??? I have. http://grant-opportunities.idilogic.aidpage.com/
We give grants like Democracy, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law in the People’s Republic of China, $15,000,000 total funding….. HUH??? The USA is borrowing money from China so they can give grants TO China??? This is only one of a large number of foreign money give aways.
Also we have the U.S. WWF gets 20% of its revenue from government tax money… $24,589,994 in 2001. http://www.undueinfluence.com/wwf.htm
4. “Americans are more apt to donate to a charity, volunteer, or help a stranger than residents of 152 other countries.” http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/Change-Agent/2011/1221/Americans-are-the-most-generous-global-poll-finds
In other words if taxes did not wipe out over 60% of my income I would have more money to give to my alumni association earmarked for the research I Want instead of a grant some politician makes as a payback for getting elected. With money comes power and I want that power in my hands not in the hands of a slimy politician.
For example
Crony Capitalism: $737 Million Green Jobs Loan Given to Nancy Pelosi’s Brother-In-Law
“Despite the growing Solyndra scandal, yesterday the Department of Energy approved $1 billion in new loans to green energy companies — including a $737 million loan guarantee to a company known as SolarReserve…. “Ronald Pelosi, a San Francisco political insider and financial industry polymath who happens to be the brother-in-law of Nancy Pelosi…”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/crony-capitalism-737-million-green-jobs-loan-given-nancy-pelosis-brother-law_594593.html
5. Then there is the inefficiency of moving wealth via government.
“….One-third of all their taxes is consumed by waste and inefficiency in the Federal Government as we identified in our survey….” Grace Commision Report: http://www.uhuh.com/taxstuff/gracecom.htm
Finally in the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower
” In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Grants and government “loans” are a method for “acquiring unwarranted influence” by politicians and that is one reason why I am against them.
On top of that a nearly bankrupt country of Shop Keepers and Burger Flippers can simply no longer afford to develop technology that is then given to other countries and not retained for our economic advantage.
U.S. Commercial Technology Transfers to the People’s Republic of China: http://www.bis.doc.gov/defenseindustrialbaseprograms/osies/defmarketresearchrpts/techtransfer2prc.html
A note on my comment of a country of Shop Keepers and Burger Flippers
“…Today the US has a consumer-based economy where nearly everything is manufactured overseas and sold back to us in our stores. With manufacturing gone, citizens within the US still need to work somewhere…. Our largest domestic employers are retailers; not manufacturers…. If we look at the top fifteen most common jobs in the US, ….The sum total of people working in these types of jobs amounts to around 30.5 Million Americans, or about 15% of the working age population. While that percentage may not sound like much, we must remember that these are only our most common jobs found in the US. This list does not include most middle class jobs, such as sales reps, area managers, marketing specialists, or others directly employed by retail, distribution, or restaurant companies in corporate or regional offices….. Many of the remainder of the workforce fulfill job duties that are essential services needed by any nation, regardless of the type of economy…..” http://oldempresario.hubpages.com/hub/The-Land-of-Shopkeepers-and-Armourers
So yes, I was completely serious.
> Very well, I just read the Google cache version.
That will do just as well. I notice that you’ve failed to find any errors in it, and have no objections to the numerous errors I point out in the WUWT post. If you can find any errors in it, do be sure to post them here, or indeed there, if you’re brave enough.
Brandon Shollenberger,
Thank you for writing that, and for responding to the posts criticizing your work. To the criticism that it has all been written and ignored before, let me counter that the truth needs to be repeated over and over so that it can not be ignored and forgotten. Mann’s book has been praised as putting the worst controversies over his work to rest, so someone like you is required to review the book in detail and show that Mann continues to obfuscate, and to show that his writing can not be trusted. Mann and his supporters are counting on his book being read but not being double-checked, so it is extremely valuable that you have read it and have double-checked and have written what you have found.
Thank you again.
Septic Matthew/Matthew R Marler:
I’m glad to! I’ve actually tried for years to get any sort of real discussion with people who disagree with me, so I’m hoping this might lead to that. Even if it doesn’t, at least I’ll know my time hasn’t been completely wasted like sometimes it feels.
Speaking of which, Arthur Smith recently posted a comment on my review on Amazon. He refers to a blog post by DeepClimate, but he misrepresents what it says (while claiming I seem unaware of it, no less). This is the same Arthur Smith who a year and a half ago refused to acknowledge Mann had calculated R2 scores then failed to publish the adverse results even though the evidence was indisputable. This is the same Arthur Smith who, the next year, claimed nobody would give him evidence of this sort of behavior.
Sorry for going off-topic, but that sort of behavior is dumbfounding to me. How can you have a discussion with people who make things up about sources they provide, refuse to look at the sources you provide, and simply deny that you ever provided them? I know there must be reasonable people who defend Mann’s work, and I want to talk to them. Where are they?
What do you do when the most reasonable response you get is like Frank o’Dwyer’s?
Brandon,
Once again (but in a separate venue) thank you.
One thing I would like to see clearly stated, in order to preserve the history, is Mann’s use of the internet to abuse his detractors.
The way I recall the sequence of events:
1. MBH98 was published
2. M&M was published
3. Real Climate was created to defend MBH98 etc. (under the guise of climate science)
4. M&M attempted to respond at Real Climate but were heavily moderated
5. Steve McIntyre created Climate Audit to voice his defense of the prosecution at Real Climate
If Mann is presenting anything other than this his is wrong.
Jeff Norman, you’re welcome!
I want to offer a few thoughts on your chronology. Primarily, you say “MBH98 was published,” but you leave off the part about MBH99 being published. You could easily remedy this by just saying “MBH was published.” The only time you need to list numbers after MBH is if you’re referring to the papers individually.
As for McIntyre’s blog, he actually started by creating a web site. It was only later he created the blog. That mainly matters to me because I actually stumbled across that original web site before the blog existed, and it’s what made me start following the hockey stick debate. I guess you could say I don’t want to forget my roots.
Brandon Shollenberger;
What do you do when the most reasonable response you get is like Frank o’Dwyer’s?>>>>
One must understand the mind set of the person with whom you are having the disussion:
1. There are those who have deliberately lied. No amount of evidence will make them abandon their lie.
2. There are those who believe the lies because they fit with their world outlook. Only a massive amount of evidence will make them abandon their belief because they must abandon not only the lie, but their belief system.
3. There are those who are mistaken, and know so. They will abandon the lie only when it is to their personal benefit to do so.
4. There are those that have accepted the lies for no other reason than that they are pervasive…the “concensus”.
Explain, debate, argue with them all. Not because you are likely to change a single mind in the first three categories, but because the people in those three categories are who we must debate with in the hopes that those in the 4th category read one or two paragraphs and actually begin to think things through for themselves based on the facts.
davidmhoffer:
I share the same viewpoint as you. My problem is I don’t understand why the people in the fourth category never speak up. I think I would die of shock if I ever had anyone respond to me by saying something like, “I don’t think you’re right because I’ve heard X, Y and Z. Is there some counterarguments I’m not aware of?”
The crazy part is I’ve gotten responses like that in discussions of basically everything else. That includes religion and politics. Think about that. I have an easier time finding reasonable disagreements over religion and politics than I do the hockey stick controversy.
Connolley,
Do you tell your children to be honest?
Brandon – you seem to have attracted the attention of the rabid nutters – Rob Honeycutt, Arthur Smith and co, who have been making a point of spamming their irrelevant comments and eulogies all over the hostile reviews to the Holy Book of Mann. I am just surprised that the mighty Scott Mandia hasn’t jumped in with his praise of Mann for shouldering mthe burden of saving the world. But kudos for attracting the greatest compliment of all, from someone called Rob Honeycutt – a classic of the irrelevant justification meme:
<b. In reply to an earlier post on Mar 12, 2012 4:13:50 PM PDT
Rob Honeycutt says:
Brandon… Yes, Wegman is a statistician. But the whole upshot of the entire report was that NONE of it changed the conclusions of Mann's work. The whole complaint of Wegman and others ends up being that he got the right result using the wrong means.
Brandon Shollenberger says:
March 12, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Septic Matthew/Matthew R Marler:
Thank you for writing that, and for responding to the posts criticizing your work.
I’m glad to! I’ve actually tried for years to get any sort of real discussion with people who disagree with me, so I’m hoping this might lead to that. Even if it doesn’t, at least I’ll know my time hasn’t been completely wasted like sometimes it feels.
=================================================
🙂 Brandon, we all get to feeling that way. The way I see it, if one engages and you’ve provoked thought, then the day is won. Even when arguing with people who will never openly cede any ground or point, a seed is planted. Further, there are many who read and don’t comment. They’ve read your challenges and your responses. You’ve also caused many to engage and you’ve provoked thought. Well done. And thanks!
@ William Connolley, I’d like to thank you as well. An echo chamber is a dreadful thing. You and just a few others choose to engage here. While I make it a point to load Mann’s works every time I change PCs, I failed to do so with Jones’. My memory isn’t what it was, apparently. I didn’t recall that particular perspective. While I disagree with the way it is presented, it has set me to some work to at least show why I believe it is improper. Though it will be tedious, I’ll not be worse for it. Thanks.
Brandon Shollenberger says: @ March 12, 2012 at 12:45 pm
……Sorry for going off-topic, but that sort of behavior is dumbfounding to me. How can you have a discussion with people who make things up about sources they provide, refuse to look at the sources you provide, and simply deny that you ever provided them? I know there must be reasonable people who defend Mann’s work, and I want to talk to them. Where are they?…..
________________________________________
They wised up and deserted the “Cause” in droves.
All that are left are the hypocrites who have a vested interest in continuing the lie because their jobs depend on it, the uneducated who do not have the scientific or logic training needed to see the lie and the fanatics to whom lying for the “Cause” is justified.
diogenes says:
“…Wegman is a statistician. But the whole upshot of the entire report was that NONE of it changed the conclusions of Mann’s work. The whole complaint of Wegman and others ends up being that he got the right result using the wrong means.”
That’s absurd. Mann’s conclusions have been falsified. He got the wrong result using the wrong means.
And Mann continues in character: he deliberately used a corrupted proxy in Mann08 that he had been informed was corrupted before he published. Explain how that is acceptable science.
The guy is a scientific charlatan. If you want to read a book that is — by comparison — completely unbiased, read A.W. Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. Only credulous, unquestioning, mouth breathing followers who believe everything Mann says in his own book would take it at face value.
Mann is a shameless self-promoter of catastrophic AGW pseudo-science, expecting the public to believe in his teleconnected treemometers. As if. Mann wouldn’t be afraid to debate it publicly with scientific skeptics if he truly believed what he’s trying to sell. But Mann is very afraid to debate, and he hides out in his ivory tower rather than allow his CAGW story to be ripped to shreds, like it is here on a daily basis on the internet’s Best Science site.
They wised up and deserted the “Cause” in droves….
I should have added these polls.
Gallup Poll:
“March 11, 2010
Americans’ Global Warming Concerns Continue to Drop….public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence. In response to one key question, 48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated…” http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/americans-global-warming-concerns-continue-drop.aspx
Rasmussen Reports
69% Say It’s Likely Scientists Have Falsified Global Warming Research Wednesday, August 03, 2011 http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/69_say_it_s_likely_scientists_have_falsified_global_warming_research
Unfortunately the mild winter and continued Propaganda has taken its toll.
Rasmussen Reports
Saturday, January 07, 2012
“….Belief that global warming is a serious problem is at its highest level in two-and-half-years… telephone survey of Likely Voters finds that 64% say global warming is at least a somewhat serious problem, including 30% who say it’s Very Serious. One-in-three voters (33%) believe climate change is not a serious problem….” http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/energy_update
The chart in the article showing the Date of the Poll vs “Global Warming is Primarily Caused By…..” That is Human activity, Planetary Trends or other is interesting.
Brandon,
You are dealing with environmental religion cult members.
They have their orginized system of now to know things.
diogenes:
When I’m feeling cynical, I view these people as launderers. Michael Mann and others won’t make the arguments themselves,* but they seem happy to allow others to make arguments for them. They’ll even go so far as to praise those arguments, such as Michael Mann has with Frank o’Dwyer’s “rebuttal.” It’s effectively a way of getting wrong arguments out there to misinform people while maintaining plausible deniability.
Or at least, that’s how I wind up feeling.
James Sexton:
You’re welcome! I’m just happy to know I have provoked thought in some people.
I always wonder just how many of these people there are. For anything I say, it could be ten people who read it, or ten thousand. It’s a little disconcerting at times.
*There are arguably some exceptions to this, such as with the Gavin’s Guru saga.
Brandon Shollenberger: Sorry for going off-topic, but that sort of behavior is dumbfounding to me. How can you have a discussion with people who make things up about sources they provide, refuse to look at the sources you provide, and simply deny that you ever provided them? I know there must be reasonable people who defend Mann’s work, and I want to talk to them. Where are they?
I don’t know. All I can say is that now I am 65, and it does not cause me as much discouragement as it did when I was only 20. I have found that on left and right, among Republicans and Democrats, and among people with whom I agree on policy and among people with whom I disagree on policy. Sometimes it takes a lot for the the full truth of something to sink in. Without giving embarrassing instances, I can say that I have been fooled myself by not checking original references enough. In this case, some of the conflicts are between what Mann et al have written in their peer-reviewed papers and in their “supporting online material”. Without the dogged skepticism that sometimes marks science, that would not be discovered. The best that you can hope for, and the reason that I expressed my thanks, is that enough people have the dogged tenacity to do it well, and that enough other “reasonable people” are inspired to check the original sources.
[snip . . OT . . kbmod]
OK…Lets tru this again since the moderator did not appreciate the profound nature of my comment. Think hard about what I am suggesting here:
I can sum up what Mann’s hypothesis suggests in one simple formula:
The mass of the a$$ is equal to the and of the dangle while the beating of the mea# is constant.
I challenge any and all scientists to prove the above formula mathematically incorrect.
Thank you Brandon for your hard work in writing this overview, an excellent to read. And one worth returning to.
Grumpy Old Man says:March 11, 2012 at 9:41 am
Perhaps methodology and methods is needed?. For methods are directly informed by the [stated] methodology. Generally one finds neither is stated up front in an academic paper and at times are fitted as an afterthought or justification to the results.
Noted other comments on the subject also.
Also in Tips n Notes prior to last clean there was a media link on the Russians stating unhappily that it seemed 20-25% of their temp data was ?used/cherry picked.
Anthony,
I am hopeful that you can cajole Brandon Sollenberger to volunteer by email to WTKK 96.9 in Boston for interview in counterpoint to one just conducted moments ago with Mann by Michael Smerconish.
Matthew R Marler:
For what it’s worth, I’m only 25. Maybe when I get older it will bother me less.
Jessie:
You’re welcome! I’m glad to hear you appreciate it.
Ed, ‘Mr.’ Jones
Seeing as I live over a thousand miles away, and I’m basically just some random person on the internet, I don’t think I’d make a good choice for a radio interview for that station. That’s especially true since I’ve never given any sort of interview, much less a live one. And it doesn’t help I didn’t even hear the interview you’d want me to respond to. I’m not saying I’d be totally opposed to something like that, but in this case, I don’t think it’d work out.
On the other hand, it might be interesting to send the station a copy of/link to my two pieces. Or even just this one. I don’t know what Mann discussed in his interview, but I figure the station might be interested in a simple overview of the hockey stick debate which contradicts Mann’s views.
William M. Connolley says:
March 12, 2012 at 12:07 pm
> Very well, I just read the Google cache version.
That will do just as well. I notice that you’ve failed to find any errors in it, and have no objections to the numerous errors I point out in the WUWT post. If you can find any errors in it, do be sure to post them here, or indeed there, if you’re brave enough>>>
And if YOU are brave enough, could you please answer the questions I asked of you? Repeat, where in the various tree ring studies you claim I have not read is there an explanation of how the technique compensates for factors affecting tree ring growth such as:
1. disease
2. pestilance
3. late frost
4. changing migration patterns of birds and other animals that affect by direct means (foraging, excrement) and indirect means (control of pests, affects on populations of beneficial insects such as bee populations and so on)
5. variations in pollination efficacy that alter growth due to changes in % resources of the tree dedicated to fruit and seed production.
Thank you so much for helping out. As in your inability and unwillingness to answer ANY of these questions in any meaningful way is a BIG help to us skeptics. It tells us we’re on the right track andf that you are just blowing smoke.
Hey, add smoke and ash cover from forest fires to the list. The dang stuff will hang in the air for weeks from a big fire and when it settles out it lands on leaves and such which can have a detrimental effect on growth for an even longer period of time. How’s that detected and handled in your prescious tree ring studies?
William M. Connolley says:
March 12, 2012 at 12:07 pm
The hallmark of a loser is when they go on personal attack.
Note to William: I’ve read all the comments in which you’ve participated or were given a response. In your case, I believe Epic Fail applies. You consider yourself “educated”, but I consider your arguments without merit. You’ve been taken apart and left incohesive.
(Notice I didn’t call you names–what I did do was evaluate the debate–and you’ve lost. Not sure why you continue to respond unless it thrills you to see your name in print.)
But let me offer an analogous situation here:
Suppose we needed to measure the temperature of the ocean using Argo buoys, but had to do it during the two months of the year where green slime happened to be found growing on the buoys. What would that tell us about the temperature of the ocean?
(No sarcasm intended, as this is basically what dentrochronologists are saying they can do for a global temperature using trees that have a much more limited areal extent than the Argo buoys. Argo buoys are considerably challenged in their task even with full-year operation, but if anybody thinks a relatively imprecise two-month record would be of any value whatsoever in either case, I have that proverbial bridge for sell.)
…or “sale”…. as the case may be.
William Connolley says:
“maybe it is possible to retrieve useful information about past temperatures even if you don’t know the entire annual temperature record. Perhaps there is a correlation between parts of the year and the annual value. Its a reasonable idea, but it should be tested.”
Here’s your test: This fall, take cores from trees in both North America & Northern Europe to see:
1. if this year’s mild winter in NA and bitterly cold winter in Europe can be determined from this summer’s growth ring(s).
2. how well temperatures during this upcoming growing season correlate with (average) annual values.
3. how well actual temperatures and corresponding ring widths correlate with past known temperatures and ring widths.
Rhetorical question: Even if the rings show some correlation, (which I doubt) which trees would Mann use to show the average annual value for the planet?
It is greatly apparent that Mike Mann has learned nothing over the years. He’s still using his,”hockey-stick!
kudos to you, Brandon, you put your head over the parapet and pointed out that the emperor has no clothes. The common meme is that “deniers” are well-funded and that “believers” are not. And yet, your negative Amazon review instantly attracted a horde of wasps – people who have been hovering around all the hostile reviews of the sacred writ – Arthur Smith, rob Honycutt…I do not think you got Caerbannog yet but you can wait in hope. Where are the well-funded “deniers” leaping to your defence? perhaps they do not exist? Your arguments stand up in their own right. They resort to the same attack lines they use against everyone who dares to criticise the great Magus. They use the Frank O’Dwyer defence, despite the fact that everyone who reads him regards him as an idiot.
But it still takes guts to stand against such a continual barrage of hostility. What is it directed against? why can they not admit that Mann is not a great statistician?
Louis – how daqre you ask the great Connolley to indulge in sheer empiricism! He does not need evidence. He knows that we are doomed! He went to Cambridge.
Louis Hooffstetter;
Here’s your test: This fall, take cores from trees in both North America & Northern Europe to see:
1. if this year’s mild winter in NA and bitterly cold winter in Europe can be determined from this summer’s growth ring(s).
2. how well temperatures during this upcoming growing season correlate with (average) annual values.
3. how well actual temperatures and corresponding ring widths correlate with past known temperatures and ring widths.>>>>
oooh! oooh! oooh! great idea!
May I propose a slight modification?
Take tree core samples from all over the place along with the temperature records from those same location. Then do a double blind test. Present the tree ring data (in no particular order) along with the temperature data (in no particular order) and challenge the tree ring geniuses to match them up.
Oh GAWD I wish I could fund something like that.
And if I COULD fund something like that… then I’d have to wish for tree ring geniuses stupid enough to participate and make total fools of themselves.
Gads! Another Groundhog day. Mann has produced yet another document, letter-to-the-editor, petition, magazine article, book, whatever. Once again talented individuals feel obligated to step away from their own activities to decode obtuse writing in order to identify untrue or speculative “facts” interwoven with fallacious logic. Then there are the usual appeals to authority (Mann being the authority). For the loyal opposition, merely seeking the truth, wherever and whenever it is found, this is a distraction from their other, productive work – a sideshow, which needs to be addressed. But, for Mann, it is a matter of survival; he is running for his life. Unfortunately, the current Mann episode is just another, one of many, with more likely to come.
This is not unlike the Clinton-Monica affair, where then-President Clinton, to fend off accusations, even argued about the meaning of “is”. It almost worked. The news media was ready and willing to relegate Monica as just another “bimbo explosion”. But Monica, bless her heart, produced DNA.
Has anyone confronted any of these prestigious “science” associations , pointing out, hopefully at public meetings, that there are currently 1,056 studies (many produced after, and in spite of, Mann’s hockey stick graph) which clearly demonstrate both the temperature amplitudes, durations, and global nature of both the MWP and LIA? By these association leaders merely asserting they believe the opinion of the “consensus” of scientists, they have simultaneously rejected the overwhelming consensus of scientists (1,056 studies to 1, and counting) who were actually involved in performing these studies. Are they willing to admit, that they have rejected 1,056 studies, from research institutions and researchers around the world in favor of one study, which has been seriously questioned by many credible scientists? While votes in science don’t count, 1,056 studies, all in general agreement, is an entirely different matter. What’s more these studies involve statistics and measurements, not the kind of process involving some new concept only understood by Mann (who in any event is no Einstein).
If Mann’s study is invalid, (not an unreasonable assumption), then our current warming began at the bottom of the LIA, around 1680. (“bottom” is the lowest temperature of the LIA, the end of the LIA is an arbitrary date which is not relevant.) Since 1680 was long before co2 began increasing and also well before the industrial revolution, and – it would have taken considerable additional time for the low annual increase in co2 , when it did finally begin, to have an impact on temperature, it’s safe to state that the first 200 years of warming were merely natural climate variation. Perhaps Mann’s hockey stick graph may yet turn out to be that evasive DNA .
davidmhoffer says:
Take tree core samples from all over the place along with the temperature records from those same location. Then do a double blind test. Present the tree ring data (in no particular order) along with the temperature data (in no particular order) and challenge the tree ring geniuses to match them up.
Yes!! – Now you’re talking!
Then we’d know just how good (BAD) “treemometers” really are!
Gail Combs says:
March 11, 2012 at 4:46 pm
I’m with you, Gail. I think Dwight Eisenhower was actually more concerned about the science/government complex than the military/industrial complex, so I agree that government grant money for science just needs to disappear. There is just too much at stake.
By the way, I remember the first time I saw the infamous “hockey stick.” I happened upon an excerpt of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the one where Al Gore unveiled this temperature record statistic. Even though I have a passing interest and precious little expertise in statistics, when I saw that hockey stick, I started laughing. Because I knew something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I had NEVER seen a climatic or other statistical record like that one, ever. And being a cynic about statistics in the vein of Mark Twain, I thought that somebody had either been drinking or had badly messed up the analysis. Now that I know more about the charlatan Michael Mann from all of you good folks at WUWT, it looks like my instincts were right after all.