The tale of the hockey stick

Or as an alternate title: “Why we find it difficult to trust certain climate scientists.”

This posting by Bishop Hill, telling the tale of the nefarious temperature reconstruction known as the Michael Mann hockey stick, from start to present, is an excellent summation for the layman reader struggling to understand the entire affair and why it is such an amazing pox on the conduct of science and practice of peer review. This sums it up quite well:

That the statistical foundations on which they had built this paleoclimate castle were a swamp of misrepresentation, deceit and malfeasance was, to Wahl and Amman, an irrelevance.  

I highly recommend reading it, and Bishop Hill deserves thanks for condensing this affair into a readable story.

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Pofarmer
August 16, 2008 8:22 pm

Er, no, I don’t think that was me!
My apologies, that was counters.
The models don’t predict stuff like that, sorry.

Steven Talbot
August 17, 2008 5:43 am

The models don’t predict stuff like that, sorry.
I’m not sure what you (or counters) mean. There’s an entire chapter 11 on Regional Climate Projections in the 4thAR, WG1:-
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter11.pdf

August 18, 2008 10:18 am

Steven, “can you show me the extent of this exaggeration”. Yes I can!
Have you looked at GISS, HADCRU, UAH and RSS recently?
I guess not from your question.
Here are the latest data. Now, guess which two columns are Hansen and Jones
and which two are the satellites.
2008 2 0.25 0.192 0.020 -0.002
2008 3 0.58 0.445 0.089 0.079
2008 4 0.41 0.267 0.015 0.080
2008 5 0.36 0.278 -0.183 -0.083
2008 6 0.26 0.312 -0.114 0.035
2008 7 0.51 0.403 0.048 0.147

August 19, 2008 4:37 am

“If we drink good water, we can remove all of diseases over %80 (WHO)”. Alkaline water can sucsess this. Alkaline water flushes acidic metabolites and toxins from cellular level. Supplies health sustaining minerals such as Ca, K, Mg, Na to the body. Contains smaller water clusters (51KHz) that hydrates the body up to 3 times more effective than normal water. Facilitate nutrients and mineral absorptions efficiently. Promotes general well-bing by restoring the body.

Steven Talbot
August 19, 2008 5:10 pm

PaulM,
I would expect the satellite records to continue to show greater short-term response, both negative and positive, than the surface-based records. The lower troposhere will react faster, and to a greater degree, to internal variation. This is true both ways – please see the response to the Pinatubo eruption and then to the 1998 El Nino: in the first case the troposphere reaction is more negative than surface, in the second case it is more positive. Exactly the same has been the case in response to the recent La Nina phase, which your figures above illustrate. What is relevant is whether there is divergence over the longer-term, once these predictable variations in response have evened out. Over the longer-term, the greatest divergence is between UAH and all the others, including RSS. GISS does not have the highest trend, as some here seem to suggest – both HadCRUT and RSS (for its shorter period) are higher.
(Sorry if this response is delayed, but I haven’t figured out how to keep in touch with topics that have slipped off the front page!).

Admin
August 19, 2008 5:14 pm

One way is to search for your username, plus a relevant keyword.
You could even refine your search to this domain if necessary, but the above worked very well.

August 22, 2008 8:52 am

[…] News » News News Comment on The tale of the hockey stick by DAV2008-08-22 10:52:18(A tad doctored) in Thompson’s ice core chart that appears (a tad doctored) in […]

manacker
August 23, 2008 4:11 pm

Counters wrote:
“Hockey Stick – It still hasn’t been shown to be “debunked.” Debunked implies it is incorrect; if it’s incorrect, than we wouldn’t expect any other records to match it in any way. There are many independent paleo-climate reconstructions used to corroborate the “big picture” of the past. RealClimate is still the definitive source rebutting this claim. Shoot the messenger if you will, but once again, no one has debunked the Stick. The only thing that has been shown is that there is a great deal more uncertainty in that particular reconstruction than in others.”
I can well understand why RealClimate would defend Mann’s “hockey stick”, but I certainly would not agree that “RealClimate is still the definitive source rebutting this claim” (i.e. that it has been “debunked”). Believe we all know that RC has “a horse in the race” on this one, so is not an objective source.
An objective source and renowned expert on statistical analyses is Edward Wegman, professor at George Mason University, who was asked to testify concerning the Mann “hockey stick” before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Wegman’s panel included two other experts, David Scott (Rice) and Yasmin Said (Johns Hopkins).
Wegman and his panel found that Mann made basic errors that “may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology.”
The panel concluded:
”Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis”
“The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable.”
Supporter of the “hockey stick” have used the argument that, while there may have been errors in the methodology used by Mann et al., the conclusions reached were still correct.
As Wegman summed it up to the energy and commerce committee in later testimony: “I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn’t matter because the answer is correct anyway. Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.”
Forget this piece of “Bad Science”. It has been buried. Let it “Rest in Peace”.
Max

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