Guest post by Harold Ambler, TalkingAboutTheWeather.com
What started as a brouhaha in the blogosophere has turned into a minor embarrassment for the United Nations in the climate debates. As first reported on ClimateAudit.org, the origin of a graph used in last week’s UN climate report, published to coincide with the summit in New York attended by President Obama and other world leaders, was not an august team of scientists working around the clock, but rather Wikipedia.
Perhaps equally surprising was the revelation that the graph’s author was not a climatologist, but rather an obscure Norwegian ecologist, Hanno Sandvik, who claimed no expertise regarding the data used in his graph. Misidentified in the UN report as “Hanno,” Sandvik politely distanced himself from the graph as the story unfolded. The UN report authors, meanwhile, had given a scientist they had never met or heard of the appearance of scientific legitimacy.
Was copying and pasting a Wikipedia graph drawn by a non-climatologist the best that the United Nations, with a staff of hundreds working on climate change using an annual budget in the hundreds of million dollars, could do? Evidently, it was. Sandvik himself appeared surprised.
‘My’ graph has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal since I am not a climatologist,” he wrote in an e-mail to TalkingAboutTheWeather.com. “The graph has been drawn using data that have undergone peer-review. That means that the graph is ‘mine’ only in a very restricted sense, viz. that I have drawn it – the underlying data [are] not mine, as the source provided clearly indicates. I have no qualification to judge whether the underlying data are correct or erroneous, and have never pretended to be able to do so.
This is not the first graph with a hockey-stick shape to gain notoriety. The most famous example is that of Penn State climatologist Michael Mann’s own hockey stick graph, prominently featured at the 2001 UN IPCC meeting and in its Third Assessment Report.
That hockey stick has since been debunked by the United States Congress by the world-renowned statistics expert Edward Wegman. See the Wegman report here.
The Wegman Report was sufficiently damning that, until now, the United Nations has distanced itself from Mann’s graph, which did not appear in the Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007. From the Congressional report led by Wegman came the following conclusion:
“The [Mann] methodology puts undue emphasis on those proxies that do exhibit the hockey stick shape and this is the fundamental flaw.”
Mann has argued that it was never his intention for the flat part of the stick that he derived from proxies to be grafted onto the modern temperature record, providing the upturned blade, as though the two sets of data had the same origin. Writing on the website that he co-founded, realclimate.org, Mann wrote the following in response to earlier critiques of his methodology in 2004: “No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.”
Such a graft is precisely what Sandvik’s graph does, however, leading to the inevitable question: Is the United Nations an “industry-funded climate disinformation website”? Unlike Mann’s graph, which, with the use of color and error bars, at least suggests both the level of uncertainty associated with temperature proxies and shows that the sources for the temperature data is not the same during the past 1,000 years, the “Hanno” graph used by the United Nations has neither error bars nor different colors for the differently derived data. By intent or no, it is inherently misleading.
The storm over “Hanno 2009” is very likely just beginning.
—
Harold Ambler is an avowed starving artist. His first book about climate, Don’t Sell Your Coat, is due to be published in November. In the meantime he’s living hand to mouth. If you liked this article consider helping him out by hitting his tip jar. – Anthony
Ad rem – “It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.” Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Past 2,000 Years. The National Academies Press, 2006
Ad hominem – “In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann…”
http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.climateaudit.org%2Fpdf%2Fothers%2F07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf
1. That graph looks cheap.
2. It shows negative correlation between 1850-1910, and 1940-1970.
3. It also has no title!
4. Y Axis: ” ⁰ C” : Degrees Celsius.. of what? The IPCC office water dispenser?
This graph is very poor as it explains little if a layman were to look at such a graph for the first time without knowing the history of the hockey stick. Wikipedia could have at least edited in some extra information to make it more believable!
‘Is the United Nations an “industry-funded climate disinformation website”?’ – Trick question…
I almost feel sorry for Hanno… his heart is certainly in the right place…. but I have no sympathy for academics who put their hearts where their brains should be and who think that a threadbare anonym is going to protect them from this sort of drecht… The IPCC exposed both themselves and you, Hanno… and I’m looking into whether I’m allowed to file an academic misconduct compliant with your university.
It is worth restating the criteria for wikipedia in considering submissions made to them;
“Verifiability
Main article: Wikipedia: Verifiability
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. This policy and the verifiability policy reinforce each other by requiring that only assertions, theories, opinions, and arguments that have already been published in a reliable source may be used in Wikipedia.”
Unfortunately many people use wiki as their first and only research tool. They are unreliable on many matters, none more so than on climate change as their gatekeeper William Connelley is associated with Real Climate.
An apparent bias towards AGW material and loose rules for checking verifiability do not make for peer reviewed articles and that such papers are then taken up by a supposedly serious organisation demonstrates the depths serious science has sunk to.
tonyb
Interesting that Mann’s OWN graph was used four times in the IPCC’s presentations to the public; and that regardless of whether he ever “grafted” the proxy data onto the temperature data, they (he ?) DID “graph” the proxy data directly on top of the temperature data. Who then, is guilty of “graft” and corruption?
Mann: ” It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.”
With 79 billion in climate research depending SOLELY on the impressions that Mann’s chart deliberately creates, I find it “specious” that Mann is guilty of extracting gold from we, the taxpayers to fund HIS disinformation.
The UN report authors, meanwhile, had given a scientist they had never met or heard of the appearance of scientific legitimacy……Sandvik himself appeared surprised…. “I have no qualification to judge whether the underlying data are correct or erroneous, and have never pretended to be able to do so.”
I love the smell of the UN burning up its credibility in the morning…..
German Hanno Ritter changed his name to the Austrian Hanno Pichl when his parent decided to marry, but which the Germans could not write (it should be Pichel). And when he went to Norway it was worse, they could neither write nor pronounce it. So he adopted the second name of his wife, but this is not recognized in Germany.
But now he has his 5 minutes of fame; that would help him if he should have an identity problem.
TonyB (14:45:25) : The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. This policy and the verifiability policy reinforce each other by requiring that only assertions, theories, opinions, and arguments that have already been published in a reliable source may be used in Wikipedia.”
I think the owners of Wikipedia are not aware that this rule is violated on a regular basis by William Connolley.
I wish I knew a way to make them aware.
Mr. Alex (13:58:40), there is no title on the graphic so it can be used on Wikipedia articles written in several languages.
A few decades ago, my brother spent four years working in the back blocks of Tanzania for a humanitarian project which was partly funded and run by the UN.
He holds the UN in complete contempt and after listening to his stories you would never trust anything that originates from within the totally dysfunctional, grossly incompetent and graft ridden UN organisation again.
Stashing one [snip] upon the other.
The genie is out of the bottle:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/global_warming_science.html
Surely this scientific garbage should, officially, be brought to the attention of some of the people who really count. I would name three at the top of my list.
1. The President of the American Physical Soiciety.
2. The President of the American Chemical Society.
3. The President of the Royal Society.
If someone has the right contact, maybe they could persuade Prof. Will Happer to contact the President of the APS. Maybe others could produce some names who might also help.
@Brian Dodge (13:51:28) :
From the Wegman Report:
“Findings
In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis. However, the reasons for setting 1902-1995 as the calibration point presented in the narrative of MBH98 sounds reasonable, and the error may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians.
In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue.
It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.”
Your supposed ‘ad hominem’ was Wegman’s response to Mann’s claim of multiple ‘independent’ studies supporting his findings.
Hey – what’s the problem – the boy’s graph fits the dominant narrative that Man Made Emissions of CO2 will lead to Thermageddon – what else is required?
I hope that no one is naive enough to expect the facts from the UN when talking about “Climate”.
With Steve McIntyre new sleuth work on Briffa Yamal series and the conclusions well summed up by Ross McKitrick, at least 10 scientific papers including the Kaufman et al. 2009 unprecedented Arctic temperatures are impacted… i.e. Hockey Stick shape is an artefact, not real.
How long until the HADCRUT that is used by most of Copenhagen supporting cast stories will likely suffer the same fate: Phil Jones release the raw data NOW!
I had no idea that Wikipeadia was a peer reviewed entity. Sort of makes you wonder what will pop up next.
“Is the United Nations an “industry-funded climate disinformation website”? ”
Of course not – it’s a government-funded climate disinformation website!
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram (10:34:16) : What’s all this about Soros-funded climate disinformation websites?
Apparently George Soros likes politics, and/or power, and likes to spend a part of his billions on it.
yeah, that was supposed to be “complaint” not “compliant”… I can file the complaint but it might not be compliant.
I guess today is my day to be contradictory. The hockey stick makes its appearance as Figure 6.10 in the IPCC’s 2007 AR4.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf
And there a plethora of hockey sticks in that chapter. In fact, much of that chapter is intended to support the hockey stick.
Maybe this Hanno (a la AlGore) can get a Nobel Prize for his great work.
Perhaps all the IPCC publications are written by a couple of intern students – let’s not be too harsh now. After all, the IPCC is about attending conferences, hobnobbing with who’s who and sitting on boards and committees; doing real work and proof reading the work of students doesn’t even enter the job description or Standards of Performance for the IPCC leadership.
Duly noted, Bob. I see a hockey stick that you mention in the Fourth Assessment Report, but it does not appear to me to be Mann’s. You’re right to point out that hockey sticks, of whatever provenance, have not disappeared from IPCC publications and likely won’t for some time.
Possibly OT, but within the categories of Alarmism,Politics, this latest article from the formerly sane Telegraph appears in support of the ridiculous priorities of the Warmistas.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6236690/Met-Office-catastrophic-climate-change-could-happen-with-50-years.html
Coulda, shoulda, woulda mighta. Very scientific.
Hanno aManno!