UPDATE: The Climate Audit server is getting hit with heavy traffic and is slow. If anyone has referenced graphs in blog posts or news articles lease see the mirrored URL list for the graphs at the end of this article and please consider replacement in your posting. I’ve also got a mirrored article of the Climate Audit post from Steve McIntyre. -Anthony
UPDATE2: Related articles
Update: A zoomed look at the broken hockey stick
A look at treemometers and tree ring growth
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We’ve always suspected that Mann’s tree ring proxies aren’t all they are cracked up to be. The graph below is stunning in it’s message and I’m pleased to present it to WUWT readers. I’m sure the Team is already working up ways to say “it doesn’t matter”.
The QOTW this week centers around this graph:
The quote of the week is:
I hardly know where to begin in terms of commentary on this difference.
– Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit in Yamal: A “Divergence” Problem
The graph above shows what happens to the “Hockey Stick” after additional tree ring data, recently released (after a long and protracted fight over data access) is added to the analysis of Hadley’s archived tree ring data in Yamal, Russia.
All of the sudden, it isn’t the “hottest period in 2000 years” anymore.
Steve writes:
The next graphic compares the RCS chronologies from the two slightly different data sets: red – the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive (with the 12 picked cores); black – the RCS chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample of living trees instead of the 12 picked trees used in the CRU archive. The difference is breathtaking.
I’ll say. Ding Dong the stick is dead.
This comparison to CRU archive data illustrates the most extreme example of scientific cherry-picking ever seen. As Steve writes in comments at CA:
Also keep in mind the implausibly small size of the current portion of the Yamal archive. It would be one thing if they had only sampled 10 trees and this is what they got. But they selected 10 trees out of a larger population. Because the selection yields such different results from a nearby population sample, there is a compelling prima facie argument that they’ve made biased picks. This is rebuttable. I would welcome hearing the argument on the other side. I’ve notified one dendro of the issue and requested him to assist in the interpretation of the new data (but am not very hopeful that he will speak up.)
See the complete report on this new development in the sordid story of tree ring proxies used for climate interpretation at Climate Audit. And while you are there, please give Steve a hit on the tip jar. With this revelation, he’s earned it.
The next time somebody tells you that tree rings prove we are living in the “hottest period in 2000 years” show them this graph and point them to this Climate Audit article.
Here’s a “cliff’s notes” summary written by Steve’s partner in publication, Ross McKitrick:
Here’s a re-cap of this saga that should make clear the stunning importance of what Steve has found. One point of terminology: a tree ring record from a site is called a chronology, and is made up of tree ring records from individual trees at that site. Multiple tree ring series are combined using standard statistical algorithms that involve detrending and averaging (these methods are not at issue in this thread). A good chronology–good enough for research that is–should have at least 10 trees in it, and typically has much more.
.
1. In a 1995 Nature paper by Briffa, Schweingruber et al., they reported that 1032 was the coldest year of the millennium – right in the middle of the Medieval Warm Period. But the reconstruction depended on 3 short tree ring cores from the Polar Urals whose dating was very problematic. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=877.
2. In the 1990s, Schweingruber obtained new Polar Urals data with more securely-dated cores for the MWP. Neither Briffa nor Schweingruber published a new Polar Urals chronology using this data. An updated chronology with this data would have yielded a very different picture, namely a warm medieval era and no anomalous 20th century. Rather than using the updated Polar Urals series, Briffa calculated a new chronology from Yamal – one which had an enormous hockey stick shape. After its publication, in virtually every study, Hockey Team members dropped Polar Urals altogether and substituted Briffa’s Yamal series in its place.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=528. PS: The exception to this pattern was Esper et al (Science) 2002, which used the combined Polar Urals data. But Esper refused to provide his data. Steve got it in 2006 after extensive quasi-litigation with Science (over 30 email requests and demands).
3. Subsequently, countless studies appeared from the Team that not only used the Yamal data in place of the Polar Urals, but where Yamal had a critical impact on the relative ranking of the 20th century versus the medieval era.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3099
4. Meanwhile Briffa repeatedly refused to release the Yamal measurement data used inhis calculation despite multiple uses of this series at journals that claimed to require data archiving. E.g. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=542
5. Then one day Briffa et al. published a paper in 2008 using the Yamal series, again without archiving it. However they published in a Phil Tran Royal Soc journal which has strict data sharing rules. Steve got on the case. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3266
6. A short time ago, with the help of the journal editors, the data was pried loose and appeared at the CRU web site. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7142
7. It turns out that the late 20th century in the Yamal series has only 10 tree ring chronologies after 1990 (5 after 1995), making it too thin a sample to use (according to conventional rules). But the real problem wasn’t that there were only 5-10 late 20th century cores- there must have been a lot more. They were only using a subset of 10 cores as of 1990, but there was no reason to use a small subset. (Had these been randomly selected, this would be a thin sample, but perhaps passable. But it appears that they weren’t randomly selected.)
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7142
8. Faced with a sample in the Taymir chronology that likely had 3-4 times as many series as the Yamal chronology, Briffa added in data from other researchers’ samples taken at the Avam site, some 400 km away. He also used data from the Schweingruber sampling program circa 1990, also taken about 400 km from Taymir. Regardless of the merits or otherwise of pooling samples from such disparate locations, this establishes a precedent where Briffa added a Schweingruber site to provide additional samples. This, incidentally, ramped up the hockey-stickness of the (now Avam-) Taymir chronology.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7158
9. Steve thus looked for data from other samples at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size in the Briffa Yamal chronology. He quickly discovered a large set of 34 Schweingruber samples from living trees. Using these instead of the 12 trees in the Briffa (CRU) group that extend to the present yields Figure 2, showing a complete divergence in the 20th century. Thus the Schweingruber data completely contradicts the CRU series. Bear in mind the close collaboration of Schweingruber and Briffa all this time, and their habit of using one another’s data as needed.
10. Combining the CRU and Schweingruber data yields the green line in the 3rd figure above. While it doesn’t go down at the end, neither does it go up, and it yields a medieval era warmer than the present, on the standard interpretation. Thus the key ingredient in a lot of the studies that have been invoked to support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series (red line above) depends on the influence of a thin subsample of post-1990 chronologies and the exclusion of the (much larger) collection of readily-available Schweingruber data for the same area.
MIRROR URL’s FOR MAIN GRAPHICS IN THE CLIMATE AUDIT POST:
If anyone has referenced the Yamal graphs at CA in blog posts, please use these URL’s so that they get loaded from WordPress high traffic server.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/count_comparison1.gif
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/rcs_chronologies_rev2.gif
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/rcs_merged_rev2.gif
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The stick is dead indeed. Perhaps Mann should be whacked with a stick.
Truth will out.
Thank you, Steve McIntyre et al. Each one of these weakens the AGW juggernaut and brings us a bit closer to a long overdue return to common sense.
Watching a pre-season hockey game the other night, the commentators were talking about how the composite sticks kept breaking, whereas the all-wood ones didn’t. A rather nice analogy to the hockey-stick graph.
ok…now i feel stupid, but not sure if i follow. someone put it in layman’s terms for me. i think i get it, but i would rather be sure!
REPLY: In a nutshell:
1- In 1998 a paper is published by Dr. Michael Mann. Then at the University of Virginia, now a Penn State climatologist, and co-authors Bradley and Hughes. The paper is named: Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations. The paper becomes known as MBH98.
The conclusion of tree ring reconstruction of climate for the past 1000 years is that we are now in the hottest period in modern history, ever.
See the graph http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/image/mann/manna_99.gif
Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician in Toronto, suspects tree rings aren’t telling a valid story with that giant uptick at the right side of the graph, implicating the 20th century as the “hottest period in 1000 years”, which alarmists latch onto as proof of AGW. The graph is dubbed as the “Hockey Stick” and becomes famous worldwide. Al Gore uses it in his movie An Inconvenient Truth in the famous “elevator scene”.
2- Steve attempts to replicate Michael Mann’s tree ring work in the paper MBH98, but is stymied by lack of data archiving. He sends dozens of letters over the years trying to get access to data but access is denied. McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, of the University of Guelph publish a paper in 2004 criticizing the work. A new website is formed in 2004 called Real Climate, by the people who put together the tree ring data and they denounce the scientific criticism:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/false-claims-by-mcintyre-and-mckitrick-regarding-the-mann-et-al-1998reconstruction/
3- Years go by. McIntyre is still stymied trying to get access to the original source data so that he can replicate the Mann 1998 conclusion. In 2008 Mann publishes another paper in bolstering his tree ring claim due to all of the controversy surrounding it. A Mann co-author and source of tree ring data (Professor Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit) used one of the tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008, which has a strict data archiving policy. Thanks to that policy, Steve McIntyre fought and won access to that data just last week.
4- Having the Yamal data in complete form, McIntyre replicates it, and discovers that one of Mann’s co-authors, Briffa, had cherry picked 10 trees data sets out of a much larger set of trees sampled in Yamal.
5- When all of the tree ring data from Yamal is plotted, the famous hockey stick disappears. Not only does it disappear, but goes negative. The conclusion is inescapable. The tree ring data was hand picked to get the desired result.
These are the relevant graphs from McIntyre showing what the newly available data demonstrates.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/rcs_chronologies_rev2.gif
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/rcs_merged_rev2.gif
The hockey stick has morphed into something that has a serious drooping problem.
A quick read of CA suggests there have been many peer reviewed papers written by the Team using this graph so although the hockey stick is now officially dead the damage its already done is incalculable and cant be undone. But a heavy dose of web-based ridicule aimed at the creators and users of this graph would help people understand the extent of the extremism adopted by some notable and reputable scientists.
[snip – this comment is causing a lot of downstream comment trouble due to people responding with ad homs thus it has been removed]
If I’ve understood this correctly, The Team have hung themselves out to dry; made themselves look irreversibly stupid; the laughing stock of what remains of the scientific community that hasn”t whored thesmelves to AGW.
Let’s see them fight their way out of this paper bag of their own making.
Bless you all for your constant grasping for reality and truth. I live for these earthly revelations.
The “divergence problem” is explained in this abstract:
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/4/741/2008/cpd-4-741-2008.html
The acronym “RCS” indicates Regional Curve Standardization and there is a bit of explanation here:
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=16682855
Mann and Briffa knew that their data was a lie….. They actively tried to stop anyone from scrutinizing their data, so they knew it was dodgy. This isn’t an honest mistake, but rather a deliberate attempt to propagandize the climate debate….
They have abused science in the worst way possible.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Tree rings as a “climate” proxy are roughly equivalent to the patterns in chicken guts as a “future” proxy. Put that in your game boy and tell me how long these charlatans have left.
Even with this, clearly, obvious result, being accurate or correct, doesn’t matter anymore. There are still far too many people who believe AGW is real and they need to be saved (Via taxes of course) and it appears all the leaders of the western world appear to be hopping on the ETS/Cap & Trade inter-iceage high speed train.
In my opinion,
a close second in the running for this weeks Quote of the Week is
steven mosher’s comment on that thread:
“Nice work Steve.
What a trainwreck. Somebody should get off the ice and back to the bench.
“
John F. Hultquist (21:11:09) :
The “divergence problem” is explained in this abstract
The explanation is bogus because it ASSUMES that the divergance is consistent across all time scales. i.e. the ASSUME that a tree that does not diverge today did not diverage at any time in the past. That would be a rediculous assumption in any field other than climate science yet it is accepted as reasonable in climate science.
The willinging to accept rediculous assumptions as fact as a long as they produce the ‘correct’ results makes the climate science consensus highly suspect.
” Mann as lord of the Stick”
The power of the stick cannot be undone! My precious….
Wait a minute…weren’t tree ring proxies discredited for purposes of indicating ambient temperature? Weren’t other factors found to be more important in tree-ring growth, such as precipitation?
Robert Wood (20:58:35) : “What is the word for ‘wanker’ in climatese?”
[snip sorry, lets not label everybody not involved]
One question I have is how do we CLONE more Steve McIntyres?
BRILLIANT sleuth work.
I hope Michael Mann is shaking in his boots.
He ought to be.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Raven (21:38:02) : problems explained
New readers to these pages frequently encounter strange terms and issues. For example, the divergence problem, RCS, detrending, hockey stick, and one or two others come to mind. My previous comment was meant to point out two such strange terms. When you, and maybe others respond, the knowledge base expands more easily than it might otherwise.
Robert Wood (21:03:10) : “If I’ve understood this correctly …”
It’s far stranger than that. I work with archaeological chronology – both C-14 and obsidian hydration data – all the time. No one I know would willingly paint themselves into such a corner, short of someone taking their children hostage. You might grumble if the data shot your pet theory in the head, but empirical data trumps mathematical models every time because the data is reality, while the model is just someone’s blood, sweat and tears. You might snarl if it became obvious that some lab mixed up C-14 samples and the results they sent you are obviously wrong, but you still report not only the results but the problems with them so that the next schmuck doesn’t use your flawed data to erroneous conclusion. As Steve wrote, it is very “disturbing.”
This scandal will never be shown to the public at large in any form, the Mann ‘creation’ will be allowed to fade away silently untill the Mk 3 version can be invented.
The MSM(main stream media) has been largely bought off, can you imagine the BBC/CNN/ABC allowing this to air? Editors are already being leaned to peddle a whole raft of bogus/rehashed reports in time for the Copenhagen festival of lies’N’denial.
The conference is dedicated to one goal, the actual truth doesnt enter into the equation, the political classes have bought themselves a consensus and that is what they will see, nothing will be allowed to tarnish and undermine the political show.
The atendees will only be shown what they want to see, the ‘evidence’ has all been manufactured beforehand, they will be shown flooding/droughts/melting in easy to digest visual format.
Anti ‘science mumbo jumbo for dummies’ the equivolent of a flashy powerpoint display/hardsell by a producer of junk bonds, it wont matter to them if the venue is snowed under 10 feet of snow and if the polar ice caps reach Newfoundland and the Falklands island chain, it wont matter if the global temp avg plummets.
The constructed man made global warming narrative is sacred now, without that narrative the polititians do not have the excuse they so desperately need to create a whole new political reality, the wholesale theft of democracy, the huge transfer of power to the new political paradigm.
The political classes have worked too hard for too long to give up just because of a small unimportant thing like actual reality, the stakes are just too high, the amount of time and money too great for the AAM based narrative to be allowed to fail, the political classes need and long for the endless power that will flow to them if they can hold off reality long enough to enact their new world order.
Pure Scientific Forgery… what happened again to that guy in Japan (?) when he fudge all the data on cloning? He was fired and won’t be able to have any grant for research… What about Mann now?
A rather BIG nail in the coffin of the IPCC climate clique, or Hockey Team, if you prefer.
First the UNEP releases an easily traceable MANN-o-matic hockey stick, now we learn that the source data for it (and whole pile of subsequent work by and with Briffa was “worse than we thought”.
Copenhagen is very close. A big of a thing as this Yamal scandal is, will it sway the politicians before they wash the economy of the world down the drain?
I certainly hope so, but there are some powerful enemies of the truth out there. Enemies who, regardless of the good intentions of some, can and will use whatever tools they possess to suppress any information that hurts their cause.
OT: Google Earth has new layers “showing” what “will” happen in 40 years if we don’t reduce Co2 emissions… http://www.google.com/landing/cop15/#intro
P.S. Sorry if I had to put it here… the comment box in the tips page is not showing. Could it be because it is too full?
REPLY: page reached the comment limit, cleaned now. thanks -A
Problem: “Tips & Notes to WUWT” has not been updating on my computer for some 24 hours.
Last entry is:
paullm (22:07:18) : I meant to suggest that ALAN CARLIN joins Sen. Inhofe, not all of the WUWT readers. Sorry!
REPLY: yep we reached the comment limit, cleaned now. – A