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
===
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
Sponsored IT training links:
Pass 70-270 exam in 1st try using certified 70-236 dumps and 642-515 video tutorials.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
If it can be shown that certain climate scientists, irrespective of whether they are paid out of the public purse or not, have quite deliberately and knowlingly produced peer reveiwed documents that were designed to deceive policy makers, (who represent these self same tax payers), can some one explain to me why:
1. They authers/perpetrators,and their employer’s should not be named,censured and/or sued by the State.
2. The Journal that published the offending documents should not also be named, censured and/or sued.
They surely cannot be allowed to get away with this deliberate deception scot free.
‘REPLY: let’s see what the rebuttal is before we conclude to use the f-word. – a’
Anthony, you are of course right. It would be foolish to base a conclusion on insufficient data.
JWDougherty (10:38:38) :
KimW (22:55:35) :
“This is a body blow to Science. For all the wisdom spoken about how science is impartial, here is proof that papers were published to give a desired result, and not what was there.”
Nonsense. What do you think people like Steve and Anthony are doing, tatting? Quite the opposite, it shows that scientific analysis properly applied catches bad or even fraudulent analysis quite elegantly. What it IS a body blow to is the clique-ish definitions of “peers” being used to limit who should review papers. There’s nothing “special” about the statistical methods used in climatology that a statistician wouldn’t understand. Nor is there anything about trees and tree growth that a climatologist would know that a forester wouldn’t, and wouldn’t know better.
What WUWT is doing is unofficial or amateur or uncredentialed science. But that’s not what ‘science” means to science-groupies and other “critical thinkers.” “Science” has been defined by them to mean institutionalized science; everything else is ostracized as “pseudoscience.” Outsiders are cranks. This definition has been foisted upon the mainstream, and accepted.
What’s worse, the procedures of institutionalized science have been credited with the power of being self-correcting, given time; and therefore the results of a an extensive period of attention by official science to an issue like global warming are taken to mean that a very strong consensus is virtually infallible. I.e., infallible enough that $trillions should be spent based on its say-so, and that uncredentialed critics of ‘settled science” can be dismissed, based entirely on their paucity of peer-reviewed publications.
Science needs a Reformation–i.e., it needs to be, socially, less of an in-group activity; it needs to make a place at the table for outsiders. Let’s hope this is a Reformation-moment.
PR Challenge: the Briffa-Cook “White Paper” had a very interesting discussion on the accuracy (or lack thereof) of climate reconstructions using tree rings. The white paper may be found at http://cdsagenda5.ictp.it//askArchive.php?categ=a07181&id=a07181s1t6&ifd=25749&down=1&type=White_Paper&simpledown=1
@ur momisugly stevemcintyre (13:18:19) :
Thanks for replying to me personally. I will look into this more because I need to be better informed in order to question/defend either side.
Peter (14:33:36) asks:
“Can you imagine any newspaper, including the Guardian, turning down the most sensational story of the century – ‘Global warming proved false, heads must roll’?”
But that’s exactly what is happening. On Bishop Hill’s blog I asked – rhetorically – if there wasn’t a science correspondent on a major newspaper who wanted a scoop. The fact that there isn’t shows that crosspatch’s theory that it’s all about money doesn’t explain it. Remember the journalistic cliché: “dog bites man – no story. Man bites dog – story”.
“Science wrong: no warming” is a classic man-bites-dog story. The journalist who breaks it will make his name, and maybe his fortune. But for the moment, nobody with an established reputation as a scientific journalist will touch it.
Phil:
Is that an escape hatch that will be used to say they never really believed the things they were promoting but they were following the crowd. It is possible that CRU can lay the blame at the feet of the US researchers that promoted AGW and duped the UK chaps into following suit!
Sean Houlihane (14:44:00) says:
“People who wish to expend effort at blogs and forums might want to aim at the middle ground, even if the Guardian website is more amusing”.
In Britain the Guardian is the middle ground. It’s centre left, but influences thinking across the political spectrum. Though its environment pages only publish alarmist articles, a sceptical comment can receive hundreds of positive responses. In the US, I suppose I’d comment at Revkin’s on the NYT. Any other suggestions?
Something that should also be understood is that the Mann et al. 2008 paper reproduces the hockey stick without using tree rings.
Well, yeah, I mean if they cherry picked one set of data, surely they wouldn’t cherry pick another set.
Steve S, not sure why you keep publishing the RC piece about the isotope ratio. It has nothing to do with using tree rings as temperature proxies. All it shows (correctly) is that the increase in the ratio in the atmosphere match qualitatively (although not quantitatively) with the ratio in fossil fuels. All it means is that fossil fuels are (qualitatively) behind most of the increase in CO2. Again, nothing to do with tree rings.
REPLY: In a nutshell:
Thank you Anthony for that simple summary. Anyone can understand it.
THANK YOU!!!!
Also, it makes great drama! If only a script writer and a good director could make it into a movie!
Expat in France (02:45:23) : I am beginning to wonder if this AGW campaign is unstoppable.
Harsh winters and cooler summers make people put little value in what the tv tells them about global warming.
Anyone like to comment on New Scientist not buying into the dead stick?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-the-hockey-stick-graph-has-been-proven-wrong.html
Greenorblue (05:57:49) : they will keep on preaching the end of the world because of “global warming”, they are doing it right now, through the media, in all countries all over the world. It is the biggest marketing campaign ever.
When Al Gore says he put profits he makes from global warming into ‘raising awareness’ what is really happening is he is putting that money into this ‘marketing campaign’. His money then begets money.
He comes to do good and is doing quite well by it.
Don B (06:10:16) :
Energy Secretarty Chu has said that the AGW sceptics have made up data. And he probably believes that.
Did you know Steven Chu uses the Hockey Stick in his global warming lectures?
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5870
Robert E. Phelan (07:30:34) :
when do we finally quit attributing this nonsense to incompetence?
I agree with you.
But, maybe there is incompetence—at the point when they thought they could get away with it.
“The fact that there isn’t shows that crosspatch’s theory that it’s all about money doesn’t explain it. ”
It isn’t ALL about money, directly but it is eventually about money. More government control of energy, for example, puts more power in the hands of politicians to regulate economic growth. This allows them to collect more cash from people who would want to influence their decisions.
My late wife was a journalist. I met many of her friends and co-workers. Flat out Marxists every single one that I met. The topic of conversation would often turn to how horrible some Republican is and how wonderful some socialist theme of the week was. If a journalist published this story, he would be an outcast among his peers. No matter how much he might want to write this story, doing so would be professional suicide. And it would never get past the editor and into print anyway. Because if it made it into print, the media outlet would become “evil”. It would be casting itself with Fox News who dares report blasphemy.
Any paper printing such a story would hear its access to various movers and shakers being cut off because the printing of that story would endanger the politicians’ ability to manage industrial production and therefor potentially cost that politician millions in campaign contributions which might cause him not to be re-elected and so the party that is most desirable by most reports might lose power.
Geoff C (17:07:47) : “Anyone like to comment on New Scientist not buying into the dead stick?”
Denial is not just a river in Egypt. 🙂
New Scientist has been a CAGW cheerleader for a long time.
HANNOGRAPH: A mechanical machine that produces a hockey-stick, independent of input.
MANNOGRAPH: A computer program that produces a hockey stick, without an input.
Jeremy (13:52:01) : “Will they make a movie – this is like Watergate – a smoking gun if there ever was. I suggest they use Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Now what about a title – we need a good moniker for this unravelling scandal.”
Brokeback HockeyStick.
Please note that the growth cycle for these trees is quite short, and onset is triggered by various conditions. Also, these pines are dependent on many, many conditions that seem to either be irrelevant to ‘temperature information’ or actually work to defeat an objective data point for temp. only. Slope, aeration, water, drainage, nutrients, pests, etc. It is misleading to claim that measuring the width of a pith cambium pair is related in a definitive way to temperature, less so by far for Atmospheric CO2.
Some pines grow only for ten days per year, and never more than once/year.
Bill P (09:53:20) :
“Also, to John F. Hultquist (21:11:09), for the linked reference to the “divergence problem”. I read abstract:
http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.clim-past-discuss.net%2F4%2F741%2F2008%2Fcpd-4-741-2008.html
And it’s worth quoting:
Abstract. Recently, an increasing off-set between tree-ring based temperature reconstructions and measured temperatures at high latitudes has been reported, the so called “divergence problem” (here “divergence effect”). This “divergence effect” seriously questions the validity of tree-ring based climate reconstructions, since it seems to violate the assumption of a stable response of trees to changing climate over time. In this study we eliminated the “divergence effect” in northern Alaska by careful selection of individual trees with consistently significant positive relationships with climate (17% of sample) and successfully attempted a divergence-free climate reconstruction using this sub-set.”
—–
So, note that, in the abstract itself – of a paper trying to”prove” tree ring data CAN be used to accurately determine temperature over the past 1000 years (or 1700 years, as Mann wants us to believe – only ONE tree ring set out of SIX actually “successfully (yielded) a divergence-free climate reconstruction”!
(If I were allowed to choose only one data set out of every six available, I could “prove” that every visible planet was identical to earth.)
philincalifornia says:
Well, with your description, it took me about a minute to find this press release: http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml And, I don’t I don’t see where Chu addresses AGW directly but he talks of “clean sustainable alternative energy sources”.
But, I am also a little confused as to why you think his views would have been different in 2007…The implication seems to be that this would be because he was accepting money from BP. But, are you aware of the fact that BP was amongst the first oil companies to accept the science on AGW…back in the late 1990s I believe? Here is their current position ( http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9028012&contentId=7050978 ):
And, here ( http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/08/magazine/08BP.html ) is a New York Times magazine piece from 2002 in which the CEO John Browne of BP describes how BP exceeded a Kyoto-sized cut in emissions, eight years ahead of schedule and at a net cost SAVINGS to the company of hundreds of millions of dollars. Here is a quote from the article:
geoffchambers (15:35:29)
This wonderfully illustrates your point:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskatchewan/story/2009/09/28/280909-man-bites-dog.html?ref=rss
OT I guess but while working from home today, watching a short documentary about the solar system, this episode is about the Sun. They state that the Sun drives weather (Can I assume climate too?) on Earth.
Doco was made by York Films, England.
http://www.yorkfilms.com/about.html