Steve McIntyre published an update tonight showing the last 200 years of the Yamal tree ring data versus the archived CRU tree ring data used to make the famous hockey stick. For those just joining us, see the story here.
First here’s the before an after at millennial scale.
Steve McIntyre 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.
Figure 2. A comparison of Yamal RCS chronologies. red – as archived with 12 picked cores; black – including Schweingruber’s Khadyta River, Yamal (russ035w) archive and excluding 12 picked cores. Both smoothed with 21-year gaussian smooth. y-axis is in dimensionless chronology units centered on 1 (as are subsequent graphs (but represent age-adjusted ring width).
Now lets have a look at the data for the last 200 years where that hockey stick lives (and dies):
Here is a comparison of the Briffa chronology of the spaghetti graphs (red) versus the “SChweingruber” variation i.e. using russ035w instead of 12 recent of 252 CRU cores, leaving 240 unchanged. (The red curve here is the archived CRU chronology, which varies slightly from my emulation of the RCS chronology.)
RR Kampen said: “The cause of this has been identified too, and has proved to be actually very simple.”
It is a simple message, to appeal to the simple minded. But the overall physics of radiative forcings and feedbacks is anything but simple. If it were, there would be no debate. That you believe this topic is “simple” tells me you do not understand it.
Tom P
September 29, 2009 3:09 pm
Steve McIntryre’s reconstructions above are based on adding an established dataset, the Schweingruber Yamal sample instead of the “12 trees used in the CRU archive”. Steve has given no justification for removing these 12 trees. In fact they probably predate Briffa’s CRU analysis, being in the original Russian dataset established by Hantemirov and Shiyatov in 2002.
One of Steve’s major complaint about the CRU dataset was that it used few recent trees, hence the need to add the Schweingruber series. It was therefore rather strange that towards the end of the reconstruction the 12 living trees were excluded only to be replaced by 9 trees with earlier end dates.
I asked Steve what the chronology would look like if these twelve trees were merged back in, but no plot was forthcoming. So I downloaded R, his favoured statistical package, and tweaked Steve’s published code to include the twelve trees back in myself. Below is the chronology I posted on ClimateAudit a few hours ago. http://img80.yfrog.com/i/schweingruberandcrud.png/
The red line is the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive; black is the chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample and the complete CRU archive. Both plots are smoothed with 21-year gaussian, as before. The y-axis is in dimensionless chronology units centered on 1.
It looks like the Yamal reconstruction published by Briffa is rather insensitive to the inclusion of the additional data. There is no broken hockeystick.
Cool, I hope someone who speaks R comes by shortly. I’m sorry that is not me.
Tom P
September 29, 2009 3:24 pm
jeez (15:12:26) :
Tried to -the code appears headed to the spam filter.
The tweak is simple enough – just remove the occurrences of [temp,] from the yamal index. Reply: de-spammed ~ ctm
Allan M
September 29, 2009 3:32 pm
“It is good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.”
(Konrad Lorenz)
Must be some premature ageing in climatology then!
—
Alan the Brit (03:23:39) :
“BTW you colonials are lucky, on our Sunday morning BBC 1 politics show we had the delights of one John Prescott (a well known Marxist Socialist former Labour Party Leader nicknamed two Jags, two shags, – due to his love of luxury gas guzzlers & extra marital activity) who is now the UK’s Climate Tzar, jetting around the globe telling everyone how they must reduce their carbon emissions to give the “kids a future”, all on his 6 figure taxpayer funded salary + generous expenses – well he is saving the world afterall!”
Are you perhaps referring to the Vogon Commander ‘Presthotic Two-Jags’?
He did state that it’s about ‘carbon rationing’ though. Him and his goons want to ration the substance of life! Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
(Lord Acton, letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 3rd April 1887)
Kim says: “I propose a Museum to Human Folly and an expedition to find those ten trees and exhibit them in the main hall.”
How about a Surfacestations.org expedition to see if any of these trees are downwind of campfire pits, cabins, have abnormally fertile soil, or were exposed to more sunlight in the 20th century due to clearing or other effects?
When you consider the human lives at stake by ‘carbon’ cap imposed energy shortages, from starvation, freezing, failing to develop new technologies etc., is this not a *criminal act* by the hockey stickians?
DennisA
September 29, 2009 4:12 pm
Gary Turner (09:21:15) The Register link is a nice summary and I have sent it to politicians, even if only to make them feel perhaps a little disquiet.
Re: Met Office and 4 degrees, this was first introduced last year by Professor Bob Watson, the current UK Director of Strategy at Tyndall and Chief Scientific Adviser to DEFRA: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/06/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange
“The UK should take active steps to prepare for dangerous climate change of perhaps 4C according to one of the government’s chief scientific advisers. In policy areas such as flood protection, agriculture and coastal erosion Professor Bob Watson said the country should plan for the effects of a 4C global average rise on pre-industrial levels.”
When asked in 1997 at Kyoto, as the new IPCC Chairman, about the growing number of climate scientists who challenged the conclusions of the UN that man-induced global warming was real and promised cataclysmic consequences, Watson responded by denigrating all dissenting scientists as pawns of the fossil fuel industry. “The science is settled” he said, and “we’re not going to reopen it here.” http://sovereignty.net/p/clim/kyotorpt.htm
rcrejects
September 29, 2009 4:19 pm
Clearly many posters are sending posts to Real Climate and Tamino’s Open Mind blogs on this topic. However, to date they are maintaining a dignified silence and not accepting posts that do not suit their position.
Any of you who find that your posts to those sites are being rejected (as usual without any explanation) can keep a copy of the post, and post it at http://rcrejects.wordpress.com if you want.
rcrejects is a repository for posts rejected at other climate sites. It has been operating since early this year, and has many examples of rejected posts by now.
Bart
September 29, 2009 5:35 pm
Tom P: I believe SM answered you at the site as follows:
I haven’t decided yet whether I want to dignify the CRU selection of 12 cores by using this data to dilute the results from population averages (e.g. russ035w). At this point, I’m inclined to think that the calculation using russ035w without the 12 special picks is a more defensible sampling procedure and that a “compromise” merged set is still acquiescing in an undocumented and suspect picking process, albeit diluted by information from an actual population, and am reluctant to appear to give any perceived endorsement of such a “compromise”. I’ll think about it, but there’s lots on my plate right now.
If I am following the debate correctly, it appears that the CRU cores do not agree with a wider sample, hence they are suspect. Therefore, mixing them back in with the general population makes no sense, as they are not randomly sampled. The fact that mixing a biased sample in with a random sample tends to bias you back toward that sample is essentially a tautology.
Tom P
September 29, 2009 6:08 pm
Bart (17:35:25) :
“If I am following the debate correctly, it appears that the CRU cores do not agree with a wider sample, hence they are suspect. Therefore, mixing them back in with the general population makes no sense, as they are not randomly sampled.”
No, they are the twelve most recent cores. There’s been no evidence provided to suggest they are in any way suspect. Indeed Steve McIntyre said they may well have been just the most recent part of Hantemirov and Shiyatov’s dataset and no selection would have been made. There is no obvious reason to exclude them.
I would be interested to hear a response from Steve – it’s gone very quiet over at CA.
philincalifornia
September 29, 2009 6:21 pm
Jeff Szuhay (11:07:19) :
Piltdown man revisited?
———————-
Speaking of which, I went over to BBC to see if they had picked this up yet (ha ha), typed in Piltdown Man the Second’s name, Briffa. Nothing new, but I did find this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1247636.stm
Is it just me, or is there some subtle irony in that last paragraph ??
“These data allow researchers to build a picture of what the Earth’s climate was like before humans were around to make written records.”
hengav
September 29, 2009 6:33 pm
Tom P (18:08:39)
You are acting as though there is some form of “smoking” gun associated with your graph including the 12 most recent cores to ascribe a motive for NOT including them. Obviously their inclusion generates almost all of the original author’s “signal”. If that was your only point, no wonder you haven’t had a reply.
philincalifornia
September 29, 2009 6:33 pm
Ron de Haan (15:53:59) :
This looks a reasonable proposal to me:
UK Climate Scientists must explain or resign! http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/leading-uk-climate-scientists-must-explain-or-resign/
———————————–
I think it would be more reasonable if it said “explain, resign, or be fired”.
Incidentally, are these people paid for by the British government, that same entity that does business in California and defrauds people out of global warming taxes every time we buy airline tickets to travel to and from the UK ??
Just asking.
Zeke the Sneak
September 29, 2009 6:54 pm
If you turn it upside down and squint at it, you can still see a golf club!
Bart
September 29, 2009 7:20 pm
Tom: I will have to concede that I am not familiar with the methodology used in sampling these cores, and I am not familiar enough with the programming language you are using to figure out how you are treating the data. I am confused that you appear to be adding in a much smaller sample, yet it is driving your result. If you would choose to enlighten me on any of these points, I would appreciate it.
notalarming
September 29, 2009 7:42 pm
Tom P.
Your approach doesn’t make much sense. If the majority of trees in the region don’t calibrate well to temperature, then it would seem reasonable to leave the 12 out.
The much larger data set says the opposite. If this were a business problem and you were trying to gauge the market for a product via survey results and you asked 100 people whether they like the product or not. 88 say they do and would buy again, but 12 say they don’t what would be the end result?
Seems simple enough.
Do you then conclude the product is worthless because of the 12 that don’t like the product and send a recommendation back to management that the product should be pulled, but not showing them the other data? Would that be reasonable?
Would you tell the management then that 100% of the data says “people don’t like the product”?
That’s the scenario we have with Briffa’s tree data as it was applied by the scientific scoundrels at Hadley CRU.
No amount of statistical analysis will change the fact that the majority of data was not only excluded, but hidden from the public for a long time and then kept hidden even after repeated requests.
You must be unbelievably dense to miss this fact, or you are part of the CRU just trying to smooth over this sleight of hand perpetrated by people in positions of trust.
Graeme Rodaughan
September 29, 2009 7:57 pm
Possible Alarmist Strategies.
[1] Ignore the debunking of the Yamal Data and it’ll go away….
[2] Smear the messager as, (a) Ignorant, (b) Deluded, (c) In the pay of Big Oil….
[3] Produce a new study using “new data” that conclusively proves the unprecendented warming of the 20th/21st Centuries and withhold the data for the next few years…. providing another window of opportunity for Political Actions
[4] Claim that the debunkers are “Cherry Picking the Data”…
[5] Claim that the rest of the Yamal data that doesn’t have a hockey stick shape is corrupted by non-CO2 signals….
[6] Claim that the debunkers are being mean, and are spoiling the AGW Alarmist Party…
Mr Lynn
September 29, 2009 8:12 pm
Denny (12:36:09) :
. . . Mr. Lynn, I would say that in regards to the statement the word isn’t getting out is not totally true. Check out this latest report I posted at GWH.com http://www.climatechangefraud.com/politics-propaganda/5139-inhofe-im-bringing-a-truth-squad-to-copenhagen
This Senator is a breath of relief for the Realist cause. If you do your homework or check out GWH.com, you will find that quite a few good Climate Scientists are on “our” side…They are finding and posting new info all of the time….
I am delighted to see that the admirable Senator Inhofe is going to lead a Truth Squad to Copenhagen to challenge the Alarmists. I hope he can convince some big names to accompany him—maybe Lindzen?
Perhaps he could set up a podium somewhere nearby and challenge the Alarmists to a debate. Conduct the debate with empty chairs, if necessary. It might interest the press enough to get some coverage.
But the need for such theater points up the sad fact that the elite media, the academic and institutional scientists, and the political leadership of the West, are completely in thrall to the Alarmists. That has to change, if Realists are to make any headway. Maybe this scandal will help (I notice that The Register is using the word ‘scandal’).
If any of you here are members of professional societies to which the Mannish miscreants belong, now is the time to call for Boards of Inquiry for possible misconduct.
/Mr Lynn
I am online too much, but I am not online 24/7. I’ve been out playing squash. Surely I’m allowed to be offline occasionally without a poster commenting adversely on this.
While I was out, CA crashed as well. Thus, it was “quiet.
Contrary to Tom’s speculations and misrepresentation of my statements, it is my opinion that there is considerable evidence that the 12 cores are not a complete population i.e. that they have been picked form a larger population. Rather than quote form actual text, Tom puts the following words in my mouth that I did not say:
Steve McIntyre said they may well have been just the most recent part of Hantemirov and Shiyatov’s dataset and no selection would have been made.
This is not my view.
The balance of Tom’s argument is:
No, they are the twelve most recent cores. There’s been no evidence provided to suggest they are in any way suspect. ..There is no obvious reason to exclude them.
I disagree. I do not believe that they constitute a complete population of recent cores. As a result, I believe that the archive is suspect. There is every reason to exclude them in order to carry out a sensitivity as I did. The sensitivity study showed very different results. I do not suggest that the sensitivity run be used as an alternative temperature history. Right now, there are far too many questions attached to this data set to propose any solution to the sampling conundrum. It’s only been a couple of days since the lamentable size of the CRU sample became known and it will take a little more time yet to assess things.
Reasons why I “suspect” that a selection was made from a larger population include the following. A field dendro could take 12 cores in an hour. We took a lot more than that at Mt Allegre and a field dendro could be far more efficient. Thus, it seems very unlikely that the entire population of cores from the Yamal program is only 12 cores and on this basis, it is my surmise that a selection was taken from the cores. Standard dendro procedures use all crossdated cores and definitely use more than 10 cores if they are available.
This doesn’t “prove” that a selection was made, but it is reasonable to “suspect” that a selection was made and to ask CRU and their Russian associates to provide a clear statement of their protocols. There’s no urgency to do anything prior to receiving a statement of their sampling protocols. For this purpose, it doesn’t matter a whit whether the selection was made by the Russians or at CRU or a combination. In my first post on this matter – which Tom appears not to have read, I canvass the limited evidence for and against. There is certainly evidence supporting the idea that the 12 cores were among 17 selected by the Russians, but in other parts of the data set, the CRU population is larger than that used in the Hantemirov and Shiyatov chronology. The construction of the CRU data set is not described in any literature; the description in Hantemirov and Shiyatov has something to do with it, but doesn’t yield the CRU data data set. Some sort of reconciliation is required.
In addition, the age distribution of the CRU 12 is very different than the age distribution from the nearby Schweingruber population. In my opinion, the uniformly high age of the CRU12 relative to the Schweingruber population is suggestive of selection – in this respect, perhaps and even probably by the Russians. Again this isnt proof. Maybe they were just lucky 12 straight times and, unlike Schweingruber, they got very long-lived trees with every core. Without documentaiton, no one knows. In any event, this doesn’t help the Briffa situation. If these things are temperature proxies, the results from two different nearby populations should not be so different and protocols need to be established for ensuring that the age distribution of the modern sample is relatively homogeneous with the subfossil samples (and they aren’t.)
The prevailing dendro view is that an RCS chronology requires a much larger population than a “conventional” standardization. Thus, even if the data set had been winnowed down to 10 cores in 1990 and 5 cores at the end, this is an absurdly low population for modern cores, which are relatively easily obtained. Use of such small replication is inconsistent with Briffa’s own methodological statements.
Tom also misses a hugely important context. There is a nearby site (Polar Urals) with an ample supply of modern core. Indeed, at one time, Briffa used Polar Urals to represent this region. My original question was whether there was a valid reason for substituting Yamal for Polar Urals. The microscopic size of the modern record suggests that there was not a valid reason. However, this tiny sample size was not known to third parties until recently due to Briffa’s withholding of data, not just from me, but also to D’Arrigo, Wilson et al.
Until details of the Yamal selection process are known, my sense right now is that one cannot blindly assume – as Tom does – that what we see is a population. Maybe this will prove to be the case, but personally I rather doubt it. A better approach is to use the Polar Urals data set as a building block.
As to Tom’s argument that none of this “matters”, the Yamal data set has a bristlecone-like function in a number of reconstructions. While the differences between the versions may not seem like a lot to Tom, as someone with considerable experience with this data, it is my opinion that the revisions will have a material impact on the medieval-modern difference in the multiproxy studies that do not depend on strip bark bristlecones.
Henry chance
September 29, 2009 8:30 pm
Say It ain’t so. We have a tree ring circus. Meltdown Mann has created a conclusion and sorted trees to fit the hypothesis.
steven mosher
September 29, 2009 8:41 pm
Tom P (15:19:16) :
Glad you posted your code. Did you check it twice? hehe. Hey Tom Wanna bet you made a error? How about 200 Euro’s?
A response to Tom P.
Tom did a great job by actually looking at the R code and attempting to rework it. I congratulate him sincerely for his efforts.
However, his result is exactly the same as SteveM presented already. http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/audit-of-an-audit-of-an-auditor/
Don’t be too hard on him, he did do a good job but missed a detail.
RR Kampen said: “The cause of this has been identified too, and has proved to be actually very simple.”
It is a simple message, to appeal to the simple minded. But the overall physics of radiative forcings and feedbacks is anything but simple. If it were, there would be no debate. That you believe this topic is “simple” tells me you do not understand it.
Steve McIntryre’s reconstructions above are based on adding an established dataset, the Schweingruber Yamal sample instead of the “12 trees used in the CRU archive”. Steve has given no justification for removing these 12 trees. In fact they probably predate Briffa’s CRU analysis, being in the original Russian dataset established by Hantemirov and Shiyatov in 2002.
One of Steve’s major complaint about the CRU dataset was that it used few recent trees, hence the need to add the Schweingruber series. It was therefore rather strange that towards the end of the reconstruction the 12 living trees were excluded only to be replaced by 9 trees with earlier end dates.
I asked Steve what the chronology would look like if these twelve trees were merged back in, but no plot was forthcoming. So I downloaded R, his favoured statistical package, and tweaked Steve’s published code to include the twelve trees back in myself. Below is the chronology I posted on ClimateAudit a few hours ago.
http://img80.yfrog.com/i/schweingruberandcrud.png/
The red line is the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive; black is the chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample and the complete CRU archive. Both plots are smoothed with 21-year gaussian, as before. The y-axis is in dimensionless chronology units centered on 1.
It looks like the Yamal reconstruction published by Briffa is rather insensitive to the inclusion of the additional data. There is no broken hockeystick.
Tom P:
Post your code so that others can confirm your work.
#######################
##DOWNLOAD DATA AND FUNCTIONS
#############################
source(“http://www.climateaudit.org/scripts/utilities.txt”) #
source(“http://www.climateaudit.org/scripts/tree/utilities.treering.txt”)
f=function(x) filter.combine.pad(x,truncated.gauss.weights(21))[,2]
#utility smooth function
#Hantemirov at NCDC
loc=”ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/asia/russia/yamal_2002.txt”
hant=read.table(loc,skip=57,fill=TRUE,header=TRUE) # Year Recon Chron Samples
dim(hant) #4064 4
hant=window( ts(hant[,2:4],start=hant[1,1]),start= -202 ) #minimum in measurement data
#Briffa Chronology from CRU
loc=”http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/melvin/PhilTrans2008/Column.prn”
briffa=read.table(loc,skip=1,fill=TRUE)
name0=scan(loc,n=8,what=””)
name0=outer(name0,c(“”,”count”),function(x,y) paste(x,y,sep=”.”) )
n=nchar(name0[,1])
name0[,1]=substr(name0[,1],1,n-1)
names(briffa)=c(“year”, c(t(name0) ) )
briffa[briffa== -9999]=NA
briffa=briffa[,c(“year”,”Yamal.RCS”,”Yamal.RCS.count”)]
briffa=briffa[!is.na(briffa[,2]),]
briffa=window(ts(briffa[,2:3],start=briffa[1,1]),start=-202)
yamal.crn=briffa[,1]/1000
#Yamal measurement data
loc=”http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/melvin/PhilTrans2008/YamalADring.raw”
download.file(loc,”temp.dat”)
tree=make.rwl_new(“temp.dat”)
tree$id=factor(tree$id) #252
tree=agef(tree)
#save(tree,file=”d:/climate/data/yamal/yamal_cru.rwl.tab”)
#load(“d:/climate/data/yamal/yamal_cru.rwl.tab”) #tree
range(tree$year) #202 1996
yamal=tree
dim(yamal) # [1] 40892 4
yamal$rw=yamal$rw/10 # Sep 28
mean(yamal$rw,na.rm=T) # 61.52668
#################
## INFO COLLATION
#########################
Info=data.frame(id=as.character(levels(tree$id)) )
Info$start= tapply(tree$year,tree$id,min)
Info$end= tapply(tree$year,tree$id,max)
count=tapply(!is.na(tree$rw),tree$year,sum)
Info$max= Info$end-Info$start+1
Info$id=as.character(Info$id)
n=nchar(Info$id);temp=n>3
Info$core=””; Info$core[temp]=substr(Info$id[temp],n[temp],n[temp]);
Info$test=Info$id;
Info$test[temp]=substr(Info$id[temp],1,n[temp]-1)
Info$id=gsub(“_”,”L”,Info$id) #guess
x=substr(Info$id,1,3)
temp=!is.na(match(x,c(“JAH”,”POR”,”YAD”)));sum(temp)#12
Info$site=NA; Info$site[temp]=x[temp]
Info$site[!temp]=substr(Info$id[!temp],1,1);
Info$n=1;Info$n[temp]=3
Info$tree=as.numeric(substr(Info$test,Info$n+1,nchar(Info$test)))
#Info[order(Info$n,Info$tree),]
# Info[order(Info$n,Info$end),]
(index3= Info$id[Info$n==3]) #this identified the 12 trees from 1988 on
#”JAH141″ “JAH162” “POR011” “POR031” “POR051” “POR081” “POR111” “YAD041” “YAD061” “YAD071″ YAD081” “YAD121”
################
# ANALYSIS 1: COMPARE COUNTS: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7142
######################
#1. clip the count image from Hantemirov 2002 CA/pdf/tree/hantemirov.2002.holocene.pdf
#2. Compare three versions
#plot count in CRU archive
count.yamal=countf(yamal)
year=c(time(count.yamal));N=length(count.yamal)
par(mar=c(3,3,2,1))
plot(year,count.yamal,col=”grey80″,type=”l”,ylim=c(0,45),yaxs=”i”)
polygon(xy.coords(x=c( year,rev(year)),y=c(count.yamal,rep(0,N))),col=”grey80″,border=1)
title(“Yamal Count: CRU Archive”)
#plot count in H and S version
par(mar=c(3,3,2,1))
year=c(time(hant));N=nrow(hant)
plot(c(time(hant)),hant[,”Samples”],col=”grey80″,type=”l”,ylim=c(0,45),yaxs=”i”)
polygon(xy.coords(x=c( year,rev(year)),y=c(hant[,”Samples”],rep(0,N))),col=”grey80″,border=1)
title(“Yamal Count: Hantemirov NCDC”)
#clip other illustration from HAntemirov and Shiyatov 2002
################
# ANALYSIS 2: COMPARE CHRONOLOGIES
######################
chron=ts.union(hant=hant[,2],briffa=yamal.crn)
Yamal=data.frame(year=c(time(chron)),chron)
fm=lm(briffa~hant,data=Yamal[Yamal$year<1800,]);summary(fm)
# Multiple R-squared: 0.8164
#correlation 0.908
#################
## 3. COMPARE COUNT TO URALS
###################
download.file("http://www.climateaudit.org/data/esper/pol.rwl.tab","temp.rwl",mode="wb");load("temp.rwl")
dim(tree) #157
count.urals=countf(tree)
#plot comparison
plot(c(time(count.urals)),count.urals,type="l",xlab="",ylab="",xlim=c(600,2005))
lines(c(time(count.yamal)),count.yamal,col=2,lty=3)
legend("topleft",fill=2:1,legend=c("Yamal","Polar Urals"))
title("Core Counts")
###################
##4. SCHWEINGRUBER russ035 IMPACT
####################
#calculate base case RCS emulation using CRU archive of Yamal
chron.yamal=RCS.chronology(yamal,method="nls")
#takes a little time
#show that emulation of CRU archived chronology is accurate
par(mar=c(3,3,2,1))
delta=mean(yamal.crn)-mean(chron.yamal$series);delta # -0.04820995
ts.plot(f(yamal.crn))
lines(f(chron.yamal$series)+delta,col=2)
legend("topleft",fill=1:2,legend=c("Archived","Emulated") )
title("Yamal RCS Chronology (CRU)")
#close match
#download russ035w data – identified as being at Yamal
download.file("http://www.climateaudit.org/data/tree/russ035w.rwl.tab","temp.rwl",mode="wb");
load("temp.rwl");dim(tree) # 3872 4
# collated from ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/measurements/asia/russ035w.rwl
russ035=tree
info.russ035=data.frame(id=as.character(levels(russ035$id))) #34 cores
mean(russ035$rw,na.rm=T) # 70.1419
#make dataset with picks and with Schweingruber
temp=!is.na(match(yamal$id,index3)) #the 12 picked series
tree=rbind(yamal,russ035)
length(unique(tree$id)) # [1] 274
#calculate RCS chronology including Schweingruber and including Briffa picks: chron.var1
chron.var1=RCS.chronology(tree,method="nls")
#takes a little time
#plot showing counts with 12 picks and with Schweingruber
count.r035var1=countf(tree)
count.pick=countf(yamal)
ts.plot(count.r035var1); lines(count.yamal,col=2,lty=3)
legend("topleft",fill=1:2, legend=c("Schweingruber Variation","CRU Archive"))
title("Yamal Core Counts")
#count.comparison.gif: shows more samples in 19th and 20th centuries and a few less in 18th century
#shown in CA post
#plot the comparison of the two chronologies:VERY IMPORTANT
ts.plot(f(chron.var1$series),ylim=c(0,2.8))
lines(f(chron.yamal$series),col=2)
legend("topleft",fill=1:2, legend=c("Schweingruber and CRU","CRU Archive"))
title("Yamal RCS Chronologies")
#yamal/rcs_chronologies.gif; in CA post http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168
Cool, I hope someone who speaks R comes by shortly. I’m sorry that is not me.
jeez (15:12:26) :
Tried to -the code appears headed to the spam filter.
The tweak is simple enough – just remove the occurrences of [temp,] from the yamal index.
Reply: de-spammed ~ ctm
“It is good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.”
(Konrad Lorenz)
Must be some premature ageing in climatology then!
—
Alan the Brit (03:23:39) :
“BTW you colonials are lucky, on our Sunday morning BBC 1 politics show we had the delights of one John Prescott (a well known Marxist Socialist former Labour Party Leader nicknamed two Jags, two shags, – due to his love of luxury gas guzzlers & extra marital activity) who is now the UK’s Climate Tzar, jetting around the globe telling everyone how they must reduce their carbon emissions to give the “kids a future”, all on his 6 figure taxpayer funded salary + generous expenses – well he is saving the world afterall!”
Are you perhaps referring to the Vogon Commander ‘Presthotic Two-Jags’?
He did state that it’s about ‘carbon rationing’ though. Him and his goons want to ration the substance of life!
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
(Lord Acton, letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 3rd April 1887)
Kim says: “I propose a Museum to Human Folly and an expedition to find those ten trees and exhibit them in the main hall.”
How about a Surfacestations.org expedition to see if any of these trees are downwind of campfire pits, cabins, have abnormally fertile soil, or were exposed to more sunlight in the 20th century due to clearing or other effects?
This looks a reasonable proposal to me:
UK Climate Scientists must explain or resign!
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/leading-uk-climate-scientists-must-explain-or-resign/
When you consider the human lives at stake by ‘carbon’ cap imposed energy shortages, from starvation, freezing, failing to develop new technologies etc., is this not a *criminal act* by the hockey stickians?
Gary Turner (09:21:15) The Register link is a nice summary and I have sent it to politicians, even if only to make them feel perhaps a little disquiet.
Re: Met Office and 4 degrees, this was first introduced last year by Professor Bob Watson, the current UK Director of Strategy at Tyndall and Chief Scientific Adviser to DEFRA: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/06/climatechange.scienceofclimatechange
“The UK should take active steps to prepare for dangerous climate change of perhaps 4C according to one of the government’s chief scientific advisers. In policy areas such as flood protection, agriculture and coastal erosion Professor Bob Watson said the country should plan for the effects of a 4C global average rise on pre-industrial levels.”
When asked in 1997 at Kyoto, as the new IPCC Chairman, about the growing number of climate scientists who challenged the conclusions of the UN that man-induced global warming was real and promised cataclysmic consequences, Watson responded by denigrating all dissenting scientists as pawns of the fossil fuel industry. “The science is settled” he said, and “we’re not going to reopen it here.”
http://sovereignty.net/p/clim/kyotorpt.htm
Clearly many posters are sending posts to Real Climate and Tamino’s Open Mind blogs on this topic. However, to date they are maintaining a dignified silence and not accepting posts that do not suit their position.
Any of you who find that your posts to those sites are being rejected (as usual without any explanation) can keep a copy of the post, and post it at http://rcrejects.wordpress.com if you want.
rcrejects is a repository for posts rejected at other climate sites. It has been operating since early this year, and has many examples of rejected posts by now.
Tom P: I believe SM answered you at the site as follows:
If I am following the debate correctly, it appears that the CRU cores do not agree with a wider sample, hence they are suspect. Therefore, mixing them back in with the general population makes no sense, as they are not randomly sampled. The fact that mixing a biased sample in with a random sample tends to bias you back toward that sample is essentially a tautology.
Bart (17:35:25) :
“If I am following the debate correctly, it appears that the CRU cores do not agree with a wider sample, hence they are suspect. Therefore, mixing them back in with the general population makes no sense, as they are not randomly sampled.”
No, they are the twelve most recent cores. There’s been no evidence provided to suggest they are in any way suspect. Indeed Steve McIntyre said they may well have been just the most recent part of Hantemirov and Shiyatov’s dataset and no selection would have been made. There is no obvious reason to exclude them.
I would be interested to hear a response from Steve – it’s gone very quiet over at CA.
Jeff Szuhay (11:07:19) :
Piltdown man revisited?
———————-
Speaking of which, I went over to BBC to see if they had picked this up yet (ha ha), typed in Piltdown Man the Second’s name, Briffa. Nothing new, but I did find this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1247636.stm
Is it just me, or is there some subtle irony in that last paragraph ??
“These data allow researchers to build a picture of what the Earth’s climate was like before humans were around to make written records.”
Tom P (18:08:39)
You are acting as though there is some form of “smoking” gun associated with your graph including the 12 most recent cores to ascribe a motive for NOT including them. Obviously their inclusion generates almost all of the original author’s “signal”. If that was your only point, no wonder you haven’t had a reply.
Ron de Haan (15:53:59) :
This looks a reasonable proposal to me:
UK Climate Scientists must explain or resign!
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/leading-uk-climate-scientists-must-explain-or-resign/
———————————–
I think it would be more reasonable if it said “explain, resign, or be fired”.
Incidentally, are these people paid for by the British government, that same entity that does business in California and defrauds people out of global warming taxes every time we buy airline tickets to travel to and from the UK ??
Just asking.
If you turn it upside down and squint at it, you can still see a golf club!
Tom: I will have to concede that I am not familiar with the methodology used in sampling these cores, and I am not familiar enough with the programming language you are using to figure out how you are treating the data. I am confused that you appear to be adding in a much smaller sample, yet it is driving your result. If you would choose to enlighten me on any of these points, I would appreciate it.
Tom P.
Your approach doesn’t make much sense. If the majority of trees in the region don’t calibrate well to temperature, then it would seem reasonable to leave the 12 out.
The much larger data set says the opposite. If this were a business problem and you were trying to gauge the market for a product via survey results and you asked 100 people whether they like the product or not. 88 say they do and would buy again, but 12 say they don’t what would be the end result?
Seems simple enough.
Do you then conclude the product is worthless because of the 12 that don’t like the product and send a recommendation back to management that the product should be pulled, but not showing them the other data? Would that be reasonable?
Would you tell the management then that 100% of the data says “people don’t like the product”?
That’s the scenario we have with Briffa’s tree data as it was applied by the scientific scoundrels at Hadley CRU.
No amount of statistical analysis will change the fact that the majority of data was not only excluded, but hidden from the public for a long time and then kept hidden even after repeated requests.
You must be unbelievably dense to miss this fact, or you are part of the CRU just trying to smooth over this sleight of hand perpetrated by people in positions of trust.
Possible Alarmist Strategies.
[1] Ignore the debunking of the Yamal Data and it’ll go away….
[2] Smear the messager as, (a) Ignorant, (b) Deluded, (c) In the pay of Big Oil….
[3] Produce a new study using “new data” that conclusively proves the unprecendented warming of the 20th/21st Centuries and withhold the data for the next few years…. providing another window of opportunity for Political Actions
[4] Claim that the debunkers are “Cherry Picking the Data”…
[5] Claim that the rest of the Yamal data that doesn’t have a hockey stick shape is corrupted by non-CO2 signals….
[6] Claim that the debunkers are being mean, and are spoiling the AGW Alarmist Party…
I am delighted to see that the admirable Senator Inhofe is going to lead a Truth Squad to Copenhagen to challenge the Alarmists. I hope he can convince some big names to accompany him—maybe Lindzen?
Perhaps he could set up a podium somewhere nearby and challenge the Alarmists to a debate. Conduct the debate with empty chairs, if necessary. It might interest the press enough to get some coverage.
But the need for such theater points up the sad fact that the elite media, the academic and institutional scientists, and the political leadership of the West, are completely in thrall to the Alarmists. That has to change, if Realists are to make any headway. Maybe this scandal will help (I notice that The Register is using the word ‘scandal’).
If any of you here are members of professional societies to which the Mannish miscreants belong, now is the time to call for Boards of Inquiry for possible misconduct.
/Mr Lynn
I am online too much, but I am not online 24/7. I’ve been out playing squash. Surely I’m allowed to be offline occasionally without a poster commenting adversely on this.
While I was out, CA crashed as well. Thus, it was “quiet.
Contrary to Tom’s speculations and misrepresentation of my statements, it is my opinion that there is considerable evidence that the 12 cores are not a complete population i.e. that they have been picked form a larger population. Rather than quote form actual text, Tom puts the following words in my mouth that I did not say:
This is not my view.
The balance of Tom’s argument is:
I disagree. I do not believe that they constitute a complete population of recent cores. As a result, I believe that the archive is suspect. There is every reason to exclude them in order to carry out a sensitivity as I did. The sensitivity study showed very different results. I do not suggest that the sensitivity run be used as an alternative temperature history. Right now, there are far too many questions attached to this data set to propose any solution to the sampling conundrum. It’s only been a couple of days since the lamentable size of the CRU sample became known and it will take a little more time yet to assess things.
Reasons why I “suspect” that a selection was made from a larger population include the following. A field dendro could take 12 cores in an hour. We took a lot more than that at Mt Allegre and a field dendro could be far more efficient. Thus, it seems very unlikely that the entire population of cores from the Yamal program is only 12 cores and on this basis, it is my surmise that a selection was taken from the cores. Standard dendro procedures use all crossdated cores and definitely use more than 10 cores if they are available.
This doesn’t “prove” that a selection was made, but it is reasonable to “suspect” that a selection was made and to ask CRU and their Russian associates to provide a clear statement of their protocols. There’s no urgency to do anything prior to receiving a statement of their sampling protocols. For this purpose, it doesn’t matter a whit whether the selection was made by the Russians or at CRU or a combination. In my first post on this matter – which Tom appears not to have read, I canvass the limited evidence for and against. There is certainly evidence supporting the idea that the 12 cores were among 17 selected by the Russians, but in other parts of the data set, the CRU population is larger than that used in the Hantemirov and Shiyatov chronology. The construction of the CRU data set is not described in any literature; the description in Hantemirov and Shiyatov has something to do with it, but doesn’t yield the CRU data data set. Some sort of reconciliation is required.
In addition, the age distribution of the CRU 12 is very different than the age distribution from the nearby Schweingruber population. In my opinion, the uniformly high age of the CRU12 relative to the Schweingruber population is suggestive of selection – in this respect, perhaps and even probably by the Russians. Again this isnt proof. Maybe they were just lucky 12 straight times and, unlike Schweingruber, they got very long-lived trees with every core. Without documentaiton, no one knows. In any event, this doesn’t help the Briffa situation. If these things are temperature proxies, the results from two different nearby populations should not be so different and protocols need to be established for ensuring that the age distribution of the modern sample is relatively homogeneous with the subfossil samples (and they aren’t.)
The prevailing dendro view is that an RCS chronology requires a much larger population than a “conventional” standardization. Thus, even if the data set had been winnowed down to 10 cores in 1990 and 5 cores at the end, this is an absurdly low population for modern cores, which are relatively easily obtained. Use of such small replication is inconsistent with Briffa’s own methodological statements.
Tom also misses a hugely important context. There is a nearby site (Polar Urals) with an ample supply of modern core. Indeed, at one time, Briffa used Polar Urals to represent this region. My original question was whether there was a valid reason for substituting Yamal for Polar Urals. The microscopic size of the modern record suggests that there was not a valid reason. However, this tiny sample size was not known to third parties until recently due to Briffa’s withholding of data, not just from me, but also to D’Arrigo, Wilson et al.
Until details of the Yamal selection process are known, my sense right now is that one cannot blindly assume – as Tom does – that what we see is a population. Maybe this will prove to be the case, but personally I rather doubt it. A better approach is to use the Polar Urals data set as a building block.
As to Tom’s argument that none of this “matters”, the Yamal data set has a bristlecone-like function in a number of reconstructions. While the differences between the versions may not seem like a lot to Tom, as someone with considerable experience with this data, it is my opinion that the revisions will have a material impact on the medieval-modern difference in the multiproxy studies that do not depend on strip bark bristlecones.
Say It ain’t so. We have a tree ring circus. Meltdown Mann has created a conclusion and sorted trees to fit the hypothesis.
Tom P (15:19:16) :
Glad you posted your code. Did you check it twice? hehe. Hey Tom Wanna bet you made a error? How about 200 Euro’s?
A response to Tom P.
Tom did a great job by actually looking at the R code and attempting to rework it. I congratulate him sincerely for his efforts.
However, his result is exactly the same as SteveM presented already.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/audit-of-an-audit-of-an-auditor/
Don’t be too hard on him, he did do a good job but missed a detail.