Broken Hockey Stick Fallout: Leading UK Climate Scientists Must Explain or Resign

If you are just joining us, first you should read about what started it all here.

While Realclimate.org continues deleting the ongoing river of comments posted on their threads ( Note: 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. Keep those screencaps going folks) asking about the McIntyre Yamal data development, Jennifer Marohasy of Australia is drawing a bit of a line in the sand. Given the churlishness of the Team and the blockades put up by Hadley, I can’t say that I blame her stance. – Anthony

Leading UK Climate Scientists Must Explain or Resign

By Jennifer Marohasy

MOST scientific sceptics have been dismissive of the various reconstructions of temperature which suggest 1998 is the warmest year of the past millennium.    Our case has been significantly bolstered over the last week with statistician Steve McIntyre finally getting access to data used by Keith Briffa,  Tim Osborn  and Phil Jones to support the idea that there has been an unprecedented upswing in temperatures over the last hundred years –  the infamous hockey stick graph.

Mr McIntyre’s analysis of the data – which he had been asking for since 2003 – suggests that scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the United Kingdom’s Bureau of Meteorology  have been using only a small subset of the available data to make their claims that recent years have been the hottest of the last millennium.   When the entire data set is used, Mr McIntyre claims that the hockey stick shape disappears completely. [1]

Mr McIntyre has previously showed problems with the mathematics behind the ‘hockey stick’.   But scientists at the Climate Research Centre, in particular Dr Briffa, have continuously republished claiming the upswing in temperatures over the last 100 years is real and not an artifact of the methodology used – as claimed by Mr McIntyre.     However, these same scientists have denied Mr McIntyre access to all the data.    Recently they were forced to make more data available to Mr McIntyre after they published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society  –  a journal which unlike Nature and Science has strict policies on data archiving which it enforces.  

This week’s claims by Steve McInyre that scientists associated with the UK Meteorology Bureau have been less than diligent  are serious and suggest some of the most defended building blocks of the case for anthropogenic global warming are based on the indefensible when the methodology is laid bare.

This sorry saga also raises issues  associated with how data is archived at the UK Meteorological Bureau with in complete data sets that spuriously support the case for global warming being promoted while complete data sets are kept hidden from the public –  including from scientific sceptics like Steve McIntyre.

It is indeed time leading scientists at the Climate Research Centre associated with the UK Meteorological Bureau explain how Mr McIntyre is in error or resign.

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Notes and Links

[1] Yamal: A “Divergence” Problem, by Steve McIntyre, 27 September 2009

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168

The above chart shows the difference when the entire data set (black line) as opposed to a subset (red line) is used to reconstruct temperature.   The chart is accompanied by the following comment from Mr McIntyre:  “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 [leaving the rest of the data set unchanged i.e. all the subfossil data prior to the 19th century]. The difference is breathtaking.”

Mann, Michael E.; Bradley, Raymond S.; Hughes, Malcolm K. (1998), “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries” (PDF), Nature 392: 779–787, doi:10.1038/33859, http://www.caenvirothon.com/Resources/Mann,%20et%20al.%20Global%20scale%20temp%20patterns.pdf

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy#cite_note-17

CRU Refuses Data Once Again

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6623

http://climateresearchnews.com/2009/09/the-hockey-stick-is-dead/