A must read: The Yamal Hockey Stick Implosion in laymans terms

I hereby nominate Bishop Hill as “speaker to the open-minded” on behalf of the skeptic geeks. I’d nearly say he deserves a Pulitzer for it, because popularizing in an accessible way for the masses is damn important.

Tamino appears to be “sick/injured” also….self inflicted????

“A must read: The Yamal Hockey Stick Implosion in laymans terms”
That would be me, a layman!
And it wasn’t even a quarter as difficult to read and follow as I thought it would. It was a very straightforward illustration of science at work. Too often these days, a skeptic is painted as someone who simply denies (whatever the subject). McIntyre shows otherwise. He didn’t start off from an assumption that global warming data was wrong. He simply asked a series of questions of Briffa’s data, as his investigation evolved, that lead to that conclusion.
This is the kind of stuff they should teach in elementary school level science, not that scientists are know-it-alls who shape and mold policy on their expert word alone, that we best believe simply because they are well-paid and prestigious know it alls!

“Don’t we need to give Briffa a chance to explain himself before we can declare the hockey stick to be dead?”
I think the data speaks for itself. The only thing Briffa needs to explain is why he withheld the data for so long and conducted his science in such an “apparently” sneaky, underhand fashion. Perhaps it is precisely because the raw data speaks for itself that he withheld it for so long. I would appreciate his view on this. You are right that we should wait to hear his version of events, but in the meantime, the data and analysis that McIntyre has now revealed appears damning.
Briffa is allegedly suffering from illness at the moment, so that may be the reason that there has not been a rebuttal.
(The use of the word “allegedly” is purely because I do not know if he is ill or not. I am NOT suggesting that any illness is not real or that any suggestion of illness is deceitful, purely that I read on another blog that someone else heard that he is ill. I do not have an authoritative view on the validity of his illness. To be clear, I am NOT questioning the validity of his illness in the least and have no reason to doubt the validity of the claims of his illness. Merely that I do not know for sure and therefore the claim of his illness is purely hearsay on my part.).

I can’t believe we use tree rings, when everyone knows tea leaves
work better.

“”” bill (05:45:00) :
There is a 200year temperature record. If tree grows do not support this record then that tree should be removed from the series. The data is wrong! “””
Yes, but of what ?
There may indeed be 200 years of data relating to readings taken from some variable set of thermometers. I’m prepared to accept that even 200 years ago, the scientists of the day knew how to read their thermometers.
what we don’t know is what it was in the environment that each of those thermometer readings relates.
One of the biggest problems in experimental science is isolating the variable you wish to measure so that you can measure it. it is also one of the biggest problems in process control. If you know what the diffusion rate of boron is into silicon at 600 deg C, that will only help you do the correct diffusion if you have some way of knowing that the silicon itself is really at 600 deg C.
Quite often process engineers measure something quite different from the variable they wish to control, and then they infer the value of their control variable from some assumed relationship between the two. That can work if you can prove that the proxy relationship is valid; if it isn’t; then you might get a process explosion instead of what was intended.
And in climate science it seems that there is much assumption of proxy relationships that aren’t really valid.
In classical optical absorption (in solids), there is lots of data to support a relationship of the form:- t =e^(-ax). This assumes that absorbed photon energy is completely converted into heat; so the only complexity is that over time that absorbed energy will be emitted as thermal radiation dependent on the temperature that the absorbing material reaches.
Few real optical materials actually do that. A good example is a well known set of Schott sharp cut long wave pass absorption filters, which are available with 50% transmissions on a steep edge at wavelengths from the blue green into the near infra-red. The absorption edge is so sharp, that a 3 mm filter glass, can easily attenuate a near edge stop band wavelength down to the 10^-5 level. It is easy enough with a monochromator and photodetector to prove that these claimed steep absorptions are quite real. Yet if you remove the monochromator from the optical train, and simply measure the transmitted energy; regardless of its wavelength, then you may be surprised to find the energy attenuation is nowhere near that 10^5 reduction.
The problem is all of those optical glasses fluoresce; and the 500 nm laser line that getrs wiped out by a 550 nm sharp cut filter, is simply transformed into an incoherent emisson at maybe 650 nm.
You can stack a whole bunch of these filters together seeking to kill the energy transmission, and ally ou succed in doing is shifting the energy to a longer wavelength; with admittedly a lot of attenuation; but nothing like the spectral curves lead you to believe.
The GHG absorption problem in the atmosphere is similarly plagued. The GHG molecular species may absorb a specific long wave IR wavelength or band of wavelengths; but only at high altitudes where the mean free path gets long enough does the excited state persist until spontaneous re-emission occurs. At lower altitudes where the bulk of the absorption takes place; collisions with the ordinary atmospheric gas molecules transfer the energy from the GHG molecule to the ordinary atmosphere gases. The re-emission of long wave IR from the atmosphere is then simply a funtion of the main atmosphere molecules and their density and temperature. The low altitude re-emission spectrum should contain no signature of the GHG species at all; it was simply the heating mechanism.
That re-emission will also be essentially isotropic, since the thermal energy emissions can be in any arbotrary direction; and one can reasonably expect that about half of that energy will be downwards towards the surface, and the other half upwards towards space (both in roughly hemispheric radiation patterns). Since the air temperature and the surface temperature are not vastly different (Kelvins) the atmosphere is emitting a spectrum similar to the surface; so not surprisingly re-absorption of that atmospheric radiation will also take place; just as in the case of the filter glass fluorescence.
Simple analysis of the processes, and the realities of the standard atmosphere temperature, and density profiles, will lead one to the conclusion, that the upward radiation encounters an increasingly friendly environment, where lower density, colder GHG molecules absorb with a narrowed absorption band, and a reduced absorption coefficient due to larger molecular spacings.
The downward atmospheric emission get increasingly harsher treatment, encountering a higher density of GHG molecules, which are warmer, so they absorb an ever widening band of wavelengths, with increasing absorption coefficient.
So it is hard to sell the idea that a very high altitude sparse layer of cold GHG molecules, can emit enough thermal energy; to survive the gauntlet down to the surface, and create significant amounts of warming at the surface. Certainly some radiation makes it; but the upward direction is favored over the downward.
If this toptical transmission problem has ever been rigorously solved for earth’s atmosphere; and its various trace GHG species; including water vapor; then I am not aware of it; which doesn’t mean it hasn’t been solved; just I am not aware of enay such solution existing. 50 years ago, I might have attempted to solve that myself; but the vast majortity of my learned mathematical tools; have long since disappeared from my short term memory; so all that survices is that which I can produce “off the top of my head” as Joel puts it. I’ll leave it to younger brains to tackle that today.
As for Dendrochronology; let me make it clear that I believe this is an ingenious well established tool for digging up certain information.
Although the core drilling of live trees, clearly produces the To ring at the surface, so dating the layers is rather straight forward; it’s a different problem when one encounters an ancient log or timber from a bog or some other buried site. Who knows where the blazes the suface layer went.
The matching of groups of rings between disparate samples from different locations, to identify ancient layers nowhere near the original tree surface, is a stroke of brilliance in my book, as it enables the continuous sequencing of rings long past the age of any living tree.
Having employed a related kind of subterfuge myself when in college; I can attest to the wonderment of using such tricks to extend knowledge. In one of my early University year’s Physics labs; i was supposed to measure a couple of red wavelength lines in the neon spectrum, to determine their wavelengths to perhaps 0.01% using about a 1 cm long Fabry-Perot Etalon.
It was supposed to be a one afternoon trivial experiment, with a rather crude interferometer device. Three weeks later, when I presented to the professor, the results of my experiment, I gave him the wavelengths of some 23 spectral lines in the red-orange region of the neon spectrum; all of them accurate to about one part in 10^8. It seems that that simple etalon, properly used, with the appropriate corrections for the refractive index of air as well as its dispersion, along with the humidity corrections, and the temperature correction of the quartz spaced etalon, and the expected phase change on reflection that occurred at the non infinitely conductive silver mirror surfaces; was capable of providing results of extreme precision.
A practical problem was that with the lab micrometers available to us to mechanically measure the length of the etalon quartz spacer, the length uncertainty, was nowhere near the wavelength of the light passing through it, so the order of the interference rings was uncertain. It was tantamount to missing the top n-layers for a core bored tree ring sample. The sample in this case did not contain any integral number of interference rings; there was some non integral partial ring in the center; but the next full rings number was indeterminate by some relatively large number.
But because I was able to match a number of relatively broadly spaced spectral lines; a set of rings so to speak, somewhat like the tree ring group matching, the determinable fractional ring could be appended to a sequence of integer rings for each wavelength, to compute an expected etalon length for each wavelength, and only when the correct integer numbers were used did the etalon length compute to the same value for all of the test lines.
Once having found the “set match”, the etalon length was abtained to a small fraction of a wavelength, far beyond the resolution of a simple micrometer; and finally a whole slew of observable wavelength could be calculated based on only an approximate knowledge of a few widely spread wavelengths.
So no; you won’t find me decrying the skills of the Dendrochronology practictioners; they strike me as a clever bunch of scientists.
But just as I would not use my Fabry Perot Etalon as a proxy for temperature, or gravitational attraction, I am leery when tree ringers start inferring all kinds of proxy variable from thsoe tree rings; particularly since the exact mechanisms of ring growth don’t seem to be too well defined in Botanical circles.
I was particularly impressed by the concept alluded to by one poster around here; that in fact trees are not robotic mindless creatures; and once reaching reproductive status; they can change their response to stimuli; evidently to preserve that reproductive success through thick and thin.
That to me is a real Eureka ! moment. I don’t know how real it is; but I would not be surprised to learn that that is exactly what happens.
So the difference between the young trees and the older trees, in Steve MacIntyre’s analyses; or the work of the others he worked with, could really be a true response of a creature who changes strides during its life, to follow the prime directive; to survive; regarless of what the weather or the climate throws at the individual tree.
How bloody ingenious !!
George