If you are just joining us, the story is this. After 10 years of data being withheld that would allow true scientific replication, and after dozens of requests for that data, Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit finally was given access to the data from Yamal Peninsula, Russia. He discovered that only 12 trees had been used out of a much larger dataset of tree ring data. When the larger data set was plotted, there is no “hockey stick” of temperature, in fact it goes in the opposite direction. Get your primer here.
Now there’s independent confirmation from a study presented at the American Geophysical Union Conference in 2008 that there is no “hockey stick of warming” at Yamal.
The presentation is” Cumulative effects of rapid climate and land-use changes on the
Yamal Peninsula, Russia by D.A. Walker, M.O. Leibman, B.C. Forbes, H.E. Epstein. (click link for PDF)
In the hallway poster for their AGU presentation, they have this graph, with the caption saying a “nearly flat temperature trend” for Yamal, especially for the late 20th century period where the “hockey stick” from those 12 trees emerges:
See the AGU poster here (warning, big 18 MB PDF file)
Here is how they summarize the graph above in the AGU presentation:
- Sea ice: -25%
- Summer surface temperature: +4%
- Maximum NDVI: +3%
- None of the trends are significant at p =0.05 because of high interannual variability.
NDVI is the vegetation index.
There’s also an interesting polar sea ice, temperature, and vegetation index trend map that is similar to what Lucy Skywalker recently plotted.
I’m sure we’ll see an explosion from “Tamino” any minute now to refute this, oh wait, he’s gone on record as saying:
As for Steve McIntyre’s latest: I’m really not that interested. He just doesn’t have the credibility to merit attention. I have way better things to do.
OK then, one less angry, sciency, rant by an anonymous coward who won’t put his name to his own work to worry about. Talk about credibility. Sheesh.
Here is the conclusion Walker et al makes in their AGU presentation
- Satellite data suggest that there has been only modest summer land-surface warming and
only slight greening changes across the Yamal during the past 24 years. (Trend is much
stronger in other parts of the Arctic, e.g. Beaufort Sea.)
- Kara-Yamal: negative sea ice, positive summer warmth and positive NDVI are correlated
with positive phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation and Arctic Oscillation.
So it seems sea ice extent, the NAO, and the AO are the bigger factors for temperature in Yamal. It also appears that the Arctic is getting slightly more green.
If anyone has access links to the full paper, feel free to post it here.
Simple check with station records around Yamal peninsula says the same:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222206740006&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222236310000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222234720005&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222202920005&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222237110000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222208910006&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
There is no hockey stick, no unprecedented warming, no trumpeted release of Siberian methane. How can climatologists present a reconstruction of temperature, which obviously does not agree with local temperature records?
Wheres the runaway warming, [snip] ?
Re: Tamino
I can’t really blame him. I mean after all would you wade into a fight knowing beforehand that you were going to get your keister handed to you. I see his comment as an acknowledgment of the validity of Steve’s work. His ‘relative obscurity’ has never stopped any of the climate harpies from criticizing his work before…
Bottom line, the evidence is clear and compelling that the hockey stick was a product of the fertile imaginations of a few climate scientists.
Tamino is acting like a spoiled child – he’s taking his hockey stick and going home.
Maybe his Mummy will buy him a Unicorn to make him feel better.
Juraj V. (10:04:09) :
Interestingly they nearly all show the 1940s warm period and the 1970s cool period. None of them suggest anything unusual about the current warm temperatures.
wow – they even imply that the cause of the modest recent warming may be positive NAO phase. From one of the summary slides:
“Kara-Yamal: Negative sea ice, positive summer warmth, and positive NDVI are correlated to positive phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation and Arctic Oscillation”
I really don’t want to pile on, but this keeps getting worse. It seems that the one weak justification for the Yamal selection (correlation to instrumental temp record) is out.
I wonder what tomorrow will bring.
The temperature records form Salehard near Yamal also don’t show warming. If anyone followed Tamino’s rant on Lucy’s Arctic temperature records last time, well this time I ran 5 year averages and still didn’t see a trend.
OT – any explanation of the recent upward spike in the DMI Polar Temperature chart – which now seems to be going back down?
Has Walker been informed that his work has been confirmed by McIntyre?
Mann made global warming is kinda in remission?
The penalty box seems appropriate.
Those with character will out those without. Perhaps (let us hope and pray), the Great Tree Ring Snafu will serve science better than some of science served their craft and lowly tree rings. Dendrochronology is a true science and deserves better than the lowlife scum who sought to use it to sell themselves and their wares to the highest bidders. Politicians are like pimps and drug pushers, they’ll use anyone to further their own interests and they don’t give a tinkers damn what it ends up costing you or I. Why and how did this happen? Because it could. Because the safeguards within the system were undermined, insufficient, none existant. Because too many members of the Guilds of Science worshiped the Golden Calf and forgot to remember the first law. I believe many more spoke and wrote against the Hocky Stick but their shouts were seldom heard. May G_d save science, and the rest of us too.
If I were a Global Warming Alarmist I would probably say this is worse than we thought !
I am sure you knew, but I do believe that Tamino is [snip – no outing ~ Evan]. I would consider him one of the Team.
[snip]
At least Tamino has said something. Over at Real Climate they are in complete and utter denial.
At what point does a “believer” accept the fact that the data does not support AGW. I have been watching the ruckus over McIntyre’s paper and am just marveled at how the “believers”/drinker can just ignore the remaining data set that Mann and his cohorts conveniently pushed aside since it did not fit with their theory. That’s right, I am saying Mann and his cohorts CHERRY-PICKED the cores from those they had available to them in order to achieve the desired results. And how can I make that assessment? Simple. When McIntyre uses the data from other cores collected the “hockey stick” is non-existent. No small difference. N-O-N-E-X-I-S-T-E-N-T. Are we supposed to submit to the massive destruction of our respective economies based on TWELVE cores????? Mann’s results are not repeatable for his entire study is biased. McIntyre provides true peer-review. And with the data now available expect more papers in the very near future showing the same result as McIntyre, no “hockey stick.” Another card in the house of AGW gone.
Interesting to see land-use changes popping up. Should please Pielke Snr!
Tammy-boy = [snip]
RC will carry on ignoring this, trouble for them, is that it’ll hang around like stink from a dead skunk under the porch!
I agree. Even though he has only said the he will not say anything. I have tried, three times, to post a comment on RC. Once with direct links to climateaudit and JeffId’s web pages, and twice with a tinyurl link. All three were “lost”. I even waited a day and a half, just in case there was a “back log” of posts. Here is my last one:
I really do not think that they can stick their heads in the sand and hope this goes away, and they will have to answer questions, soon. It looks as though they are the ones in denial.
Of course, now the argument will shift from “is he still around? why hasn’t he published in a peer-reviewed journal by now? Don’t listen to him, he is irrelevant” to “well, this is OLD NEWS and is therefore irrelevant”…
Not just Denial, but shock, anger, gnashing of teeth and fear. “Whats that mate!” “Footsteps of an angry crowd coming our way” “Run away Run away, hide hide.”
But hey Guys
The 20 or so years by Walker et al do neither support nor refute the (corrected) Yamal chronology, they are over entirely different time spans.
This is the only comment i think related to this story that got through RC poor ol Gavin did not cop on!
8.I’m sure you want to update this
It’s got some problems.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-we-know-that-recent-cosub2sub-increases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/
How do we know that recent CO2 increases are due to human activities?
— 22 December 2004
Another, quite independent way that we know that fossil fuel burning and land clearing specifically are responsible for the increase in CO2 in the last 150 years is through the measurement of carbon isotopes.
One of the methods used is to measure the 13C/12C in tree rings, and use this to infer those same ratios in atmospheric CO2. This works because during photosynthesis, trees take up carbon from the atmosphere and lay this carbon down as plant organic material in the form of rings, providing a snapshot of the atmospheric composition of that time.
Sequences of annual tree rings going back thousands of years have now been analyzed for their 13C/12C ratios. Because the age of each ring is precisely known** we can make a graph of the atmospheric 13C/12C ratio vs. time. What is found is at no time in the last 10,000 years are the 13C/12C ratios in the atmosphere as low as they are today. Furthermore, the 13C/12C ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO2 starts to increase — around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO2 is in fact due to fossil fuel burning.
[Response: Not following your point at all. What do you think is wrong with this? – gavin]
Of course RealClimate will deny. As Gavin once roughly stated ..’We are in a battle for the meme of Anthropogenic Global Warming.’ They must protect their position at al costs!
They have already sacrificed scientific objectivity. They have encouraged totalitarian efforts to prevent debate. They supported all the emotional advocacy that science once shunned. They will shamefully be responsible for many future casualties as dedicated objective environmental scientists will suffer greatly from lost credibility from the RealClimate team’s bastardization of the scientific process!
As a regular reader (if not contributor) to your excellent blog, I really must say that I think you, SM, Jeff Id, Steve Mosher, Bob Tisdale et al have perhaps finally found the ‘smoking gun’…..THE evidence, hidden from all, secreted away, protected even by the so-called “Scientific Journals” from scrutiny by us – or at least me, as one of the ‘great unwashed’. The really cool thing is that I am a direct descendant, as are we all in the ‘western world’, of the people who, as a product of the great libertarian movement started way back in France 1791, were able to become educated enough to at least hope that rational thought and freedom of expression would be able to recognise extremism and religious fundamentalism, in whatever guise it presents itself.
I guess that, like so many of your readers, I feel that I’ve become something of an ‘expert layperson’ over the last four years in the field of climate science. I started my journey a bit like Lucy Skywalker…..someone told me that the melting Arctic Icecap was going to cause the world to flood – I remembered a bit of Secondary School Physics about ice cubes and density, displacement etc and, after a bit of surfing, I found WUWT…back in ’05’.
WUWT gave me the starting point for an intellectual journey which has involved much research, a three year crash course in physics, a few problems – one of which was some fairly major prejudice as far as my own industry was concerned – hence the return to the pseudonym ( I know, I know….coward etc etc) but finally a thirst for knowledge about a subject
which I honestly feel has been hijacked to satiate some kind of deep-seated
need we have, in the Western World, to feel somehow unworthy. It’s as if
AGW has become the new Puritanism, the hair shirt we somehow must wear for becoming, broadly, an educated free society.
Green agendas trumpet the idea that we, homo sapiens, are the great villains of the peace. Somehow we have become, in their eyes, the great pariah. We are, at the same time, as far as they are concerned, both hopelessly guilty of every single bad thing that happens here and yet also somehow uniquely powerful in our ability to control our planet, to choose, somehow, the fate of our earth. Our shame, it appears, knows no bounds. Our very existence will lead to a new version of Dante’s Inferno…….and, thank the heavens, in the face of this new fundamentalism, one can still encounter the likes of Anthony Watts, Steve Macyntire, the Pielkes, Jeff Id, Steve Mosher, Lucy Skywalker et al…Quietly but persistently going about the business of being sceptical, scientific, true and, above all, not cowing to the falsehoods of what has fast become the next big thing in global political movements.
I like human beings….I feel privileged to be one myself. Perhaps now, thanks to you guys, we can all get back to the business of just being us.
Cheers!
Saaaad.
, whilst being this apparently alien force we must subjugate ourselves to some version of reality which currently, at its core, has the idea that we are inherently evil to the planet and must change our evil ways to preserve some kind of notional “eden”?……guess what? In my corner of this blue planet, termites whack waaaay more CO2 into the atmosphere than us piddly human folk.
Man. My fork has never been this ready to stick into the alarmist hockey stick sausage…. want to see if it’s really done!
“I really do not think that they can stick their heads in the sand and hope this goes away …”
They’ll say (in effect), “The sand looks fine down here!”
Jimmy Haigh (11:06:35) : At least Tamino has said something. Over at Real Climate they are in complete and utter denial.
hehe, have to laugh. Tamino did three posts in response to my “Circling the Arctic” so evidently my credibility is a lot higher that Steve Macintyre’s. More likely I touched a raw nerve (as did Lucia) and he’s still in recovery.
Thanks Anthony for the mention again. I did a second piece Circling Yamal just before Steve’s breakthrough, which compares thermometer records from stations in all directions from Yamal, to the treering claims of temperature, and right through a long period of overlap. With thermometer records going back to 1880 and even 1860, this squarely covers the time when the temperatures were supposed to change from flattish into a dramatic rise – say between 1900 and 1950. Thus in both space and time, I think my work (based on that of John Daly) has an important contribution and an edge over the AGU presentation. But it’s nice to see good confirmation from a good source.
“I have tried, three times, to post a comment on RC. Once with direct links to climateaudit and JeffId’s web pages, and twice with a tinyurl link. All three were ‘lost’.” – Corey (11:44:12)
That’s because the good folks at RealClimate are cherry-picking the comments! 😀
You guys are doing incredible work and yet the media……silent
Hope Tamino gets well soon, his comments are “interesting”. Still, he bungled that east England data set, so he shouldn’t be so condescending to his betters.
Look at the positive side… The MET office will surely disconnect their models from that graph and will now be able to give better weather predictions.
“As for Steve McIntyre’s latest: I’m really not that interested. He just doesn’t have the credibility to merit attention. I have way better things to do.”
The coward’s lament. You can bet your life he’s spent every waking minute trying to refute it.
The Register (UK webloid on what’s what in computers) has picked up the story. I was delighted, The Register is read all over the world (motto: Biting the hand that feeds IT).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/
2 news hits in google so far, and 618 web hits. Not quite silent, but I think maybe they’re waiting to see how robust the analysis is – as has been said before, this is not in itself a new reconstruction.
It is not for the best interest to only publish the analysis on the blogosphere. The analysis must be submitted to a peer-reviewed, recognized journal as soon as possible, with a copy at the arxiv server. Once the analysis has been submitted, spread out news about the preprint so interested parties can download and read the preprint way. In this way the news will be propagated among the scientific circle.
Before this work is published, it will be really hard to use this work in the battle against climate change alarmists in official meetings, because they will always first point out that the results *has not been* submitted/published in a peer-reviewed journals.
SeanH
The media is probalbly deliberating if it should just ‘look away’ and hope that it also will ‘go away’ or if should prepare for any competion which will pick it up and force them to acknowledge its existens and handle inte somehow.
We can be pretty sure that journalists who usually cover climate-stuff generally lean heavily towards the alarmist side, and that they tend to rely on RealClimate and other similar ‘reliable’ sources for their interpretation. The more alert ones among them will of course be aware of the rumble drummed up by Steve and others, but since RC is silent they are at a loss regarding how to respond.
Give it some time. This one will not go away …
The CO2 haters lost their precious satellite.
How about this 1.9 billion dollar boondoggle. I don’ know how the MSM missed this one too. The comments are precious.
NASA’s Carbon Satellite Fails, See Video of Launch
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/launchfailure/
I agree with Haryo. The sooner Steve publishes his work, the harder it will be to ignore or discredit it (even for Tamino!).
No Haryo;
This time i think it is better to not play their game again.
The Yamal stick have a momentum that, wisely used can change the way the scientific elite use to hide behind platitudes as peer-reviews, consensus, to name a few.
This is a on line internet audit that change the way science publishing is audit from now on. That may be the largest impact of this story 100 years from now.
Lucy et al. You realize there is a way this will all be salvaged….. Teleconnections!!! The tree rings are showing the warming that was happening in Reno, Nevada, North America!!!
Michael –
I vote your post the dumbest thing I’ve seen written on this blog in some time and that is saying something with some of the alarmist minutia I’ve seen written here.
That was my tax dollars that just fell back to earth you imbecile also that particular satellite might just have easily found evidence to refute MMGW , hence we ALL lost an important tool today.
I’m a skeptic…please change sides, We don’t need nonsense like your post.
“I have tried, three times, to post a comment on RC. Once with direct links to climateaudit and JeffId’s web pages, and twice with a tinyurl link. All three were ‘lost’.” – Corey (11:44:12)
They are circling the wagons and gathering the ammunition. Unfortunately, they are nearly out of ammo and arrows are flying everywhere. I predict there will be a weak round of return fire and then the silence of the massacre’s aftermath.
And if I may switch metaphors, you have to remember it’s a Team effort. The Team needs to huddle up and decide what play they are going to use, since they are about to lose big in overtime. What must be most discouraging to them is that McIntyre now has their playbook, (i.e. the data.)
The other obvious conclusion from all this is: There is no link between the rising concentration of CO2 and the global temperature. But we knew this already.
“As for Steve McIntyre’s latest: I’m really not that interested. He just doesn’t have the credibility to merit attention. I have way better things to do.”
So many directions to go with this. The best part about this post/quote is that it is pure denialism. The very thing skeptics have been accused of for years now, expressly manifest in one of AGW’s biggest bulldogs. It is like a Swedish massage of the mind, that quote. In spite of all the things I’ve been called by (mostly) people online over my questioning of the official party line… that quote demonstrates that any remaining tension and/or self-doubt over my own skepticism was misplaced. It says that questioning is and remains the right thing to do. It says this because that quote isn’t a quote at all, it is silence. It is the internets biggest AGW bulldog closing his mouth. And that, my friends, is music to my ears.
Tamino, I know you read this site. I have been where you are. I have been in a situation where my mind would not allow me to accept alternative paradigms from what I knew to be true. My family was in a christian 7th-day cult during most of my childhood wherein we were forced to live by certain rules and believe certain complete faleshoods or face ostracism. I’m telling you that I know what it feels like when you’re forced to start thinking about what you know in a way that feels too socially painful to admit. Just please know that people won’t think less of you if you start to question what you know, they will actually think *BETTER* of you. It doesn’t feel that way, but it’s true. I’ve been there, I know. The best thing I got out of it was a promise to myself never to suspend disbelief again, it’s too healthy.
Cold Lynx (13:21:56) :
I agree that free on-line publication is the way to go.
– Lots of “peers” can review your work.
– Makes the whole publishing process much faster.
– Removes all circular review circles.
– Forces you to write your work in layman terms since they are opened to general public
– Free to publish and free to read.
– Easy access.
The warm is turning.
Haryo (12:55:52) :
Before this work is published, it will be really hard to use this work in the battle against climate change alarmists in official meetings, because they will always first point out that the results *has not been* submitted/published in a peer-reviewed journals.
What about this?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/27/more-on-the-hanno-wikipedia-graph-in-the-un-climate-report/#more-11214
I don’t care much for the phrase “cherry picking”. Where does it come from? When I was a lad of 13 years up in Michigan, I had a job of picking cherries one summer. Three dimes for each 1 1/2 gallon pail full. It was hard work and I was lucky if I made $3.00 for eight hours of work.
So out of respect for real cherry pickers around the world, call them what they really are: Cheaters!!!
Michael (13:08:29) :
It was covered here, see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/24/bad-week-for-hardware-orbiting-carbon-observatory-satellite-burns-up/ and that quotes a Bloomberg News story. I remember hearing several other news accounts at the time.
Do you have specific examples of news sources that didn’t cover it?
Well,
The news is worming up in the blogoshere and has reached German blogs as well:
http://www.readers-edition.de/2009/09/30/das-ende-der-klima-wissenschaftlichen-glaubwuerdigkeit-ein-drama-in-5-akten/
I’m thinking of starting a petition drive for accredited climate scientists it sign expressing their discontent with the junk climate science.
The petitions can be delivered to the world climate summit at COP15 – Copenhagen · United Nations – Climate Change Conference – Dec 07, which by the way is, the day that will live in infamy, the attack on Pearl Harbor.
climatesciencefraud.com is available for the drive.
This from the Bloomberg article on the carbon satellite.
“Man-made CO2, which traps heat in the atmosphere, is largely produced by power plants, vehicle engines and factories.
The data gleaned from the satellite was intended to help guide government global-warming policy, NASA said.”
Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to study the trace amount of man made CO2 of the trace amount of all CO2 seems like a waste of my money. Especially since it looks like they intended to use it against me to justify the carbon tax.
OK then, one less angry, sciency, rant by an anonymous coward who won’t put his name to his own work to worry about.
Might I suggest, in an homage to Colbert Report, the use of “scienciness” in analogy to “truthiness”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
Scienciness is something that you just feel has to be Science like and you don’t really need to do all that actual work to show it is valid; just like all those Mann graphs and the other AGW Scienciness work…
For us dumb electrical engineers, could somebody please tell me what the labels are for the X and Y axes on that graph? Is that years AD for the X axis and degrees C [F?] for the Y axis?
This story is certainly encouraging news for all skeptics following the AGW debate. However I wonder how much impact is it going to have on the average person out there who follows the AGW debate through the MSM. IMHO I suspect that it will have little or no impact on them and the majority of western society will continue to believe our only hope is to engage in the folly of carbon trading schemes and the like.
As for Steve McIntyre’s latest: I’m really not that interested. He just doesn’t have the credibility to merit attention. I have way better things to do.
Tamino who?
Steve’s didn’t reconstruct the hockey stick using the Schweingruber variation overnight, and the team needs a little time to go over the data and react.
I’m pretty sure though I already know the conclusion: “It’s worse than we thought.”
He just doesn’t have the credibility to merit attention.
Even if that were true the data itself does merit attention. If Tamino had wanted to be respected as a scientist he would have respected the data. Tamino needs to consider how others view him as a scientist with the way he handles data.
Because what is science without respect for data??
I have to agree with AJ Abrams (@ 13:25:06). Michael, you are not getting it. Science is science. It doesn’t matter what the “intent” of that satellite was, if it generated useful data, it was going to be of value to us as a civilization.
Would you rather be RIGHT because high quality data and good science prove you right, or because you have an unshakable faith in your position? You can’t be in the former camp unless you have this high quality data to do that good science on.
“He discovered that only 12 trees had been used out of a much larger dataset of tree ring data. When the larger data set was plotted, there is no “hockey stick” of temperature, in fact it goes in the opposite direction.”
Talk about a ‘tree ring circus!’
Gene Nemetz (16:48:43) Tamino needs to consider how others view him as a scientist
Also, the way Tamino views someone who not only respects data but goes through pains to do so, i.e. Steve McIntyre, says a lot about him.
“… It has been reported that a catastrophic down trend in Mann made AGW Credibility is occuring. If the trend is allowed to continue a tipping point will be reached where Mann made AGW Credibility will collapse into itself dragging the rest of the AGW Movement with it. To forestall this disaster of epic proportions, a new tax on fossil fuel usage is to be deployed to provide the funding necessary to promote Mann made AGW Credibility…”
“… Al Gore has released a new documentary warning about the decline in Mann made AGW Credibility, it is titled – An Inconvenient Canadian – …”
“… This loss of Mann made AGW Credibility is occuring faster than predicted and is worse than we thought …”
Sonicfrog (13:24:00) :
Lucy et al. You realize there is a way this will all be salvaged….. Teleconnections!!! The tree rings are showing the warming that was happening in Reno, Nevada, North America!!!
Nah – it’s a “virtual hockystick” of future warming… You see – the warming is all in the pipeline, those few trees are ‘sensitive to the future’ …. It’s a true marvel of nature they are “leading indicators” of future warming, not “Lagging Indicators” of past warming…
Now why didn’t anyone else think of that….
I’m sure this a stupid question, but why did the skeptics have to get Mann’s data? Aren’t there other old trees that could have been sampled and studied? Couldn’t skeptics have generated their own data without waiting ten years and going through a lot of hassle to get Mann’s? Thanks for any explanation.
KLA (14:56:51) :
from that German blog :
picture of headstone for the burial of the Hockey Stick
http://www.readers-edition.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/tomwe.jpg
An additional advantage of online publication is that corrections and addenda can be made “in place,” not in a subsequent, separate issue.
Another advantage is that all supporting data can be posted and made accessible. Potential critics needn’t write to the author to get access. This is very important.
Graeme Rodaughan (16:52:07) : “… Al Gore has released a new documentary warning about the decline in Mann made AGW Credibility, it is titled – An Inconvenient Canadian – …”
Also titled :
“Al Gore’s First Class Pain in the [self snip}” 😉
Good question, John Galt. Could it be that the skeptics are not generally on the research gravy train and able to spend days and weeks traveling on other peoples dimes? (unless they give those other people quarters in return)
That said, I support Lucia’s tip jar to help pay for real science peer reviewed publications.
“Treemometers: A new scientific scandal
If a peer review fails in the woods…
A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers.
At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC’s assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.
At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a “reconstruction” of historical temperature anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors.
Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is problematic, and a dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In dendro jargon, this disparity is called “divergence”. The process of creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples – a choice open to a scientist’s biases.
Yet none of this has stopped paleoclimataologists from making bold claims using tree ring data.” (more)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/
“”” Sequences of annual tree rings going back thousands of years have now been analyzed for their 13C/12C ratios. Because the age of each ring is precisely known** we can make a graph of the atmospheric 13C/12C ratio vs. time. What is found is at no time in the last 10,000 years are the 13C/12C ratios in the atmosphere as low as they are today. Furthermore, the 13C/12C ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO2 starts to increase — around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO2 is in fact due to fossil fuel burning. “””
Extracted from what purpotrs to be a comment by Gavin Schmidt at RC.
He says they can make a graph of atmospheric 13C/12C ratio versus year.
Well not exactly; they CAN make a graph of TREE RING C13/C12 ratios; assuming they did the tree ring assays correctly; whcih I certainly am going to assume; lacking evidence that they did not.
Well we know; or at least botanists know that some plants/trees take up C13 differently from C12; although I am lead to believe that different types of plants have different metabolism and do different things vis-a-vis C isotope.
So now here’s a question for you botanists out there who have studied this isotope sensitive plant carbon metabolism.
How does the plant C13/C12 preference vary, with temperature, moisture, sunlight (spectrally), soil minerals; etc, etc.
In other words over what range of environmental variables that trees might be subject toi has this plant isotope preference been measured; and where can such data plots be found; if at all.
I would be amazed if the plant isotope ratio is a function of nothing but the atmospheric isotope ratio.
I have another problem with this C13/C12 metrology. My first query/curiosity concerns the assertion that “fossil fuels” primarily coal/petroleum/natural gas; not to mention other carbonaceous fuels being burned like the earth’s forests, and grasslands, etc are all supposed to be either plant materials or fossils of plant materials; and if that is true (assuming it is) would not fossil fuels be identical in carbon isotope to actual observed modern plants/trees/grasslands etc.
So why is the isotope ratio of fossil fuels not identical to that in plants.
But hey; that is only a part of my problem with this carbon origin proxy called isotope ratio.
Let us suppose (mental experiment) that somebody; say some big coal miner/big oil company discovered a large new deposit of coal/oil/fossil fuel and started to mine it/refine it/butn it etc.
Now this mental coal source is unique among coal deposits, in that it is very porous stuff; and lo and behold those pores in this wonder coal are filled with trapped atoms of Argon gas. So naturally the boig oil/big coal company is going to extract SOME of this new source of trapped argon, and sell the stuff. But he doesn’t need all of it so most of that coal is going to go untreated, and sold as is with Argon in place. So it’s a bit lighter than other coals but he sells it by weight anyway; so it is just a bit more bulky than regular coal.
Well now once industries start burning this Arcoal in their factories and power plants, all that Argon just goes up the chimney into the atmosphere; so as a result, the abundance of Argon atoms in the earth’s atmosphere starts to increase, as this new source of coal is burned.
Now maybe this Arcoal dposit is much easier to mine than some other coals; so the company takes some regular coals off line for the future, and concentrates on mining the easy stuff with Argon in it.
So absolutely nothing is going to happen to the changes in carbon content of the atmosphere; what ever changes would have happened due to the ongoing fossil fuel consumption still goes on; but now the atmospheric abundance of Argon is increasing from its 0.96% or whatever it is.
But you see that that increase in atmospheric Argon, is clearly not evidence of increased fossil fuel consumption; it is simply evidence that SOME of the carbon in the atmosphere came from a mine that is full of Arcoal.
There is no way that anyone can say that the increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to fossil fuel burning because only our wonder Arcoal contains Argon, which is clearly increasing in the atmosphere.
So back to reality; scratch Arcoal; we haven’t found any yet.
But we do know (or some atmospheric scientists know) that fossil fuels are being burned because they contain a different C isotope ratio than non fossil sources of carbon; and the C13/C12 ratio in the atmosphere is changing.
But what we cannot say; based on just that statement, is that THE INCREASE in atmospheric CO2 must be due to fossil fuel burning; only that some of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere must come from burning fossl fuels; but how do we determine whether the increased carbon came from fossils.
Now I am not going to claim that we cannot tell how much of the atmospheric CO2 INCREASE is due to fossil fuel burning; there is likely evidence of just exactly how much of each type of fuel, whether trees/grasslands/agricultural burn-offs/natural gas/petroleum/coal etc etc is consumed every year since fire was discovered.
So I’ll buy that the C13/C12 atmospheric isotope ratio shift is evidence that so-called “fossil” fuels; which contain anomalous isotope ratios, are being burned, and thus changing the atmospheric CO2 ratio; but I am yet to be convinced that it can be proven that the increase in atmospheric CO2 can be ascribed to fossil fuels; although I expect some of it might be.
So count me skeptical that the isotopic ratio of atmospheric carbon is as sound a proxy for fossil fuel contribution to CO2 increases; it might just be another Arcoal situation.
” gtrip (14:14:10) :
I don’t care much for the phrase “cherry picking”. Where does it come from? When I was a lad of 13 years up in Michigan, I had a job of picking cherries one summer. Three dimes for each 1 1/2 gallon pail full. It was hard work and I was lucky if I made $3.00 for eight hours of work.
So out of respect for real cherry pickers around the world, call them what they really are: Cheaters!!! ”
Some cherries are hard to reach at least on my trees, but trust business to come up with a better term………..”low hanging fruit”.
It’s funny how I never thought of myself as an activist… honestly I was always happy to live and let live and get on with being happy and content in my own little sphere. But, I am of a scientific mindset (ok, ok I admit I was a bucket chemist by training – mineral processor and later mineral economist) and have an inherent drive to educate people… ignorance is a real turn off. Somehow the more I read about climate science the more I feel the need to expose the truth – it’s been quite the turn around. Maybe it is an age-related thing.
Anywho… Bob Carter replied to my email and said thanks for the links and brief to Senator Fielding (re. the recent hockey stick breaking stories). I am also cheesed off that the mainstream media is not running this remarkable story, so I posted on the The Australian:
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/markday/index.php/theaustralian/comments/chattys_in_daggys_out_in_changing_news_world/
Maybe john Day will turn it over to some science reporter and get a story up. It’s all well and good scientifically open minded types aagreeing that this was poor science (I am being kind) but until the word gets out to the average voter in the proverbial street the politicians are very unlikely to take heed (assuming they would regardless).
Where to next?
“”” Joel (17:24:19) :
Good question, John Galt. Could it be that the skeptics are not generally on the research gravy train and able to spend days and weeks traveling on other peoples dimes? (unless they give those other people quarters in return) “””
Well Joel, as you know, I am not a skeptic; and I am also not on any gravy train; if I travel anywhere for any reason; it is always on my dime. But I do contribute via my tax burden to the source of some of those gravy train grants; what’s more I even approve of much of it. I am sure that somehow, I also pay the cost of some of those “big oil” research gravy trains; those people do have a vested business interest in really knowing what the truth of all of this is; and they are willing to pay for the research to get at that truth.
And I feel I have a right to get thoroughly PO’d if either of those gravy train groupies starts fudging their results to stay on the train (or for any other reason). So I’ll watch their published output; and I’ll holler if it doesn’t seem to add up; either way.
George
John Galt (17:02:17) :
yes there are other litanies trees and fossils that are independently researched. When bias occurs, then the source of the bias is investigated. A fair proportion of this biophysical research isn’t advocacy based, then neither is climate data and some excellent climate reconstructions It is research and data.
Here for instance if the Had which has its CRUT in a glut can’t release any information because its privileged or misplaced, then they’re merely being sententious. It is afterall the taxplayer who pays them over what they are telling us is a future disaster
The advocacy is a different issue. When an agenda is imposed or infiltrated into paid learning and research institutions then they are no longer seats of learning.
I’m not sure that empirical facts are, or could be described as official. The agenda that is manipulated around them may well be described as official.
To all you Michael bashers out there,
It is not my intent to argue every subtle innuendo of all the nuances pertaining to the science involved in the global warming aka climate change debate. There will be plenty of time for the climate brainiacs to hash that out.
My main focus is to defeat the Cap-and-Trade carbon tax bills similar to the ones the European socialists have already been defeated by. Once implemented in our country, the damage will be irreversible. The energy bill passed by the House now before the Senate must be defeated by all means necessary, there is very little time left to accomplish this task. The defeat of the bill is backed up by the science, of that I am sure.
I doubt you guys have the skills to make them see the light before it is too late, that is why I am here to help. I do have that unique ability to provoke some angry responses to some thought provoking material I have at my disposal. Anger stimulates thought and also makes for some interesting reading. Jut look at the most interesting thread and comments of praise to date on WUWT from yesterday, A must read: The Yamal Hockey Stick Implosion in laymans terms. These are the types of threads the lurkers like to read, and why a good amount of participation is necessary.
I do not profess to know everything, I am a philosopher and a machinist by trade, with an extensive knowledge of everything mechanical, psychological, and esoteric. I will try to limit my contribution here to science and understanding. Just remember, science does not exist in a vacuum. Throw all the punches you want at me, you will not get a rise, I have the hide of a rhino.
As an incentive to get rid of me as fast as possible, get the Cap-And Trade Bill defeated.
Yes. It makes one wonder. Couldn’t Al Gore have paid independent palaentologists, oceanographers, research chemists, and solar physicists to have conducted an unbiased research into the climate?
“”” Furthermore, the 13C/12C ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO2 starts to increase — around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO2 is in fact due to fossil fuel burning. “””
I guess this is the central point. Gavin’s statement is not correct. The declining 13C/12C ratio may be evidence of the increased consumption of fossil fuels from around 1850; but you need more than that information to assign the increasing atmospheric CO2 to the fossil fuels; there were other sources of increasing burning of carbon materials; like increasing agriculture; deforestation and so on; increasing populations of both humans and domestic livestock populations.
“Tamino needs to consider how others view him as a scientist”
Tamino is a scientist? I thought he was an angry anonymous troll….
John Galt (17:02:17) :
I’m sure this a stupid question, but why did the skeptics have to get Mann’s data? Aren’t there other old trees that could have been sampled and studied? Couldn’t skeptics have generated their own data without waiting ten years and going through a lot of hassle to get Mann’s? Thanks for any explanation.
_____________________
Yes, they could have gathered their own data, but the results, regardless of the outcome, could not be used to refute or disprove Mann. At best they would be ‘a study with differing results’ and Mann/Biffra would stand (and most likely the skeptics study would be ignored).
The purpose of using Mann’s data and methods would be to verify Mann’s work or show that it was in error. Scientific method requires it. If not, we might still be talking about cold fusion.
I’m not sure non-Canadians are ghetting all the hockey references.
What’s important here isn’t that we found the hockey stick wrong; Steve M did that some time ago; what’s new is that it is obviously wrong because of pretty hard to deny cheating of the data.
Gene Nemetz (17:13:22) :
The likely got that from Joanne Nova.
Oh, they credited her, it’s worth doing here too.
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/09/breaking-news-cherry-picking-of-historic-proportions/
Normally, we’d simply cancel global warming for lack of interest but there are still too many people who have an interest in continuing global warming.
They’ve gone all-in. Their chips are in the middle and they don’t want to lose them.
Rumor has it that RealClimate’s response to McIntyre’s new analysis will be to recreate the Hockey Stick in “the most sophisticated computer climate model yet created.”
Hope the Associated Press doesn’t sue me for using “the most sophisticated… yet created” line…
What is amazing about all of this is the amount of work it must have taken to produce that hockey stick result. It would have been nearly impossible to arrive at that result by chance. Had practically any other subset of cores been used, there would have been no such dramatic graph come out of the study. That is also what is most troubling. In order to arrive at that result, one would have to cull dozens of samples to select only those that produce the desired results.
In other words, there is a vanishingly small probability that this result simply popped out of the study in one of those “well, what do you know, this looks just like Mann!” moments. Arriving at this result must have been the objective of the study and the time taken to locate the data that would provide the result must not have been trivial.
This is, I believe, going to be very difficult to pass off as random chance. Someone should be called to answer for this.
I doubt you will see much change in the likes of Tamino, Gavin or any other addicted AGW believer. That’s because they really do suffer from an addiction not unlike a gambling addiction or several others.
The turn on is “saving the world”. That is what drives the adrenalin surges. That is what makes them want to continue believing no matter what. Just as an addicted gambler believes the next jackpot will turn around their losses, these guys BELIEVE. They see nothing wrong with MANNufacting data just as addicted gamblers often steal or embezzle to keep going. As long as they can keep the dopamine rush coming they will continue the fight.
[snip sorry just a bit to much, try not to be angry at these people ]
I have to agree with others. A lame ad hominem by Tamino is essentially the same thing as an implicit acknowledgment of McIntyre’s work.
Score 1 to McIntyre, 0 to the Team.
Again, if I may repeat myself. The importance of Steve M’s work is not the temperature reconstruction showing no hockey stick; it is the implication that the Team has deliberately, one might even say [snip], misrepresented the data by selecting only those few data sets that supported their contention, whilst concealing the more numerous data sets that contradicted.
Heres a little document of interest:
http://www.amap.no/documents/index.cfm?action=getfile&dirsub=/ACIA%20International%20Scientific%20Symposium%20on%20Climate%20Change%20in%20the%20Arctic%20-%20Extended%20Abstracts&FileName=ACIASymposiumAbstractsPosters.pdf
it is necessary to find special regions that meet specific requirements: well-preserved remains of trees that exhibit high sensitivity to climate changes. One such area is the Yamal Peninsula (northwest Siberia). Holocene deposits in the southern part of this peninsula (in the region located between 67°00 and 67°50N and 68°30 and 71°00E, near recent polar timberline) contain a large amount of subfossil remains of Siberian larch, Siberian spruce and Mountain birch
At present, a total of 2700 sawn wood samples have been collected in order to create continuous tree-ring chronology for the past several thousand years. To date this work has resulted in constructing an absolute 7310-year chronology (from 5309 BC to 2000 AD) based on the data on individual series of 54 living and 452 subfossil larches (Larix sibirica).
Results:
This long record shows that the amplitude of temperature variability has altered noticeably through time. Nevertheless recent warming is unusual. That argues that the most recent decades of this long summer record represent the most favorable climate conditions for tree growth within the last seven millennia.
“As for Steve McIntyre’s latest: I’m really not that interested. He just doesn’t have the credibility to merit attention. I have way better things to do.”
Lol. So much for Mr. “Open Mind.” Anyway, that’s basically an admission that Steve is in the right here.
Note also that Tamino addressed McIntyre’s arguments in posts in February and March of 2008. You can find them by searching for the word “McIntyre” on the Tamino blog.
People please note that we are not talking about Manns’ hockey stick, but Briffas’. Related of course, but not quite the same thing.
I assume the problem “vg” has with Gavin’s post is that, if he is relying on tree rings to prove his point, which tree rings is he using?
Here’s another interesting dissertation with descriptions of the Yamal trees and environment:
http://vak.ed.gov.ru/common/img/uploaded/files/vak/announcements/biolog/2009/13-07/KHantemirovRM.pdf
Work on the collection of the material were carried out during 17 field se -mesons. To date, collected transverse saw cut with a tree-3458ev: trunks and, in rare cases, the roots poluiskopaemyh larches,spruce and birch trees. The largest share of these samples is larchSiberian (95%), much smaller than the Siberian spruce (about 4%) andBirch winding (about 1%). Most wood samples contain -shook 60-120 rings, the maximum number of rings found in onesample was equal to 501, average for all samples is 125.
…
As a result of this work was an absolute tree -ring Chronology on Larch duration of 7319 years.Yamal tree-ring chronology is one of the mostlong Tree-ring chronologies world.
…
To maintain uniformity reconstruction Dendroclimatic analysis were not included samples collected north of 68 ° N
…
Fig 2 shows share of tree samples fro living trees.
…
Studies of modern dynamics of larch standsperformed in ecotones of the polar boundary of the forest in the valley. Yadayahodyyaha.Sampling areas selected on the first terraces above the floodplain height4-6 m, which ensured the absence of influence on the dynamics of renewalstudied stands a factor in the river valleys, as the appearancefresh river sediment. Test area 1 was laid in the areagrowing the most northerly of larches, the rest were placeddownstream at different distances (up to 22 kilometers) from the borderforest. At each of the plots measuring 25×25 meters to determinedate of the appearance of wood samples were collected wood (cores) from allliving trees with a diameter at breast height of at least 4 cm, whichcorresponds to a height of not less than 3 m. Samples were taken at a height of 10-20 cmfrom the surface. In addition, within the area from alldead trees with a diameter not less than 4 cm intervals to determinelife was taken from the saw cut stems at a height of 10 cm at 10 sample plotscollected samples from 220 living and 122 dead trees.To calibrate the data on the width of annual rings, the analysis in -Chin, causing the formation of abnormal anatomic structures,as for the analysis of climatic factors determining the formation,tion age generations of larch in the Yamal Peninsula in the XX century, wereused daily data for the years 1882-2008. Sale of station -hard, located 150 km south-west of the study area
…
Greatest influence on the growth of annual rings of larch provided the air temperature in the period from 16 June to 30 July.The correlation coefficient between the indices of the width of annual rings and average temperature during this period is 0.71, the proportion of explainable dispersion of 58.1%. Therefore, as prediktanta was used average temperature of this period
…
Figure 5 is:
Reconstruction of the temperature of summer on Yamal. Data are represented in the form deviations from the average value after smoothing 50-, 100 – and 200- summer by filters. On the lower graph it is shown by dotted line the linear trend of a change in the temperature since 5150. B.C. until 1850. A.D.
…
Coldest century was the period from 1630 to 1531 years. BCThe same average temperature is awarded for the period from 1661 to 1760 years.BC, which, apparently, is manifestation called smallglacial period in the north of Western Siberia. However, variabilityTemperatures were higher in the first of these periods, which increases the degree ofunfavorable climatic conditions for the northern ecosystems.The warmest summers were in the 5 th century BC: 432, 427 and 426 years.BC Very high frequency of warm seasons was observed in the 27 century. BCand 3. AD (Fig. 8). But the most unique frequency particularly warmseasons is the last century, which fell on 17 of the 100 mostwarm seasons.
…
Thus, we can note the following features of summerTemperatures in the north of Western Siberia during the last 7200 years:
1) reduction in summer temperatures for 7000 years, from 5150 BC on1850 AD about 0,4 ° C;
2) relatively low variability of summer temperatures (from interannualto intrasecular) in the period from 5150 to 1900-1700 gg. BC and high inaverage volatility in the next millennium;
3) low frequency of extremely cold summers in the period from 51 to18 cc. BC and their high frequency in the next century;
4) two of the coldest period in the last 7200 years, the first – inearly 19 century. AD, lasting about 30 years (roughly from 1810 to 1840gg.) with a minimum in the 1815-1820 gg. and the second, longer – in the 17-16cc. BC (about 1655-1530 gg. BC) with a minimum in 1626-1624 gg.to AD and weighed down high repeatability extremelycool summers;
5) the unprecedented warming in the last century
…
Conclusions
…
9. 150 years ago began an unprecedented for the last 7000 years increased summer air temperatures
This quote from Joanne Nova’s blog is most profound.
“Hiding data in science is equivalent to a company issuing it’s annual report and telling the auditors that the receipts are commercial in confidence and they would just have to trust them. No court of law would accept that, yet at the “top” levels of science, papers have been allowed to sit as show-pieces for years without any chance that anyone could seriously verify their findings. In science, getting the stamp of Peer Review has become like a free pass to “credibility”.’
Came from this post:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/09/breaking-news-cherry-picking-of-historic-proportions/
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Cognitive dissonance seems to be the limiting factor, with a touch of Hegelian dialectic thrown in for good measure. Break down these barriers and you win.
“That argues that the most recent decades of this long summer record represent the most favorable climate conditions for tree growth within the last seven millennia.”
Only 7 millennia?
I’m working on a paper that shows the last decade was the warmist in the last 7 interglacials.
Steve McIntyre seems to have identified the tree-ringleader of the Briffa 12. YAD06.
From the same document a hockey stick!:
Figure 18- of change in the mean temperature of summer (deviations from the average), smoothed by 50-year filter, and the dynamics of polar timber line
I would like to take some temperatures with a broken hockey stick, rectally.
Gore Al and The great muppet Hansen, followed by all the minor muppets, cast and freaking crew.
Science journals wrecked public paid science in disrepute.
I hope Steve M and co will seriously consider writing a paper on this astonishing finding and submit it for peer-review, and specifically ask “the hockey team” as the referee. Then post the review comments (does that violate the peer-review policy?) for every interested individual to have their input. May science be advanced by the end of the day.
So let me see if I get this straight.
Michael Mann’s cherry picked ice core data that produced the infamous hockey stick graph, correlated with Keith Briffa’s cherry picked bristlecone pines tree ring data that confirmed a sharp rise in global temperatures, both of which have now been discredited by the way, was the basis for forming public policy decisions that have a grave affect on all of mankind.
Does that sound about right?
Is it over now? Can I go home? I certainly don’t want to debate science with a bunch of scientiffical religious freaks.
As long as we’ve got this far, how about debunking the “science” behind the Montreal Protocol? It should be much easier. Maybe Michael Mann could explain exactly how underarm deodorant from the Northern Hemisphere slyly creeps, totally undetected, to the South Pole, where it suddenly jumps up and creates an ozone hole.
Tom in Texas (20:03:07) :
“That argues that the most recent decades of this long summer record represent the most favorable climate conditions for tree growth within the last seven millennia.”
Only 7 millennia?
I’m working on a paper that shows the last decade was the warmist in the last 7 interglacials.
Good one! LMAO!
The AGW leaders are in Boyd Shock.
Unfortunately the Japanese media, scientifically so illiterate, have not yet covered this landmark story. A big shame indeed.
Richard M (18:34:40) :
I doubt you will see much change in the likes of Tamino, Gavin or any other addicted AGW believer. That’s because they really do suffer from an addiction not unlike a gambling addiction or several others.
The turn on is “saving the world”. That is what drives the adrenalin surges. That is what makes them want to continue believing no matter what. Just as an addicted gambler believes the next jackpot will turn around their losses, these guys BELIEVE. They see nothing wrong with MANNufacting data just as addicted gamblers often steal or embezzle to keep going. As long as they can keep the dopamine rush coming they will continue the fight.
If/When the AGW Movement Crumbles, the AGW addicts will suffer an enormous loss of meaning within their lives, their lives will seem pallid, empty and devoid of purpose. This gaping hole will need to be filled with a new meaningful obsession – but hopefully one paid for out of their own pockets.
Oh you people. Science journals and peer review were just about to break this same discovery.
So sit back and wait for their explanation.
gtrip (14:14:10) :
I don’t care much for the phrase “cherry picking”. Where does it come from?
I thought that the term “cherry picking” comes from those people who have a tendency to pick the cherries from the pie, not from the tree, because they like them best?
The AGW crowd are in large part responsible for creating our new banana republic. Should I feel sorry for them?
Given the discussion of cherry picking the low hanging fruit, an interesting point has been made by more than one poster about using tree rings as a proxy for CO2 isotope ratios. Kinda makes me want to ask the same questions. Which trees did they use? The entire data set? In different parts of the world? And if a subset was chosen, what else could identify/mark the set as being non-random (which begs the obvious research question about sample selection)? And might that additional identifying marker be the cause for the CO2 findings, and not because the rubber meets the road? Goodgawdamighty! Have we identified yet ANOTHER “—mometer” system that needs a survey? With photos? And BBQ’s?
bill (20:04:12) :
From the same document a hockey stick!:
Figure 18- of change in the mean temperature of summer (deviations from the average), smoothed by 50-year filter, and the dynamics of polar timber line
Do you want to say that if there is cherry picking it was done by the russian team who prvided the sample first ?
We have won an important battle but not the war.
This incredible Yamal story is bound to snowball : Climate Science journal editors will now probably facilitate access to data by the likes of Steve, Jeff, Lucy, Mosh, Roman and others who request it. Other horror stories will be found.
The next step should be to do everything possible to get our hands on GISS temp data : raw and adjusted. We MUST determine if there is fraud there as well. Nothing should be sacred in Science, including NASA.
The mainstream media and politicians will eventually listen.
The epilogue of this sorry affair should be to never make Science lie in the name of an ideology regardless of its apparent merit.
Best regards,
François
John Galt (17:02:17) :
Ah, you want to play hockey, eh? Well, I agree. If you want to play, bring your own stick to the game, crooked or otherwise. I know of only one effort to build one, but it ended up more of a rhetorical exercise – something to do with java – than a serious attempt to challenge the status quo.
Auditing and commentary over the last few days have been devastatingly effective. But coups de grace are apparently not yet on anyone’s drawing boards.
To Bulldust @ (17:44:56) :
Mate – Leigh Dayton, Science Writer at the Australian used to produce David Suzuki, wrote for the Fairfax press and was previously at the ABC.
You have as much chance of seeing this story on the Science pages of The Oz ( barring a sarcastic flamer like her demolition job on ‘Great Global Warming Swindle’ ) , as you will on ‘Closed Mind’.
Your only hope is that the Opinion Page editor picks it up and runs an oped piece or refers to it in the Cut&Paste section.
And we might as well look for a reference in the Green Left Weekly as expect to see anything about this in the Fairfax press – not that there is a lot of difference these days other than the mast head between the SMH/Age and the Green Left Weekly anyway !
Fingers crossed.
“only one effort to build one”… Sorry, make that two, counting Craig Loehle’s chronology.
The only hockey stick graph I acknowledge as being accurate is the Federal Reserves balance sheet.
It’s all science fiction now.
An Inconvenient Truth soon to be found in the science fiction isle at the video store.
Michael (15:42:26) : “This from the Bloomberg article on the carbon satellite.
“Man-made CO2, which traps heat in the atmosphere, is largely produced by power plants, vehicle engines and factories.
The data gleaned from the satellite was intended to help guide government global-warming policy, NASA said.”
Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to study the trace amount of man made CO2 of the trace amount of all CO2 seems like a waste of my money. Especially since it looks like they intended to use it against me to justify the carbon tax.”
———————————————————–
….. LoL… Good comeback to your detractors Micheal. I agree, the AGW proponents have used 1.9 billion dollars of American tax payers money to build and launch a satellite to study an insignificant trace atmospheric gas… in order to determine it’s significance…… Already they have a biased view that Micheal points out eloquently by quoting them.
These people ain’t doin’ science. They are doin’ Politics. No science would have been done by that Satellite. It wasn’t designed for that.
So hopefully, when they send another satellite into orbit, it’s payload will be designed for the scientific study of the atmosphere and not for the political justification of a flawed hypothesis….
Let’s be fair gentlemen. The Carbon Satellite that failed to achieve orbit is quoted to cost $278M, not the entire 1.6B for NASA’s multi-mission contract.
With team hockey flattened, it is time to begin to clean up the bloody mess they have made of science and education. With so many having climbed aboard the alarm train – there are great helpings of humiliation to go around. But the ring leaders – those who knowingly altered, misreported, or withheld data – will need to answer for their actions. And those who have been damaged by the alarmist machine should have their day.
This may well collapse venerable old institutions. But how else can we expect to rebuild the good halls of science without tearing out the rotten old ones?
The fact remains that somehow, amidst the flood of alarmist rhetoric, mere handfuls of individuals challenged an overwhelming status quo and forced the truth to the surface. THAT, is a triumph of honest science, and of human spirit to be reckoned with from this time forward.
Graeme Rodaughan (20:55:41) :
“If/When the AGW Movement Crumbles, the AGW addicts will suffer an enormous loss of meaning within their lives, their lives will seem pallid, empty and devoid of purpose.”
RK:
This is one of the themes of Eric Hoffer’s “True Believer.” People go on crusades primarily to make their lives meaningful.
I think bill (18:57:21) and (19:53:27) : has raised some interesting issues here, re. the two papers he references, one by Pogrovsky and Timokhov for the International Symposium on Climate Change in the Arctic 2004, and the second by -oh rats – I cannot read Russian, how did you translate it Bill? – well it includes Hantemirov and looks interesting.
These papers seem to make Yamal dendrochronology respectable, and may well have ammo the skeptics have not yet spotted, that was already prepared to debunk us debunkers before Briffa’s data was released.
Having got the cynical hypothesis out of the way, let’s look at the issues: we have a 7310-year Yamal chronology based on 54 living and 452 subfossil larches, averaging 125 rings per tree, max 501, most 60-120 rings. This still shows “unprecedented warming in the last century” that HAS to be explained. My first thought, is, this does NOT agree with the neighbouring thermometer records I flagged up. So what has caused the recent “unprecedented” spike that disagrees with thermometers, that Hantemirov etc report at Yamal? Bad calibration? Sheer fluke? Cherrypicking? Local microclimate issues (possible in my opinion, since living trees on the banks are a different subset from subfossil trees in the river)? Bad thermometer records? (one has to consider all possibilities though I think this is the least likely option) Tunguska? What?
cherry picking redux:
Commercial picking notwithstanding, as a kid, I picked the fruit from our apple, pear, and cherry trees. Of the three, cherries were the easiest; throw a rope over a limb, and jerk. The ripe fruit fell at our feet to be picked up. Apples and pears had to be hand picked before they could fall and become bruised.
Give me cherry picking any time.
Lucy Skywalker (01:43:51)
Find the paper using google, open it as html (google option), use google toolbar to translate. (you will need the pdf open and a second translator to get the full effect!)
Let’s be careful not to read too much significance into this further (cherry-)tree ring result.
Yes, McIntyre has again seriously undermined a crucial element to several of the palaeoclimate reconstructions.
What does this prove? That the reconstructions are barely worth the paper they’re printed on, because of cherry picking, statistical manipulation and confirmation bias. It also strongly suggests that Mann, Briffa and others are well aware of what they are doing – the classic example being the Mann 09(?) paper that proved robustess of the new hockey stick by removing either the upside down Tiljander sediment series OR the Yamal larches and comparing with the reconstruction including the other questionable series, but not showing what happens when both are removed.
It also shows that the purpose of peer review as currently practiced is entirely mis-understood by the general public (it may check for gross errors in papers, but does not verify and validate the findings, especially when complex statistical analysis is being used in an Earth Science or Life Science paper), and proves that replication and validation of published work from archived data are an essential part of the scientific process.
The findings of all SMs hockey stick breaking (whether revelations on Mannian PC data mining, the use of strip bark bristle cone pines, inverting lake sediment sequences or these cherry picked Yamal larches) have only one conclusion of wider significance, which is as follows (and trying to be careful with the phrasing):
That the proof of recent warming being unprecedented by comparison with previous natural variations is not reliably demonstrated.
It does not disprove recent warming, or that this warming may be (in part or in full) caused by increases in atmospheric CO2 – the original evidence is based on spectroscopical observations in a closed system that CO2 absorbs radiation at certain wavelengths that other constituents of the atmosphere do not.
Ok, there are questions as to how reliably these laboratory observations and measurements can be scaled up to the real world with all the added complexities (carbon cycle, varying atmospheric water vapour and cloud, heat transfer being dominated by convection, aerosols), and particularly how well GCMs model the likely future temperature changes, but McIntyre’s work does not address these other than the work undertaken to evaluate the GISS temperature reconstruction (Lucia, Watts and Pielke Snr are amongst those asking these questions, but their work is not nearly so conclusive yet as that at Climate Audit)..
Michael, J. Hansford, & Indiana Bones
I followed the press releases covering the development and eventual and surprising demise of the Carbon Satellite, since I was intrigued by one of its major missions, which was to locate the missing 50% of the CO2. What I gathered at the time was that AGW theory called for there being about twice as much CO2 in the atmosphere as seemed o be the case, and the hope was that the satellite would be able to locate the sink that was absorbing the missing CO2. Of course, had the satellite failed to locate the sink or where odd bits of Co2 were hiding in the atmosphere it would have been a bit difficult to explain. I wonder if the AGWers had begun to recognize the down-side posed by the Carbon Satellite. How frequently do rockets fail these days, anyway?
It seems to me that this story, played right, could have far-reaching consequences. The hockey stick has enormous symbolic value; for those in the general public who know anything of AGW, the hockey stick is global warming. It had great visual impact and sent a frightening message. It’s iconic.
And now, the hockey stick (OK, Briffa’s not Mann’s, but they carry exactly the same message) has been shown to be a clear misrepresentation (or whatever the acceptable substitute for [snip] may be) then its credibility is destroyed. And if you destroy the credibility of the symbol, then the credibility of the whole crumbling edifice disappears too.
I’m not a PR man, and and I don’t know the best to spread the story of McIntyre’s important discovery, but if the sceptic camp can ensure that this story reaches the MSM with the right slant (“False Hockey Stick undermines whole AGW story”) then anyone who’s been bamboozled by Gore’s fil will have their faith in the AGW story severely shaken.
George E Smith
Still hanging eh? George. Still living in hope tha SteveMc is wrong and the Team haven’t been deliberately misleading the world with the aid of Ban Ky.
Try doing your own research George. Go to SteveM’s site, collect the data from the Team and do it yourself.
Lucy Skywalker (01:43:51) :
Lucy, do those stations also measure precipitation? Can I access them if they do? J. of Physiology articles show a greater growth response to precipitation than temperature (on the order of 2X). Just want to do a little checking.
J.Hansford (22:47:35) :
“….. LoL… Good comeback to your detractors Micheal. I agree, the AGW proponents have used 1.9 billion dollars of American tax payers money to build and launch a satellite to study an insignificant trace atmospheric gas… in order to determine it’s significance…… Already they have a biased view that Micheal points out eloquently by quoting them.
These people ain’t doin’ science. They are doin’ Politics. No science would have been done by that Satellite. It wasn’t designed for that.
So hopefully, when they send another satellite into orbit, it’s payload will be designed for the scientific study of the atmosphere and not for the political justification of a flawed hypothesis….”
Thanks for the support.
Isn’t it ironic the satellite crashed into the antarctic.
Ian Blanchard (03:30:58) :
“Let’s be careful not to read too much significance into this further (cherry-)tree ring result.”
I agree. I think that the Team will be able to mount a defense that will be sufficient to rebut our side’s more ambitious claims. Let’s not give them a straw man to knock down.
MikeN (10:25:22) :
The temperature records form Salehard near Yamal also don’t show warming. If anyone followed Tamino’s rant on Lucy’s Arctic temperature records last time, well this time I ran 5 year averages and still didn’t see a trend.
According to Anthony: “anonymous coward who won’t put his name to his own work……. Talk about credibility.”
REPLY: anybody that decides to put their real name to their work, whether it be Tamino, or MikeN, or even Phil. gets a boost in credibility in my view. Phil. of course has been invited to do so many times and declined, as has Tamino. – Anthony
Mann and Briffa should both receive match penalties for high sticking.