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.
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“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.