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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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 @ur momisugly (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.