Circling Yamal 3 – facing the thermometers
Guest post by Lucy Skywalker
Let’s look closely and compare local thermometer records (GISS) with the Twelve Trees, upon whose treerings depend all the IPCC claims of “unprecedented recent temperature rise”.
For my earlier Yamal work, see here and here. For the original Hockey Stick story, see here and here.
Half the Hockey Stick graphs depend on bristlecone pine temperature proxies, whose worthlessness has already been exposed. They were kept because the other HS graphs, which depend on Briffa’s Yamal larch treering series, could not be disproved. We now find that Briffa calibrated centuries of temperature records on the strength of 12 trees and one rogue outlier in particular. Such a small sample is scandalous; the non-release of this information for 9 years is scandalous; the use of this undisclosed data as crucial evidence for several more official HS graphs is scandalous. And not properly comparing treering evidence with local thermometers is the mother of all scandals.
I checked out the NASA GISS page for all thermometer records in the vicinity of Yamal and the Polar Urals, in “raw”, “combined”, and “homogenized” varieties. Here are their locations (white). The Siberian larch treering samples in question come from Yamal and Taimyr. Salehard and Dudinka have populations of around 20,000; Pecora around 50,000; Surgut around 100,000; all the rest are officially “rural” sites. Some are long records, some are short.
Russia has two problems. First, many records stopped or became interrupted around 1990 after the ending of Soviet Russia; worst affected are the very telling Arctic Ocean records. Second, during Soviet Russia (and possibly now for all I know), winter urban records were “adjusted” downwards so that the towns could claim more heating allowances. Nevertheless, it will become clear that these issues in no way impede the evidence regarding treerings.
Click to enlarge these graphs. The first shows the 20 GISS stations closest to Yamal and the Polar Urals. The second shows treering width changes over time (only 10 of the 12 trees here). This was supposedly compared with local thermometer records, and used to calibrate earlier treering widths as temperature measurements to create a 1000-year temperature record. It was a pig to turn these graphs into a stack of transparent lines at the same scale as the GISS records for comparison, but finally, interesting material started to emerge.
I scaled all the GISS thermometer records to the same temperature scale, and ran them all from 1880 to 2020 at the same time scale (GISS graphs do not do this). I overlaid them as transparent lines along their approximate mean temperatures for comparison. Mean temperatures (visually judged) vary from around -2ºC (Pecora) to -13ºC (Selagoncy, Olenek, Hatanga, and Ostrov Uedine) and even -15ºC (“Gmo Im E.K. F”). The calibrations are degrees Centigrade anomaly, and decades.
Ha! Straightway we see clear patterns emerging. Let’s agree them:
Thermometer records: (1) time-wise, thermometers show temperatures rising from 1880 to 1940 or so; (2) temperatures fall a little from 1940 to 1970; (3) temperatures then rise a little but do not quite regain the heights of the 1940’s; (4) despite mean temperatures ranging from -2ºC to -15ºC (total means range 13ºC), and a range of temperature anomalies from each mean of only 9ºC from warmest year to coldest year, when mean temperatures are aligned, clear correlations emerge; (5) there are high variations between adjacent years. We shall investigate all this more closely in a minute.
Treering records: I’ve shown here the full records given for the 10 trees that runs from 1800 to 2000; but below, I use the same timescale as the thermometer records (1880-2020) for comparison. It is useful to see a few things here already: (6) treering sizes are increasing from 1830; (7) before that they show a decrease; (8) they do show correlation from 1880 on (this is NOT proof that the correlation is due to temperature).
Yamal area: (9) The 7 stations around Salehard seem to go in lock step with each other pretty well. (10) The five Yamal treering records (YAD) also correlate with each other, showing spikes around 1910, 1925, 1940, 1955, 1965, and 1980-1990. (11) But the treerings fall out with each other 1990-2000; and (12) these treering spikes do NOT correspond to the thermometer temperature spikes; but (13) there is a slight correlation with the longterm temperature; however, (14) crucially, there is no hockeystick blade in the thermometer record (15) nor is there one in the treering record if we remove the red YAD061 which is clearly an outlier – only a plateau’d elevation of the peaks throughout the 20th century starting before the real CO2/temp rise (and this is actually matched by pre-1800 values at times).
Excuse me for wondering if treerings beat to a different drum than temperature – it is certainly curious that there appears to be something causing correlations in the treerings. Wind? Sunspots? The moon? But let’s check by zooming in a little closer…
Salehard close-up: (16) all the nearby thermometer records mirror Salehard closely, although stations are up to 500 miles apart, the range of mean temperatures is -2ºC to -9ºC, and the range of annual temperatures at each station is up to about 9ºC – altogether a remarkable consistency. Click to see animated version of these records. (17) The close fit of Mys Kamennij (pale sea-blue) is particularly significant, since it is maritime and rural, and the same distance as Salehard from the treering site (some 120 miles), but in the opposite direction; (18) Ostrov Waigatz (Vaigach Island) shows the same pattern but with greater extremes; (19) in comparison with all this, the treering records show virtually no correlation at all – yet since treering differences between summer and winter exist at all, one would expect to see some correlation with warmer and colder years. (20) Perhaps if a far larger sample were used, a correlation might be detected, but clearly (21) we have trees here that are far too individual – especially YAD061.
Polar Urals: Here are seven station records around the Polar Urals site, compared with the five Taimyr (POR) treering records. (22) Mean temperatures are lower here – further North but also more continental, so perhaps the summers are as warm as Yamal, with similar near-treeline environment. (23) more noise in the temperature record, but the overall pattern is still the same; (24) 1943, 1967, 1983 are warm in common with the Salehard records, and 1940 is cold; other years are harder to compare. (25) The early fragmentary records for Dudinka and Turuhansk still fit together and overlay the Salehard records well, showing clear temperature rise between 1880 and 1940. (26) The treering records are fairly coherent, more so than the Yamal ones, and (27) they fit the Yamal records’ spikes in 1910, 1925, 1940, 1955, 1965, and 1980 on, but (28) again, this does not fit the temperature record.
The best of both record series: Really rural thermometer records from the maritime Arctic: (29) show the strongest pattern yet which (30) fits the other two sets of thermometer records but (31) does not fit the treering records even though (32) the treerings show coherent patterns within themselves, despite the two sites being some 800 miles apart.
Briffa’s full chronology: The Yamal chronology Briffa used (black) is compared with Polar Urals (green) and shows recent temperatures exceeding the Medieval Warm Period but (33) this is highly questionable, as is the recent final uptick. No MWP supports the alarmist “Unprecedented!” yet Polar Urals generally have been shown to fit local thermometer records better than Yamal for the period of overlap.
More GISS Arctic graphs: There are many serious problems with GISS but we can only take the evidence here. (34) GISS 64ºN+ shows a misleading trend line – temperatures rise to 1940, fall to 1970, rise to 2000 but not higher than 1940, then level off after 2000; (35) I don’t know what stations went into this composite – the final uptick alerts my suspicions to some UHI or other station problems; (36) Tamino takes the biscuit for cherrypicked trends in the GISS 80ºN+ North Polar winter record (sea green) – it clearly opposes the general worldwide fall in temperatures 1940-1970. However, it’s interesting to see such extremes.
GISS’ homogeneity adjustments: Thankfully, only a few of these Russian records are “adjusted”. But the alterations are telling. Surgut spikes upwards over Salehard from about 1960 on – but (36) the adjustment (probably UHI) is perversely done by truncating and moving earlier records upwards, instead of adjusting later records downwards. And (37) why were Salehard’s and Ostrov Uedine’s earlier “raw” records omitted in the adjusted records? I think every correction here will tend to amplify global warming trends.
GISS world temperatures, 2008: This map was shown in Tingley & Huybers’ latest Hockey Stick presentation at PAGES conference. GISS’ own station records around Yamal and Polar Urals appear to show (38) this map is misleading, since according to GISS’ own records, above, averages local to Yamal / Polar Urals after 2000 are at the most 1.5ºC anomaly (above local mean).
CRU Arctic temperatures, seasonal anomalies: (graph by romanm) Since this is from uncheckable individual station records, (39) the figures could be contaminated by various “correction” factors, (41) UHI is especially likely in the winter. But note that (42) the difference in character between months, and between summers and winters, is striking – summers have hardly changed – and (43) still no definitive Hockey Stick as per illustrations and per Briffa’s Yamal treering record, nothing beyond the range of natural patterns clearly evidenced here. Even the known slight overall increase during the twentieth century takes place mainly earlier in the century.
Conclusions: There is no sign whasoever of a Hockey Stick shape with serious uptick in the twentieth century, in the thermometer records. Yet these records are clearly very consistent with each other, no matter how long the record or how cold, high, or maritime the locality, with a distance span of over a thousand miles. Neither does the Hockey Stick consistently show in the treerings except in the case of a single tree. Even with thermometer records that are incomplete and suffering other problems, the “robust” conclusion is –
“Warmist” treering proxy temperature evidence is falsified directly by local thermometer records.
Ah Lucy, but you did not “correct” the Russian records. All becomes clear once you do so. The flatness your graphs imply is simply a product of bad Russian temperature collection procedures that are encoded within the patented GIS algorithm 😉
Brilliant! Another nail in the coffin for AGW.
I am sure when I was at primary school, we were told that the tree ring width denoted moisture content (or lack of) for a certain year, not temperature. To my mind (simple I admit), the amount of moisture available to the tree would be more likely to dictate the amount of growth in a given year than the temperature or is that too simplistic?
“I scaled all the GISS thermometer records to the same temperature scale, and ran them all from 1880 to 2020 at the same time scale (GISS graphs do not do this). ”
Anthony, how exactly did you extract the 2020 data? By force?
“I scaled all the GISS thermometer records to the same temperature scale, and ran them all from 1880 to 2020 at the same time scale (GISS graphs do not do this).”
“Treering records: I’ve shown here the full records given for the 10 trees that runs from 1800 to 2000; but below, I use the same timescale as the thermometer records (1880-2020) for comparison.”
How do you obtain a thermometer record going out to year 2020 when we are still in year 2009?
hey, Anthony, thanks a million… I know I feel proud of this particular page as it turned out clean and I think it complements Steve’s work – the proxies all depend for their “robustness” on correlating to a temperature record whose worth is unquestioned.
I took Tamino’s graph from our last set-to and used it here, to demonstrate extreme cherry-picking. Useful, that was.
Now I’ll stand back and hear the critics. I do want good science in the end.
But…. But… what are you going to believe, all those temperature stations? Or YAD061?
I think YAD061, for ’tis an enchanted tree, steeped in magic and home to fairies, and pixies and there’s this little ladder at the top that goes up through a hole in the clouds to a magical new land. And every week, the magic land at the top of the magical faraway tree moves on and changes to a new land full of mystery and intrigue and adventure.
Apologies to Enid Blyton…
The subtitle “Circling Yamal 3” is a dead link.
I’d like to say thanks to Jeff Id for putting up my page first. Perhaps a link there… but I’ve now added a couple more pics that Jeff doesn’t have, this time taken from Briffa 2007’s temperature material using CRU gridded data.
soorry, should have given refs:
Jeff Id’s page for comments
My page for updates
YAD061….Yes We Can….Change We Can Believe In 😛
(sorry)
Sorry, Lucy, I didn’t notice your byline.
Excellent stuff, but my query above (and John Peter’s – great minds…) remains!
sorry, should have given refs:
Jeff Id’s page for comments
My page for updates
Kaboom, my bad language. It’s just the scale, it was a matter of convenience, of course there isn’t a future record!
Fitting. When AGW finally “hangs” for its crimes against reason, it will be swinging from a branch of YAD061.
Just a quick question to Lucy and others familiar with the data.
Why is this tree group known as ‘Polar Urals’? Yamal is at the northern end of the mountain chain known as the Urals, while the area shown as being their location on the map above is more than 1,000 kilometres away to the ENE.
By the way, the town called ‘Hatanga’ is actually ‘Khatanga’ and is a stop-over/re-fueling airport for Russian Arctic flights – I spent an hour there once.
hey, Kaboom, you’ve drawn my attention to it, I’ve mis-labelled the y-axis (time) on my plot of all individual stations, I’m going to change it now. Should be 1900 where it says 1880.
kaboom, you wouldn’t be a socialist would you? :-p
ahhhh, I guess with that acronym, I couldn’t exactly call your agenda ‘hidden’.
WOW! Incredible, thankyou Lucy.
Christian S (01:58:15) : Perils of transliteration. Also Sale(k)hard and Waigatz/Vaigach.
One example of brilliant GISS homogenisation algorithms. From station data, St. Petersburg (Russia) 1940-2005 linear trend is 2.30 degrees C. But in Helsinki (Finland), 250 km away from St. Petersburg, the trend in same period is 0.59. Both cities are coastal located at same sea.
But GISS algorithms homogenise Helsinki trend to 1…2 degrees:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2009&month_last=09&sat=4&sst=0&type=trends&mean_gen=0112&year1=1940&year2=2005&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Data from Russian cities seems to be mostly quite absurd, but GISS regards it as reliable as other data and its algorithms spread error to larger areas. Brilliant indeed, it would be intresting see global temps trend with Russian cities removed. Or even with global rural stations only.
AGW never made it out of the lab it was concocted in. Such things only attain life in the pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The really scary part is that some are trying to peddle it as reality.
Good job, Lucy.
Excellent post Lucy. I wish I could say I am surprised by your findings but all I can do is roll my eyes and hope that one day common sense and the scientific method will prevail.
Doesn’t this mirror the underlining problem with the proxy study on Baffin Island using lake sediments – namely the local temperature records do not support a Hocky Stick curve.
The bigger problem is that science by uncalibrated proxy data is either being done incompetently or delibrately.
That is an amazing amount of work, and simple enough for even me to understand. All the data laid out and the outliers labelled. It’s a shame there isn’t a process whereby analysis like this cannot get out into the peer reviewed literature, and be attached somehow to the original paper.
Looking at the Polar Urals, one could say that there may be some merit in using treemometers, but when one sees the patent misuse of these by Briffa, it calls the whole method into question. I wonder how many dendrologists are thanking Briffa for this? He has effectively wiped out their discipline.
Welll done Lucia. I lurk on your site quite often, but I’m not yet at a point where I can make a valid contribution. Keep up the good work.
Lucy
You obviously have not read Briffa’s latest info on his UEA CRU site with respect to data release:
We would like to reiterate that these data were never “owned” by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and we have never had the right to distribute them. These data were acquired in the context of collaborative research with colleagues who developed them. Requests for these data have been redirected towards the appropriate institutions and individuals. When the Briffa (2000) paper was published, release of these data was specifically embargoed by our colleagues who were still working towards further publications using them. Following publication of the 2008 paper, at the request of the Royal Society, Briffa approached colleagues in Sweden, Ekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk and their permission was given to release the data. This was done in 2008 and 2009. Incidentally, we understand that Rashit Hantemirov sent McIntyre the Yamal data used in the papers cited above at his request as early as 2nd February, 2004.
Perhaps you should remove a few of the “scandalous” comments in yoiur text?
Such a small sample is scandalous; the non-release of this information for 9 years is scandalous; the use of this undisclosed data as crucial evidence for several more official HS graphs is scandalous.
Yamal was released in 2004. Data was not Briffa’s to release etc.
SamG:
“kaboom, you wouldn’t be a socialist would you? ”
Well, we ALWAYS extract our data by force……….
Congrats Lucy
thats worthy of sending to UEA
To evaluate temperature from rings, I suppose they use statistics gathered somewhere else… somewhere where temperature is all the time above 0 celcius.
I can bet if you apply these statistics to treerings from an area where temperature is below freezing almost all year long, it induces some distorsion. Like for example around zero, treering growth increase is not anymore proportional to temperature increase…almost no growth below zero, and far more above zero.
If you carefuly pick an area where temperatures are most of time close from zero, and apply treering growth measures from warmer areas in the world, I can bet it works exactly like a temperature magnifier. 0.2 degrees increase in temperature may for example give in Yamal 2 times more days above zero -> almost 2 times more growth.
You see what I mean? Sorry for my poor english.
Also you are calling into question Briffas plot of temperature:
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/363/1501/2269.full.pdf
figure 1 page 2272
i.e. you are accusing Briffa of untruths.
It is worth reading his document as to me it seems an honest interpretation of results.
The empirically demonstrated link between
this growth variability and local measured instrumental
temperature data is patently strong and apparently
stable, at least over the last 70–90 years for which
station records are available. This supports the
interpretation of the 2000-year chronologies in terms
of evidence of changing summer temperature variability,
and simple analyses of the timing and coincidence
of relative warm and cool periods over this time
support the conclusion that the twentieth century was
unusually warm in each individual region as well as
over northwest Eurasia as a whole. Medieval warmth
was real in these regions, particularly in Avam–Taimyr.
The warmth was widespread but restricted to a
relatively narrow period just prior to AD 1000.
Assuming that tree growth is driven predominantly by
summer temperature changes; these results indicate
that the magnitude of medieval warmth in northwest
Eurasia did not match that from recent times.
You will not that TRW is associated more with summer warmyh than average yearly temperature. I assume your plots are the latter? and therefore not very relevant.
Lucy it would also appear that you are claiming that your simple analysis is correct and Briffas more complete analysis (e.g. Fig 7) is falsified despite having been done by a proffessional?
It should also be remembered that the hocky stick is shown in RCS corrected tree ring widths and not deg C. I do not think Briffa even gives an index value to temperature conversion.
So how tall is the blade in degC??????
“bill (03:11:41) : ”
My BS detector just went off the scale.
Goreacle Report: Shoo Business>
Hollow-weeny Edition by manbearswineAGW vs Suzy Coyote.
Boooooo shoooo boooo … “If a bear is spotted, said conservation officer Andrew Szklaruk, he and his colleagues are called in to shoo it away.”
…-
“*Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up”
“**Canada, Greenland to sign agreement to protect Arctic polar bears”
…-
“Polar bear patrol escorts Hudson Bay trick-or-treaters
CHURCHILL, Man. – Most trick-or-treaters are well-versed in Halloween safety: travel in groups, wear colourful clothing and only stop at brightly lit homes.
The drill is slightly different, however, for kids in a remote Manitoba town on Hudson Bay.
Youngsters in Churchill are warned not to dress in furry white costumes, to steer clear of baited traps stuffed with seal meat and to listen for the tell-tale sound of fireworks.
That’s because these candy-seekers have more to worry about than ghosts and goblins. They need to avoid a different kind of predator on Halloween – the polar bear.
In Churchill – known as the polar bear capital of the world – Halloween falls smack in the middle of the busiest time for the iconic mammals. The bears are restlessly wandering around as they wait for cooler temperatures so they can head out onto the frozen winter ice.
Add to that streets crawling with about 300 trick-or-treaters and their tasty bags of treats. The combination could be deadly.
But Conservation, Parks Canada and RCMP officers have ensured everyone’s safety for the last 40 Halloweens and this year is no different. Thirty of them will encircle the town and keep an eye on youngsters going door to door.
“It’s a precautionary measure because the polar bear is a predatory animal,” said Const. Mike Boychuk. “Our main goal is to have a safe community whether it be from humans or from bears.”
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/WeirdNews/2009/10/29/11568001-cp.html
*urlm.in/dill
**urlm.in/dilm
Nice work Lucy!
What happens if you smoothe the temperature records on a 43 month running mean and compare with tree rings and an inverted sunspot curve?
Lucy Skywalker:
Well done, Lucy.
Jeff B 01:53:23:
“….it’ll be swinging from a branch of YAD061”
Don’t think so. They chopped it down to count its rings. Fancy chopping down an enchanted tree! Murderers!
Wonderful work, Lucy! I’ve looked into this several times myself, e.g. looked at the graphs for stations nearby Yamal, and came to the same conclusion, but I didn’t have time or guts to go through it in detail and publish it as you did. Very good!
It’s about time the idea of the uniqueness of the current arctic warming gets revised, almost all the long-running records seem to tell the same story: The previous warm period (peaking in about 1940) was warmer than the current one.
Lucy,
the larch tree-rings correlate only with temperatures from July 16 to June 30, as Hantemirov’s pdf in Russian (also mentioned at Climate Audit) shows in the Fig. 4, page 18 (black bars are coefficients of correlation).
The poor things aren’t able to grow in any other month. Therefore they aren’t a whole-year temp proxies but only summer temp proxies.
http://vak.ed.gov.ru/common/img/uploaded/files/vak/announcements/biolog/2009/13-07/KHantemirovRM.pdf
bill (03:11:41) :
How is it that Briffa, and others that use Briffa, can publish if they are not able to archive the data used? In many cases, this is in violation to the policies of the journal in which they publish. If a scientist cannot provide the evidence for claims made, how is that science?
On your other point, Steve had the data, but obviously did not know it was Briffa’s data. Do you have evidence that he knew he had Briffa’s data, as your post implies?
bill:
“Perhaps you should remove a few of the “scandalous” comments in yoiur text?
Such a small sample is scandalous; the non-release of this information for 9 years is scandalous; the use of this undisclosed data as crucial evidence for several more official HS graphs is scandalous.”
Pick some others as the majority of those still stand.
I would not have been so restrained to call them merely scandalous.
Someone(s), somewhere(s) must face prosecution for what has been done if there is anything resembling justice left in this world.
Perhaps you should remove a few of the “scandalous” comments in your text?
Such a small sample is scandalous;
In this case I don’t think so. If there were only few trees available at the time of writing of Briffa et al 2000 (I understand that the collections were started in 1997 or 98), the authors should have waited for more sampling.
There was no danger that somebody else would secretly snatch Yamal larches in big numbers to construct a counter-chronology and steal thusly the victory from them, was there?
charlie (01:12:12) :
I’m sure I’ll get corrected if I’m wrong on this, but I believe that bristlecone pine treering data is assumed to be the length of the growing season. i.e. the trees freeze at a certain temperature, and do not grow. So, a longer growing season means a bigger ring, meaning warmer temperatures. I’m with you that I think this is too simple an explanation for tree ring growth.
Checkmate!
We have an expression in the structural engineering profession (very experienced engineers only) in the UK when checking other engineers work, especially for Building Regulations (Codes) approval. “Looks right, IS right!” This looks right to me:-) A good post.
Great work Lucy.
You’d think the first thing that would be done is to actually show how the tree-rings reflect the temperature trends. They say they do this step and then one looks at the actual data and, once again, what do we find – nope.
And Briffa issued a “Caution” on his webpage a few days, essentially saying that the Yamal series should be used very cautiously by researchers given so few trees were used. [but he also says they have new numbers now that are essentially the same – maybe they can check the new numbers against your temperature records this time].
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/cautious/cautious.htm
I also think Briffa’s original Yamal chronology (the processed RCS method version) has much more of spike at the end than shown in the one chart above. In this file, the column “Yamal.RCS” is the one that most of the hockey stick studies have picked up. It is more like a goal tender hockey stick.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/melvin/PhilTrans2008/Column.prn
Raise your hand if you are surprised at this.
Did they turn the chronology upside-down? Again?
bill,
– For a field that is based on statistical analysis, using such a small sample IS scandalous.
– Publishing without title to the data IS scandalous.
– Knowing that the results from the hidden data are being cited by others as valid foundations for their work IS scandalous.
Perhaps, bill, you could tell us in what field such practices are classed as acceptable behaviour?
It seems to me that releasing data in 2004 is useless if how the data was used is not disclosed.
So we wait almost ten years to come up with that tap dance? We hear this argument frequently from the CRU crew. I’ll be the dog ate Briffa’s confidentiality agreements along with Phil Jones’!
Scandalous!
After being prodded by McIntyre to enforce their publication policy which Briffa had failed to follow in the first place.
Scandalous!
Which Steve McIntyre also commented on. Yes, he had the data, but he had no idea that the Hantemirov set he had was what Briffa had used. More tap dancing about Briffa’s scandalous behavior.
More to the point, if Briffa were being honest he could have facilitated connecting McIntyre with the “owners” in the interest of openness upfront. The fact that he chose stonewalling for almost ten years speaks volumes.
Scandalous!
Lucy,
Leave in “scandalous”…as many times as necessary. Briffa’s dissembling comments offered late in the game and the incomprehensible defense of such dissembling by certain parties is scandalous.
Great work by the way.
Anthony,
Conclusions: There is no sign whasoever = whatsoever
Absolutely incredible work, Lucy !
It’s truly a shame (and should be a professional embarrassment) that the “experts” that peer review AGW junk science don’t find this.
Well done Lucy, an excellent piece of detective work. But what happened to item (40)?
Looks rock solid science to me Lucy,
Thanks a lot.
it’s all a moot point anyway, because ALL of the multi-year ice is gone anyway….;^)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091029/sc_nm/us_climate_canada_arctic_1
“Sorry, Lucy, I didn’t notice your byline.”
I’ve often not noticed who the author of a post here is, and others have also been mistaken. (For instance, some persons on the Minn. Public website are crediting Bob Tilsdale’s article to Anthony.) I suggest one or more of the following; that:
Buylines be boldfaced and/or set in larger type and/or centered directly under the title (preferably all);
Articles by Anthony explicitly include his name, rather than allowing authorship of unsigned articles fall to him by default.
Clearly one can get as many tree rings as you need. There are lots of trees in Russia.
What one can’t get is an accurate measured temperature record for the reasons mentioned.
So, its it possible to construct an experiment to see if trees are an accurate proxy in a short timespan. Say 5 years.
ie. Lets say you monitor lots of sites for 5 years, with accurate temperature measurements over a wide geographic area.
Pick the sorts of trees used for the poxies. Young and old specimens.
Then sample those trees and check 5 years of rings.
You need the young trees because they are in the old trees.
Can you determine if the poxies are proxies?
Nick
I know Mr Briffa and he is a nice man. I find it hard to believe that he deliberately massaged the data.
I cannot see how his use of (basically) one tree in soviet russia can have led to so much wealth being squandered on such a fruitless pursuit.
How will the world look back on this period in the future?
Lysenkoism but in a whole world full of democracies and independent research labs.
I don’t believe in AGW or climate change yet you do get pulled along with the belief “How could they all be so wrong? It must be true!”
It is only when I hear our Government Ministers speaking on the issue that I realise they have absolutely no conception of the arguments involved.
Is it because newspapers rely on sensationalism to sell copy?
Ice not melting much. Should be back to normal in a few months! Not much of a story i suppose.
In other news, my government has decided to give away my money to other countries to “help stop a 2 degree rise in global temperature”. How on Earth this is going to stop natural climate variation I have no idea. Perhaps if you lined up 200,000,000 5p coins on the ground their combined albedo would reflect so much radiation from the Sun back into space? Whatever, the next hockey stick is going to be the rate of increase of my taxes!
re:Bill I would have thought that work should not be published until the data is available for other scientists to check. Is that not the procedure. Perhaps the COLD FUSION people should have published and embargoed their data and just said ” My data shows cold fusion happens. I am working on developing it further. So i cannot release the way I did it just yet.Oh and by the way… spend millions and billions to help me develop this for the benefit of future humanity” But they did not take that approach and their data and experimnents were not repeatable… mmm checking other people’s experiments to see if the results were fluke or were reproducible. Now there’s a novel idea!
Lucy,
Excellent work. I really loved the last line;
“Warmist” treering proxy temperature evidence is falsified directly by local thermometer records.
Anthony, at what point can we begin using the five letter f-word?
Each passing day becomes more frustrating as the scientific case for AGW falls apart, while the propaganda efforts continue unabated (under the guise of science), with most of the mainstream media actively participating as advocates, either through ignorance or under the assumption that, since it fits their left wing agenda, the ‘truth’ of the matter is relative.
Lucy:
Excellent compilation. Your story almost writes itself. It does seem as though the “amateurs” have truly opened up CAGW’s Pandora’s box.
In response to ErichH and Jeff B, AGW supporters (Colose in Climate Change in response to my comment there) say that ‘increasing CO2 means an increase in energy available, so eventually global warming is going to win against the
background noise of the climate system.’. Thus it comes down to numbers
doesn’t it? No one denies CO2 has GHG activity. But to what effect in the actual environment? As just an onlooker in this debate, I want to know why anyone is interested in anything other than the magnitude of the CO2 climate sensitivity and what its range should be for the influence of CO2 to be negligible? Isn’t this at the heart of the issue?
The joke in the popular press is that for the AGW crowd, it’s global warming if it’s hot and global warming if it’s cold. But joking aside, don’t they have a point if the CO2 sensitivity is high enough? Wait one thousand years and who cares but wait one hundred years – and well, our kids will be around and perhaps some of us as well.
Nice work Lucy. I think the bottom line here is the tree rings do not reflect temperature in the region – at all. They have that stopped watch quality (once in a while they reflect the temperature).
As per false trend lines I have noted this problem many times in the GISS (please do not call it “NASA”, we at NASA are a diverse lot) data and NCDC data.
Let me explain. Draw out a steady sine wave with a long wave length. If you start your graph when the wave is near minimum and end it when it is near a maximum and draw a line between the end points you see a huge ‘upward’ trend, even though the actually amplitude is not changing.
Look at your graph ‘comparing trend with more natural smoothing’. You can see the makings of a sine curve with the record starting near a minimum and ending near a maximum.
Which leads me to your second result – the alarmists don’t know how to do math right, or refuse to do it right. It is all a big scandal of incompetence or disinformation (sometimes I think both).
“I scaled all the GISS thermometer records to the same temperature scale, and ran them all from 1880 to 2020 at the same time scale (GISS graphs do not do this).”
“Treering records: I’ve shown here the full records given for the 10 trees that runs from 1800 to 2000; but below, I use the same timescale as the thermometer records (1880-2020) for comparison.”
“How do you obtain a thermometer record going out to year 2020 when we are still in year 2009?”
Come on guys and gals, give me a break! Look at the graphs and you will see that the abscissa runs from 1800 to 2020 but the data only goes out to just short of 2010.
Excellent Lucy, you’ll soon be up there with Steve M. himself.
bill:
“Also you are calling into question Briffas plot of temperature.”
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck . . .
“Perhaps you should remove a few of the “scandalous” comments in yoiur text?”
When you decide to write your own article, supporting Briffa’s study, you can use whatever words you choose.
Good Skeptical View website
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Curious.htm
Well done Lucy,
Even if faults can be picked out there is quite a case to be answered.
If the professionals fail the amateurs can prevail.
Lucy, this is an epic piece of work and most helpful in putting together pieces of the jigsaw of conflicting data and ‘interpretation’ on tree rings and temp measurements. Ii feels increasingly as though we are all in a parallel universe as we listen to the latest political manoevrings and posturings in the run up to Copenhagen. A dialogue of the deaf or rather no dialogue, just the deaf.
Dennis Hopkins: Its seems that Briffa was given the data by his Russians mates so maybe you are right
BTW this looks like it may be major story material? (similar to the Briffa one posted at CA?)
Just to emphasise a point. I’m not, repeatedly not, accusing Briffa or his team of fraud. But I am using the language I feel is appropriate for a global issue, on the lines that “extraordinary claims need extraordinary proofs”. The ramifications of Briffa’s work extend far beyond his personal visions, I think, that brought him into this work. I could have been in his shoes, doing inadequate science with “confirmation bias”. I’m aware that my work here is not perfect. And I was a warmist myself, once. I suspect Monckton was too. And many others. I think we are crossing a Rubicon insofar as we are all going to have to wake up to how our personal actions can have global consequences we didn’t perhaps consider. And if we don’t face it alive we still face it in facing death. So while I used strong words I also care for Briffa the individual. In fact, if I didn’t care, I don’t think I could use such strong words.
Great work, Lucy Skywalker. You make the issue so clearly visible. I look forward to having more time to read in detail.
Nice work Lucy.
Bill above said that:
“TRW is associated more with summer warmyh than average yearly temperature. I assume your plots are the latter? and therefore not very relevant”,
I think your plots are highly relevant.
For example Salehard June-July-August temperature data does not show any unusual warming. Maybe if you have time you could run the same plots using the summer temperatures only?
Like some other people above, I would prefer toning down the language a bit, the data you present should do all the talking.
Ok so there’s no match. We still need to reduce our dependency on foreign oil and move away from CO2 emitting fossil fuels. It’s yucky.
Plus there are many other global interests to advance by not being mean about the global warming glitch. People are human.
And those who care deeply about our planet should be given an added extension of forgiveness and appreciation.
So be nice and let’s move forward with policies to acheive what’s best for all of us and the planet.
Whew! That hurts.
Lucy surely the hockey stick is seen in instrument readings?
Here are some hockeysticks from europe – recent temperature records (from1850)
And a couple of proxy grape harvests one going back to 1380 (note these are reverse hockey sticks – cold = longer ripening hot = shorter ripening.
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/8184/pinotnoirswissoxdihad.jpg
And here’s hadcrut3v with a synthesised version allowing projection to future temperatures!!
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/6135/synthesisedtemperature.jpg
All these show the characteristic shape. The only questionable thing is the shaft – just how flat is it?
Well you say proxy = no good
The MWP is in dispute (hence the need for proxies)
All we have is current temperature measurements. I have plotted many from around the UK all show the rise in temp from the 60s to today (small island sites tiree, lerwick, showing similar to Ross on wye, Oxford) Not all of these are UHI effects. Not all can be discounted.
How do you explain the rise?
If we are running an AGW phase of existence then it will take years to correct. No one is suggesting the end of the world, just rather nasty changes, population movements drowned cities, not world shattering just something I would rather my children not have to contend with.
Fossil fuels are FINITE resources one day they will become too expensive to use. Nuclear is simply pushing our pollution onto future generations. A Chernobyl size accident in the UK (and one will happen) will kill millions and make vast % of UK uninhabitable.
What is wrong with forcing fuel efficient vehicles on the population? What is wrong with extending the fossil fuels by using intermittent renewable power?
Should we not be thinking of our children’s children’s future. There is no point relying on something coming to our aid – fusion etc – it MAY arrive too late.
I hope as a former AGWr you read the posts here and elsewhere with an open mind. Why are your and other sceptic views correct, no error, no wrong assumption, when any scientist suggesting/confirming AGW are liers and cheats deserving hanging drawing and quatering? Does this sound like open debate to you?
Lucy
Very nice work.
I basically think that a lot of the work from the professionals is experimental, coming as it does from a very new branch of science that relies more on models than observational evidence.
Dr Mann had his experimental work suddenly elevated to a world icon, and had to either retract or defend. Any historian knows that what he says is unsustainable.
Similarly anyone looking at the recent temperature record since 1850 knows how highly processed the information is, and that dropping sites then selecting new ones means the micro climate being recorded is no longer valid. The 1850/1880 termperature data is experimental.
As for tree rings, surely this is the most abstract one of the lot-it records moisture much better than temperatures-the two are not necessarily the same thing.
When experiment is piled on experiment and touted as being factual, that is when we start to see the problems arise. In consequence side stepping has to take place-that co2 concentration was constant, that climate never varied much before the modern age, that the MWP was cooler than today, that temperatures have risen rapidly-omitting to mention they are taken from a low point of the little ice age. So temperatures have risen since the LIA-who would have thought it?
Sooner or later it unravels, but whether it will do so before Copenhagen seems unlikely.
Tonyb
Lucy, nicely done. Even I understood it, and I am an idoit!
Contrary to some popular opinion (wishes, my own included), this does not “kill” the theory of AWG. What it does do it throw some light onto some of the questionable peer reviewed studies and methodologies used solidify the AWG theory and used to ram the alarmist “consensus” view down the world’s throat.
In light of the quickly approaching Copenhagen soirée, the question becomes, how do we get the attention of the politicians who might have the presence of mind to consider the weakness of some of the AGW underpinnings before crafting drastic policy to combat the “problem”.
PS
Briffa makes it plin in his Royal Society paper that the trees only respond to temperatures for a couple of months (around july) and the response month is different in different areas.
How do your plots of average anual temperature prove or disprove the temperature effect on tree rings?
PPS I wish I had your faith in the future of the human race. I have read your website and it certainly did not give me that faith. :o(
Steve M. (05:13:39) :
Sorry, but longer does not mean warmer. You can have long cool summers, short hot summers, etc. tree rings are not thermometers. If they were there would be a clear connection between degrees C and ring width, This analysis shows rings do what they do completely independent of temp.
As do many living things. Do these ‘scientists’ think birds migrate or trees shed their leaves and bulbs sprout on temperature? LOL!
Most living things respond to hours of daylight, not temperature (which of course is also tied to hours of daylight).
Bill:
I generally agree with the sentiment to minimize use of words like “scandalous”, but in this case, the word is properly used.
As to the Briffa statement: “We would like to reiterate that these data were never “owned” by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and we have never had the right to distribute them.”
Horsehockey. Nearly all peer-reviewed journals require data archiving. Science demands it. Speaking now as a lawyer, rather than as a scientist, once “secret” data is give out to one person who uses it for publication in the public domain, it cannot be held back from anyone, unless the data themselves were licensed for use or other wise restricted. It that was the case, then the publication should not have accepted the paper in the first place (for the obvious scientific reasons).
Like so many others, including Lucy, I find it is offensive to fail to share data. The problems we face are too large to let egos and the potential to come in second stand in the way of insight and wisdom.
David.
Christian S (01:58:15) :
By the way, the town called ‘Hatanga’ is actually ‘Khatanga’ and is a stop-over/re-fueling airport for Russian Arctic flights – I spent an hour there once.
Back in the 90’s I spent some time in Russia and like Lucy’s transliteration. Her transliteration is better than the other one which replaces the Cyrillic “X” with “Kh”. The actual sound is a gutteral “H”, while most English speaker pronounce it as a “K”. By using an “H” us English speakers are forced to pronounce it closer to its original Russian sound.
Polar Urals: “1940 is cold;” (?)
Am I misreading, or did you mean warm?
That gives credence to the hypothesis that the immediate local environment of YAD061 changed around 1930s that made the tree grow more than the others… I thought global warming was a global phenomenon and certainly not so local that it would only affect ONE tree.
As I recall Mann’s hockey stick was produced using an algorithm that would create a hockey stick shape even with random numbers. Briffa’s hockey stick supporting data is based on very poor scientific method, to say the least, and is falsified by the thermometer record.
Then there is Al Gore’s graphs which show a correlation between temperature and CO2 over the last half million years. But when examined closely the record shows the temperature changes precede the CO2 changes which proves the CO2 did not initiate the temperature changes.
And then there are the computer models. But those are falsified by at least two real measurements: 1) The models predict more warming in the troposphere at about 10k elevation in the tropics. But satellite and weather balloon data show no such warming. 2) The models all require positive feedbacks to attain the temperature rises the IPCC predicts. But the Evidence Lindzen presented at WUWT shows a negative feedback based on satellite data.
So what is left of the AGW theory?
Sonicfrog 08:47:54:
“Lucy, nicely done. Even I understood it and I am an idoit!”
Hear, hear! And I’m an idoit too!.
Is it possible that the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration and not temperature played a large part in the recent increase in tree growth? I have heard that many cereal crop’s growth rate has been researched at different CO2 levels, but has anyone looked at how pines grow?
So how can a little boy with no tailoring credentials falsify the statements made to the king by professional tailors? “Sire, why are you naked?”
Mike Reese (09:33:48) :
It is most likely the case. That said, trees in the far North are usually very slow to grow since it is, for much of the year, cold. The effect of global warming and rise of CO2 should be felt by all tree. The data show that only YAD061 had a significant growth compared to ALL other trees in that area. So, again, global warming and rise of CO2 was not the cause for YAD061 to grow so fast. As we discussed in a previous post, the most likely reason for this sharp growth was a change in the local environment of that tree (i.e. more water and/or more food at the roots).
bill (08:44:22) :
The link you give : has it been corrected for UHI? Those are towns after all, has anybody checked where the thermometers are?
http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/research/climate/rms/intro.html
“The Radcliffe Meteorological Station is situated in Woodstock Road in the garden of Green College beside the old observatory building, adjacent to the Radcliffe Infirmary. It possesses the longest series of temperature and rainfall records for one site in Britain. These records are continuous from January, 1815. Irregular observations of rainfall, cloud and temperature exist from 1767. ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:4516-Oxford-map-1510×1384.jpg
Not such a rural area after all, so there must be a UHI.
and the one in Dijon seems to be at the airport, another heat source increasing with time.
Bill
I appreciate your doubts. Now please try to be careful not to put words into my mouth.
I didn’t know what I would find on examining all the Russian GISS records. Plus, I know there are UHI problems, and I suspect more, with GISS, so I would not have been surprised to find a certain amount of UHI visible, making disentangling harder. Even so, there was no serious uptick. Not of the order of magnitude to which the tiny sample of trees were calibrated.
Sure, a lot of UK records show upticks. But all those I’ve seen could easily be UHI whereas lots of rural records show no uptick whatsoever, I’ve seen no rural record with a serious uptick beyond natural possibilities, and I’ve looked at quite a lot. And on these grounds, I suspect your refs of being atypical, I won’t say cherry-picked as you have given these to me in good faith. I would want to investigate a proper sample. Always.
Hey, I wish I could share my faith / attitude with you. It’s come out of being in some difficult places and being positive as well as realistic, non-judgemental, and just paying attention. My concern with AGW has shown me that real Science can be a wonderful therapy that can go very deep if needed.
We may be getting very close to the nub of the matter here. I’m not a scientist, but I can understand perfectly well what is presented here. It is clear that something quite fundamental is happening with scientific method and the procedures and provenances of the scientific community and how it relates to the political domain. It is disturbing for outsiders to see such apparently closed minds in operation. Maybe this has always been the case, but it is much more out in the open.
There are big new dimensions going on here. The science has been politicised to an unprecedented degree. This website deserves the highest praise for dealing with the science and the evidence in an empirical and honest way and avoiding as much as possible the ‘ad hominem’ invective and the appeals to authority.
WUWT has allowed me, and no doubt many others, to get an understanding of the evidence and the issues in a way that the AGW lobbyist never do. They seem to prefer alarming headlines and obscure data and computer models. I pride myself on having an open mind, and that means not accepting theories without a critical look at the evidence, which looks increasingly dubious. Lucy adds one more valauble piece to the jigsaw of the evidence.
Whether it is GHGs, Solar cycles, Sea levels, global temperatures, polar ice, etc the picture does not appear straightforward and ‘settled’. The politicians and parts of the scientific community seem to have called time on the science prematurely. Now huge sums of our money are riding on this phantom. ‘The Science is settled’ and there is a ‘consensus’ are still bandied about, but may come back to haunt them.
The BIG question is what are the real scientists and sceptics going to do about all this. How does the sceptical view get a hearing where it is needed? Otherwsie are we just talking to ourselves? In the UK, at last, some prominent sceptical voices are beginning to be heard – Clive James on the BBC and Rod Liddle (Spectator) and of course Chrispopher Booker (Telegraph). None has special knowledge about Climate Science, but a gut feeling that something is wrong when the sceptical intellect is denigrated by the term ‘denier’… and the evidence has been treated in such a cavalier manner.
Bill
You posted a graph of grape harvest to bolster your defense of Briffa> Need you be reminded that Gavin has declared the use of grape harvest data is a no-no:
Are vineyards a good temperature proxy? While climate clearly does impact viticulture through the the amount of sunshine, rainfall amounts, the number of frost free days in the spring and fall, etc., there a number of confounding factors that make it less than ideal as a long term proxy. These range from changing agricultural practices, changing grape varieties, changing social factors and the wider trade environment.
There are some things that Gavin and I can agree on.
Lucy Skywalker (09:56:29) :
Have a look at Ross on Wye, yeovil, Tiree, Lerwick – The last 2 are small island communities. The others are small towns. All show increasing temperature.
data here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/
But of course it will be said here that the data has been fixed by the met office to agree with their agenda!
Bill: No warming buddy, it’s over!
Hmmm, I didn’t realize the English Isles were in such close proximity to Yamal. Got to get my “New Geography” Globe updated.
Bill, you’re getting sidetracked. Stick with the Yamal region.
“”” Kaboom (01:12:12) :
“I scaled all the GISS thermometer records to the same temperature scale, and ran them all from 1880 to 2020 at the same time scale (GISS graphs do not do this). ”
Anthony, how exactly did you extract the 2020 data? By force? “””
No Kaboom, the 2020 data was just hindsight; sorry about that !
George
Well Lucy you have been busy.
Lots of nice data there to digest. Too bad you can’t wangle your way to a free trip into the region; well wait 8 months or so before you go.
Maybe AlGore would cut you a grant from his megabucks.
George
Bill, I was interested that you mentioned Yeovil’s temperature record as an example, since I live nearby.
Yeovil is certainly no longer a “small” town, but that’s irrelevant, as a click on the Met Office link you provided shows the readings to be from Yeovilton, a Royal Naval Air Service air base 4 miles from Yeovil and unconnected with the town.
Denis Hopkins (06:38:13) :
re: cold fusion ” their data and experimnents were not repeatable”
Sorry to go OT, but if you check http://www.LENR-CANR.org you will find that not only were they repeatable, substantial progress has been made in determining the actual physics behind the observed events. I sympathize with the frustration of having science buried by “Expert Opinion”. LENR has been going through the same kind of event.
Do you really believe they can’t measure a few things at one site and use that to calculate the entire world’s part, present and future climate? Come on! They got computers now!
George E Smith
I’d love to go there, if I have a chance to converse with shamans.
Bill
Be a darling and turn those data into graphs for us. I’m afraid I can only photoshop material and I don’t currently have time on my side to learn excel or R. I know it’s not Yamal, but actually I am interested. For instance, the GISS Ross-on-Wye record only runs from 1880-1975. I really didn’t believe it stopped there.
Paul N
I’m not outside reach of Yeovil. Yes, weather station at airbase. UK Met Office used to be under RAF, or something like that, in the innocent old days.
Everyone
Thanks for so many kind words of encouragement. Kinda surprised me, but I did feel proud of this page. There’s another one coming in about a fortnight I hope on the UK, then I need to take a break to move house and other things.
AJStrata (08:53:15) :”Most living things respond to hours of daylight, not temperature (which of course is also tied to hours of daylight).”
Hmm. Good point, one to remember.
Very good, Lucy S.
Bill P (09:22:29) : Polar Urals: “1940 is cold;” (?)
I think you’ve caught my sloppy work. It looked at first sight like 1940 but I think maybe it has to be 1942. This is the downside of working visually not with Excel. But I’ll try to do one really large graph of Salehard now and link it in, with finer calibrations if poss, as it seems a good standard.
Hi Lucy hope you are having a nice day.
It looks like you did a nice job of collecting the data. You should ( and so should everyone who posts) get in the habit of posting your data as used. You collected data from GISS. Since we know it always changes it would be wise to collect and post the SNAPSHOT you used. I beat the AGWers with this stick all the time, so good procedures on both sides.. Ok. Also merely posting to the
URL is not enough as we all know that they change, the data behind them changes etc. Ok? Anthony should just make a repository for the data from articles he
posts and if you guest post on wattsup you better have your data
and code ready to be posted. Show the other side HOW ITS DONE.
Next. A visual comparison of the annual temperature records and the tree ring chronology will not tell you much
Their procedure works like this. For the larch the growth season is JJA
june july august ( actually, I think a really short period within that )
For a tree ring series to be “counted” as a treemometer its rings have to
correlate ( you have to do the math) with temp record at certain values. Say, above .4
So the tree ring isnt corelated to the annual temp DIRECTLY, its correlated to the JJA temp.
Anyways, not an expert on this, dont endorse it, but I believe this is what they do in several cases.
Lucy, impressive work.
I noted in your study many references, but they are not listed here or on your website. I am particularly interested in:
“UHI is especially likely in the winter. But note that (42) the difference in character between months, and between summers and winters, is striking – summers have hardly changed”
Great work Lucy! I agree with Steven Mosher. He beat me to it. Did Briffa use only the growing season data for his “correlation”?
Soem years back, if memory serves, S. Macintyre noted that part of the Mann cherry picking was to use Gaspe cedars from the south (sunny) side of hills, but to leave out the north side ones, which showed no recent “warming”. Could the growth driver be insolation? Maybe the north side trees were in the shade of the hills and never experienced any direct increase in insolation. Murray
Thank you for posting, Lucy.
It appears that a lot can be accomplished by “eyeballing” ; – )
And after reading here and at CA about the faux wiggle-matches, inversion gymnastics, adjustment athletics, weighting exhibitions, scaling competitions, cherry-picking festivals and doublespeak demos by the warmers… well, let the “professional” who is without sin cast the first stone at this effort.
If I can rephrase some of what I’m learning here:
1. Individual temperature records from a wide area of Siberia appear to correlate pretty well. (The claim that Soviet-era record-keepers tampered with the numbers for heating oil allocations sounds likely. If it occurred, how do you think it affected the instrumental record?).
2. If (in spite of the alleged tampering) the these (relatively short) ground temperature records (Yamal and Polar Urals) can be believed, they negate the claim that warming in the last decade was an unprecedented occurrence, since both graphs show greater warming in the early 1940’s then in the 90’s.
3. There isn’t enough tree ring evidence (whether because of Briffa’s cherrypicking, or whatever…) to support any assumptions about modern temperatures – cooling or warming.
Somewhere I read that Briffa’s paleo record was better represented than the modern. In other words, that he had more tree ring samples from the period prior to the 1880’s. Do you find his graph of the paleo record any more compelling?
Steve S. 8:26:40 “And those who care deeply about our planet should be given an added extension of forgiveness and appreciation.
So be nice and let’s move forward with policies to acheive what’s best for all of us and the planet. ”
Are you for real? Are you kidding? What is your definition of “care deeply about our planet”? Scientists should cherry pick data, falsify data, hide their data for years, refuse to abide by the scientific method? This is how a scientist cares? Major BS — maybe elephantS nor whaleS — and a lot more besides. Take your bleeding heart and destroy some other society; not ours; not that part of the world that has no truck with totalitaria
There have been several comments to this effect:
“The calibration to yearly average temperature is irrelevant, Briffa’s actual proxy reconstruction is only calibrated against the growing period.”
Sure.
But the resulting reconstruction is then turned around and used as the ruler itself. It is often nice to know that your ruler actually has the slightest bearing on actually measuring the subject matter of interest.
Reductio ad absurdum A broken clock is both perfectly accurate and precise–and will thus have an astonishing correlation under any metric–when only used at precisely the time denoted by the hands.
Using Briffa’s reconstruction to determine average yearly temperatures should involve at last some checking on how well that concept might work in the available instrumental period.
Even ignoring uncertainties involved in extrapolating, or difficulties in determining the correct historical growing period, it is handy to perform the actual calibration of interest.
Steve S. 8:26:40 “And those who care deeply about our planet should be given an added extension of forgiveness and appreciation.
So be nice and let’s move forward with policies to acheive what’s best for all of us and the planet. ”
Are you for real? Are you kidding? What is your definition of “care deeply about our planet”? Scientists should cherry pick data, falsify data, hide their data for years, refuse to abide by the scientific method? This is how a scientist cares? Major BS — maybe elephantS nor whaleS — and a lot more besides. Take your bleeding heart and destroy some other society; not ours; not that part of the world that has no truck with totalitaria
Must have hit the wrong key in my excitable moment! To finish…not that part of the world that has no truck with totalitarian methods. What you want is for the elites who “care” to be able to falsify all evidence and control all information so they can force everyone else to do their will (so-called “save the Earth”). Sorry. That won’t pass muster here. The scientific method in a scientific enterprise or you are called out, shamed, humiliated and you will never regain your reputation as a scientist. And I am all for firing and/or prosecution. Wake up Steve S.
Nations with wealthy and free individual citizens voluntarily limit family size and work hard to preserve their environments.
Nations with poor and unfree individual citizens are forced to survive by relying on their offspring and so produce more of them. The environment must necessarily take second place to survival.
The Earth will only ever reach a sustainable people/environment balance if everyone on the planet becomes rich enough and free enough as fast as possible.
Artificial pricing of energy by political dictat takes us in exactly the opposite direction and will be far worse for both people and the environment than energy priced by market forces.
The conscience money that the more advanced nations are going to have to pay to the less advanced isn’t going to help the planet one jot.
It will just be a transfer of wealth from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries with a negative effect on global sustainability.
The net result will be lots of rich people in all countries dominating the vast unfree majority who will be kept poor forever with the most malign consequences possible for the planet.
Bill P (09:22:29) : Polar Urals: “1940 is cold;” (?)
Here is my new graph, added to the page. It was 1941 and I’ve added all the spike years which are hopefully correct now. Thanks.
“”” Stephen Wilde (13:41:29) : “””
Well you can’t force people to be successful.
We already violate Gaia’s rule of survival of the fittest; by insisting on ensuring the survival of those that Gaia would have the Sabre Toothed Tigers, and Dire Wolves eat. But that is what after all makes us human. That blind person (excuse me; sight impaired) that MN would destroy, just might be a very talented organist or pianist, and “pay” for their own survival by making life more pleasant for us with their talents; whatever they are.
So we freely violate Gaia’s law, since none of us is so smart as to choose who should survive.
But when we do it on such massivs scales, as to support those who just turn out to be lazy, besides being untalented. We should never abandon the unfortunate; but we shouldn’t encourage just plain slackers either.
steven mosher (12:17:12) :
Hi Mosh. good to hear you.
(1) Ha. Data. You are right of course. However, I didn’t draw the graphs fresh from the figures because I haven’t even learned excel graphs let alone R (it’s all done in photoshop) and don’t currently have the time to learn. BUT I did keep the original GISS graphs, which are date-stamped at time of download, around 21 October, I’ll do a screenshot of that. The truth is, I’ve not got years of science training and work behind me, just a reasonably sharp mind and eye and passion for helping the derailed science, so I use whatever tools are to hand and hope that others can take up the torch and improve my work. I could write a whole essay on this. BUT I do appreciate that standards are vital.
(2) June July August. Thanks for that info. For that I need to be able to construct the graphs from the data. I think I’ll download the data anyway so it’s close date-wise to the graphs used. And take a screen shot of the files. Any offers to construct those graphs? Will it make a difference? Possibly, because I see Briffa 2007 shows the classic UHI-looking uptick for the summer graph. See my note to Tom in Texas, below. I need to mull over this one. Any thoughts?
Tom in Texas (12:26:28) :
(1) References: my numbers in brackets were not done as per academic practice, referring to others’ work. I should have done something different. It was simply my own way of tallying the points I was noticing – because there are so many, many are only small details, but they all add up.
(2) I said in my piece, rather off the top of my head, that I reckoned UHI in winter was higher. This was a thought I had on the spot when I wrote and I shouldn’t have included it because it’s only a thought. I remembered the Russian winter heating that we all know about from exposed pipes shown at WUWT last year. But I see that Briffa 2007 has a temperature graph that flicks up in the SUMMER rather than the winter. Or at any rate, the winter noise drowns the signal. I think UHI is a serious issue that we need as a skeptics community to be able to crack, at least to reasonable approximations, for any given station, to bypass GISS and CRU.
Lucy, first I want to commend you on doing what you have done. This is to actually run the numbers yourself.
However, as a couple of other commenters have pointed out, the correlation is not with the whole year. In doing this kind of analysis, you first need to find out which month(s) the tree rings are correlated with. (I don’t know how Briffa did the analysis, but that’s how I do it.)
In this case, the correlation is with July, and somewhat June as well. I haven’t done all of the analyses, but I find the following correlations between the tree ring data and local temperature records for July alone:
Salehard – 0.60
Berezovo – 0.53
Mys Kammenyj – 0.60
In other words, it does appear that there is a signal in the Yamal records. Whether that signal can be extracted and used to reconstruct historical temperatures is another question … but I fear that your analysis above does not establish a lack of correlation.
Bill P (13:27:24) :
(1) yes, you’ve summarised it about right. And you appreciate the virtues of eyeballing (not that I would want to do without proper calculated material, just that visuals are important too, like anecdotal evidence, and show much that narrow precision can miss).
(2) my object here was to use the oldest thermometer records, linked to all the rest, to cover as (hehe) “robustly” as possible, the time of splice between supposedly steady past temperatures and recent “alarming” rise. I’m a bit dizzy with having seen lots of pics recently and I have the distinct feeling that somewhere I’ve seen evidence of treerings correlating to the MWP that (unlike what Bill suggests) we know very robustly exists from many peer-reviewed sources as well as anecdotal ones. Also I felt that some kind of pattern was evident in even the rogue treerings – see also my second Yamal post. It just wasn’t a correlation to the longterm temperature record. Not in that tiny set. So altogether, I’m definitely open to the possibility that treerings as temperature proxies may yet prove usable. But not until we get the AGW bias out of the way. And I don’t want to discount the possibility that treerings may beat to a different drum… like cosmic radiation. Evidence is appearing along such lines.
George E Smith (14:43:07)
I agree entirely.
But who supports the slackers ?
Anyone who supports tyranny (foreign aid to rulers and support for helpful tyrants rather than for the poorest of the ruled).
And anyone who buys votes with over generous payments from taxpayer funds.
In both cases over powerful government is the problem not the cure.
I call it ‘the decadence of democracy’ and there is no solution.
On balance I thing the West is on the way out, the East will gain control but with hugely different cultural imperatives and 500 years from now, if anything remains, the 500 years from Simon de Montford’s Parliament to the creation of the European Union will be the golden age long since lost notwithstanding the violent upheavals that occurred during that period.
I prefer a glass half full to a glass half empty but the present situation makes me glad that at my age I’m an observer rather than a participant.
Willis Eschenbach (14:53:32) :
I think Lucy’s point is that it for those who propose a correlation to prove it and not for her to disprove it.
She has provided more than enough doubt for the proposers of a correlation to have a serious case to answer.
I speak as a lawyer, not a scientist.
Lucy,
Don’t let your critics rattle you.
None of us have the complete answer.
What matters is to show that the ‘science is settled’ brigade are talking through their a**** and you have made a substantial contribution to demonstrating that.
The real world is telling us that more GHGs do not seem to translate into a measurable climate effect despite the absorption characteristics of those gases in the air.
Deciding that CO2 levels are a significant contributor to climate changes was always fanciful and that idea was opportunistically hijacked for political reasons by ideologues to the detriment of real climate research over the past 30 years.
Climatology as a science is not far from the foetus stage and we all stand to be corrected but its a certainty that the so called professionals haven’t a clue.
Great work Lucy Skywalker!! Another missile in the exhaust port!! You must have bulls-eyed swamp rats back home!!! Difficult to refute actual temperature data against proxy data. Some sleepless nights for Briffa once the data was released. I hope we see more data released. I suspect there will be more of this kind of result.
Willis Eschenbach (14:53:32) :
The point that you, Mosh, and others make, re correlation to summer months, is an important one, and I guess the one RC will most want to use. I was stalled by it now, and took time out to look at the issues. My first thought is that it is a case of being blinded by Science, so that we stop seeing and pursuing the obvious. It is long-term temperature changes we are looking for, and we should, therefore, IMHO, see correlation in temperatures at all times of the year ie the mean temperatures, not just the growing season temperatures. If we see one thing in the growing season and another at other times, surely this can only be because the sample is too small to eliminate noise sufficiently? I think we can see this issue in at least one other instance. If you look at Briffa 2007’s maps for different trends of different growing-season factors, they are all different. To me, this suggests strongly that we are seeing weather not climate (noise not signal) in this case because the variations are so small.
I shall go on thinking about this one. Thanks.
As others have noted the correlation was not with the annual temperature but with selected months depending on the site (e.g. Yamal, June, July). Bearing this in mind, Briffa has only shown the historical record of the temperature for these particular months. It is perhaps amusing to note that the correlation with the Nov temperatures also reaches 95% confidence, but with an inverse correlation, which clearly shows the relationship between treering and temperature is more complex than is suggested by the simple correlation. (Figure 6b(i) Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2008 363, 2269-2282). In fact based on this, admittedly aphysical model, you could reach the reverse conclusions
Lucy, thanks for your reply. You say:
Actually, that’s not the case. It is frequently inherent in the plant itself. Some plants require cold at a particular time of year to grow well. Here’s some typical quotes off the internet, referring to various plant:
Thus, particularly in the arctic or sub-arctic regions, it is not at all uncommon for a tree or other plant to be positively correlated with temperature during one part of the year and negatively correlated with temperature in another part of the year. Not to mention uncorrelated with temperature during some other parts of the year.
Rather OT but something which might be of interest, looking at the paper Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2008 363, 2269-2282, there is a very interesting comment with respect to climate modelling on page 2280
“Indeed even the maximum concordance values calculated for the series 101-year
windows reach only just above 0.3, barely significant, while values approaching 0.4 occur in the naturally forced experiment.”.
In other words the particular GCM with greenhouse gas forcings used was less successful at reproducing the observational and tree-ring temperatures than the natural forcings. Three interpretations if we accept the temperature record as correct, first this particular GCM was inadequate, second the GCM was applied in a way which it was not fit for, and third the changes in temperature have nothing to do with greenhouse gas forcing. I suspect the second is the correct one.
Eschenbach (16:47:38) “Thus, particularly in the arctic or sub-arctic regions, it is not at all uncommon for a tree or other plant to be positively correlated with temperature during one part of the year and negatively correlated with temperature in another part of the year. Not to mention uncorrelated with temperature during some other parts of the year.” In essence (and thoroughly established on WUWT on several posts), actual temperature measurements are far more accurate than any other proxy. Duh.
Lucy, a few days ago, Anthony did a story based on the article at http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=776 Can you have a look at what the tree rings say about that era? My understanding of the hockey shtick is that temperatures today, when the old western and eastern Greenland settlements are arctic tundra, are allegedly much warmer than 1000 to 600 years ago, when the western and eastern Greenland settlements were thriving agricultural communities. I.e. the hockey shtick is plain absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong. And if it is so spectacularly wrong about one of the few items we *CAN* cross-check, how many other errors are there in various temperature reconstructions that we *CAN’T* cross-check?
Willis, you’re playing a good devil’s advocate, thanks. It’s too late for me to ruminate further, but I know that in the past, folk like Tamino have, once I’ve digested their stuff properly, ended up giving me excellent ammunition. But at this point I’m not sure…
Lucy, thanks for your comments. I am most impressed with your way of investigating a study, which is to go out, get the data, and run the numbers yourself. The world needs much more of that, as just sitting back and saying either “I believe it” or “I don’t believe it” doesn’t go anywhere. I encourage you to continue in that vein. Please take my comments in the most supportive manner in which they are intended.
My very best to you,
w.
The June, July, August temperature aspect is not important.
The claim made was that tree-rings represent temperature for the whole year.
If Briffa would have said “this is only JJA months and I don’t know about the rest of the year”, the paper would have died and would not have appeared in every other hockey stick study trying to show the recent warming was extraordinary.
I just don’t know how many times we can examine the actual data behind these studies and find it does not support the claims made before a person has to say “it almost looks like all of it is just …”
David Ball (17:09:54), you say:
I fear that my writing is not clear, as that is not the point I was making. As you say, it is obvious that a thermometer is a better thermometer than anything that is not a thermometer … but that’s not the issue.
The issue is, how can we determine the temperature when there are no thermometers? There are a variety of proxies which have been used for this purpose (∂O18/O16 ratios, tree rings, speleothems, Ca/Mg ratios, lake sediments, etc.)
I do think that there is a temperature signal in tree ring widths. However, I do not think that they make a very good temperature proxy, for a variety of reasons. Inter alia, they are often proxies only for the temperature of a particular month, and even there they have problems (U-shaped temperature response, moisture and exposure as confounding variables, difficulty in establishing ring widths from a single core, necessity for “standardization”, etc.) All of these combine to make it very difficult to extract a temperature signal from the “noise”.
Willis Eschenbach, I did not misunderstand you. I know that was not the point you were making, but it is the point I was making. You said “The issue is, how can we determine the temperature when there are no thermometers?” But there are thermometers used here. As clean as can be expected data. Why did Briffa use proxy instead of the thermometer data? That seems to me to be the real issue. It also seems to me to be very clear why the proxy was used and not calibrated instrument readings.
bill (10:42:46) :
Lucy Skywalker (09:56:29) :
“Have a look at Ross on Wye, yeovil, Tiree, Lerwick – The last 2 are small island communities. The others are small towns. All show increasing temperature.”
And a positive AMO does not affect your side of the pond, Bill??
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Damn impressive post, Lucy.
Thank you for your efforts.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Stephen Wilde “It will just be a transfer of wealth from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries with a negative effect on global sustainability.”
Did anyone catch this? It needs to be repeated….again and again.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
And why does that’s being said here make it false?
Lucy Skywalker (14:48:32) :
thanks lucy. WRT data. I’m trying to lobby everyone to establish data archives for the posts they do. set a standard for blogs that EXCEEDS the shabby performance of science journals.
WRT JJA, heed what willis has to say, he knows more than I do on this. How one goes from a seasonal correlation to an annual figure is a mystery to me. but I raise the issue so that I can learn.
thanks for your effort. All the best
moshpit
Willis Eschenbach (14:53:32) : do you need to lag the tree response to the growing season. I mean the tree doesnt respond instanteously to the weather…and the effect of the response lingers beyond the ‘weather’ signal.. dont trees redden the signal?
Hi Willis
Ruminating, I find my response is pretty neatly made already by several posters if we stack them together:
David Ball (17:09:54) :
Eschenbach (16:47:38) “Thus, particularly in the arctic or sub-arctic regions, it is not at all uncommon for a tree or other plant to be positively correlated with temperature during one part of the year and negatively correlated with temperature in another part of the year. Not to mention uncorrelated with temperature during some other parts of the year.” In essence (and thoroughly established on WUWT on several posts), actual temperature measurements are far more accurate than any other proxy.
njc (16:11:41) :
It is perhaps amusing to note that the correlation with the Nov temperatures also reaches 95% confidence, but with an inverse correlation, which clearly shows the relationship between treering and temperature is more complex than is suggested by the simple correlation. (Figure 6b(i) Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2008 363, 2269-2282).
Walter Dnes (17:39:30) :
Anthony did a story [on a medieval Greenland farm preserved in permafrost until now], based on http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=776 [The hockey stick says] that temperatures today, when the old western and eastern Greenland settlements are arctic tundra, are allegedly much warmer than 1000 to 600 years ago, when the western and eastern Greenland settlements were thriving agricultural communities. I.e. it is plain absolutely wrong… And if it is so spectacularly wrong about one of the few items we *CAN* cross-check, how many other errors are there in various temperature reconstructions that we *CAN’T* cross-check?
Bill Illis (18:45:04) :
The June, July, August temperature aspect is not important. The claim made was that tree-rings represent temperature for the whole year. If Briffa would have said “this is only JJA months and I don’t know about the rest of the year”, the paper would have died and would not have appeared in every other hockey stick study trying to show the recent warming was extraordinary.
David Ball (20:18:19) :
Willis Eschenbach… said “The issue is, how can we determine the temperature when there are no thermometers?” But there are thermometers used here. As clean as can be expected data. Why did Briffa use proxy instead of the thermometer data?
Stephen Wilde (15:17:20) :
I think Lucy’s point is that it for those who propose a correlation to prove it and not for her to disprove it. She has provided more than enough doubt for the proposers of a correlation to have a serious case to answer. I speak as a lawyer, not a scientist.
Law and science overlap insofar as both are concerned about “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. For a long time, ivory-tower science could leave out many essentially human factors and commonsense doubts, and get away with “trust me, I’m a scientist”. This state of affairs had its upside for some good science. But with alarmism driving the funding and conclusions, the trust has been undermined.
I mean, Willis, “seasonal” and “sometimes inverse correlations” are special pleading, and stacking those on top of the “scandalous” issues with which I started, it’s too much to expect tame trust and belief to follow. These points would need to be shown to be crucial, essential, unavoidable… and in simple language that answers the obvious doubts of small sample and non-correlation with the basic temperature mean records.
Has anyone considered that these sites are in close vicinity to the massive Russian oil and gas fields, possibly affecting temps, water, soil, atmosphere or trees? Also that the Yamal penninsula may be geologically very young and that profound regional changes may still be occuring?
Glenn, I looked at the substantial Yamal oilfield, the megaton Tsar Bomba (Novaya Zemlya) and underwater volcanoes, but none of these seemed to fit though you can prove me wrong. If you look at the little video or slideshow I linked to on one of my Yamal pages you get an excellent feel for the terrain. Microclimate issues I would think are likely. Water puddles and water courses changing in a flattish permafrosted landscape. CA have had a lot of informed folk opining there, people who know about trees. Things like the effect of poor root formation where there’s permafrost. There are so many possible variables. Only way is to cut the Gordian knot with appropriately large samples.
Lucy
One should remember that trees grow when they can, and do not ungrow.
A warm optimum month will give a ring width of x. A similarly warm month out of growing season will not give much if any growth – no leaves – no photosynthesis. A cooler longer period in the growing season may of course give a ring width of x.
On could surmise that a greater tree ring width = higher growing season temps = higher yearly average temp. But I do not think Briffa states this.
In Briffas paper the summary states
“A set of long tree-ring chronologies provides empirical evidence of
association between inter-annual tree growth and local, primarily summer, temperature variability at each location.”
The text states:
“”…there is clear evidence of relatively high growth rates
and, hence, evidence for a prevalence of inferred
relatively warm summers during the twentieth century
in each of these regions and, as a consequence, in the
average northwest Eurasian series.”
“In northern Eurasia, up to
70% of the variance in indices of timberline ring-width
variations can be associated with summer temperature
changes (Jacoby et al. 2000; Naurzbaev & Vaganov
2000; Vaganov et al. 2000; Briffa et al. 2001, 2002).”
“While noting the probable sensitivity of the results to
the particular analysis period (Esper et al. 2005), it is
still apparent that the optimum sensitivity in Fennoscandia,
is to July and August temperatures. In Yamal,
the season is somewhat earlier, in June and July,
whereas in Avam–Taimyr, only warm July temperatures
exert a clear positive growth influence.”
“Again allowing for sampling error, these results
imply that the more precise timing of the statistically
significant temperature influences on tree growth
encompasses late June, July and early August in
Fennoscandia, late May, June and early July in Yamal,
and the second half of June and the first half of July at
Avam–Taimyr, the latter also consistent with the results
of previous work (Kirdyanov et al. 2003). These results
also imply that, while early spring warmth in March
is likely to enhance ring-width growth in Fennoscandia
(figure 6a), it is detrimental in Yamal (figure 6b) and
Avam–Taimyr (figure 6c).”
I do not see where he equates ring width to average annual temperature.
I think in the document he proves that there is a reasonable correlation between temperature (during certain months) and ring width. It is now up to someone else to disprove this.
Lucy I now have produced a spread sheet that creates time averaged/not time averaged and location averaged for UK (or anywhere else for that matter) plots.
it is reasonably easy to drive and can be sent to an email address if requested or I will plot to JPGs whatever places and averages you request. The data is from the page I referenced so only a few UK places for free. However I can get data from GISS if requested.
Willis Eschenbach (14:53:32) said:
In doing this kind of analysis, you first need to find out which month(s) the tree rings are correlated with. (I don’t know how Briffa did the analysis, but that’s how I do it.)
I already cited Hantemirov PhD Thesis abstract (2009, in Russian) at this thread, who did the analysis at the whole dataset (collections started 1997/8) and found the highest correlations of temperature and growth being between July 16 and June 30.
In his Thesis, he evades any mention about global or yearly temperature and writes only about larches as proxies for SUMMER temperature.
savethesharks (22:51:37) :
And a positive AMO does not affect your side of the pond, Bill??
The answer to this is – not a lot:
http://img390.imageshack.us/img390/4466/amocethadcruttsicrutshr.jpg
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/6020/amocethadcrutcrut.jpg
Compare CET and AMO
Beware end of plots – excel plots cells containing code but null (blank) data as zero don’t know how to turn this off!
I looked at summer anomalies for Salehard, and found similar behavior. Yamal does correlate with Salehard at about .4. However, the summer temperatures have the same behaviour, with 1980-2000 temperatures the same as 1925-1950.
I’m curious to see if Tamino will have another cherry-picked debunking.
savethesharks (22:51:37) :
And a positive AMO does not affect your side of the pond, Bill??
bill (07:12:13) :”The answer to this is – not a lot:
http://img390.imageshack.us/img390/4466/amocethadcruttsicrutshr.jpg
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/6020/amocethadcrutcrut.jpg
Compare CET and AMO
Beware end of plots – excel plots cells containing code but null (blank) data as zero don’t know how to turn this off!”
Are you blind??? There is a pretty damn good correlation there.
To say the oscillations of the AMO not affecting the UK, especially when they are downstream of all the Atlantic weather and ocean temps…is akin for someone to claim the PDO does not directly affect the western USA!!
Thanks for the great graph though.
Helps prove that the big-daddy Atlantic has some first-generation, significant say-so in Euro weather, like we all know it does.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Much is made about a correlation, but the observed co-efficients of around 0.4 can be viewed as being rather low. In fact the growing season temperature is a poor explanatory parameter since it fails to explain the majority of the variance in the tree-ring data. Some other factor(s) must be involved and for all we know could explain the observed tree ring data better.
In this context, it should be understood that it is not a question of disproving the correlation shown in the Briffa paper, which is there whether or not we believe the interpretation placed upon it, but rather establishing which other factors are required to explain the tree-ring data.
Still say correspondence is surprisingly unrelated:
http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/9026/amocetheavilyfiltered.jpg
and very unrelated over shorter timescale:
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/6707/amocet.jpg
certainly plenty of unrelated changes over 5 years
Steve McIntyre posted the Yamal / Urals core count in a graph at Climate Audit, back on the 19th. I was thinking that there was a stronger paleo record, but it appears that Yamal, Urals, and Taimyr all have relatively thin (20 – 25 core) counts for the 10th to the 17th centuries.
http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/core_counts_region.gif
Anyone know how big the Russian scientists’ original sampling was?
I think it’s pretty easy to explain Briffa’s work as well as others like Mann. In the late 90s the concept of AGW was assumed to be gospel. Groupthink was dominant. These scientists were simply racing to show what they already knew to be true.
Of course, this is a poor way to do science at any time. Now, they are scrambling to preserve their reputations which just leads to more mistakes. They would do much better to admit they were sloppy. It will be interesting to see if any of them can admit it.
This entire article is irrelevent, and its findings not worthy of paying attention to, because it was not “peer reviewed” by Michael Mann and company. Only articles published in journals “peer reviewed” by the Mann gang are to be taken seriously.
Do we know definitively if this particular species is “constant growing period” or if it grows for the entire thawed period?
Because regardless of the correlation of Rings-to-JJ Temp during the instrumental period, I can imagine rather severe issues extrapolating those results through the LIA or MWP.
bill said (amongst other things) :
“A warm optimum month will give a ring width of x. A similarly warm month out of growing season will not give much if any growth – no leaves – no photosynthesis. A cooler longer period in the growing season may of course give a ring width of x.”
Tree growth is a little more complicated than that. Root growth and shoot growth are not on the same schedule, for one thing, and, of course, photosynthesis is only part of the story. Remember respiration?
The soil cools more slowly than the air and roots go on growing well after the foliage has ceased to exist ( in the case of deciduous trees). In fact, vigorous shoot growth suppresses root growth. The roots get to do their thing when those hormones from the shoot stop coming.
So, it’s not hard to imagine a warm autumn with plenty of moisture leading to a great deal of root growth, whose benefit is only revealed the following spring, when the shoot is able to capitalize on the sugars it sent below ground the previous fall.
Bill,
As you are aware, there are MULTIPLE LINES of evidence supporting AGW.
There are three possible conclusions regarding AGW:
1) An overwhelming majority of international climate experts agree about much of the tenets of AGW and are honest.
2) An overwhelming majority of international climate experts are ignorant about their own expertise in a sudden and collective manner. (Although Lucy is nicer and calls this choice “group think”.)
3) They have all agreed to conspire to delude the billions of folks on the planet and just a very tiny percentage of them (and mostly unpublished) are trying to save us all from this mass hoax.
Common sense and a sense of probability should lead one to the likely correct choice (#1) above but almost every poster here chooses #2 or #3. If you look at Lucy’s Website you can see the sources she has used to arrive at her choice of #2 and her choice is not surprising.
Scott
If you want to post a reply can you do it on ‘In betweeners’ as this particlar thread is just about to drop off the edge of the flat world.
Tell me, do you agree with the IPCC’s claim of persistently cool temperatures throughout the 16-19th century and the Met office claim of lack of climate variabilty prior to the modern age?
Do you also believe we have such a thing as a reliable single global temperature and that the Giss data is a pillar of certainty and rectitude? Do you realise that much of the data covers urban areas but the allowance for UHI is virtually zero? Do you realise that ‘Global’ temperatures started at the bottom of the last climate cycle?
Are you aware of the abundant proof of warmer temperatures in the MWP and Roman periods?
tonyb
Scott Mandia,
It is not unusual for an entire scientific field to be wrong about something for extended periods of time.
The atom can’t be split, the world is flat, the Earth is the centre of the universe, temperatures will be +0.85C in 2009, temperatures will continue rising at 0.2C per decade as long as there isn’t a volcano, the ENSO can be ignored, etc.
TonyB (11:34:45) :
Scott
If you want to post a reply can you do it on ‘In betweeners’ as this particular thread is just about to drop off the edge of the flat world.
That’s why–as I suggested in the thread that asked for site-improvement ideas–the number of clickable threads in the sidebar should be doubled, especially now that new threads are being added at such a brisk pace.
Scott A. Mandia (09:50:09) :
Bill,
As you are aware, there are MULTIPLE LINES of evidence supporting AGW.
I am not aware of any peer reviewd evidence that is not dependent drastically on computer models with hidden inner parameters, assumptions etc.
Please give a link to a non model dependent evidence of AGW .
There are three possible conclusions regarding AGW:
1) An overwhelming majority of international climate experts agree about much of the tenets of AGW and are honest.
tenets? From webster:
Main Entry: te·net
Pronunciation: \ˈte-nət also ˈtē-nət\
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, he holds, from tenēre to hold
Date: circa 1600
: a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true; especially : one held in common by members of an organization,
could describe a cult.
if it is science, it can only have axioms, theorems derived from them and data to check the theory and falsify it if possible. Honesty is good, but an honest fool is not to be trusted on his/her statements.
2) An overwhelming majority of international climate experts are ignorant about their own expertise in a sudden and collective manner. (Although Lucy is nicer and calls this choice “group think”.)
3) They have all agreed to conspire to delude the billions of folks on the planet and just a very tiny percentage of them (and mostly unpublished) are trying to save us all from this mass hoax.
I agree that 3 is extreme. If they were that good at conspiracy , they would already rule the world.
That leaves 2,which I would phrase “An overwhelming majority of international climate experts are depending on their own expertise and are not bothered with the facts, the data that is. ( see Lindzen’s deconstruction posted here)
I can’t tell you how tired I am of people saying “A consensus of scientists believe in AGW” or the like.
The problem with this is that the statement itself is meaningless.
Let me explain what I mean by looking at various statements of what scientists agree with and don’t agree with.
1. The earth is warming over the last century or more. There is general agreement with this.
2. Humans have had some affect of an unknown size on the climate. Again, there is widespread agreement with this as well.
However, at this point the agreement starts to break down very badly. How are we affecting the climate? Is it CO2, or methane, or what? How much do humans affect the climate? Is the total effect responsible for 10% of the changes we see, or 90%, or somewhere in between? And once that is answered, how much of that effect is from each putative cause? Is it 90% CO2 and 10% black carbon, or the other way around, or neither?
My own belief, sustained not by models but by evidence, is that we have affected the climate in several ways. Primarily, these are through changes in land use/land cover (LU/LC), aerosols, and black carbon. I suspect that the largest effect is from black carbon in the arctic, which warms the arctic but doesn’t have much effect elsewhere. LU/LC changes generally tend to warm the planet. When you cut down the trees, you cut down the clouds. Aerosols seem to have different effects, and those effects can be quite subtle (e.g. aerosols affecting cloud formation).
However, as I detail in my Thunderstorm Thermostat Hypothesis, I don’t think that these affect the climate all that much.
So tell me … do I believe in AGW, or not? Most people would say that, because I don’t believe that CO2 sets the global temperature, I don’t believe in AGW. I would say I do believe in AGW, I just think the effect is very small.
And more to the point, as an AGW “believer”, am I driven by honesty, by ignorance, or by conspiracy? Are those the only possibilities? Or am I just some guy doing my best to make sense of a complex world, with my own valuable insights happily coexisting with my own total blind spots and incorrect beliefs?
That’s why I grow weary of claims of the consensus. Yes, many scientists believe that humans are affecting the climate … but how much are we affecting it, and in what ways, and how much of each way?
And once we get past that, how much of the so-called “consensus” is “group think”, and how much is based on a misplaced faith in tinkertoy models, and how much is driven by wanting some of the funding which goes mostly to AGW supporters, and how much is driven by fear of losing a job, and how much is driven by a desire for publicity, and how much is …
There is no simple multiple-choice “pick one of three” answer to that question about the “consensus”.
Finally, I don’t care in the slightest if there is a consensus. It is totally meaningless. As Michael Crichton succinctly put it,
Read Crichton’s speech, it is well worth the time.
So despite the facile claim that
this is just another example of the “fallacy of the excluded middle”. There are many more possibilities than the trio of honesty, ignorance, and conspiracy … to start with, there’s the possibility that Scott A. Mandia (09:50:09) has asked a question which is so poorly posed as to not have an answer. Then there’s the possibility that the “consensus” disappears when we ask more carefully phrased questions. There’s also the possibility that people are driven by more than honesty, ignorance or conspiracy. Like fear of disagreement. Like fear of losing a job. Like a desire to appear to know the answers. Like a craving for publicity. Like a wish to obtain funding. Like a desire for power. Humans are complex beings, the idea that there are only three possible answers is nonsense.
So please, let’s get past simplistic questions that claim to have only a few possible answers. As with most things on this planet (including the climate), it ain’t as simple as people like to claim …
Bill, I’d be really delighted to get graphs of:
(a) Salehard in as many seasons as you can manage reasonably
(b) UK records that are NOT on the GISS list (you used Hadley I think) especially Ross-on-Wye and outliers like Lerwick, which ones did you mention? – if they have good long runs – or even if they don’t.
(c) comparisons between outliers like Lerwick with AMO. Which brings me to a puzzle. They graphs you put up distinctly DO show correlations, and I’m totally bemused and not comfortable why on earth you say they don’t. Heck, they show far more correlation than Yamal treerings to thermometers. You have to allow smoothing because the AMO is a slow stately creature, not like the capricious jet streams which can put lots of different weather signals over the short term.
Now if you are still game, please email me via my website. Thanks!
Willis, thanks, you said my POV pretty thoroughly.
Scottie, there were several phrases you used that just made me think “this man is simply not doing real science, he’s regurgitating, not investigating or checking”. For a start, I’ve already told you that while I was a warmist, I investigated all those “MULTIPLE LINES of evidence supporting AGW” to which you refer, linking Bill as a co-expert but by inference counting the rest of us out. I told you that not only did I investigate them, I believed them because for a while they seemed to hold up… then holes started to appear and I investigated… again… a bit further… and hole after hole after hole started to appear. Although you refer disparagingly to my sources, you fail to note that I also STILL reference those warmist websites I once used to believe… Gristmill, Skeptical Science, the New Scientist’s pages, etc. So please don’t put words in my mouth until you have investigated a bit more thoroughly. But let me encourage you at this point. It is worth it, and it is, in the end, satisfying, therapeutic, and fun, to really do science, believing nobody, in essence. It was the same love of investigation that took me into warmist science and then took me right through and out the other side.
Lucy, there is a very long term dataset (1796-) from Armagh University in Ireland located here.
w.
Lucy I will see what I cane do for salehard (unfortunately GISS has locked me out of their site after I wrote a programme to download the GISS data for surface stations of quality 1,2. Too many accesses and they thought I was doing something naughty!! Have to use a proxy now!)
So in the next few days I will send the excel file to you. It will not be small!
bill (10:45:20), you say:
To avoid this in future, you need to put a pause of a few seconds in the loop.
Typically, the problem is not the number of accesses you are making. It is that constant access prevents other people from accessing the data. So just put a pause in the loop to allow other people to access the data, and you should be fine.
Now I see why there are no “Climatology” programs at major universities. As a physicist, this is voodoo with a Kryptonite doll to me. I will assume given the rigor that went into this and the kudos all around, that this is good work, but as I see it, this METHODOLOGY is the source of my skepticism about Global Warming, not the conclusions.
What proven methodology was followed that assures that the answer derived here is the correct one and the other is not. And what methodology proved that?
I fully agree in principle that this work operates on a better set of assumptions and reaches a conclusion more in agreement with other independent assessments. However whether this type of work is done in support of Global Warming or against it, I will unilaterally harbor heavy skepticism, as ultimately NOTHING IS PROVED while the water gets muddier.
So while offering a great logical challenge to Briffa’s conclusions drawn from these 12 trees, we are still left with the most relevant question that can be asked. And that question is not “Is Briffa right or wrong?” but rather “Does anyone really feel that 12 sets of tree rings from one forest present an accurate representation of the climate of the entire planet over two centuries?”. The fact that this caveat does not precede any and all such presentations, is the primary thing that leaves the bad taste in my mouth when it comes to this issue.
If you feel some reality is represented here, I hope you work in retail. But there are better, more scientifically valid fronts upon which to fight this battle. So as long as it is fought on THIS front, the blame for the damage done to science is shared…
Willis, your post is a perfect illustration of where it’s all gone wrong. I have no problem with your tone, assessment, logic, frustration or questions as a rational being. But science is a razor’s edge. It has no feeling, no fairness, no cordiality, no middle ground and no consolation prizes. Its dominion is very small but its reach is infinite.
So while in this modern day e-world where words travel instantaneously and everyone has their own soapbox, it makes you look nice and enlightened to qualify your words with niceties or a nod to this or that. But from the standpoint of science, statements like:
1. The earth is warming over the last century or more.
2. Humans have had some affect of an unknown size on the climate.
…are complete garbage. Not nice at all of me to say that, I know, but if science were a person he would say:
“Prove it”
And you wouldn’t be able to. Neither one. Even despite the fact that it all may be true. And until someone CAN produce a provable statement, EVERYONE needs to shut up and get back to work.
So to me and many like me that’s the debate. And I’M tired of are people trying to craft the ‘perfect take’ on the issue. The one that sounds nice, nobody can disagree with, and everyone can sleep at night thinking about. Concessionary caveats and unquantifiable suspicions about black carbon and LU/LC ratios are no more valid than the loose conclusions of the non-scientist who just read his first article about AGW. When either of you can predictibly quantify your predictions and rectify them with all known, proven physical mechanisms, then we can have a nice 3 way talk. But I won’t even pencil it into my calendar
Global Warming, like any science lives and dies by this:
Prove it.
And they can’t. Not even the most basic watered down statements like yours. When they can, I’ll believe it. Until then none of the billion trillion words published every day debating the topic are worth a cent or a second of mine or anyone else’s. This article included.
So spare yourself the agony of trying to explain your position but still be a nice guy. Science is about calling a spade a spade, not meeting people halfway. You are not a bad person for doing the same…
Derek D (16:13:18), thanks for your comment. You boil your argument down to:
This merely reveals that you have a deeply flawed understanding of how science works. Nothing in science can ever be proven. Nothing. It can only be shown to be untrue.
As Einstein showed, Newtonian mechanics could be proven wrong. That’s how science advances, by proving that a claim is wrong, because there is nothing that could ever prove Newtonian mechanics right. This in not a new idea, it was laid out in detail in 1962 by Karl Popper.
Please come back when you understand how science works … and in the meantime, don’t bother trying to explain science to people who do know how it works. It just proves you haven’t done your homework since 1962 …
Lucy I’ve put the excel temperature plotter on skydrive and emailed your website the location