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.
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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.