By Steve McIntyre from his camirror.wordpress.com site.
For the very first time, the Climategate Letters “archived” the deleted portion of the Briffa MXD reconstruction of “Hide the Decline” fame – see here. Gavin Schmidt claimed that the decline had been “hidden in plain sight” (see here. ). This isn’t true.
The post-1960 data was deleted from the archived version of this reconstruction at NOAA here and not shown in the corresponding figure in Briffa et al 2001. Nor was the decline shown in the IPCC 2001 graph, one that Mann, Jones, Briffa, Folland and Karl were working in the two weeks prior to the “trick” email (or for that matter in the IPCC 2007 graph, an issue that I’ll return to.)
A retrieval script follows.
For now, here is a graphic showing the deleted data in red. 
Figure 1. Two versions of Briffa MXD reconstruction, showing archived and climategate versions.shown below, clearly does not show the decline in the Briffa MXD reconstruction.
Contrary to Gavin Schmidt’s claim that the decline is “hidden in plain sight”, the inconvenient data has simply been deleted.
The reason, as explained on Sep 22, 1999 by Michael Mann to coauthors in 938018124.txt, was to avoid giving “fodder to the skeptics”. Reasonable people might well disagree with Gavin Schmidt as to whether this is a “a good way to deal with a problem” or simply a trick.
Figure 2. IPCC 2001 Fig 2.21 showing Briffa, Jones and Mann reconstructions together with HadCRU temperature.
Retrieval script:
##COMPARE ARCHIVED BRIFFA VERSION TO CLIMATEGATE VERSION
#1. LOAD ARcHIVED DATA
url<-"ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/n_hem_temp/briffa2001jgr3.txt"
#readLines(url)[1:50]
Briffa<-read.table(url,skip=24,fill=TRUE)
Briffa[Briffa< -900]=NA
dimnames(Briffa)[[2]]<-c("year","Jones98","MBH99","Briffa01","Briffa00","Overpeck97","Crowley00","CRU99")
sapply(Briffa, function(x) range( Briffa$year[!is.na(x)]) )
# year Jones98 MBH99 Briffa01 Briffa00 Overpeck97 Crowley00 CRU99
#[1,] 1000 1000 1000 1402 1000 1600 1000 1871
#[2,] 1999 1991 1980 1960 1993 1990 1987 1997
Briffa= ts(Briffa,start=1000)
#2. LOAD CLIMATEGATE VERSION
loc="http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=146&filename=939154709.txt"
working=readLines(loc,n=1994-1401+104)
working=working[105:length(working)]
x=substr(working,1,14)
writeLines(x,"temp.dat")
gate=read.table("temp.dat")
gate=ts(gate[,2],start=gate[1,1])
#Comparison briffa=ts.union(archive= Briffa[,"Briffa01"],gate ) briffa=window(briffa,start=1402,end=1994) # plot.ts(briffa)
X=briffa
par(mar=c(2.5,3,2,1))
plot( c(time(X)),X[,1],col=col.ipcc,lwd=2,ylim=c(-1.2,.5),yaxs="i",type="n",axes=FALSE,xlab="",ylab="")
for( i in 2:1) lines( c(time(X)),X[,i],col=i,lwd=1)
axis(side=1,tck=.025)
labels0=seq(-1,1,.1);labels0[is.na(match(seq(-1,1,.1),seq(-1,1,.5)))]=""
axis(side=2,at=seq(-1,1,.1),labels=labels0,tck=.025,las=1)
axis(side=4,at=seq(-1,1,.1),labels=labels0,tck=.025)
box()
abline(h=0)
title("Hide the Decline")
legend("topleft",fill=2:1,legend=c("Deleted","Archived"))
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“Why would anyone want to graph data that they already knew was invalid? Omitting it was obviously the right thing to do” – Icarus
Well, you’ll have to excuse us more conventional scientists, but generally where part of our data has a recurrent but unexplainable glitch which can’t be explained by our current theory then we look for the flaw in the theory, not just say “this bit doesn’t work” and then ignore it (and “hide it” in all more public versions of the graph i.e. outside the journals which few will read).
If tree rings can “lose sensitivity” (i.e. lose correlation) with temperature in the late 20th century and you don’t know how or why, then HOW DO YOU KNOW THEY DIDN’T LOSE CORRELATION ELSEWHERE? You don’t. Or put another way, the rest of your data is effectively worthless until and unless you can understand under what circumstances such divergence occurs.
That you and they apparently cannot see that and/or that they publish and use this data regardless is one reason (of many) why “scientist” is not a title they deserve.
When you have been lying and cheating for so long like the AGW crowd what is the problem, why not just keep on lying and cheating. At the current rate of atmospheric increase of carbon dioxide it will only take about another 3500 years to reach record levels (if man is still alive), so come on AGW’ers no time to waste.
The irony is that the AGW hypothesis was first proposed in 1938 in a paper published in the Royal Meteorological Society’s Quarterly Journal (my late father told me about it in 1961, he is currently turning in his grave in disbelief at current Pseudo Scientific Stupidity) and it was proposed as a GOOD thing, people in those days worried about a return to an ice age.
However during the ensuing 70 odd years Earths average temperature has warmed and cooled, all within the range of natural variation according to the empirical record, atmospheric CO2 has steadily increased, and still to this day not one single piece of empirical evidence has been found to support the AGW hypothesis. Come on warmers only 3000 odd years left to find some REAL evidence, then you will not have to keep on lying and cheating, or alternately just throw the towel in and admit that AGW is a NULL HYPOTHESIS. Cheers.
If I had the money I would hire many Large Venue Projectors and paint Copenhagen [from Dec 17th until John Prescott opens the doors!] with images of the “Hide the Decline” graph. Plus a morphing
” Hockey Stick to Reality” graph for good measure. No explanations necessary.
Copenhagen will be tainted [for decades] with the smell of bad science and green political garbage. And John Prescott.
By the way, in 2005, Tom Wigley recommended us another way to see that the hockey-stick-like reconstructions were rubbish:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=538&filename=1119957715.txt
Wigley: “A word of warning. I would be careful about using other, independent paleo reconstruction work as supporting the MBH reconstructions. I am attaching my version of a comparison of the bulk of these other reconstructions. Although these all show the hockey stick shape, the differences between them prior to 1850 make me very nervous. If I were on the greenhouse deniers’ side, I would be inclined to focus on the wide range of paleo results and the differences between them as an argument for dismissing them all.”
That’s interesting. Because he’s not on the “deniers’ side”, he finds it appropriate to hide the evidence against a hypothesis even though he is aware of it.
its a long time since I studied biology, but at my first dendro-lesson I’ve learned that correlation of dendro-data with climate is extremely problematic in the second half of the 20th century. And that the reason is air-pollution.
If I’m not completely mixing things up, already in the 80s these things were discussed in the scientific community.
And now my question:
What has changed since then? Have there falsifications of the above mentioned been published that confirm that (raw) data of tree rings from the second half of the 20th century can be used?
Or may the so-called “scandal” be simply the ususal kind of handling tree-ring data in these kind of studies? And due to the simple fact that the input of Nitrogen, Sulfur etc. into forest ecosystems massively rised after WW2?
Yes indeed. PoMo has also given people a habit of attacking motives, instead of examining reasoning and data.
To me the correct sequence should be:
1. Does the reasoning and data make sense?
2. if not, will people admit this?
3. if not, what possible motive might be driving them?
But PoMo reverses this:
1. They are being driven by a bad motive
2. so they won’t admit
3. that their reasoning and data are bad.
Greenies believe their own motives are pure, and that sceptics’ motives are impure. Therefore greenies’ arguments are right, and skeptics’ arguments are wrong (and even if they are right, they are still wrong). It gets very circular and self-reinforcing.
PoMo did, however, make a great contribution to the deconstruction of oppressive structures in culture, like institutionalised racism, but in its more mediocre forms, PoMo adherents tend to just use it to ignore any rational argument that they don’t like, on the basis that, “well yeah, he would say that, because he’s a…”
That’s where culturally we’re losing the integrity and the standards. In a sense they believe less in science than most people do, simply because they view science as something that’s culturally manufactured. So better to manufacture a science for a “good” cause than to let the greedy nasty people (moms driving SUVs) manufacture science to suit their own consumerist lifestyle.
The other problem is that all this relativistic thinking tends to make greenies quite soft natured, so they can lack the fortitude to live up to their ideals (although some do). Sorry, was that long enough bashing greenies? I’m sure there’s more…
I’m not a scientist, so my first curiosity would be, if we know certain events can render dendro records useless for temperature reconstruction for decades at a time, what other unknown events in the past may render further portions of the records useless?
There seems to be a huge leap of faith between:
“we have some data which is interesting because it seems to suggest there may have been warming if we assume all else is equal, so we need to try to find better ways to reconstruct past temperatures using other kinds of data that are actually reliable, to see if there really has been warming”
and:
“we have some data which suggests past warming, and it would be unhelpful to our publishing schedule to dismiss it just because it might have been contaminated in ways we can’t check, so we’re going to stick to it as gospel, and present it as the ‘weight’ of evidence”.
If engineers were in the habit of using the second approach, my iPod would never work, my plumbing would rarely flush, and my roof would have collapsed.
Official US position on the leaked info is, according to Carol Browner, the “Climate Czar(ina)” —
“Nothing has changed, because the science is settled.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/25/climate-czar-says-e-mails-dont-change-anything/?feat=home_top5_read
The “Reality-Based Community” insists you believe the emperor’s tailor, not your own lying eyes.
We’re all looking at this – and are outraged – on the basis of traditional, normal science. But some science (especially climate science) has been hijacked by a new definition of science, ‘post-normal’ science. If we don’t understand this, we will never understand what has been motivating these guys. I was astonished when I researched this. It’s a neo-Marxist attempt to redefine the role of science. I compiled a post about this that you might find illuminating – especially as it quotes extensively from Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA, in Norwich, UK, and contributor to the IPCC, also involved in the CRU emails. Hulme clearly defines climate science and the IPCC as ‘post-normal’, and so not subject to truth claims in the normal way.
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/
Is there any reason in the original Briffa-report on why the Data from 1960 and onwards was not published?
I think the hiding in plain site comment might be in relation to the IPCC reviewer comment you just posted. In the previous IPCC review they had stopped the chart at 1960 so the decline would not be on the chart. This made it pretty obvious that they did not want people to see the post 1960 data. So they hid it in plain site by faking the data from 1960-2000 so that no one would notice it was missing.
You can search the emails here http://www.eastangliaemails.com/search.php – amazing you can’t make this stuff up
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=868&filename=1206628118.txt
Chillybean 15:39:30:
“Ralph Miliband….David Miliband……Ed Miliband..”
Don’t forget Steve Miliband………..”Some people call me the space cowboy….”
It is easy to assume that the UEA is a place where all the staff think alike: this would be a mistake. While reading The Reference Frame’s post on the CRU leak (an excellent resume by Lubos Motl with this youtube clip — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTGLpqFGyYM), I saw mention of Mike Hulme’s co-authored letter to a newspaper warning of — well the usual stuff — but the interesting part is that the letter was drafted by Dr Helen Wallace, senior scientist for Greenpeace. All he had to do was sign it and kerching! there was another warning from the cognoscenti about the falling sky. Thank you rubber stamps, just sign here and here… Allegedly, of course, for we have not yet heard from Dr Wallace about whether the email is genuine. Anyway, Professor Hulme is made of sterner stuff than this allegation would imply and it is unfair to tar him — and no doubt others at that learned institution — with the the same brush as those who are alleged to be implicated in dubious practices.
So I searched on his name and went to The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/06/mike_hulme_interview/
The extract below is heavily snipped ([]) and is best read in the original:
quote
Just two years ago, Mike Hulme would have been about the last person you’d expect to hear criticising conventional climate change wisdom [] [he was] the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, an organisation so revered by environmentalists that it could be mistaken for the academic wing of the green movement. Since leaving Tyndall [] critic of such sacred cows as the UN’s IPCC, the “consensus”, the over-emphasis on scientific evidence in political debates about climate change, and to defend the rights of so-called “deniers” to contribute to those debates.
As Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, Hulme remains one of the UK’s most distinguished and high-profile climate scientists. In his new book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, he explores how the issue of climate change [has become] as much of a cultural idea as a physical phenomenon.”
[]
Hulme despairs over the comments made to the Copenhagen climate conference in March by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then the Danish Prime Minister. Rasmussen told delegates that “science should be the basis for decision-making in this field”, and asked scientists to keep it simple, “not to provide us with too many moving targets…and not too many considerations on uncertainty and risk and things like that.”
unquote
I urge everyone to read the original.
Uncertainty and risk and things like that! Don’t confuse me with the facts, just tell me what to say! Tell me what to think! Gutless, responsibility-off-fobbing politicians needed Mummy’s hand to hold as they innocently peed away their taxpayers’ money. And now they can say ‘no, not us, it was the scientists, they told us lies!’ Riding the tiger, they will solve the problem of dismounting by pushing off the scientists as placatory lunch. Well, not all scientists lied. The good scientists — the true scientists who have tried to uphold the highest standards, like Professor Hughes — must be applauded. The UEA is not wholly corrupt and people should remember that while pursuing the truth. Climate science will need to be rebuilt and good men will be needed to rebuild it.
JF
Let’s hope no-one ends up like David Kelly.
While on the subject of tree rings. It looks like tree growth is affected by GCR rates…
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3098/cosmic-rays-speed-tree-growth?page=0,0
I can tell you guys…the silence in the MSM/Broadcasting over here (London) is absolutely DEAFENING!!!
Keep it up.
Mailman, Lets just say that the CRU d is a firehouse in New York, The fireman are told that they have to prove all fires are started by water if they want to get their funding for the comming years. So the fireman find several ways to prove that all fires are started by water. They come up with 4 ways and publish it in their reasearch papers ,they send the papers out to other firehouses to get the material “peer reviewed”All the other fireman agree with the findings and they declare that all fires are started by water if you look hard enough.The funding arrives by the truckload. They announce to the world that the debate is over ,and water is the culprit because the fireman said so !and they should know they are experts on fire. Now go back and replace fireman with” CRU”, fire with” “global warming”and water with “carbon”
This is what these people did,what caught them is that they had to alter so many scientific studies in the process to keep the lie going that they became a joke to many in the world and now the world has the proof. They have been working on this theory for decades and no one cared ,untill they linked it to carbon with the tree ring data etc. That gave them the enemy they needed an enemy that could not defend itself.
My point here is this has to be put in terms that non scientist can understand like my wife and children most people don”t know how reasearch is conducted if the don’t know that none of what has just happened means anything to them.
Can someone help me/us to understand the full significance of this. I’m really confused.
In my understanding the reason that the decline is not included (hidden) is that it is based on tree ring data and there was concern that trees have been forming rings at a different rate since the 1950’s. But if we look at actual measured temperature data there is no decline since 1960. Is that true? So if the tree ring data predicted a decline but there wasn’t actually a decline then wouldn’t that say the data is bad or the science behind using tree ring data is bad?
Or said another way what is the real significance of ommitting data asside from the fact it was inappropriate behaviour?
By the way I’m a long time fan of WUWT and definately anti-Gore alarmism. I just don’t understand some of these issues. This is one that’s been bugging me so can someone help?
Thanks,
Doug
Thanks George,
“No AGW is a Frankenstien monster created by mad scientists artifically brought to life. It cant be killed will simply break out of the cofin and rise from its grave. The cofin has to be nailed shut, weldeds shut, incenerated, the ashes need to be disolved in acid then the liquid remains need to be shot in the brightsts visible stars in the galixy where they are vaporized down to their atomic elements.
In short do not under any circumstances let up on this.”
I agree… it is an ideology, not science, and facts and logic do not apply with them. It took me quite a while to realize that the “truth” just gets in their way. They don’t care how much money it costs or how many people it hurts. This hit me kind of hard when I figured this out many moons ago.
If nothing else this should give them pause for a bit… So if the trend goes toward cooling will they once again jump on a Man Mad Global Cooling bandwagon?
The government fools running both the UK and the US will not change their minds easily. They see the power gained by controlling all aspects of the lives of their citizenry. Reality means nothing the those who wish to govern.
“There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” – Ibid
Couldn’t help looking at the UEA history on their website; Found this gem:-
“UEA’s academic thinking was distinctive from the word go. The choice of ‘Do Different’ as the University’s motto was a deliberate signal that it was going to look at new ways of providing university education. ” Boy oh boy, they got that right!
On a more serious note, take a look at all the funded research programmes now going on at UEA, and the cost of this rubbish. Notice the same names cropping up all the time, it’s wonder that they can get a day off:-
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/research/
Why did the UK government select a rather new and unimportant University to do this research in the first place, the college only started in 1963, hardly a place of excellence and longstanding scolarship, yet it is touted as the world’s foremost research centre on climate.
We must be mad to have listened to these people.
its a long time since I studied biology, but at my first dendro-lesson I’ve learned that correlation of dendro-data with climate is extremely problematic in the second half of the 20th century. And that the reason is air-pollution
It’s “plausible” – but given that most pollution problems were regional, coresponding with industiral activity, and that particulates, as well as SOx and NOx levels all improved from 1960 through 1980 due to increasingly-strict environmental laws, we would expect to see the degree of “divergence” lessening. Instead, we have Briffa, Jones et al simply waving their hands and claiming that none of the contrary data points were meaningful.
Sorry, but a claim that requires trillion-dollar economic disruption requires stronger proof than this self-reinforcing clique has provided.
WAG (23:42:16) :
Because "the divergence problem" shows that tree rings are not a reliable measure of temperatures. Basing a whole socio-political plan of action on something that we know is not reliable is–in a word–stupid. It is akin to finding a site that says that vaccines cause cancer, knowing that the "science" is unreliable, and still stirring up a panic and trying to ban the use of vaccines in children.
If tree rings are reliable temperature proxies, they should not suddenly come unglued from instrument records now, when anyone can go chop down a few living trees and compare it with NOAA.gov. That it isn’t reliable for recent (and warmer) times, means that it probably isn’t reliable for other time periods.
It calls into question how much of the climate science we are being fed is truly based on measurements versus someone's pre-existing biases. It means that we need to call off Copenhagen for at least a decade, while we submit all existing climate studies to independent verification by non-affiliated parties. This would include all recent and current peer-reviewed research.
In short, Climategate is exactly the same as the Nixon surveillance tapes in the 1970s and should have the same result: throw them out of office and let them live out their lives in shame. At the very least, admit that human-caused warming is more of a political theory than a scientific one.
For those coming up to speed from elsewhere in science, could you please clarify the environment in which the given “script” will run? I have never seen anything like it. After a Google search, I am guessing it is “R” or a related language, but “R” does not appear to have a “plot” command, and the script appears to have a lot of “methods,” such as “plot.ts” that seem even less easy to find. As a bonus, is there a variant of the scripting language that you are using which runs on (Sorry! ;( Windows?
Thanks!
Icarus,
“Tree-ring chronologies that represent annual changes in the density of wood formed during the late summer can provide a proxy for local summertime air temperature1. Here we undertake an examination of large-regional-scale wood-density/air-temperature relationships using measurements from hundreds of sites at high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. When averaged over large areas of northern America and Eurasia, tree-ring density series display a strong coherence with summer temperature measurements averaged over the same areas, demonstrating the ability of this proxy to portray mean temperature changes over sub-continents and even the whole Northern Hemisphere. During the second half of the twentieth century, the decadal-scale trends in wood density and summer temperatures have increasingly diverged as wood density has progressively fallen. The cause of this increasing insensitivity of wood density to temperature changes is not known, but if it is not taken into account in dendroclimatic reconstructions, past temperatures could be overestimated. Moreover, the recent reduction in the response of trees to air-temperature changes would mean that estimates of future atmospheric CO2 concentrations, based on carbon-cycle models that are uniformly sensitive to high-latitude warming, could be too low.”
Thi statement is akin to the old story about the scientist testing sensitivity of a frog’s response to the spoken command “jump.”
Carefully cutting off one leg at a time and commanding the frog to jump, he noted positive results for each of the first three amputations; upon severing the fourth and final leg, no response at all ensued.
His final notes read:
“It is clear that cutting off the sum of a frog’s appendages renders the beast stone deaf.”