by Steve McIntyre
Even in their Nov 24, 2009 statement, the University of East Anglia failed to come clean about the amount of decline that was hidden. The graphic in their statement continued to “hide the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction by deleting adverse results in the last part of the 20th century. This is what Gavin Schmidt characterizes as a “good thing to do”.
First here is the Nov 2009 diagram offered up by UEA:
Figure 1. Resized UEA version of Nov 2009, supposedly “showing the decline”. Original here ,
Here’s what UEA appears to have done in the above diagram.
While they’ve used the actual Briffa reconstruction after 1960 in making their smooth, even now, they deleted values after 1960 so that the full measure of the decline of the Briffa reconstruction is hidden. Deleted values are shown in magenta. Source code is below.
Figure 2. Emulation of UEA Nov 2009, using all the Briffa reconstruction.
R SOURCE CODE:
##COMPARE ARCHIVED BRIFFA VERSION TO CLIMATEGATE VERSION
#1. LOAD BRIFFA (CLIMATEGATE VERSION) # archive is truncated in 1960: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/treering/reconstructions/n_hem_temp/briffa2001jgr3.txt”
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])
#2. J98 has reference 1961-1990 #note that there is another version at ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/contributions_by_author/jones1998/jonesdata.txt”
loc=”ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/contributions_by_author/jones2001/jones2001_fig2.txt” test=read.table(loc,skip=17,header=TRUE,fill=TRUE,colClasses=”numeric”,nrow=1001) test[test== -9.999]=NA count= apply(!is.na(test),1,sum) test=ts(test,start=1000,end=2000) J2001=test[,"Jones"]
#3. MBH : reference 1902-1980 url<-"ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/contributions_by_author/mann1999/recons/nhem-recon.dat" MBH99<-read.table(url) ;#this goes to 1980 MBH99<-ts(MBH99[,2],start=MBH99[1,1])
#4. CRU instrumental: 1961-1990 reference
# use old version to 1997 in Briffa archive extended
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")
Briffa= ts(Briffa,start=1000)
CRU=window(Briffa[,"CRU"],start=1850)
tsp(CRU) # 1850 1999 #but starts 1871 and ends 1997
delta<-mean(CRU[(1902:1980)-1850])-mean(CRU[(1960:1990)-1850]);
delta # -0.118922
#used to get MBH values with 1961-1990 reference: compare to 0.12 mentioned in Climategate letters
#get updated version of CRU to update 1998 and 1999 values
loc="http://hadobs.metoffice.com/crutem3/diagnostics/hemispheric/northern/annual"
D=read.table(loc) #dim(D) #158 12 #start 1850
names(D)=c("year","anom","u_sample","l_sample","u_coverage","l_coverage","u_bias","l_bias","u_sample_cover","l_sample_cover",
"u_total","l_total")
cru=ts(D[,2],start=1850)
tsp(cru) # 1850 2009
# update 1998-1999 values with 1998 values CRU[(1998:1999)-1849]= rep(cru[(1998)-1849],2)
#Fig 2.21 Caption
#The horizontal zero line denotes the 1961 to 1990 reference
#period mean temperature. All series were smoothed with a 40-year Hamming-weights lowpass filter, with boundary constraints
# imposed by padding the series with its mean values during the first and last 25 years.
#this is a low-pass filter
source("http://www.climateaudit.org/scripts/utilities.txt") #get filter.combine.pad function
hamming.filter<-function(N) {
i<-0:(N-1)
w<-cos(2*pi*i/(N-1))
hamming.filter<-0.54 – 0.46 *w
hamming.filter<-hamming.filter/sum(hamming.filter)
hamming.filter
}
f=function(x) filter.combine.pad(x,a=hamming.filter(40),M=25)[,2]
## WMO Figure at CRU #http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/nov/homepagenews/CRUupdate #WMO: http://www.uea.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.138392!imageManager/1009061939.jpg #2009: http://www.uea.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.138393!imageManager/4052145227.jpg
X=ts.union(MBH=MBH99+delta,J2001,briffa=briffa[,"gate"],CRU=cru ) #collate Y=data.frame(X); year=c(time(X)) sapply(Y, function(x) range(year [!is.na(x)]) ) # MBH J2001 briffa CRU # [1,] 1000 1000 1402 1850 # [2,] 1980 1991 1994 2009
smoothb= ts(apply(Y,2,f),start=1000)
xlim0=c(1000,2000) #xlim0=c(1900,2000)
ylim0=c(-.6,.35)
par(mar=c(2.5,4,2,1))
col.ipcc=c("blue","red","green4","black")
par(bg="beige") plot( c(time(smoothb)),smoothb[,1],col=col.ipcc,lwd=2,bg="beige",xlim=xlim0,xaxs="i",ylim=ylim0,yaxs="i",type="n",axes=FALSE,xlab="",ylab="deg C (1961-1990)") usr 1960 points( c(time(smoothb))[temp],smoothb[temp,"briffa"],pch=19,cex=.7,col=”magenta”)
Guys and Gals, let’s leave Aimee alone she’s too easy a target.
Aimee, you are entitled to your views, but please don’t call people who don’t hold them “deniers” it is meant to associate sceptics with those who deny the holocaust, why would anyone with the arguments on their side do that?
As for Briffa, the question being begged by all this is why they had confidence in the data before 1960 once they noticed the downtick. Surely then without instrumental temperature measurements to compare to the earlier proxies they use of those proxies would have been invalid?
“Reply: I’m allowing this unsnipped for entertainment value. Challenge to you Aimee. Name ONE species that went extent in the last 3 months. ~ charles the moderator.”
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Could we also challenge people to name species that go extinct due to the removal of their natural and ancient habitat to make way for “green” bio-fuel plantations too? I am of course thinking of the magnificent Orang-utan. I know that they are not extinct – yet,
So can we have a competition to list of all the species that environmentalists are driving to extinction?
If the good hearted and well meaning idiots who get so steamed about people leaving on a light bulb actually fired more than one neuron at once and got steamed about REAL pollution and destruction of habitat and the destruction of ancient, irreplaceable forests, instead of the increase in a trace gas plant food, then perhaps the world would be in a better state today.
I agree, I think Aimee’s naivety suggests she is very young and should be left alone as being too easy a target. Let it go everyone.
“As an hysterical alarmists you don’t have to exaggerate everything. I’m sure 5 minutes would be more than enough.”
LOVE IT!!! Funny, as in, hot coffee on my monitor funny! Thank you!!!
Willem: The point is in fact that implementing desperate means to cut CO2 may actually make us the opposite of “better humans”. In fact, it may already have killed hundreds of thousands: The ridiculous and very short-sighted political decisions to force the use of biofuel may have been partly responsible for the food crisis of the last couple of years. The 2006-2008 food price rally probably was partly due to a financial bubble, so it’s hard to tell how many people were really killed by biofuel promotion, but there’s no doubt it will get much worse if this crazy (in its current incarnation, i.e. using food for fuel, future biofuel technologies may be better) biofuel promotion continues.
And to Aimee: Stupid, short-sighted promotion of biofuel most certainly also has made species go extinct! E.g. in Indonesia, where rain forests have been replaced with palm oil fields, releasing so much CO2 in the process that CO2 saved by using palm oil diesel will have to “pay back the upfront CO2 payment” over several hundred years before it’s balanced.
Let’s start being better humans by protecting our environment from dangers that we KNOW are real: E.g. help developing countries build clean, modern coal power plants to avoid the brown clouds that kill thousands of people (and that may even be the main cause of e.g. the melting Himalayan glaciers). And let’s not stop the developing countries from economic development by denying them these power plants. Then we’re really being “better humans”.
Another small example of how political decisions may actually harm the environment: The EUs decision to ban normal light bulbs at a time when the “green” light bulbs still contain mercury, which necessarily will make it into the environment (I stockpile the old Edison-bulbs I find, I live far north where we mostly need light in the heating season, and we have electrical heating anyway, so the heat from the light bulbs isn’t wasted).
As long as the scare scenarios of a “burning world” are very far from “settled science”, those of us who have /real/ concern for the environment understand that one needs to thread carefully. The road to hell is paved with good intentions…
Give Aimee a break..
For more than ten years I have listened to, and lived my life believing that AGW was true. I also pushed my convictions on my children.
The obvious shock in the posts by those of you who suspected this scandal is is glaringly obvious. For me, and millions of others like me coming to terms with this scandal, has been, and still is an extremely painful process.
We are waking up, but coming out of a 10 year sleep is a slow process, and the shock of the “Climategate” sirens and it’s social implications is frightening. It’s tempting to snuggle back under the bed covers, and pretend non of this is happening.
The Briffa 2000 graph is very different to the Briffa 1998 fig 5 here:
http://eas8001.eas.gatech.edu/papers/Briffa_et_al_PTRS_98.pdf
(Briffa 1998 is based on trees from across the N hemisphere.)
How did Briffa create the change ?
Willem de Rode (23:40:50) :
Maybe CO2 reduction will not keep us cooler, but certainly it will make us beter humans.
As long as you don’t mind being party to the death of millions in the third world due to food shortages that will be caused by the AGW fraud. I can’t see how that is being a better human?
Mmmmm . . . kitten !
PhilW: Very good comment! I’ve taken AGW more or less for granted for almost 30 years (!) – since around 1980, after watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos as a very young man. I think that what made me check the facts must have been Al Gore’s movie. I never saw it myself, but the scare scenarios reported by my kids (and the fact that they were shown it in a public school) made me want to check the facts better. And the facts, to me, are that we simply don’t know yet. A little AGW is very probable, but exactly how high climate sensitivity to CO2 is, is not yet “settled science” at all. Also, a high-CO2, warm world may not be as bad as the alarmists will have it: The most scary parts of our earth’s recent history were the Ice Age maxima, where the earth was very cool and very dry.
Given that I don’t think the science is settled at all, I used to think that fast cuts in CO2 emissions would still be the best way to go, since we eventually need to move to new sources of energy anyway. It took me a long time to understand that trying to stop CO2 emissions too fast may create problems of its own, which may, if we don’t thread carefully, strangle human development for decades or centuries, especially in the third world.
For those who want to watch exploding kittens. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doh3InpBq4g
For the rest of us, I had to watch the travesty of melting Glaciers in the Himalyas as the harbinger of doom as the lead item on our NZ National TV news, followed by how Copenhagen will save us all and that our PM has committed us to pay $25 million – or up to $50 million as our guilt tax. The MSM do live on a different planet. Climategate only appears on blogs here, the MSM is completely subverted to AGW.
Looks like that graph got infected too.
Anthropogenic Global Warming Virus Alert.
http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s5i64103
The Aimee comment is just precious.
“It still amazes me why you deniers are willfully accepting that millions of species going extinct every month”
There are currently 1.8 million known species of plants and animals living on the planet Earth. According to Aimee, every living creature on planet Earth will be extinct by the end of this month…
That’s some real interesting news. You would think that even CNN would be covering this mass extinction.
Cheers
Cheers
How ironic;
Published in Pravda.ru before cnn.com
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/30-11-2009/110832-climategate-0
Aimee,
“and the polar caps being bombarded by solar radiation.”
I think you’ll find that 1/2 of the World is always being bombarded by solar radiation – it’s called daylight.
Interesting – the AGW crowd due to the high traffic here are now sending their messages to wuwt.
Interesting their arguments they are not about science but touchy feely like: save your grandchildren, save the animals, save the planet. I did design of furnaces and thought radiation heat transfer in college and was a skeptic for a long time. I am also a proponent of thermal efficiency and the reduction of NOx, particulates and SOx in the atmosphere; I am an Engineer that designs respecting the environment.
In my case my children bought the PR of AGW and told me I was wrong, and now after this evidence they tell me yes dad you were right, but it was for the good of the planet. The true believers keep talking about the poles melting, how they are in the side of “good” whatever that is.
In conclusion the AGW crowd works for: the end justifies the means. This is NOT SCIENCE or ENGINEERING
doctorbulldog ;
RE: “It still amazes me why you deniers are willfully accepting that millions of species going extinct every month”
Well, when you line on a planet this small with a core temperature of a few million degrees, that sort of thing is bound to happen every now and then.
“Name ONE species that went extent in the last 3 months.”
~ charles the moderator.
A very high probability would be the species inhabiting East Anglia University working on Climate Change.
Aimee, you’ve got lots of replies but I can’t resist. Serious question about values:
If you had the ability to reduce human population down to 1 billion, would you do it?
(remember, before modern technology, the whole of Europe had maybe 30 million people).
CRU Fraudsters Continue Publishing Scare Stories in MSM
This is the shameless headline from the Times today
“Major cities at risk from rising sea level threat”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6938356.ece
And here are some choice quotes from that article:
“Sea levels will rise by twice as much as previously predicted as a result of global warming, an important international study has concluded.
The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) calculated that if temperatures continued to increase at the present rate, by 2100 the sea level would rise by up to 1.4 meters — twice that predicted two years ago.
Such a rise in sea levels would engulf island nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific, devastate coastal cities such as Calcutta and Dhaka and force London, New York and Shanghai to spend billions on flood defenses. [note: get into flood-defense construction now!]
Even if the average global temperature increases by only 2C — the target set for next week’s Copenhagen summit — sea levels could still rise by 50cm, double previous forecasts, according to the report….
…In an interview with The Times, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said that geo-engineering, where carbon is stripped from the atmosphere using specialist technologies, would be necessary to control runaway damage to the climate. “At some point we will have to cross over and start sucking some of those gases out of the atmosphere.” [Note: Pachauri seems never to have heard of trees.]
…The IPCC report predicted that the melting of ice sheets would contribute about 20% of the total rise in sea levels, with the majority coming from the melting of glaciers and the expansion of the water as it warms. It said that it was not able to predict the impact of melting ice sheets, but suggested this could add 10-20cm….”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I went to the SCAR website to understand who they are, etc. Because of the dearth of ground weather stations on Antarctica, they appear to have had help from NCAR “to estimate near-surface temperatures over a 50-year period”.
…OK, but…
There is a certain CRU email from Kevin Trenberth, head of CA section of NCAR, regarding “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”.
Do all roads of investigation always lead back to these guys? – bear in mind, Trenberth was also one of the lead authors of the 1995, 2001, 2007 IPCC reports (per his bio) and Pachauri, head of the IPCC, says the leaked emails “have no effect” on what the IPCC has reported.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By the way, Aimee, kittens will only explode after 10 minutes if the microwave is on low. Turn the power up to full, and it only takes 1 minute 42 seconds. Yeah, makes a mess, but it cuts down all that screeching from the kitten.
Aimee: I like my pets, especially my cat. I have no plans to nuke him. But, there are people out there who have proposed to take away our historical companions to save the planet.
I like trees too. But I have no plans to engage in frivolous lawsuits, like certain groups do, to halt management of of our forests to satisfy their vision of the good old days. I don’t care for placing wildfires on the endangered species act.
If you want to save the Planet, Aimee, fine, do your part. But make sure you address the hypocritical lifestyle that Al Gore lives.
Without being rude to Aimee, im afraid she’s what termed as ” a useful idiot”.
Can someone please just think of the polar bears?
PhilW (00:32:11) :
A very good post. I’ve been sceptical since the day Jim Hansen did his air conditioning trick in The Congress back in 1988 – I was a geology student at the time.
On topic, I was born in 1960 and I’m starting to get a complex.
” Espen says: I think that what made me check the facts must have been Al Gore’s movie.”
I was luckier – I had read his book “The Earth in the Balance” which dates from 1992. This showed that he was clearly an eco-extremist, completely oblivious to science or economics. I’ve ignored everything he has said ever since, and so should any responsible journalist.
Capn Jack Walker (23:28:14) :
FergalR (23:31:23) :
Using that word is an insult to the victims of the holocaust Aimee.
You live in a strange world. Most would accept these definitions as acceptable use:
wiki
Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person is faced with a fact that is too painful to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.
websters
denier1 definition de·nier (də nir′; for 2, den′yər; Fr də nyā′)
noun
1.a small, obsolete French coin of little value
2.a unit of weight for measuring the fineness of threads of silk, rayon, nylon, etc., equal to .05 gram per 450 meters
Etymology: ME dener < OFr denier < L denarius, denarius
denier2 definition de·nier (dē nī′ər, di-)
noun
a person who denies
deny definition deny (dē nī′, di-)
transitive verb denied -·nied′, denying -·ny′·ing
1.to declare (a statement) untrue; contradict
2.to refuse to accept as true or right; reject as unfounded, unreal, etc.
3.to refuse to acknowledge as one's own; disown; repudiate
4.to refuse the use of or access to
5.to refuse to grant or give
6.to refuse the request of (a person)
7.Obsolete to forbid