Understanding Climategate’s Hidden Decline
By Marc Sheppard The American Thinker
Close followers of the Climategate controversy know that much of the mêlée surrounds an email in which Climate Research Unit (CRU) chief Phil Jones wrote about using “Mike’s Nature Trick” (MNT) to “hide the decline.” And yet, 17 days and thousands of almost exclusively on-line op-eds into this scandal, it still seems very few understand exactly which “decline” was being hidden, what “trick” was used to do so, and why Jones’s words have become the slogan for the greatest scientific fraud in history.
As the mainstream media move from abject denial to dismissive whitewashing, CRU co-conspirators move to Copenhagen for tomorrow’s UN climate meeting, intent on changing the world as we know it based primarily on their now exposed trickery. Add yesterday’s announcement of a UN investigation into the matter, which will no doubt be no less corrupt than those being investigated, and public awareness of how and why that trick was performed is now more vital than ever.
So please allow me to explain in what I hope are easily digestible terms.
First and foremost — contrary to what you’ve likely read elsewhere in the blogosphere or heard from the few policymakers and pundits actually addressing the issue, it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide. Certainly, the simple fact that the email was sent in November of 1999 should have allayed any such confusion.
In fact, the decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists – those determined by proxy reconstructions. As this scandal has attracted new readers to the subject, I ask climate savvy readers to indulge me while I briefly explain climate proxies, as they are an essential ingredient of this contemptible conspiracy.
Truth be told — even reasonably reliable instrumental readings are a relatively modern convenience, limiting CRU’s global measured temperature database to a start date somewhere in the mid-19th century. That’s why global temperature charts based on actual readings typically use a base year of 1850 or somewhere thereabouts.
And yet — most historical temperature charts, including the one Al Gore preached before in An Inconvenient Truth, go way back to 1000 AD. That’s where proxies come in.
While historical documents (e,g, ship’s logs, diaries, court and church records, tax rolls, and even classic literature) certainly provide a glimpse into past temperature trends, such information is far too limited and generalized to be of any statistical value. So climate scientists have devised means to measure variations in such ubiquitous materials as lake sediments, boreholes, ice cores, and tree rings to evaluate past temperature trends.
They then employ complex computer programs to combine such “proxy” data sampled throughout a region to plot that area’s annual relative changes in temperature hundreds or even thousands of years prior. By then combining the datasets, they believe they can accurately reproduce hemispheric and global temperature trends of the previous millennia.
And while reconstructions — as past temperature interpretations from proxy data are called — can differ greatly from one source to another, those generated by the CRU have often been accepted as the de facto temperatures of the past.
Largely because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proclaims them to be.
Warmist Public Enemy Number One: The Medieval Warming Period
It’s important to understand that early analyses of these “proxies” clearly demonstrated that three radical temperature shifts occurred within the past millennium, as do many contemporary studies. Indeed, the years 900-1300 AD were labeled the Medieval Warming Period (MWP), as global temperatures rose precipitously from the bitter cold of the previous Dark Ages to levels several degrees warmer than today. The Little Ice Age, a sudden period of cooling, then followed and lasted until the year 1850. And then began the modern warming period, which was by no means unique and appears to have ended with the millennium itself.
Originally, even the IPCC accepted that pre-20th century analysis. In fact, the 1990 First Assessment Report used this schematic IPCC 1990 Figure 7c (courtesy of Climate Audit) to represent last millennium’s dramatic temperature swings.
But this image of a fluid climate system subject to abrupt and natural up-and-downturns made unprecedented 20th century warming about as marketable as Florida swampland. And opportunists who depended on the aberrance of post-industrial revolution warming in order to condemn and control mankind’s CO2 emissions soon recognized that perhaps the LIA but most certainly the MWP simply had to go.
And as many of these hucksters were closely connected to the IPCC – both sender and recipient names on those illuminating CRU emails include many of its editors, lead authors and contributors — that task was far less daunting than one might imagine.
Proxies, Tricks and Hockey Sticks
The first step was taken in the 1995 Second Assessment Report, when the above Figure 7c was replaced with a 1993 reconstruction from RS Bradley and Phil Jones himself that used 1400 AD as its base – effectively wiping the MWP off the radar-screen.
But it wasn’t until the 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) that the MWP simply vanished. This multi-proxy reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature anomalies appeared in chapter 2, page 134, of the Working Group 1 (WG1) report [PDF].
IPCC 2001 WG1 Fig 2.20
Of course, the first thing you’ll notice is that both the MWP and LIA have indeed disappeared. In fact, temperatures appear to trend downward throughout the millennium until a sharp jump upward last century. But if you look closer, you’ll also notice that the “reconstructed” series terminate in 1980. What forms the dramatic blade to the hockey stick shape (yes, this is indeed the famous “Hockey-Stick” graph) is instead the distal segment of the 1902 to 1999 instrumental data series.
Mann has recently claimed that the available proxy data ended in 1980, but even his coconspirators at RealClimate admit that’s nonsense. The truth is that the proxy data was scrapped because unlike those measured, reconstructed temperatures showed a marked decline after 1980. And, as the chart plotted temperature anomalies against what the plotters selected as the “normal” period and temperatures of 1961 to 1990, the reconstruction would have been quite unremarkable otherwise. So at the 1980 mark, the actual post-1980 measurements were actually attached to the truncated proxy series to create the illusion they were one.
The figure below, found on the same page of the WG1 report reveals this trick more clearly. This chart plots the original 4 reconstructions used: 2 from Mann et al, 1 from Jones et al and 1 from Briffa et al. Notice how all but the first series continue to trend downward around 1960 while instrumental readings begin to trend upward? And even that series ends abruptly in 1980.
IPCC 2001 WG1 Fig 2.21
So not only did conspirators cherry-pick the one series of the four that approximated measured temperatures the longest, they also terminated that series at the point that it too, began to trend down. They then joined it to the actual 1980-1999 temperatures to “hide the decline” in the final product, as that decline created an inexplicable divergence between the reconstructed and measured temperatures. The existence of which challenges the entire series dating back to 1000 AD.
Remember, all of the temperatures prior to 1850 were estimated by computer algorithms and no actual readings exist to prove or disprove those figures. So a relatively short window of opportunity exists to test the programs against observations. Had 20th century measured temperatures continued to align with those recreated as smoothly after 1960 as they did previously, then the programmers could declare their code and hence their millennial temperatures sound. But the divergence, if allowed to stand, instead revealed serious design flaws in the proxy reconstructions. Which suggests that just as the decline was dealt with through trickery, so was the MWP.
And it seems that each time the trick was used, its involvement would be more deeply concealed.
Every multi-volume IPCC Assessment has been accompanied by a relatively brief and highly-politicized Summary for Policymakers (SPM). This synopsis invariably commands the bulk of the media and political attention. Here’s the version of the graph depicted prominently on page 3 of the 2001 TAR SPM [PDF], the only version of the report most policymakers and reporters would ever actually see. Notice how they further obscured their chicanery by omitting the series defining legend and the “1988 instrumental value” declaration:
IPCC 2001 SPM Fig 1b
And despite the fact that the only confirmable segment of the series failed that very test, which should have declared the entire series null and void, the chart’s caption informed policymakers that:
“the rate and duration of warming of the 20th century has been much greater than in any of the previous nine centuries. Similarly, it is likely that the 1990s have been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium.”
And it’s this highly fraudulent version that has become the poster child of the equally fraudulent Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) movement.
Thanks in large part to the trick that hides the decline.
Trick or Cheat
Now we’ll take a closer look at exactly what Jones meant when he wrote that he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Why did Jones refer to the ruse as “Mike’s Nature Trick?”
As die-hard Hockey Team opponents and fans alike already know – the original 600-year version of the now infamous “Hockey-Stick” graph was dubbed MBH98 because it first appeared in the Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes paper Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries [PDF], originally published in the science journal Nature in 1998. And “Mike’s Nature Trick” received its dubious designation among CRU insiders for the very same reason.
As to the rest of the sentence — It seems Jones was working on a cover chart for a forthcoming World Meteorological Organization report [PDF], WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999, when he wrote the email. As the graph would incorporate one reconstruction of his own plus one each from Michael Mann and Keith Briffa, he was informing them that he had used the trick on Mann’s series at the same 1980 cutoff as MBH98, but found it necessary to use 1960 as the cutoff on the Briffa series.
And what I uncovered in the source code told the tale why. While Mann used multiple proxy sources, Briffa’s reconstructions were based solely on a property of annual tree ring growth known as maximum latewood density (MXD). And the MXD-only-driven plots began to diverge from actual temperatures as early as 1960. In fact, while many of CRU’s programs are designed to exclude all data after 1960 for later manual splicing with instrumental data, others employ “fudge factors” to force the generated plot to more closely adhere to measured temperatures as far back as 1930.
And as you’ll soon see, Jones’s admitted use of MNT took it to an entirely new level of fraud.
Here’s the original reconstruction, with the three proxy and measured temperature (black) series intact:
Notice how Briffa’s series (green) begins to trend sharply downward around the mid-20th Century. Jones’s series (red) soon follows but less sharply and then begins to trend higher. Mann’s (blue) appears to flatten out around the same year that Jones’s begins to fall. Meanwhile, all three have broken with the measured rising temperatures of the late 20th Century.
Now take a look at the chart actually published by the WMO, with all three proxy series having been surreptitiously subjected to MNT:
Since the release of CRU’s FOI2009, alarmists have continued their claim that there’s nothing deceptive about the “trick” and that it has been openly discussed in scientific journals like Nature since 1998.
But I defy anyone to compare the above chart – the one Jones wrote he had applied MNT to – to the unadulterated version above it, and tell me there’s been no deception committed. At least with MBH98, a sharp eye might recognize the ruse. Here — there is no indication given whatsoever that the graph represents an amalgam of proxy and measured temperatures. This, my friends, is fraud.
And I hope that those investigating the fraud will carefully consider this explanation of his WMO cheating given last week by Jones: [my emphasis]
“One of the three temperature reconstructions was based entirely on a particular set of tree-ring data that shows a strong correlation with temperature from the 19th century through to the mid-20th century, but does not show a realistic trend of temperature after 1960. This is well known and is called the ‘decline’ or ‘divergence’. The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste. CRU has not sought to hide the decline. Indeed, CRU has published a number of articles that both illustrate, and discuss the implications of, this recent tree-ring decline, including the article that is listed in the legend of the WMO Statement figure. It is because of this trend in these tree-ring data that we know does not represent temperature change that I only show this series up to 1960 in the WMO Statement.”
And they’ll immediately recognize the dishonest denial they’re dealing with when they read the WMO Statement figure from the inside cover Jones referred to:
“Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records. The data are shown as 50-year smoothed differences from the 1961–1990 normal. Uncertainties are greater in the early part of the millennium (see page 4 for further information). For more details, readers are referred to the PAGES newsletter (Vol. 7, No. 1: March 1999, also available at http://www.pages.unibe.ch) and the National Geophysical Data Center (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov).”
Even if MNT had been explained as Jones claimed — which it wasn’t — just how was the observer expected to differentiate the reconstructed from the actual data? And good luck finding that newsletter.
Spin it anyway you want – Mike’s Nature Trick is Phil’s WMO cheat.
More Tricks of the Charade
While suddenly the most famous, Mike’s is not the only in CRU’s bag of tricks.
Many of the programs I reviewed contained routines to exclude proxy data that demonstrated poor correlations with local temperature, which of course explains why CRU’s 19th through mid-20th century proxy temperatures appeared to be observationally accurate. Others “estimated” values for missing data.
And then there’s the Yamal matter – also a popular subject of the CRU emails.
In an October 5th email to climatologist Tom Wigley, Jones took issue with a piece I had written that day exposing the lies in CRU-based UN climate reports, which included a section on Keith Briffa’s mistreatment of Polar Ural data in order to exaggerate 20th century warming. That email prompted the reply from Wigley — now familiar to AT readers — in which he admitted it was “distressing to read that American Stinker item,” before offering to help Briffa, who “does seem to have got himself into a mess,” write an “explanation” for his deceitful cherry-picking of Yamal peninsula data.
Indeed, Keith’s Yamal Trick also “fudged” proxy reconstructions, not by overwriting them with instrumental data ala Mike, but rather by underhandedly stacking the actual dataset with trees hand-picked to assure his predetermined outcome. Yet both methods intentionally corrupted reconstruction results for the same devious purpose — to skew late 20th century temperatures higher in order to artificially create the dreaded hockey stick effect.
Now, you might be wondering why all this fuss is being made over late 20th century temperatures when even we realists accept that they did rise until 1998. Hopefully, you now understand why the divergence between proxy and measured temperatures betrays a potential serious flaw in the process by which temperatures are reconstructed from tree-ring density. And that any reconstruction demonstrating such a flaw-revealing divergence should be dismissed outright, not presented as policy fodder.
But there’s another issue at stake here.
Anthony Watts has surveyed over 75% of the 1200-plus U.S weather stations from which national temperatures are accumulated. Most of those were found to be inaccurate by more than 2°C, largely due to being located within 10 meters of an artificial heating source. In fact, less than 10% met strict placement guidelines set forth by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Not to worry — NOAA claims it has methods to “adjust” for such bias, including the use of “smoothing” adjustments to “homogenize” station data to that of surrounding stations.
Unpublished computer programs artificially adjusting the data — what could possibly go wrong with that?
Would you be shocked to learn that at ICCC 3, Watts told us he had calculated such adjustments to raw temperature data between 1940 and 1999 to be 0.5°F to the positive? That accounts for almost one half of the 1.2°F warming over the last century.
And that’s here in America. Try to imagine what kind of shenanigans might be going on elsewhere in the world.
Consequently, even the “instrumental” temperatures the CRU crooks were fudging their results to align with were likely themselves fudged. So they were pumping the incline while hiding the decline.
Hold the Fudge and the MWP won’t budge
In a June 2003 email to Jones and company, Mann discussed the notion of expanding CRU charts to 2 millennia, in an effort to ‘try to “contain” the putative “MWP.”’ No deception in that, I suppose. Of course, an honest 2000 year reconstruction, such as this one from CO2Science.org, adapted from a 2005 Moberg et al. temperature history derived from tree-rings and lake and ocean sediments, would actually emphasize rather than “contain” the MWP:
Any questions why Mann and friends work so diligently to “contain” (hide) the MWP?
As you can see, the post-LIA warming that began around 1850 is neither unprecedented nor spectacular. And certainly not worth rewiring the economic circuitry of the planet over.
And the CRU/IPCC reconstructions have been counterfeited for the express purpose of hiding that very fact.
After all, the stakes are enormous – perhaps trillions of dollars and unquestionably every American’s personal liberties. Tomorrow, over 20,000 delegates from 193 nations will gather in Copenhagen to craft an agreement which would not only force American power consumption to levels equal to those of about 1910, but would also have us pay reparations for an imaginary “climate debt” we’ve accumulated by building the world’s greatest economy of all time. That debt is based on the amount of CO2 our financial growth has purportedly pumped into the atmosphere, which, according to the conclusions of the IPCC, based largely upon reports from the CRU, has selfishly imperiled the planet by inducing climate change.
Of course, asking Americans to pay reparations based on the claim they’ve done harm to other nations by spoiling the climate is like asking me to pay damages to my neighbor based on his claim that he can’t sell his house because my great-grandmother’s ghost is haunting it.
As many have known and Climategate has proven, either would be equally preposterous.
But at least belief in ghosts is only marginally inspired by fraud.
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I agree with Leif that whether the MWP got ‘squashed’ by ignoring the post-1960 decline is the major issue here; the code is an irrelevance. Whether the dendroclimatology (thanks Gary) is valid seems to hinge on the question of whether the trees always “peak clip” temperature (and hence would also have done so in the Middle Ages), or whether it’s something new specific to recent times – most likely, an anthropogenic effect. CRU certainly seemed to have assumed the latter; many here would like to assume the former. I don’t know which is right.
But let’s for a moment assume that CRU (and others) are wrong and the MWP really was as warm as today – globally. I’m still not sure that’s the “get out of jail free card” that some people are looking for.
There are plenty of things that are different between then and now:
1) There have been global-scale land use changes – particularly deforestation – between then and now, which could well have reduced the planet’s ability to apply negative feedback and control excursions. Lovelock – despite giving us this inspirational idea of planetary homeostasis in the first place – certainly thinks so.
2) We are continuing to apply external forcings through GHGs which will stress the system even further
3) Human population is massively higher and our society is much more complex and “geared”, making it more, not less, susceptible to underlying change.
So all the traditional “Green” concerns continue to apply. In particular, I’d be very happy to see Copenhagen come up with a mechanism to prevent further, and preferably reverse, deforestation. I can’t see why anyone could object to that, even here!
“Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.”
Samuel Johnson
Woodfortrees,
“I’d be very happy to see Copenhagen come up with a mechanism to prevent further, and preferably reverse, deforestation. I can’t see why anyone could object to that, even here.”
That is something I could get behind. It takes me back to the classic environmental days of the seventies, that were more to do with “saving the rainforests”, “saving the whales.” It was a greener movement then, in the widest sense of the world. Now it seems, everyone wants to rip up rainforests to plant crops for biofuel so we can create less of that airborne fertiliser that makes the world greener. Really sad.
tallbloke (01:28:35) :
Thanks for the link to another Klyashtorin article.
I agree with Leif Svalgaard too. Although conditions today are massively different from in the MWP, as Woodfortrees argues, the MWP does take the air out of the Warm-mongers balloon because their argument is that warming will kill millions and make the world less habitable. This has already been demonstrated abundant times in different threads to be bunk: in Canada and Russia for example, much more land would become arable. You should read a book called “Deforesting the Earth”: many of the environmental arguments for the fall of the Roman Empire have been debunked, for example. Europe has more forest cover than at any point since the 12th century, and the United States has more forest cover, as does Maritime Canada, than in the early 19th century. People fortunate to live in the beginning of the 20th century in North America are probably breathing purer air than any European urban people since the fifth century B.C. owing to the elimination of wood and coal cooking fires and indoors pollution. We do tend to exaggerate the environmental problems that remain here. The situation, unfortunately, is different in highly polluted China, Egypt and other under-developed countries, but the answer is to advance technology, rather than to impose punitive CO2 indulgences on the developed world, to send the money to various dictatorships and undemocratic governments, while lining the pockets of the likes of the Goracle.
cthulhu (12:20:41) :
anna v (11:49:03) :
sure and that applies to post-1960s. Whether that also impacts the reconstructions further back in time is an acedemic question. If Briffa doesn’t believe it does and he thinks the reconstruction is sound until 1960 then cutting the reconstrution off and using the instrumental record is valid.
Have you ever heard of calibration? To use a curve that you suspect would be useful as a thermometer curve, you have to calibrate it during a period where you have instrumental measurements you trust, as from 1960 to 1998 in this case, and see what the past curve tells you, where there are no such trsutworthy instruments to calibrate against. If the most trustworthy interval defies your curve’s tendencies, your curve is not a good thermometer.
In short. The “hide the decline” comment was about one line in one graph out of the multiple lines in multiple graphs that show unequivocally there is warming. It only refers to how to graph the data points to better make an argument. BTW, the decline is there in the graph but is put into context by the actual instrumental record.
I think it is important to report all the different sets of data. With and without tree ring data:
The other problem is that you are looking for problems in the original 2004 paper that since has been superseded by this:
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/m08.jpg[/IMG]
in 2008. (Mann 2008). I’ve posted before but note how many sources of temperature data are in that dataset. All agreeing with recent temperature increases and a hockey stick.
Then you have all these:
We start with the original MBH hockey stick as replicated by Wahl and Ammann:
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/WA_RC_Figure1.jpg[/IMG]
And what about the hockey stick that Oerlemans derived from glacier retreat since 1600?
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/oerlemans.jpg[/IMG]
How about Osborn and Briffa’s results which were robust even when you removed any tree of the records?
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/wp-content/uploads/OB06.jpg[/IMG]
Or there. The hockey stick from borehole temperature reconstructions perhaps?
[IMG]http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/images/smpollackrecon.gif[/IMG]
No. How about the hockey stick of CO2 concentrations from ice cores and direct measurements?
[IMG]http://cses.washington.edu/cig/figures/ipccar4co2.gif[/IMG]
Err… not even close. What about the the impact on the Kaufman et al 2009 Arctic reconstruction?
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/kaufman_noyamal.jpg[/IMG]
Oh. The hockey stick you get when you don’t use tree-rings at all (blue curve)?
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/M08.jpg[/IMG]
No. Well what about the hockey stick blade from the instrumental record itself?
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/had.jpg[/IMG]
Nah….
Not a lot of text. Just a lot of published peer reviewed data.
Regarding the hockey stick, here’s Monckton’s long paper describing the shenanigans behind protecting it from criticism and “verifying” it, followed (pages 16-29) by summaries of 21 published papers that provide evidence of warming during the MWP. (Ten papers deal with Europe and the North Atlantic, eleven scientific papers address the period elsewhere on the planet.) Each summary occupies about half a page and contains a graph that illustrates key data points.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/what_hockey_stick.html
John K. Sutherland (11:10:30) :
Thank you, John, for the reference to Charles Mackay’s book ‘Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions’ published in 1841.
The first line of the preface is very pertinent.
“In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals,
they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of
excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find
that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and
go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously
impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is
caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
Sums it all up!
@ur momisugly Mapou (00:42:49) :
Mapou (00:42:49) :
Marsh wrote: “This isn’t fraud at all. The post 1960s decline in temperatures is false whichever way you look at it, so “hiding the decline” is substituting bad data for good. For it to have been fraud he would have had to do it the otherway round – replace good data with bad.”
_________________________________________________
You misread my post, sir. That quote was from cthulhu (11:16:30) : which I placed in my post in order to respond to it. It is NOT my statement.
In fact I DO get it, which you would have known had you read my post in its entirety.
I do not believe that the planned internal investigation by UEA on CRU’s activities will arrive the above conclusions.
Why are you accusing Briffa of cherry-picking trees? What is the evidence for this?
Re: Somite (07:29:53)
A good example of the confusion I mwentioned i n a previous post.
No-one is denying that the worls is warmer now than it was 150 years ago (a good thing too). The question is whether this warming is in any way unusual. There is pleny of good reason to think that it isn’t.
Actually Ive just had a look at some of your links and you don’t appear to understand what you’re posting.
Somite,
So you are quoting works from the disgraced scientists to prove that the work from the disgraced scientists is not, ahem, disgraced. And to ram home the point, you provide links to a website known to be the propaganda arm of the disgraced scientists. I see how your logic works.
MikeN (09:14:03) :
“Why are you accusing Briffa of cherry-picking trees? What is the evidence for this?”
I believe it was because he selected 10 trees from a sample of 65 trees, where those selected had definate hockey stick characteristics while the other 55 did not. One in particular (Yamal61) exhibited such an outrageously large hockey stick shape that it alone accounted for much of the hockey-stickness of even the other 9.
Briffa has still not given any explanation for selecting those 10 trees and the exercise in dishonesty was so blatant that even arch alarmist Tom Wigley wrote how Briffa had gotten himself into a mess.
Is that cherry picking enough for you?
Somite: Regarding the hockey stick, here’s Monckton’s long paper describing the shenanigans behind protecting it from criticism and “verifying” it with the studies you linked to.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/what_hockey_stick.html
I have a serious problem with this….. IF the decline does indeed show that “reconstruction” is totally unreliable, that temps went way North when the reconstruction shows it should be heading South, does this not mean that things are actually way worse than we thought? And if “reconstruction” can’t be relied upon, how do we know anything charted during the MWP is in any way accurate when no one measured the actual temperature?
Bill Marsh,
My apologies.
Excellent article, but I have a question. Forgive me if it’s already been answered in the 100’s of comments above.
If the proxy data cannot be trusted, then how can you validate that the MWP actually happened? It seems you can’t have both. The original chart 7c, according to the hacked e-mails, might as well have been drawn on a cocktail-napkin. Maybe the IPCC had a good reason for replacing that chart?
If that is true, then they have done a disservice by not explaining themselves. I will be witholding judgment until the UN inquiry is complete.
“Of course the planet warms after an ice age is over. Even a 5th grader can understand that. The years after the little ice age that ended around 1850 are what they wanted to focus on only that period and distract you from the reason why the earth has warming and cooling periods this dramatic, substituting the reason the planet warms is you. It’s your fault. I wonder why they did that?”
It’s this attitude from warming skeptics that I find most fascinating. To take personal umbrage to the idea that human activities have contributed to climate change. I don’t feel personally responsible for the past 200 years, any more than I would for possibly human-induced extinction of ice age megafuana in North America 20k years ago. To feel that threatened seems to imply somekind of guilt. Also reminds me of the NIMBY attitude.
Even NASA has sequestered and is holding data under the pressure of a FOIA request for the last two years. It is requiring the efforts of the applicant and his attorneys to release it.
There was a state climatologist in Oregon who was fired by the governor because he did not ‘believe enough’ in AGW…..
The impact of this fraud will affect people’s liberties and taxes for generations.
Science is a platform to apply an application of measurement ‘standards’ to determine if a hypothesis can be made into a theory.
Unfortunately, science is made into a religion by ‘scientists’ that seek to gain truth by their peers and by an aggregate of politics in both government and academia that will ‘pay’ their way to the next discoveries.
Outcome based science is rampant and truth is not the golden mean anymore. The ‘feel good’ objectives and directives of schools and of society in the last 30-40 or so years and motivations that promote ‘self esteem’ standards have replaced the desire for ‘truth’ for a marketing cliché “does it sell”?
Ocean levels are obviously cyclic over periods of time and based on the glaciations that occur over large areas of land mass, thus changing the level of oceans. Based on assumed factors that the worlds mass and volume of water in liquid and solid form is roughly fixed, excluding the small fractional amount in the air, and the land mass is roughly static in form or placement for the last million years, then the largest influencing variable is heat.
Using this reference chart for the last million years then you can see that there is an approximate maximum ocean level that we are presently enjoying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Se…temp_140ky.gif
With the trends that are so obvious and repeatable who is willing to say that this recent event that started 18 thousand years ago is special?
This argument does not refute the imperative necessity to ensure that the resources we use are utilized efficiently, and the output of our consumption should be clean as possible or practical..
SLEAZY DOES IT
As with the pirates of CRU, American warmers know how to conceal the truth, as well
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/badwater.htm
“The plaque claims Death Valley recorded the hottest air temperature anywhere in the world on 17th July 1998 – implying it was an all-time world record. It was not. It was referring to 1998 only. Actually, the hottest temperature ever recorded at Death Valley was way back in 1913 on 10th July – a whopping 134°F (57°C).”
They are all cut from the same cloth, or, more accurately, moth eaten rag.
In 1890’s, Arrhenius built upon Fourier’s assessment of atmospheric properties plotting CO2 and temperature data collected in industrialized England. Arrhenius’ plots and calculations related CO2 and ambient temperatures. Callendar (1930’s) extended the analysis using long term observations from 200 stations reiterating the relation between CO2 and climate warming. Keeling (1950’s) began collecting atmospheric CO2 samples at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii which is the most complete record.
USGS reports all volcanic activity produces nearly 200-million tons CO2 annually; although much less than human activity production. Mauna Loa, near the Observatory and the world’s most active volcano, had major eruptions in 1950, 1975, and 1984. Atmospheric CO2 levels measured at volcanoes indicate the degree of activity and estimated heat flow from one volcano are reported at140-mW/m2. Correlating CO2 and temperatures data collected near active volcanoes should be significant but not show a cause and effect relation; however, correlating world-wide data significantly shows CO2 lagging temperature by approximately two years. Arrhenius and Callendar analysis similarly could be significantly biased owing to urban heat-island effects and extensive coal burning at the time, as CO2 is an abundant byproduct of burning.
Apparently, no laboratory control experiment to date, such as in a biodome, has shown CO2 levels influencing ambient temperatures. Tyndall (1861) measured the absorptive characteristics of CO2 followed by more precise measurements by Burch (1970). Absorbance is a measure of the quantity of light (energy) absorbed by a sample (CO2 molecule) and the amount of absorbed energy can be represented as specific heat of a substance. Specific heat of CO2 ranges from 0.791-kJ/kgK at 0-degrees F to 0.871-kJ/kgK at 125-degrees F and average atmospheric concentrations are 0.0306-percent. As revealed, the specific heat of CO2 increases as ambient temperatures increase showing CO2 likely is an ambient temperature buffer.
The atmosphere contains from 4-percent water vapor in the troposphere to 40-percent near the surface. Specific heat of water vapor relatively remains constant at 1.996-kJ/kgK. Water absorbs energy (heat) and evaporates to water vapor. During condensation (precipitation), latent heat is released to the atmosphere thus increasing ambient temperatures. Water vapor holds the majority of atmospheric heat and regulates climate and temperature more than any compound. Historically, however, water vapor characteristics as related to climate were much less appreciated, but investigations concerning the significance water vapor plays in global climate-dynamics are just beginning.
Energy not stored in the atmosphere is released into space through radiation. Re-radiation is the emission of previously absorbed radiation by molecules. Specific heat of water vapor and CO2 molecules shows that water vapor reradiates significantly more energy back to the surface and this case further is justified by quantities of each compound. Thus, this synopsis and other publications suggest that minute variations in atmospheric CO2 concentrations likely results in an insignificant affect on climate; whereas water vapor likely is the significant factor. Nevertheless, this argument easily could be rectified with an appropriate biodome-type control experiment.
guess i’m just stupid, but i read the article three times, and didn’t get the point of it. 1980 disappears (or something to that effect) where is 1980 on the graph. what disappeared ?
i live in north cen tral iowa, and i can tell that we did NOT have a steep rise in temps in 1998, based on the temp reports that are published in my utility bills since 1991
That is not all they are hiding
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a718bd5d970b-pi
Tibet Little Ice Age Summer Temperatures Exceed Modern Summer Temps of “Unprecedented” Global Warming, Peer-Research Finds
OK, just go over here and read almost anything. There’s a lot more on other “declines” they are hiding, and much much more.
http://www.c3headlines.com/