From the Telegraph:
The ‘hockey stick’ that became emblematic of the threat posed by climate change exaggerated the rise in temperature because it was created using ‘inappropriate’ methods, according to the head of the Royal Statistical Society.
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
Professor David Hand said that the research – led by US scientist Michael Mann – would have shown less dramatic results if more reliable techniques had been used to analyse the data.
Prof Hand was among a group of experts charged with investigating the “climategate” email scandal that engulfed the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) last year.
Sceptics claimed that the hacked messages showed scientists were manipulating data to support a theory of man-made global warming.
However the review, led by Lord Oxburgh into the research carried out by the centre, found no evidence of ”deliberate scientific malpractice”.
Lord Oxburgh said the scientists at the research unit arrived at their conclusions ”honestly and sensibly”.
But the reviewers found that the scientists could have used better statistical methods in analysing some of their data, although it was unlikely to have made much difference to their results.
That was not the case with some previous climate change reports, where “inappropriate methods” had exaggerated the global warming phenomenon.
Prof Hand singled out a 1998 paper by Prof Mann of Pennsylvania State University, a constant target for climate change sceptics, as an example of this.
He said the graph, that showed global temperature records going back 1,000 years, was exaggerated – although any reproduction using improved techniques is likely to also show a sharp rise in global warming. He agreed the graph would be more like a field hockey stick than the ice hockey blade it was originally compared to.
“The particular technique they used exaggerated the size of the blade at the end of the hockey stick. Had they used an appropriate technique the size of the blade of the hockey stick would have been smaller,” he said. “The change in temperature is not as great over the 20th century compared to the past as suggested by the Mann paper.”
…
Prof Hand praised the blogger Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit for uncovering the fact that inappropriate methods were used which could produce misleading results.
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Complete article here
Jay Cech (08:58:16) :
“What is the source of the graph in the article?”
It was from a WUWT article from July 2007. Sorry, I don’t recall the name of the article & am too busy to search.
Glenn (09:57:27) :
“It wasn’t us, it was the Americans”?
Bingo. Full-blown CYA mode has been activated. They can’t discredit the science, they have too much riding on promoting CAGW. UEA-CRU is/was very prestigious, the main jewel of the CAGW crown, so they don’t want to disparage them. However there is that pesky media-loving American at that minor university only really known for its “American football” team…
There is too much out there now against the over-hyped CAGW alarmism for the main proponents to maintain a unified front. Even the “Impervious IPCC” is crumbling. Fracturing among national lines is to be expected.
I am awaiting the future spin where it is declared that Hansen has done terrible things with GISS’ interpretation of the historical temperature record yet the Hadley-CRU version is true and trustworthy. Should be interesting.
That chart posted by Smokey needs to be shouted from the rooftops–if anything will kill the Cult of Global Warming it will be recognition of the fact that the earth has been warmer in the historical past the rise in temperatures.
By teh ywa, aJsme, eth easron it si tfdificul to psot smiinsg or trdapnsose tetelrs is cabeuse hlaf the pepleo evha no btreoul aedirng tihs ptos–as lgon as eht rowds coantin lal eth lsetrte, the nimd “xiefs” them to lkoo rghit.
It isn’t until afterwards that we see the mistakes.
I await with bated breath the graph showing the “Field hockey stick” and the supporting data for it. When will Prof. Hand be showing that beauty?
The directly affects the amount of warming over the next 90 years predicted by the 21+ general circulation models. They are based on a nearly all of the heating experienced over the last 50 years being due to CO2. If it cannot be said that nearly all of the heating experienced over the last 50 years was due to CO2, then the disaster scenario producing computer programs are wrong.
When are the new CO2 effect coeficients going to be entered into the 21+ computer programs and then rerun out 90 years?
bob (09:13:00) :
Has McIntyre shown that the statistical methods did indeed produce different results, rather than could have produced misleading results.
bob, as I understand it one thing McIntyre and McKitrick showed was that Mann’s statistical methods produced hockeysticks no matter what data was fed into it, or at least for totally random data. Mann’s methods specifically mined for hockeysticks – the whole stick. There were some other things wrong with Mann’s methods, too – like using the “stripbark” bristlecones themselves for tree ring data analysis, and the “divergence” problem which started to crop up.
Briffa’s methods did the same thing via cherry picking the “correct” trees from within a population, in contradiction to why in statistics you analyze a whole population to begin with to see if it correlates with a known measure.
Add in problems such as Jones’ CRU statistical behavior and GISS’s, and no, it’s not time to “move on” as per Post Normal Science’s anti- Scientific Method m.o..
From kadaka (09:49:59) :
None asked for, and only reluctantly accepted. You do great work.
It is all MANN-made global warming, as in Micheal Mann made.
“Professor David Hand said that the research – led by US scientist Michael Mann – would have shown less dramatic results if more reliable techniques had been used to analyse the data.”
— what a load of “limited hangout”! See Wikipedia
This wasn’t, isn’t, nor ever will be about “reliable techniques” – but about instituting carbon credit as part of the Global Governance architecture of control.
In a an earlier Letter to Editor:
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/12/nb-on-global-warming.html#Related-Letter-to-Editor-Jan272010
January 27th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Don’t be fooled. The agenda for which global warming was constructed has obviously nothing to do with weather, climate, or environment. But with full-spectrum control of human life through the architecture of carbon-credit.
And that agenda can be pushed with many more mantras, including still, climate-change (in any direction).
Try not patting one’s self on the back like the anti-war movement did with the size of turnouts irrespective of whether it actually scuttled war or not. Here, unless and until all the diabolical architectures of global governance, inter alia, carbon credit, are scuttled, “the mad faith that has cost us so many futile billions already” will not only continue to cost several times that, but also cement incremental faits accomplis through various manufactured ‘hegelian mind fcks’ longer matters linger.
See: Between Global Warming and Global Governance – Concern for Environment is a ‘Hegelian Mind Fck’!
Thank you.
Zahir Ebrahim
Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
lol, kadaka and Glenn nailed it!! At least in Fox’s eyes. http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/15/michael-mann-climategate-global-warming/
That evil American……he took all the hard work those poor CRU people did and totally botched the graph!!!! Did Hand actually read the e-mails that showed collusion and collaboration between both sides of the ocean? Not that I feel sorry for Mann, but wow, with friends like that……….
Please also see Open Letter to Steve McIntyre : The ‘Highest Order Bit’ of Climategate is being ignored by Scientists – WHY?
http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/12/openletter-stevemcintyre-climategate.html
And that question still remains for Steve Mcintyre.
Thanks.
Zahir Ebrahim
Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Jay Cech (08:58:16) :
What is the source of the graph in the article?
There is no attribution.
-Jay
EXACTLY, it does not seem to come from the Telegraph
Being a congenital data manipulator is not solely the realm of Mann and his co-conspiritors in climate fraud.
You only have to look at the average politician – hence the mutually beneficial relationship growing between the two groups: one writes unsupported scare stories in exchange for a comfortable lifestyle through big, long term, grants, so that the other has ‘a reason’ for increasing taxes for the rest of us.
Jay Cech (08:58:16) :
What is the source of the graph in the article?
There is no attribution.
-Jay
… and the Prof in Statistics D.Hand talks about a field hockey stick so the
spagetti stick in the lower picture is from ?
Penn State has, again, been put on notice.
They really are in danger of becoming forever known as The University Which Covered Up junk climate science.
Smokey (10:19:01) :
Jay Cech (08:58:16) :
“What is the source of the graph in the article?”
It was from a WUWT article from July 2007. Sorry, I don’t recall the name of the article & am too busy to search.
Sorry, I did not see this, it is very MISLEADING at the moment. You
automatically think, the Telegraph journalist or Hand …
In the 2nd graph, it refers to the 20th century average.
What is the average over the entire timespan of the graph?
“Zahir Ebrahim
Project Humanbeingsfirst.org”
Your diatrabe is unintelligible to me. One should not look for conspiracies when stupidity does just fine.
Chart of 18 MWP proxies: click
Law Dome chart showing the MWP: click
Mann’s data errors: click
The Holocene Optimum: click
Harvard report of peer reviewed studies: click
The MWP was global in extent: click
MWP global interactive chart: click
The climate alarmists are desperate to get rid of the MWP because it debunks their story that the current climate is warmer than ever before. It’s not. The climate is acting normally. Nothing unusual is going on.
PJB (12:44:55) :
“What is the average over the entire timespan of the graph?”
Here’s the average from Vostok that covers the same time period. The closest I could find on short notice. Probably a good proxy for temp change, though: click
Smokey (10:19:01) :
Jay Cech (08:58:16) :
“What is the source of the graph in the article?”
It was from a WUWT article from July 2007. Sorry, I don’t recall the name of the article & am too busy to search.
Smokey or whoever supervises.
It is a question of journalist ETHICS (it is on the main page!): you cannot
leave it like it is, it is manipulative – the text below the graph suggests a
connection.
Somewhat OT, but it seems we now have a
-Climate Gestapo:
“Police investigating the alleged theft of e-mails behind the recent “Climategate” uproar have been telephoning climate change sceptics to question them about their political and scientific beliefs.
The Norfolk Constabulary was called in by the University of East Anglia after thousands of its climate scientists’ confidential e-mails were published online last November. The documents appeared to show the scientists concealing information and manipulating data to fit their theories, although two independent inquiries have cleared the university of wrongdoing.
The Financial Times has learnt that everybody who made a request to the university’s climate research unit under Freedom of Information rules ahead of the alleged hacking is being approached by officers searching for the culprits.
In a letter to the FT, Sebastian Nokes, a businessman and climate change sceptic, said he was interviewed at length by a detective, who “wanted to know what computer I used, my internet service provider, and also to which political parties I have belonged, what I feel about climate change and what my qualifications in climate science are. He questioned me at length about my political and scientific opinions”. ”
Complete story :
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b942edba-47f6-11df-b998-00144feab49a.html
The real “trick” the alarmists came up with was, when it was becoming obvious that “global warming” wasn’t happening, replacing anthropogenic global warming with anthropogenic global climate change,
The notion of there being such a thing as “global climate” is absolute foolishness (but is quite useful in alarming the public needlessly, and in obtaining grants for “future study” and “more research”).
Climates are of a regional nature and are nothing other than a general idea of what sort of weather can be expected for a given region. Weather can have a great deal of variance in any given climatic region, and as Mark Twain is said to have said, “Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.”
H2O is the great modulator of temperature on the planet, because of its large latent heat of vaporization (539 BTUs per pound of H2O) and the amount of H2O in the vapor state that can be entrained in air being dependent on the temperature of the entraining air. Too, the more H2O entrained, the less dense a given volume of air is. A volume of air with H2O entrained is less dense than the same volume of air would be with less H2O entrained at the same temperature.. Warm air rises through cooler air, but moister air rises through drier air also..
Surface winds blow over oceans and lakes, and entrain H2O vapor state molecules. When a loosely bound molecule of H2O at the surfasce of a body of water becomes entrained in air, it also changes from its liquid state to its vapor state, taking its latent heat of vaporization with it, and that latent heat of vaporization comes both from the air entraining it, and the surface of the body of water. The air lowers in temperature, as does the surface of water.
This H2O entrained air rises, and continues to rise, until the surrounding air is colder, at which elevation the latent heat of vaporization of the H2O molecules is given up to the colder air, and the H2O molecules change back to a liquid state, and clouds form.
The colder air becomes warmer, and the amount of IR it emits, in all directions, increases. As most of the “directions” will miss the planet, this process transfers heat away from the planet, cooling the planet.
Clouds raise the albedo of the planet, reducing the amount of IR reaching the surface.
When the surface air temperatures over bodies of water rise, this process increases, cloud cover increases, thus cooling the planet. When the surface air temperatures over bodies of water become lower, less H2O can be entrained, the above process slows, and less H2O becomes entrained in the air above those bodies of water. Less latent heat of vaporization of H2O is transported to higher elevations to be radiated away from the planet, and cloud cover becomes less, allowing more IR to reach the surface.
When surface air temperatures over 70% of the planet rise, this process cools the surface, and when the temperature of the surface air over 70% cools, this process slows, allowing the planet to warm, thus balancing the temperature of the planet.
As the surface air temperatures over bodies of water are dependent on conduction of heat from the warmer parts of the land areas, it makes for a great balancing act.
I look at these graphs and I have been struck by something again and again.
“Normal” seems to be he smallest part.
Coincidentally the so-called normal occurred during the 60’s, when presumably all of the climate scientists were young, hale and hearty and full of spunk if you will. The best days of their lives.
I call selection bias.