The scientist behind the controversial ‘hockey stick’ graph has said it was ‘somewhat misplaced’ to make his work an ‘icon of the climate change debate’.
From the Telegraph, By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
Professor Michael Mann plotted a graph in the late 1990s that showed global temperatures for the last 1,000 years. It showed a sharp rise in temperature over the last 100 years as man made carbon emissions also increased, creating the shape of a hockey stick.
The graph was used by Al Gore in his film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and was cited by the United Nations body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as evidence of the link between fossil fuel use and global warming.
But the graph was questioned by sceptics who pointed out that is it impossible to know for certain the global temperature going back beyond modern times because there were no accurate readings.
The issue became a central argument in the climate change debate and was dragged into the ‘climategate’ scandal, as the sceptics accused Prof Mann and his supporters of exaggerating the extent of global warming.
However, speaking to the BBC recently, Prof Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, said he had always made clear there were “uncertainties” in his work.
“I always thought it was somewhat misplaced to make it a central icon of the climate change debate,” he said.
…
Professor John Christy, an atmospheric scientist from the University of Huntsville in Alabama, said just a quarter of the current warming is caused by man made emissions. He said that 10 to 30 per cent of scientists agree with him and are fairly sceptical about the extent of man made global warming.
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Anyone know who this bunch are?
http://www.theclimatesummit.org/
The Italian arguing the warmist side on the Telegraph comments claims to be their EU co-ordinator or some such grand sounding title. (He also claims to be a Physicist with a PhD, but it isn’t obvious from his posts.)
As I recall, the Hockey Stick Graph was added to the IPCCC report after the scientific inputs were already in. So, “all the scientists in the world” had not seen it prior to publication. It was inserted by the editors. If that is so, who was (were) the editors who gave it the primary position as the lead concept of that report?
Also, as I recall, “all the scientists in the world” had not reviewed Mann’s work. We know this because, even when asked for copies of his work to review, Mann stonewalled for years. So, the IPCC couldn’t have reviewed it and agreed with it, because they hadn’t seen it.
Once again, who were the editors or individuals who made Mann’s work the centerpiece of the IPCC report?
Just o clarify a misprint in my earlier post.
I meant to say ‘maybe Gav is on hols’.
‘Hols’ is British English short for holidays (vacation) and Gavin Schmidt is British by birth – and I am disappointed to say studied at the same college as I did 🙁
On the latest BBC Panorama prog yesterday
Whats Up With the Weather
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00swp0k/Panorama_Whats_Up_With_the_Weather/
About 17:30 in.
Mann “I’ve done my best, whenever I’ve been given an opportunity to try to clarify, the uncertainties in our work”.
Is the Mann news story in any way predictive of the soon to be released report by PSU who was investigating Mann?
Does Mann already know the results of the PSU investigation? He should.
Is he leveraging his position before it is too late? I think so, which to me means the findings by PSU won’t be entirely a whitewash . . . partly.
John
Now, lets be clear here. Mann lied, cheated, deliberately altered data to achieve his HS graph. Along with Hansen and NOAA they have altered historic data in order to confirm Mann’s fraudulant work. This is not accidentally poor science, IT IS FRAUD. I hope Cuccinelli nails him and his university(s).
The one thing that you can’t argue about is the weather….climate, is something else entirely 🙁
If their method as scientists (note, I did not say scientific method) worked so successfully (and was only really laid low by an unexpected public exposure of their shenanigans) one can only wonder at what else is being “promoted” as the truth and for what reasons, at what cost…
I watched the original BBC program, and what is clear is the extent to which Louise Grey has cherry picked. Amazingly for the BBC, it was clear that the vast majority of people asked for an opinion were luke warm to down right denialist (sorry to use the phrase, but a number believed that global warming was complete hype and didn’t allow for even a little doubt. The only person to unequivocally believe in AGW, when asked why, said that if they said so in the news then it must be right!
The scientists were all in agreement that some warming had taken place, that CO2 had increased due to man’s activity. The only area of real difference was the extent, and even the warmest agreed that there was uncertainty.
Doubts were also raised in the program about the efectiveness of windpower. The “doom and gloom” drowning world, child scaring TV advert of a few months back was criticised. Rising sea levels were dismissed as insignificant (sea level rose 30cm in the last century and who noticed it, was the summary). Nobody on the program mentioned “runaway” warming which was always the key point of warming alarmists, and then we come to Mann’s retrenchment.
It is clear from this program that there are elements of doubt entering the minds of even BBC journalists. Bear in mind that the program on which this appeared, Panorama, is a key BBC current affairs program put out at a peak viewing period.
I can think of three possible reasons for this miraculous conversion:
1) A unlikely decision to start questioning the “consensus” position.
2) A realisation that public opinion is swinging strongly against the warmists
3) Given that the BBC is a leftist organisation, they are now taking up a position of opposing the new carbon reduction policies (misguided IMHO) of the new Conservative government.
Unfortunately miraculous conversion and Louise Grey don’t go together.
If I commit a fraud and it is palpably provable as a fraud, when I come up before the judge is it open to me to plead “uncertainty” in my defence?
Let’s see, who ws lead author of the TAR chapter on paleoclimate that iconized Mann’s HS? Wasn’t it the same Michael Mann?
The problem is that the media, in the past, failed to clearly point out the “uncertainties” and it was the ‘Hockey Stick’ graph that persuaded me that, as Al Gore put it, “the science is settled” and the “debate is over”. Most people were persuaded by the media. I changed my mind when I realised the MWP and LIA (from peer reviewed work) were erased from the graphs and sleight of hand coupled with poorly placed thermometers created the rapid upward slope of the Hockey Stick illusion. Climategate and Pachauri’s business interests merely reinforced my doubts.
The blue and gray fuzz around the hockey stick graph represents data from various other sources, afaik.
There has not been an effort to put plausible error bars on the data, perhaps because it is already quite challenging to simply get it to line up, while interpreting the temperature implications of different tree ring or sediment layers thicknesses is inherently very ambiguous.
Of course this also makes it possible to draw hockey sticks as desired, with no need to explain except perhaps some belated recognition of inherent uncertainties.
I’d like to echo the words of Professor Raymond Bradley:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=111&filename=926681134.txt
This from IPCC FAQ 6.2 Page114 of TAR4.
‘All published reconstructions find that temperatures were warm during medieval times, cooled to low values in the 16th 17th 18th 19th centuries, then warmed rapidly after that.’
The Met office assert;
“Before the twentieth century, when man-made greenhouse gas emissions really took off, there was an underlying stability to global climate. The temperature varied from year to year, or decade to decade, but stayed within a certain range and averaged out to an approximately steady level.”
This statement is somewhat surprising as the Met office are the custodians of the longest dataset in the World -Central England temperatures- dating from 1659 , which is one of the most examined and researched temperature records in the world.
This actual instrumental record- as opposed to more imaginative proxies involving lumps of wood and holes in the ground- do not seem to agree with either the Met office, the IPCC nor Dr Mann’s bold assertions, as the record clearly shows wild fluctuations and a certain amount of cyclical behaviour.
This is CET to 1659 with global emissions of CO2 http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a7c87805970b-pi
This is the annual mean CET (Central England Temperature) from 1659 as a straightforward graph.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jdrake/Questioning_Climate/_sgg/m2_1.htm
This the same record by month;
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jdrake/Questioning_Climate/_sgg/m2m1_1.htm
As can be seen, throughout the record the temperatures have been warming-centuries before the input of Co2 by man. The period around 1700-1730 shows a particularly notable upturn in temperatures.
The instrumental record showing this notable variabilty is backed up by high quality contemporary observational records. Anyone browsing the diary of Samuel Pepys for January 1660/61-the year the Royal Society was established- would read;
“It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all; but the ways are dusty, and the flyes fly up and down, and the rose-bushes are full of leaves, such a time of the year as was never known in this world before here.”
This mild dry winter was followed the following year by a similarly mild but very wet winter. However there were very sharp and extended periods of frost during three of the next five winters. It is said that skating was introduced into England during the winter of 1662/63 and that King Charles II watched this new activity on the frozen Thames.
Here are some additional linear regressions for some of the oldest data sets in the world-all show the same slight warming trend over centuries and climate variability.
http://i47.tinypic.com/2zgt4ly.jpg
http://i45.tinypic.com/125rs3m.jpg
CET is backed up by various other records which show the latter stages of the early 18th Century warming, such as this one from Uppsala.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/how-long-is-a-long-temperature-history/
We are fortunate with this particular record- from our friend Arrhenius’s home town- to have the botanical garden records as well. These take us back to around 1695. Around 1710 the custodians start to plant outside some quite exotic plants-together with mulberries.
So the temperature rise can be traced back to at least 1690, and if we look further back, before the English Civil War, we know that the coldest part of this second phase of the LIA occurred in the early part of the 17th Century, so we can actually trace that rise from around 1601, which some say was the coldest year in our history.
It would appear that the Giss records -which start at in 1880- merely ‘plug’ into this well documented, gently warming, centuries long trend as a continuation of it -not the start.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
Some might believe that this all suggests that CO2 appears to be a somewhat weak climate driver that is overwhelmed by natural variability, and that our international institutions appear to have inexplicably forgotten their climate history and not be aware that, far from being ‘unprecedented,’ the apparent cyclical nature of our climate explains the current temperature trends very nicely.
Historic instrumental temperature records can be found here on my web site together with a variety of related articles.
http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/
Tonyb
It is important to note something about Michael Mann.
He is no expert on tree ring proxies.
“In Mann’s lavish 13,465-word online résumé the word ‘tree’ appears only 6 times. By comparison the word ‘ocean’ appears 37 times.”
Source: his resume.
Did a Secret Climate Deal Launch the Hockey Stick Fakery?
Source: Canada Free Press – May 13, 2010
Not an icon of the climate change *debate* – why not? Not an icon of climate change – true.
The only reason Mann would have for not wanting it to be a central icon of the debate is because it has been so thoroughly discredited in the debate. Mann is uncomfortable in the role of poster boy for exaggerated climate science.
You know, all this talk about taking out an insurance policy has got me thinking…
Why doesn’t the US take out a global warming insurance policy with AIG?
We wouldn’t have to make any premiums on it, as AIG has already received billions in bailout money. What they could also do is write a credit default swap with Goldman Sachs, or have Goldman Sachs write it for them (I’m not sure who would be the counterparty to who, but who’s to quibble?). These credit default swaps could then be broken up into bite size chunks and peddled to warmists throughout the world. Al Gore could buy them up and after marking them up, sell them with his books and movies.
But the graph was questioned by sceptics who pointed out that is it impossible to know for certain the global temperature going back beyond modern times because there were no accurate readings.
And this reporter holds a paid position as an ‘environment correspondent’?
The Panorama reporter, Tom Heap, commented on a homeowner’s plasma TV as a source of emissions at the power station.
But on several occasions he bragged about his zero emissions electric car! Did he think it was an electric car, or was a magic car?
On balance, I didn’t think much of the Panorama programme. The questions were slanted to create the appearance of agreement: “Do you believe CO2 is a GHG?”; “Have humans emitted CO2?”; “How certain are you that humans have had an effect on climate?” We can all pretty much agree on these questions, if they are taken no deeper.
The real question is: How certain are we that human emissions are the cause of a future environmental catastrophe?
The closest Panorama got to that question was to quote the IPCC range of between 1 and 6 degC rise by the end of the century. A huge range – so the IPCC is not at all sure .
Panorama missed the real issue – no surprises in that.
Mann says hockey stick “icon” is “misplaced”
A bit like the original data eh Mike?
“And this reporter holds a paid position as an ‘environment correspondent’?”
tallbloke,
A fine example of Louise Grey’s journalistic talents is revealed on Bishop Hill’s blog – she’s managed to repeat a story she reported on last year.
looking at the graph now.. why does the band of noise narrow significantly at 1600? different measurment proxies?
I never wanted that icon (points to a random graph). The hockey stick.
I wrote too soon about Real Climate keeping quiet. the following gnomic utterance has just appeared (courtesy of Gavin)
‘Seen at a meeting yesterday:
Grant us…
The ability to reduce the uncertainties we can;
The willingness to work with the uncertainties we cannot;
And the scientific knowledge to know the difference.
(Drawn from a white paper on the use of climate models for water managers)
Discuss’
Obviously uncertainty is favour du jour among the faithful….I detect a ground clearing operation so that when some nasty news comes out (Penn University inquiry??) they have plenty of apparent cover to show that explaining the uncertainties has always been at the forefront of their efforts. Or at least 95% of the time. Or maybe 40%. Or that they promise to do so by 2035..or maybe 2350. And anyone who says otherwise is a voodoo.
Anyway they have always been whiter than white and it is only Big Oil shills like McIntyre and other troublemakers who are trying to cause difficulties. The science is Settled (within the limits of uncertainty, whatever they may be).
Mann seems to be saying all kinds of things when the reporter voice-over plays. And then they make him look sort-of snarly faced and say whatever it is he says.
Mann is being mildly disingenous too – he *has* said that he favors Hansen-like one-time weather events to advance ‘climate change awareness’.