While not really “secret”, one might describe it that way because unlike the many things Dr. Mann has been doing lately, there wasn’t one peep of press coverage about it. He helped organize this conference, and as we know Dr. Mann doesn’t shy away from reporting to the press on anything that helps his stature. Surprisingly, the usual science writers didn’t mention it, and you’d think they would, given all the major players that converged in Portugal for this event. So, it seems like they may have missed it too. Portuguese blogger “EcoTretas” only got word of this from a tip about a related story in a Portuguese newspaper. His essay is below, and there’s a lot more after that. – Anthony
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The ClimateGate Secret Meeting
A usual reader of the blog sent me yesterday an interesting news from a Portuguese newspaper. It deals with the classic Medieval Warm Period problem, in the most green Portuguese newspaper. I immediately recognized one of the worst environmental journalists in Portugal, dealing with one of my favorite issues. Interestingly enough, Ricardo Trigo, a portuguese climatologist, was trying to explain the pseudo-science behind climate change and global warming, confusing things like Greenland’s vikings and Maunder’s Minimum.
But what really interested me in the story was a reference to Phil Jones, the person in the center of the ClimateGate controversy.
And references to a conference in Portugal, regarding the Medieval Warm Period. I spent some time trying to figure out what had happened. Turned out that I had not read the news with attention: the conference had happened a month before!
Between 22 and 24 of September, a symposium entitled “The Medieval Warm Period Redux: Where and When was it warm?” was organized in Lisbon, Portugal. The Climategate mob was here, including Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Malcolm Hughes and Raymond Bradley. I bet the main point on the agenda was how “to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period“. The abstracts for the conference are available here. Probably, the best abstract of the symposium was for Malcolm K. Hughes (highlights are my responsibility):
| We meant the title of our 1994 review “Was there a Medieval Warm Period, and if so Where and When?” (Hughes and Diaz, 1994) to be read in two ways. Firstly, it was to be read quite literally. Secondly, it was meant to be ironic. The literal reading was rewarded by an attempt to identify and synthesize records thought to be appropriate to this task. Irony was used to imply that, since a clear and simple answer was not forthcoming from the review, it might be useful to reformulate the question. Please read the title of this abstract in the light of this explanation of the 1994 title.
The trajectories of these two concepts (“Medieval Warm Period” and “Medieval Climate Anomaly “) will be traced. A case will be made for the abandonment of both of them, on the grounds that they are inappropriate, uninformative, and that they very probably divert attention from more revealing ways of thinking about the Earth’s climate over the past two millennia. It is clear from many recent publications, especially many of the abstracts submitted for this meeting, that high-resolution paleoclimatology has moved firmly from the mode of descriptive climatology to that of physical climatology. As a result, there is little utility in picking over definitions of the geographic and temporal extent of putative epochs, especially in the Late Holocene. The pressing questions concern the dynamics of the climate system, and the relative roles of free and forced variations, whether the forcings are anthropogenic or not. |
All the information I’ve got till now makes me believe that this was an almost secret meeting. No news transpired, not even here in Portugal. Given the abstracts, and the one seen above, their intentions are clear! If Ricardo Trigo kept his mouth shut, nobody would probably hear about it. So I wish to thank my loyal reader for bringing this to our attention.
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Here’s more on this conference. First have a look at the attendees. It reads like a who’s who book of paleoclimatology. I’ve highlighted some of the more recognizable names.
The source of that list is the brochure, which you can download here. With all these paleo-bigwigs meeting in one place, surely somebody would have written about it?
It appears they are trying to rehabilitate the paleoclimatology so that it plays well in the next IPCC report. The main website has this to say about it:
We propose to revisit the MCA/MWP assimilating widespread and continuous paleoclimatic evidence in a homogeneous way and scale them against recent measured temperatures to allow a meaningful quantitative comparison against the 20th-century pace and magnitude of warming. It is the goal of the organizers to focus attention on this topic, so that the latest results will be considered in the next (fifth) assessment report of the IPCC.
[Annual mean NH temperature anomalies from their 1500 to 1899 means (°C) simulated by different models (lines) and compared with the concentration of overlapping NH temperature reconstructions (grey shading). Taken from Figure 6.13 of Jansen et al., 2007: Palaeoclimate. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon et al. (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.]
Among the topics to be discussed are:
• Reconciling multiple proxy climate records—what do the differences indicate regarding the scale of MCA/MWP climate?
• What do the latest modeling results tell us about possible forcing mechanisms during this period?
• What are some other impacts of climatic variability during the MCA/MWP regarding such topics as changes in ocean basin tropical cyclone activity?
• What were some of the key regional patterns of climatic anomalies during this time? How do they compare with 20th century patterns?
• In what specific ways does the post-1980 period, considered a time when the global warming signal is evident, different from the largest anomalous multidecadal periods of the MCA/MWP?
Clearly, they seem to be embracing the existence of the MWP, but at the same time once again they appear to be trying to figure out how to minimize it.
When you see things like this (from MBH98 co-author Malcolm K. Hughes) on the MCA/MWP:
A case will be made for the abandonment of both of them, on the grounds that they are inappropriate, uninformative, and that they very probably divert attention from more revealing ways of thinking about the Earth’s climate over the past two millennia.
And look at the attendee list and lack of press coverage, you realize it’s the same gang of people running the same game all over again.
The key is, will they learn to shoot straight this time?
The -snip-. I know what they’re like and I still can’t believe their bare faced cheek.
What with the IPCC now deciding in the wake of the IAC report, that the best way to deal with uncertainty is to suddenly become certain, it’s obvious these greedy, dishonest troughers are going to blag it out to the very end.
The -snip-.
COMMENT: Even abbreviated cussing isn’t kosher, sorry – mike
I think this meeting gives an interesting insight into the mind-set of the CAGW set.
Their logic would seem to follow this pattern:-
We’ve lost the battle to hide the evidence of a MWP which had temperatures similar to today. The hockey stick graph has become a liability.
Lets defocus the importance of this to our CAGW conjecture and concentrate on models which cannot be as easily falsified.
The existence of a MWP at a time when CO2 levels were low, and the lack of any statistically significant warming for the last 15y, when CO2 levels were high and growing puts CAGW between a rock and a hard place.
Expect more wriggling and squirming from the ‘team’ as they attempt to find a solution to please their political masters and keep the grant money coming in.
I once went to one of them secret meetings, but alas, never again.
Secret meetings always seem to be filled with extreme hurt in the nether parts of ones own sewer system it seems. So who really wants to meet in secret?
David M Hoffer, well put, the problem with these magi is they do not as yet posess the power those who preceded them in history did, like Stalin and Hitler, they burbt the books that told the truth about their lies. The Viking history is hard to cover up, if they caim an even climate for 2000 years can we ask where the glaciers came from that engulfed their farmlands and only now are starting to recede (or maybe that has stalled too) were they among the scientists that made fun of the claims that the east coast of Canada is the Viking “vineland” because as any idiot can see there are no vines there??
I have qualifications in obselete computer hardware and general engineering but I plainly see their smoke and mirrors are failing to cover their sad lying asses, it is fraud on a grand scale given that it is against (in england at least) queen and country then treason is their crime, sadly the EU insist on no hanging these days, I will settle for dismissal, stripping of all qualifications and arresting all their assets, thats all.
rbateman says:
October 23, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Elizabeth says:
October 23, 2010 at 8:58 am
Does not a better understanding of “geographic and temporal extent” of these geological epochs help determine the extent of anthropogenic forcings?
Yes, it does lead to a better understanding, and it does so by placing the climate variations in upper & lower bounds to which natural forces are properly ascribed. With the natural forces constrained to upper & lower bounds, it becomes much clearer what part anthropogenic has and is playing. It looks like AGW is miniscule and of no particularly great import… at the level of the back of the geological envelope.
Bravo to you for seeing the bigger picture.
As there is no agreement on what the extent of, or even what the climate variations of these periods were – and as there is very little concrete knowledge on what the natural reasons for those or any climate changes are, I fail to see the logic of that claim.
All that might be able to be said is at that time the climate might have been in a particular set of states – but not all states are known and some of the triggers for those changes and their levels are not known.
Moreover, it is not clear what the motives of the re-assessment is; as the researchers in the gathering are known for hiding their data and their processing and even ‘hiding’ validation failures of their proxies.
Perhaps if all their work was carried out ‘open book’ – as it should be if it is funded from taxation – then there would be more trust in what they were doing and any subsequent results. Otherwise it will be seen as an exercise in publicly funded obfuscation of the subject.
“A case will be made for the abandonment of both of them, on the grounds that they are inappropriate, uninformative, and that they very probably divert attention”
On the conference, I would say:
“A case will be made for the abandonment of all it’s conclusions on the grounds that it was secretive, political, and that it will very probably produce misleading propaganda”
Mike M. says:
October 22, 2010 at 6:29 pm
Where is Keith Briffa?
Uhmmm, hiding behind some pine trees?
:o)
Jimbo,
You might have highlighted this from your second link:
This does not directly contradict the findings of Mann. et. al. 2009, although the proxy count is low. The cited Mann study showed that some of the northern hemisphere was on a par with the 1961 – 1990 mean and a few areas were warmer, but not as warm as the instrumental record indicates for late 20th century when compared with the same baseline period. Silly me, but this seems to be in line with the findings of MBH 99, although Mann et. al. 2009 attempted to define the spatial extent of the MCA. Another, admitted, problem with this study was the fact that it could not be calibrated with the instrumental period because of the coarse resolution of the proxies used.
In the end I cannot agree with the author of the head post, this is a normal conference which featured people presenting their latest results, others stating the needs for data to make forward progress and others proposing directions for future research. There is nothing weird here, lots more gets accomplished via a face to face communication — anyone who has participated in a teleconference will know this.
As far as the charge that conferences are held in nice places… Well yeah. Most everyone is going to have to travel even if a conference is held in say, Glendive, MT in January. So why not hold it in a place where you can have a decent time with a lot of places to socialize outside of the conference. After all, the socializing and resulting cross fertilization of ideas is the real point of these things. God knows, in the days when I used to have employers who were willing the send me to conferences on Computer Science this seemed to me to be the main point. Yeah, it was fun, but mostly because of the people I was able to talk to rather than the place it was held (although that was a nice benefit, Disneyland, New Orleans, Chicago, New York, DC anyone?).
Was this meeting scheduled in order to discuss how rebrand the MWP in the Fifth Assessment Report? Is the term Medieval Climate Anomaly – MCA – in widespread usage? No, I think not, and a quick search find Mann at the heart of this new terminology:
“…For this reason, we prefer to use ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ to underscore that, while there were significant climate anomalies at the time, they were highly variable from region to region.”
http://www.physorg.com/news178459644.html
Perhaps the bulk of future pal-reviewed papers will now use the term MCA to give the impression that the MWP was odd, unnatural, out-of-kilter and generally not a good fit with the rest of the two thousand years of climate because the term MWP itself is inappropriate.
The troops are converging around the MWP, preparing an assault to embed in the 5th Assessment Report that will strengthen the premise that the late 20th C warming was indeed unprecedented by painting the past as a natural hiccup.
The recent high-profile resignation from the IPCC’s review body (sorry, folks – can’t remember his name – ‘senior moment’) was sniffily dismissed by the climate mafia because the gentleman was a ‘physicist – not a climateologist’. Now it seems that its all physics after all – so presumably his resignation DOES count…
This is clearly a gathering of like-minded people. I cannot imagine any proper scientist giving Jones the time of day after climategate. These people clearly have no sense of shame or proper science.
“John M says:
October 23, 2010 at 8:44 am
“Fleur Loveridge-Wanker”
C’mon man, you’re pulling our leg.”
It’s pronounced ‘Vaanker’ so it’s ok.
At time of writing, I count 4 of 137 comments calling this for what it is – boring, standard science conference stuff. The majority of the rest are pure groupthink reinforcement, baseless allegations of fraud, paranoia, mockery, rote repetition of smears and reposts of stolen emails.
So this is the web’s no.1 science blog is it? You ought to be ashamed.
Phil’s Dad says:
October 22, 2010 at 7:03 pm
Ready.
Aim.
Shoot foot.
LOL! Witty.
Craig Loehle says:
October 23, 2010 at 6:39 am
I wasn’t invited! “Sob!!!”,/i>
Well, you went and made this pretty graph:
http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/graphs/mwp/loehle_e-e_2007-5-fig-2-web.jpg
You rained on the parade. So now you can’t go to the party.
😉
They just don’t learn. They’re going to rethink all their reconstructions and “homogenize” the data from various reconstructions, and yet, they still haven’t employed the skills of the worlds statisticians. Although, if they did use acceptable mathematics and proper statistical analysis, they would only prove themselves wrong and be looking for new jobs. So, in the end, I guess I can’t be too surprised.
Just how stupid is Mann? In a couple of weeks the Republicans are going to take the House and they already said they are going to investigate Climategate. That means in a few months Mann will either have to answer questions or plead the 5th. Doing this now just hands the Republicans more ammunition.
Maybe they were visiting the boquilobo bog or researching the ancient oaks of Parque National da Peneda-Geres.
John says:
October 24, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Just how stupid is Mann? In a couple of weeks the Republicans are going to take the House and they already said they are going to investigate Climategate. That means in a few months Mann will either have to answer questions or plead the 5th. Doing this now just hands the Republicans more ammunition.
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In most opinion polls, historically, Congress is lucky to get 20+% approval ratings, it’s usually in the teens.
Don’t see that changing any regardless of who controls Congress.
Ijhofe and Burton witch hunts to insue if they regain control of one/both houses of Congress?
You Betcha!
More meaningless biased non-peer reviewed reports from Congress a la The Wedgie Report?
You Betcha!
More over-the-top Political Theatre?
You Betcha!
Dave H says:
October 24, 2010 at 12:55 pm (Edit)
At time of writing, I count 4 of 137 comments calling this for what it is – boring, standard science conference stuff. The majority of the rest are pure groupthink reinforcement, baseless allegations of fraud, paranoia, mockery, rote repetition of smears and reposts of stolen emails.
So this is the web’s no.1 science blog is it? You ought to be ashamed.
—…—…
Hmmn. And those emails – freely released by an insider disgusted with the lies and coverups of many of this same conference, after they were deliberately gathered to one directory after an FOIA request by to be hidden by these same people – so a deliberate effort to hide data and invalidate the science from outsiders…..
But you see nothing but a boring conference? Odd. May I ask how much you have profited by climate research money in the past 15 years? What articles you have published in which journals that you wish to protect for your own gains the past 15 years? See – them money and time and resources spent here by these previous and continuing conspirators is money, time, and effort deliberately spent now (conspicuously out of the exposure of the free press) to “create” the next IPCC report that they themselves will benefit from.
And you see nothing wrong?
So…
If tree ring calculations say that it was too cold to grow stuff in Greenland, then the Vikings didn’t really grow stuff crops there?
And more recently, we should be able to prove that the North West passage could not have been open at any time, and that Admunsen couldn’t really say that he sailed through it in a wooden hulled boat?
And if a computer model calculates my shirt to be red, even though I have several witnesses that it is light green, it really is RED?
Well, Gallup says you are wrong. If you ignore the outlier 84% (2001 attacks) you will see that the number is about 40% that Congress struggles to attain.
You are clearly wrong here as well, it shows the absolute improvement in the Jan 1995 Gingrich/Contract era and the following ones. As the Congress shifted Dem, the Approval began to fall. Then Pelosi takes over in Jan 2007 with 37% and drove it down to 18%.
That graph ends in May 2008 with approval at 18%, this one covers 2009 to July 2010, where 19% approval takes a mild jump during Barry Hussein Obama’s coronation and then continues the Pelosi death spiral back to 18% again. And some polls even place it into single digits. Also note that there are some 20% ratings in that history and it looks like it only happens when your Dems are in charge.
Reference: Here are the Gallup pages I looked at (the 1st referenced graph is found at the first link, the other is found at the 4th link): 2008-05-14, 2008-07-16, 2010-07-22, 2010-09-20, 2010-10-15. I should point out that Gallup does as well as hiding the raw data as Mann does. I can’t find it anywhere.
You are worried about Jim Inhofe and Dan Burton? LOL. You should actually be losing sleep over Darrell Issa (currently Ranking Member, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform). This gent is a Pit Bull. Once that title Ranking Member gets switched to Chairman then you may begin worrying (and begin drinking, just don’t drive ;-).
It is strange that you mentioned witch hunts don’t ya think? I mean we literally had Dems engage in one in Delaware. In case our foreign friends have not heard, the Democratic Socialist party has been busy asking the (R) Senate Candidate if she practiced witchcraft or was in a coven when she was in college! Yep. Right here, right now in the fall of 2010 they have resurrected a practice from 400 years ago! Ironic that this commenter, EFS_Junior, brings up witch hunts even though the Socialist party he is no doubt a member of, actually HAS been engaging in a real-life actual witch hunt. Ironic. Yes? Surprising. No.
Of course he is trying to allude to McCarthy era hearings that were not witch hunts at all since Communist spies are not witches. There actually were and are Communist spies, which is what the entire point was in the first place..
By application of an entirely new branch of mathematics, for which a separate patent application has been filed, the simultaneous invention of matheMANNics, afforded a unique and previously unknown means of quantitatively integrating indeterminate quantities, ambiguous social constants, tunneling low energy IQ neurons, lost and deleted data, pretzel peer(review)ing, plausible and reversible deniability and single variable gaseous processing with the constants of misprision and fraud that when matheMANNicly factored results in a complete and natural replacement for rational thought.
The algorEithm.
Rattus Norvegicus:
“After all, the socializing and resulting cross fertilization of ideas is the real point of these things.”
And who’s paying for all this?
I assume that the exciting prospect of cross fertlilizing ideas is why Alarmists tend to invite so many sceptics to their jollies.
The lemmings seem determined to hurl themselves over the cliff.
Why do these warmist fools seem to have such a complete failure of concept regarding consequences to their actions?
Do they think ‘Sorry!’ is going to be enough?
They are in for a very rude shock sooner rather than later, imho.