Here is the web page for Dr. Raymond S. Bradley who is listed as:
University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences and Director of the Climate System Research Center (http://www.paleoclimate.org).
Readers may also recognize Dr. Bradley from his co-authorship with Dr. Michael Mann in the famous MBH98 paper which produced the embattled “hockey stick” graph.
Dr. Bradley has also gained some recent notoriety with his accusations of plagiarism regarding the Wegman report to congress, by Dr. Edward Wegman of George Mason University, which was critical of MBH98’s statistical methods.
Here’s Dr. Bradley’s photo from his UMass web page:
Notice anything interesting? Here are some hints:
His graph for CO2 data titled “Greenhouse Gas Record from the Vostok Ice Core” shows a value around 360 ppm for CO2 at the “zero date” of the present history. The photo must be old, since the current value in the atmosphere from Mauna Loa is said to be around 390ppm currently.
So, it’s an old photo, what’s the problem you say?
For readers not familiar with the CO2 data from the Vostok Ice Core, you can find the official data set here from NOAA’s FTP servers:
CDIAC (Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center)
ftp://cdiac.ornl.gov/pub/trends/co2/vostok.icecore.co2
NCDC (National Climatic Data Center)
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/co2nat.txt
NASA Goddard also offers access to the official Vostok data here:
http://gcmd.nasa.gov/records/GCMD_CDIAC_CO2_VOSTOK_ICECORE.html
…and they offer this helpful graph, which is time reversed from Dr. Bradley’s graph, with the present day on the left:
That’s odd, the Vostok CO2 data for the present is around 280ppm, way lower than the 360ppm shown on Dr. Bradley’s graph. Strange, but that NASA web page on Vostok Ice Core data shows the most recent update at:
So it must be current, right?
So let’s look at some other sources, maybe they are closer to Dr. Bradley’s value, surely there must be some update somewhere to this Vostok data that I’ve missed.
Let’s check Wikipedia, which always seems to be updated. Even though William Connelly doesn’t edit there anymore surely it’s been updated with this new data in the past year or so? Here’s the Wikipedia graph:
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg
That’s odd, the CO2 data there shows just over 280ppm of CO2 in the Vostok record. But they reference Petit, et al 1999 on that page. Hmmm, I went to find that paper, and was able to locate a PDF copy of it here: http://www.daycreek.com/dc/images/1999.pdf and I saved a local copy here Vostok_nature_1999 to prevent overloading that website with downloads. Here’s the title of that 1999 paper from Nature:
Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica
J. R. Petit*, J. Jouzel†, D. Raynaud*, N. I. Barkov‡, J.-M. Barnola*, I. Basile*,M. Bender§, J. Chappellaz*,M. Davisk, G. Delaygue†, M. Delmotte*, V. M. Kotlyakov¶, M. Legrand*, V. Y. Lipenkov‡, C. Lorius*, L. Pe´ pin*, C. Ritz*, E. Saltzmank & M. Stievenard†
Oh, OK, that explains it, the CO2 levels in 1999 must have been 360ppm and that’s where that value on Dr. Bradley’s graph comes from. Let’s check the Mauna Loa record for 1999 here: ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_mm_mlo.txt
The values for 1999 are:
1999 3 1999.208 369.46 369.46 367.90 26 1999 4 1999.292 370.77 370.77 368.19 30 1999 5 1999.375 370.66 370.66 367.84 29 1999 6 1999.458 370.10 370.10 367.87 30 1999 7 1999.542 369.10 369.10 368.42 30 1999 8 1999.625 366.70 366.70 368.21 30 1999 9 1999.708 364.61 364.61 367.95 29 1999 10 1999.792 365.17 365.17 368.41 31 1999 11 1999.875 366.51 366.51 368.58 29 1999 12 1999.958 367.85 367.85 368.58 29
Well that explains it then right? The value of the CO2 atmosphere in 1999 was around 360 ppm, so that’s what Dr. Bradley was showing in that old photo. And the 1999 Nature paper from Petit et al must show the same value, right? Here it is:
Huh, that’s strange, it only shows around 280ppm of CO2 at the “present” of 1999 when this graph was published.
Well OK, the archived NOAA data on the FTP server must be updated and have ~360ppm somewhere in the dataset, right? So I looked through it to be sure. Here’s the most recent data from: ftp://cdiac.ornl.gov/pub/trends/co2/vostok.icecore.co2
Hmmm, the most recent data is from 2342 yr BP (years before present) and shows 284.7. That can’t be right, because the distinguished Dr. Bradley shows the data at around 360ppm. Yet, the header shows the co-author names from the 1999 Nature paper on the Vostok ice core data analysis. Surely there must be an update to it?
Maybe the other NOAA data set from NCDC is what he used? at: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/co2nat.txt
Well, it agrees with the CDIAC data, but there’s still no ~360ppm of CO2 listed in the data for the most recent readings.
Well gosh, how can this be?
The answer is seems, is that there is no new data from the Vostok Ice core. It ended, and the official repositories of that data have no new data. The last CO2 value for the Vostok Ice Core dataset is listed as being 284.7ppm.
So how does Dr. Bradley get ~360ppm? Easy, I think he uses the same technique he and his co-authors learned when writing the famous MBH98 paper that made the hockey stick -splice the instrumental record onto the paleo record:
Graph above from Fred Pearce’s Feb 2010 article in the Guardian shows the instrumental record attached to the ice core record.
And here’s a later version from 2003 showing the same instrumental record splice along with paleo data (Figure 1. from Mann et al. EOS Forum 2003):
Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2003b/mann2003b.html
So it seems rather apparent that Dr. Bradley (or whoever made the graph) simply took the Vostok Ice Core CO2 paleo data and “spliced” it with the instrumental record on the end. Or, as Joe Romm likes to say “make stuff up”.
The only problem is, as he presents it with the title of his graph: Greenhouse Gas Record from the Vostok Ice Core as shown below…
…it’s patently false in my opinion. Ditto for the red Methane line, but that’s another story.
Now here’s the problem. If you took surface temperature data from Antarctica, and spliced it with surface temperature data from Hawaii, and then presented it as the entire historical record from Antarctica, our friends would have a veritable “cow”.
Or, if you took stock performance data from poorly performing Company “A” and spliced on better performing stock data from Company “B”, and then made a new graph and used that graph to sell investors on Company “A”, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would have a veritable “cow” when they found out, wouldn’t they? People go to jail for such things.
But hey, this is Climate Science.
big h/t to WUWT reader Brian M. who sent the tip in via email.
Addendum: I should add that I have no evidence that this graph has been used in any scientific publications or professional presentations by Dr. Bradley, I’m only pointing out that for this photo, which appears to be staged, what is presented doesn’t match the actual Vostok data. Readers should not extrapolate anything beyond this scope until new examples are presented. – Anthony
Mike’s Nature Trick: It isn’t just for tree-ring proxies.
Ask your climatologist if Mike’s Nature Trick can work for your data.
Rob Z says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:26 am
CO2 numbers below 200ppm? I thought the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were well mixed? Not good. What’s the offset between reality and the ice cores? Don’t plants have issues at low concentrations of CO2?…
______________________________________________________________
Yes Plants have an issue with CO2 below 200ppm they CROAK! (the C3 plants like trees)
“…The CO2 concentration found in air bubble and in secondary air cavities of deep Vostok and Bryd cores range from 178 and 296 ppm…
According to Barnola et al (1987) the level of CO2 in the global atmosphere during many tens of thousands of years spanning 30,000 to110,000 BP were below 200ppm. If this were true then the growth of C3 plants should be limited at the global scale because their net Photosynthesis is depressed as CO2 concentration in air decreases to less than about 250ubar (less than about 250ppmv)(McKay et al 1991) This would lead to the extinction of C3 plant species . This has however not been recorded by paleobotanists (Manum 1991).” http://www.co2web.info/stoten92.pdf
More on the problems with the CO2 measurement can be found at http://www.co2web.info/
I may have missed something but since the chart is splicing of ice core data with other measurements, there must be massive fudging at the transition to achieve a continuous line on the graph. Would any honest scientist do this without an explanation?
@Ian H
‘I’ve had academic photos taken. The photographer just wants to pose you an in academic looking setting – some maths scribbled on a whiteboard – pointing at something on a computer screen – whatever.’
What’s the saying: You can always screw an academic out of seeing the whole picture.
What’s in a background?
Al Gored says:
Um… that was because the mission was accomplished. I don’t recall the sign having any more details on exactly which mission, as far as I can tell people who were upset about that chose the mission they wanted to make a hassle about.
All official pictures with me in them have backgrounds that I chose, it would be a stretch to assume any different of Dr. Bradley.
Surely there is a lot of overreaction here.
The Vostok ice core measurement go back nearly 600,000 years and show a regular pattern of CO2 changes through the glacial periods from about 180 pp to 280 ppm and back. The current measurement is 390 ppm (or 360 when that image was created). So something that varied naturally from 180 to 280 now has a value of 390, and you see something wrong with pointing that out? On the scale of the graph the Vostok measurements end 19/20ths of the way from the 50kyear marker to the zero line – that is not much greater than the width of the line being plotted. The Vostok measurements are identified, the current value is identified, so as far as I can see there is no ‘manufactured data’ and the only thing that could be objected to is that someone has drawn a line from the end of the Vostok data to the current value. Is that so serious? There are things in climate science which are dubious (like some of the computer models) but the CO2 measurements are one of the sound parts, so are you not shooting yourselves in the foot by objecting to this?
What is known about the uncertainties pertaining to the CO2 data (i.e., ppm) derived from the Vostok ice core? I scanned the Petit et al. paper, and it seems the dating is the primary focus of uncertainty with that analysis. I’m interested in understanding how reliable the presumed peak CO2 levels were through the interglacials.
“”””” Peter H says:
November 24, 2010 at 10:14 am
Does that graph show what has and is going on with atmospheric CO2 over time?
Yes it does. “””””
Well actually it shows what has and is going on with the ice core CO2 over time; well except for that fake recent data. He even labelled it as such.
How convenient that they plot those CO2 and Temperature curves from Vostok on different graphs. They obviously have adjusted the vertical scales to make the two data sets come out with about the same amplitude (no problem there) but since they can do that, couldn’t they also adjust the zero offset so that the two lines lie on top of each other.
Then it would be immediately apparent what the only really interesting information is in these curves; which is that the temperature changes before the CO2 changes; not the other way round.
Al Gore had the same problem when plotting similar data in his book: “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Yep truly inconvenient Al, that today’s CO2 rise incident; might simply be a consequence of the 800 year delay since the mediaeval Warm period.
eadler says:
The funny thing is, I think you actually believe this.
If this was ANY OTHER DISCIPLINE, that dramatic change would most likely result in recalibration of the ice core data, not a plan to seriously cripple our society.
Seriously, tell me you’re not actually under the belief that the planet experienced a steady, smooth, monotonous 260ppm CO2 concentration from the end of the last ice age until the day the steam engine was invented…
Anthony , you are right to be cautious about where this graph comes from but as you say above this is THE message he chooses as a back drop on his offical page at umass. The graph is not some accidental scribble on a blackboard it is a well prepared and labelled graph and it seems unlikely that all that work was done just for the photo , it must come from somewhere. I’m sure someone will spot where it’s from.
Ice cores don’t become ice cores until some considerable depth so there’s no way that level of CO2 came from Vostok data , there is no update. It’s an ice core. The first sample analysed was from 148m , an ice age of 5700 years and and estimated age of the trapped air bubbles of about 2300 years. At that time CO2 was no higher than the previous peaks. All the rest on Bradleys graph comes from some where else and is GRAFTED on without any labeling or attribution.
This is clearly another case of “Mike’s trick” as you correctly suggest.
However, you should be careful about the term graft as you use it to apply to the Pearce graph and the 2003 one. Both of those show superposition of incompatible data , which is very bad practice but not deception if clearly labeled as both those cases appear to be.
What made made Mann’s hockey stick and Jones’ WMO front page graph blatant misrepresentation was the fact this they were GRAFTED, ie. date from one data set was truncated and was then blended with data from another incompatible data set. Jones even went so far as to use the same colour for the whole thing
In order to get the running mean from Briffa’s “decline” data to blend into the temperature data it was necessary to “pad” the window of the running mean tree-rings data with something else. Having chopped out the inconvenient downward data it seems the window was padded by repeating the last value before the trucation. Thus making the mean flatten out and blend into the thermometer data.
McIntyre went into all this in his usual excruciatingly thorough way and it’s documented at CA.
So I think it’s very important to differentiate between superposition and splicing/grafting data.
What you have clearly shown here is a splice. What’s more, it is an unaccredited change to someone else’s work. Probably Petit et al.
Thanks for shining a light on this.
A pound of coal will emit a fairly well-known amount of CO2 when burned. Same with a pound of crude oil or pound of methane. You look at a country’s combined oil, gas, coal consumption. The US CO2 emissions have been flat in recent years, China’s is skyrocketing, increasing in both annual volume and rate of increase.
When you increase the burning of coal/oil at the rate that China and Brazil and India have been, there absolutely has to be an additive effect as far as the total atmospheric CO2 is concerned. But if CO2 emissions were to stop increasing and simply stay at today’s levels, I believe the atmospheric CO2 would actually begin to decline as increased biomass begins to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere at an increased rate.
So … inject more CO2 into the air, plants will grow better, after some lag period these plants will begin to pull more CO2 per year out. If the CO2 emission rate is maintained at a flat rate, the plants will “overshoot” and CO2 levels will begin to drop. Plants will then slow down a bit and undershoot so CO2 levels will rise again … the process will ring a little bit until it settles into equilibrium.
The problem is that right now CO2 emissions are increasing at a faster rate than the plants can “bulk up” but if the growth in the rate of increase levels off, I expect to see a leveling off and then a decrease in atmospheric CO2 in a multi-decadal context (in other words, it would take longer than 10 years but probably less than 100 years).
The removal of CO2 from the atmosphere is relentless and no matter how much we try to put back in (all fossil fuel does is put *back* CO2 that was taken out earlier), the earth’s biosystem will become more efficient at removing it. The more we put in per year, the more is taken out per year.
This is apples and oranges. The real-time measurements are at a much greater resolution than the ice core measurements. The ice core measurements are smudged, as it were, by age accuracy and gas diffusion.
I have a good, real science, experiment. In one hundred years, take ice core samples and compare the derived CO2 levels with the historically measured levels.
“”””” jimmi says:
November 24, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Surely there is a lot of overreaction here.
The Vostok ice core measurement go back nearly 600,000 years “””””
Well jimmi there certainly is soemthing wrong here.
Over that time frame from Vostok the CO2 ranges from 180 to 280 with one spike up to 300ppm; so you would get the idea that the average CO2 for nearly a million years has been about 230 ppm ;but we are assured that in the recent pre-industrial era the basline atmospheric CO2 was 280 ppm; which is what the maximum was over the long history.
The third grade science question in “Are You Smarter than a Fifth grader ?” might be.
Do you believe that the CO2 trapped in ice cores must be equal to the CO2 which is in the atmospehre at the same time ?
Those ten year old kids would surely answer that the CO2 measured in the cores, can not be compared with the values in the atmosphere. Moreover; Vostok Station is at a high altitude; I’d guess 10,000 feet; but you can google or wiki it.
Well what do you know; the atmospheric pressure up there is much lower than at sea level; and maybe the gases remain in the ice at different rates depending on the atmospheric pressure.
Well we all know that CO2 is quite soluble in water; and more so in cold water. That ice probably is the result of precipitation of moisture that originated somewhere else and was at high altitude when the droplets formed and dissolved the CO2.
But the “air” that is trapped in those pockets in the ice, was air thatw as at ground level when it became trapped.
Why anyone would expect the ice samples to maintain the air/CO2 ratio of some high altitude atmosphere level is beyond me.
So to claim that atmospheric CO2 over the last 800,000 years was 230 ppm average is just plain silly.
Let’s put this in simple terms for the hard of thinking, without any tenuous analogies:
The 360ppm figure is not from the Vostok ice cores, but from instrumental measurements. The Vostok numbers are not direct measurements as such, but proxies based on retained CO2 in bubbles trapped within the ice. Given that the ice cores don’t show this level in the most recent ice, there has to be some question as to the absolute CO2 values suggested by the proxy (though the historic trend/shape is likely an accurate one.
If the proxy data is just that, and can’t be shown with sufficient certainty to tally accurately with instrumental data, then it is invalid to join the two datasets together and suggest that the series should be read as homogenous and comparable across time.
Choosing it for one’s publicity shot on one’s website suggests that one is perfectly comfortable with being associated with it.*
*If I may weaken and resort to an analogy at the end, a senior politician is unlikely to pose for their prime publicity photo on the set of a violent pornographic snuff movie. The association isn’t really the desired one…
When CO2 is plotted with reconstructed temps, one side has the temp scale and the other side has the CO2 scale. It isn’t “rescaled” to be exact. It is just using the vertical lines for separate scales.
Man, if I don’t just sit at the computer and hit send, my comment ends up down the page long after a thought was finished and we moved on to something else.
Splicing, data, lines, colours etc. etc. aside.
Let’s forget about all of what might follow from this photo and concentrate on the photo itself.
It does not appear to be photo-shopped in any way; a very close-up view will show this (look at the hairs on the back of the head in relation to the background).
Nobody of the alleged scholastic standing of Dr. Raymond S. Bradley would allow any written or pictographic representation of his august self to be published without his express permission.
Someone of this presumed standing would be very careful to ensure that nothing in the least threatening to his/her reputation would be included in that material which was to be published.
Dr. Bradley must, therefore, have been aware of the background to his featured photograph; in fact, Dr. Bradley must have posed for this picture.
Such approval of the photograph implies approval of everything appearing in the photograph, including the background.
Should my somewhat simplistic suppositions be shown to be correct, then the esteemed Dr. Bradley agrees with that data shown on the graph. This data has been shown to be incorrect.
What is the only reasonable conclusion which can be drawn?
It is very cold where I am. I have to dress in several layers and go out and feed our horses. I am not happy about this. Still, it happens every winter so I am not surprised. I am surprised at the number of people that do not understand that the current posting is not about the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is about someone making a chart that mixes together data sets from different places and different times. This is not appropriate. (“ . ”)
I just love how you can sail the Oasis Of The Seas through the Mann’s 2003 error bars
jimmi says:
November 24, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Surely there is a lot of overreaction here.
The Vostok ice core measurement go back nearly 600,000 years and show a regular pattern of CO2 changes through the glacial periods from about 180 pp to 280 ppm and back. The current measurement is 390 ppm (or 360 when that image was created). So something that varied naturally from 180 to 280 now has a value of 390, and you see something wrong with pointing that out? On the scale of the graph the Vostok measurements end 19/20ths of the way from the 50kyear marker to the zero line – that is not much greater than the width of the line being plotted. The Vostok measurements are identified, the current value is identified, so as far as I can see there is no ‘manufactured data’ and the only thing that could be objected to is that someone has drawn a line from the end of the Vostok data to the current value. Is that so serious? There are things in climate science which are dubious (like some of the computer models) but the CO2 measurements are one of the sound parts, so are you not shooting yourselves in the foot by objecting to this?
———————————————————————————————–
But Jimmi your assuming that the ice core CO2 was the same as the air value at the time. There is no certainity in that. On the contrary as another post has indicated its possible that it is less than the air value at the time. We simply do not know and consequently it would be reasonable to indicate the different method of measurement on the graph unless of course one wants to push a dramatic looking visual as “evidence”. But I would agree of course the graph is not in a “peer reviewed” paper so its possible to get away with a much more sloppy presentation.
Anthony & WUWT reader Brian M.,
Thanks for the pre-Turkey Day stimulation.
I think this post provides a simple message like, “There is a kind of intellectual buzz in the air and it is buzzing now about a UMASS prof near you.”
Your buzzing energy is impressive.
Happy thanksgiving to all & to all a good night.
John
Isn’t there another problem with this graph, in that the CO2 vertical axis has a distorted lower end? The bottom of the vertical axis is labeled “0”, and the the next number up is “180”. But from that point on, the numbers the same distance represents only a rise of “60”. This creates an exaggerated notion of the actual increase in CO2, as if CO2 has almost doubled from the pre-industrial era, rather than only gone up about 50%. Clearly, the graph has been calibrated to create a more sensational impression of the changes that have gone on, rather than an accurate reflection of the proportions of the change.
Keith says:
*If I may weaken and resort to an analogy at the end, a senior politician is unlikely to pose for their prime publicity photo on the set of a violent pornographic snuff movie. The association isn’t really the desired one…
Or reading a playboy magazine.