Steve McIntyre is blogging again. This time it is about a little noticed Climategate email where Dr. Raymond Bradley disses skeptics as being too unsophisticated to be able to figure out what was withheld.
I agree with Steve, when he says it is rather “repugnant”.
Here’s the relevant passage from Bradley
…in the verification period, the biggest “miss” was an apparently very warm year in the late 19th century that we did not get right at all. This makes criticisms of the “antis” difficult to respond to (they have not yet risen to this level of sophistication, but they are “on the scent”).
Commenter “Baa Humbug” quips:
What they failed to realise is that the “antis” are like bloodhounds. We only need a few molecules per thousand to pick up the trail.
The issue is that MBH98 withheld vital R^2 goodness of fit data which could have alerted most anyone with a basic understanding of such a problem where the proxy data “missed” replicating an entire year, but as we’ve seen time and again, they chose not to let such adverse information become publicly available then.
Even Bradley has doubts, as Steve points out in a second post, here’s more from the same Climategate email by Bradley:
Furthermore, it may be that Mann et al simply don’t have the long-term trend right, due to underestimation of low frequency info. in the (very few) proxies that we used. We tried to demonstrate that this was not a problem of the tree ring data we used by re-running the reconstruction with & without tree rings, and indeed the two efforts were very similar — but we could only do this back to about 1700.
Yet, even today, we have people who defend the hockey stick as truth, and say that people like Mr. McIntyre are in error, or simply disingenuous.
It is truly amazing to see people defend such behavior by the team. Repugnancy is in the eye of the beholder I suppose, rather like a choice of true faith.
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What i find even more repugnant is that journalist like Black,Harribin,won’t give air time to these kind of mistakes and keep the dogma going depsite overwhelming evidence like this!
I’ve heard of witch doctors who act more like scientists than this Climategate bunch …
people do what they do for a reason.
and
people don’t do what they don’t do for a reason.
there’s a reason why information was withheld. there’s a reason why data were manipulated. only true sociopaths lie for no reason at all.
“Yet, even today, we have people who defend the hockey stick as truth, and say that people like Mr. McIntyre are in error, or simply disingenuous.”
Even if you accept Mr. McIntyre is not in error the hockey stick doesn’t go away as demonstrated by the multiple reconstructions by different individuals performed to date.
The “climate change skeptic” community is still stuck on MBH98-99
REPLY: and the AGW community is still stuck on thinking that CO2 is the cause of everything – A
Someone ought to tell Dr Bradley that egotistical hubris and wishful thinking isn’t science…
Tea leaves also carry a strong scent until doused with divining waters! Only then are they able to be successfully read by those with the appropriate foreknowledge.
I was under the impression that no matter what numbers you put in, you got a hokey schstict……
Steve Goddard has been posting the historical records, glacier retreat, heat waves, flooding, etc, from newspaper articles, etc, on his website for a while.
Interesting reading, considering they were complaining about “climate change” over a 100 years ago……….
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/
Well, if hounds we be then, in the immortal words of the Bard, “Cry ‘havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war.”
I wonder what level of sophistication would Bradley ascribe to the “antis”, now?
This email by itself almost proves that global warming alarmism is not a science. If it were a real science the scientists would publish all their data, no matter if it agreed with their theory or not, and let the chips fall where they may. But here we scientists trying to hide the “scent” of errors from investigation.
[Posted to the wrong thread. ~dbs, mod.]
Sharperoo. The hockey stick does go away if you take the most basic of reconstructions from the historical record. even a cursory glance will show you the Little Ice Age and Medievial Warm period, and only slight digging brings up the Dark Age and Roman Warm period (please note the Euro-centric names on global phenomena due to the fact that these labels are over a 150 years old).
Any reconstruction that does not match this basic history is false on its face. Mann’s attempt to rewrite history notwithstanding, you cannot deny that the world has had (at least) four major climate cycles since the start of the Common Era with warm periods of similar magnitude to today’s climate. Natural variation of this magnitude completely belies climate models (which cannot explain this cycle) and eliminates the IPCC’s ridiculous proof-by-exhaustion fingering of CO2 (since we cannot show that whatever happened this isn’t happening now).
“REPLY: and the AGW community is still stuck on thinking that CO2 is the cause of everything – A”
What you want to say about the pros and cons of that argument it’s still the case that continuing to attack papers written over 12 years ago which have been superseded by new work both from the author in question and other authors is not a good approach.
Claiming that either McIntyre is right or there’s a hockeystick is a false dichotomy. McIntyre has never produced his own reconstruction and has only ever critiqued others, which is certainly his right but that also makes it impossible to apply his work to what’s actually happening as opposed to what might be wrong with what others say is happening.
You can accept everything McIntyre says (or at least a lot of it) and still say there’s modern temperatures are the hottest in a thousand years.
While it’s easy and indeed common for the blogosphere to get caught up in “the debate” and the personalities (see also Steig/O’Donnell) there’s still an underlying reality which is being investigated. The investigation suggests time and again that as above it’s now hotter than in recent history. This in itself says nothing about why that is and ultimately almost everything in the paleo climate record is going to be little to do with human activity.
REPLY: spoken like a true MWP and RWP
denierdoubter, which is the crux of the problem – Asharper00 says:
February 22, 2011 at 8:00 am
“Yet, even today, we have people who defend the hockey stick as truth, and say that people like Mr. McIntyre are in error, or simply disingenuous.”
Even if you accept Mr. McIntyre is not in error the hockey stick doesn’t go away as demonstrated by the multiple reconstructions by different individuals performed to date.
The “climate change skeptic” community is still stuck on MBH98-99
======================================================
lol, uhmm, MBH 98-99 wasn’t the only hockey stick study
deconstructeddemolished by the skeptics. Sharp, you should peruse Steve Mac’s archives. You’ll find several refutations of various hockey stick studies.sharper00 says:
“Even if you accept Mr. McIntyre is not in error the hockey stick doesn’t go away as demonstrated by the multiple reconstructions by different individuals performed to date.”
You’re right, the hockey stick does not go away as long as you slap recent temperature data onto past temperature reconstructions that have not been demonstrated to match current trends and that hide the decline in past reconstructions.
The hockey stick does not go away, but then neither does creationism nor 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Ah, so it is revealed that they (the “team”) were acting as politicians all along, not scientists. Interesting but hardly surprising.
The investigation suggests time and again that as above it’s now hotter than in recent history
==================================
nope
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/to:2011/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/to:2011/trend
“REPLY: spoken like a true MWP and RWP denier, which is the crux of the problem – A”
I think ignoring on-topic and relevant arguments and going with glib dismissal using terminology which itself is often the topic of entire posts when used against your position is deeply ironic and an unfortunate representation of where “blog science” has landed.
REPLY: Oh gosh, put in my place by yet another anonymous troll who can’t or won’t understand the base issue presented here, but complains that we are spending too much time looking at old papers while denying the existence of the MWP which was disappeared by the paper while at the same time withholding important verification data. That’s not science. – A
Just a note on0 terminology in the email:
“(they have not yet risen to this level of sophistication, but they are “on the scent”).”
Sophistication: The act of sophisticating; adulteration . From sophistry: – a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone.
Hockeyteam fool the people once (Mann) shame on you.
Hockeyteam fool the people twice (Steig) shame on ????
Sharper00 said:
Even if you accept Mr. McIntyre is not in error the hockey stick doesn’t go away as demonstrated by the multiple reconstructions by different individuals performed to date.
And, most of those either follow the same flawed methodology, or use the same cherry-picked BCP data to anchor the hockey stick in place. As SM has pointed out, even the studies that supposedly don’t use the BCP’s, actually include them through back-door methods.
The hockey stick doesn’t go away because the climate scientists in question are doing everything in their power to keep them there.
“Even if you accept Mr. McIntyre is not in error the hockey stick doesn’t go away as demonstrated by the multiple reconstructions by different individuals performed to date.”
Only if you beleive tree rings are a proxy for temperature. They aren’t. They are a proxy for optimal growing conditions, which means just the right amount of moisture and sunlight. Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry and growth is reduced.
This explains whey we are now hearing that AGW causes increased temperatures, decreased temperatures, decreased snowfall, increased snowfall. The wrong proxy was used for the temperature reconstruction. It wasn’t a proxy for temperature at all. It was a proxy for the Goldilocks conditions. Not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry, just right — and tree growth is maximized.
So, according to the hockey stick, conditions for tree growth have slowly gotten worse for the past 1000 years, until the last century where both tree growth and human civilization improved.
@P Wilson
“Just a note on0 terminology in the email:”
Note: “A piece of paper currency.”
Therefore you are attempting to produce currency, this is likely illegal in your jurisdiction. Therefore you a criminal and a fraudster.
Sure I could have picked the meaning closest to the one you meant and the most appropriate for the context but hey the “Pick the most nefarious definition” game is fun for everyone!
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sophistication
1. To cause to become less natural, especially to make less naive and more worldly.
The problem with many Warmists is they still don’t get it. They don’t get that the proxies are in error and that was recognized by the CRU correspondents who knew the raw data and the Briffa methodology. They read, but do not understand that Mann and CRU had absolutely no confidence in their climate paleontology. Warmists gloss over the failure of a scientists to provide the thermometer readings from 1652 that were used as benchmarks. They gaze over the fact that Briffas tree rings were improperly cataloged and perhaps not even preserved. And differed dramatically from the Russian readings at the same site which were on an order of 10 greater in number.
Now they read that some omitted thermometer data would turn the hockey stick into a sine wave and they again see something else entirely.
Is this disease contagious?
Of course, McShane & Wyner smacked down all the reconstructions done by tree rings. I’d bet we’d see similar results with other reconstruction objects.