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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sharper00: “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.”
A. Most of the reconstructions that you are thinking of were done by collaborators or students of Mann.
B. Most of the reconstructions share many of their proxy series. For example, the cherry picked Graybill western US bristlecone series; or the Briffa Yamal series that had an inadequate number of tree for drawing the conclusions that it drew.
C. Those reconstructions are now a great deal less hockeystickish than Mann’s original hockey stick. Even Mann’s most recent reconstruction is much less hockeystickish than his original.
D. There are also numerous independent reconstructions from areas all over the world that disproved Mann’s hockey stick.
E. None of the reconstructions are able to reflect the contemporary instrument record. They either fall short of the instrument warming or they don’t show any warming.
F. When going outside Mann’s 2000 year period we find numerous sources, like ice core reconstructions, that tell us that both the magnitude and rate of climate change that we are currently witnessing is very common to the earth.
G. The “hide the decline” evidence that recent proxy data gives us tells us that proxy data may not have followed surface temperature any better in the past than it is following it today.
In other words, the agenda that Mann had in mind when he created his reconstruction has been thoroughly debunked. If a few reality challenged warmers want to continue to believe in Mann’s hockey stick, then no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise.
If the silly arse would like to visit the hunt I follow in Devon I would gladly introduce him to the sport of being publicly horsewhipped.
I’d have had the Labour government arses in Parliament horsewhipped too after their class angst-ridden vote at the time.
“”””” sharper00 says:
February 22, 2011 at 8:31 am
“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. “””””
Well there was a time when I believed that thoae people who “did the experiments” and took the data, would then use it to explain what happened.
It is quite unreasonable to expect those who do not have the data, and cannot get the data, despite earnest trying. to describe what is happening.
So release the raw data to McIntire; and then you are free to complain if he improperly interprets it.
From the words, I see in Bradley’s comments; there isn’t a one of those so-called “climate scientists” who is even aware that there is a formal science of sampled data systems; let alone has any working knowledge of that discipline.
sharper00 –
Your willingness to ignore (“ignorance”) is showing. The “multiple reconstructions by different individuals” all fundamentally suffer from inclusion of subsets of the same bogus proxies (bristlecones, foxtails, Tamiyr upside-down, etc) and similar statistically innumerate methodologies.
Check the archive pages of ClimateAudit (reconstructions) or read it all in very plain, simple English in Montford’s excellent “Hockey Stick Illusion”.
The statistical big lie that is the hockey stick remains a lie, no matter how oft told.
Now, go do your homework and don’t come back until you have something useful to add.
Sharper00,
Talking louder and more often does not make you, algore, or any other hysterical climate “doomer” correct.
By the way, what “new” work–by the author or others—are you refering too. And please give me some resources that do not refer to MBH98.
Also, are you an MWP denier?
“REPLY: Oh gosh, put in my place by yet another anonymous troll “
Not everyone who disagrees with you is a troll or is skepticism only something that’s for other people and not the things you say?
“who can’t or won’t understand the base issue presented here2”
I understand the base issue just fine – more outrage about a paper written over 12 years ago regarding “just so” interpretation of an email written 11 years ago and which was release almost a year and a half ago.
“denying the existence of the MWP “
This terminology just rolls off your tongue. I haven’t addressed the MWP at all, I’ve simply stated that it’s warmer now than anytime within the last 1000 years. It’s another false dichotomy to say we have to pick between a MWP and total relative global temperature between then and now.
“That’s not science.”
Science involves investigating the underlying reality I mentioned above. “Blog science” concerns itself mostly with petty squabbles while ignoring that reality, that is the point I’m making.
REPLY: “I’ve simply stated that it’s warmer now than anytime within the last 1000 years. ”
Just to be clear, you are saying then without a doubt, that it is warmer now than the MWP. It’s important to be succinct on that point.
– Anthony
A new gem from the climategate emails! Even though there would seem to have been a thorough reading of these historical documents by several people it seems there is still more to discover.
By the way Sharperoo, why don’t you apply your skill to explaining why the remarks in the subject email are totally misconstrued by the “antis” and that they don’t trouble you in the least.
Certainly it is a legitimate newsworthy matter when a new egregious email passage is unearthed from these historical documents that revealed the real methodology behind the fabrication of the hockey stick. Hey we’re still talking about Galileo being dragged before the inquistor to recant his book on the motions of the planets and the heliocentric theory. Did you know that the Catholic Church quietly exonerated Galileo in the 1960s. There were throngs of sharperoos to be sure that supported the inquisitor guardians of the status quos of history. How dare Galileo question the Ptolemaic consensus.
What we have here are climate scientists forming their own version of the scientific method unlike any other branch of science and redefining academia… with the added aroma of a holier-than-thou attitude and then attempting to make it look like that’s the way it’s always worked.
The only thing these “professionals” are accomplishing is gifting the entire scientific community a huge disservice in the public eye.
“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.”
And it is a good thing. As the temperatures have gotten warmer, human civilization have improved by just about every measure imaginable. Lifespans, health, wealth, education, freedom.
It was only a few generations ago when a large percentage of children born never made it to adulthood. This is still the reality in the poorest of countries, those that have not yet industrialized. In those countries if you do make it to adulthood, then once you are past 40 any trip to the hospital is likely to be your last.
Sharperoo has proved time and again that he ain’t too sharp and his logic is totally daft. More kangaroo than sharperoo.
Sorry, that’s personal and not very gentlemanly of me, but sometimes I HAVE to react to such idiocy.
The “climate change skeptic” community is still stuck on MBH98-99
The whole of Climate Science have made little progress in the last 20 year. Watch this doco from 1990. You’ll see familiar names making familiar arguments.
The only thing that has changed is the perception of danger among the general population and politicians. This is not the result of better climate science in the last two decades. Rather, it’s the result of better propaganda by CAGW dogmasphere.
Indeed, once upon a time it was possible to see documentaries like the one below on TV.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59HS6g58Y9k&w=480&h=390]
sharper00: “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.”
This is an interesting fallacy. The idea here is that we didn’t know what we were doing 12 years ago, but we do today. And from this follows the idea that 12 years from now the reconstructions that we have today will still be good. I would consider this as highly unlikely. Twelve years from now today’s reconstructions are likely to be considered as faulty as those that were done twelve years ago.
sharper00: “The investigation suggests time and again that as above it’s now hotter than in recent history.”
The evidence is not conclusive that it is hotter than in the MWP. But the important point is that over the entire record of earth’s climate there are thousands of points at which one could have made the statement, “it’s now hotter than in recent history” – assuming we had been there to make the statement. And the answer is “so what”. I’m simply not alarmed by 0.8C of warming over 150 years. And I’m not willing to allow an agenda driven left to stamped me with pseudo science.
sharper00 says:
February 22, 2011 at 9:06 am
I haven’t addressed the MWP at all, I’ve simply stated that it’s warmer now than anytime within the last 1000 years.
====================================
uh no
You simply stated “in recent history”…….
…now you’ve move the goal post again to last 1000 years
Got any more dates you’d like to cherry pick?
re: sharperoo
Prior to 1850, all the reconstructions in the IPCC “spaghetti” graphs are incoherent with each other on all timescales. The only reason there is any coherence after 1850 is because that is the time period they are all calibrated to.
If you can point to any 2 of the reconstructions that are independent of each other and display any coherence prior to 1850 then please let me know.
Since they all show different things at different time periods and scales can you also point out how we can determine which is correct?
“Science involves investigating the underlying reality I mentioned above. “Blog science” concerns itself mostly with petty squabbles while ignoring that reality, that is the point I’m making.”
A valid point. There are some well established mainstream sites that don’t allow contrary opinions to be posted. The moderators routinely delete them. We are fortunate that WUWT doesn’t operate that way.
I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_said_I_may_not_agree_with_what_you_say_but_I_will_defend_to_the_death_your_right_to_say_it
I keep coming back to this analogy with the Tobacco Institute.
Mainly, the work now being done in the “climate industry” would make these folks (i.e. Bradley et al) prime candidates for plum positions within the Tobacco Institute if it still existed.
http://www.cas.muohio.edu/~marcumsd/p111/lectures/grehab.htm
Oops forgot a link. Note that even though the church exonerated Galileo after 350 years they rationalized (we really weren’t so bad) as much as they could.
What better approach is there to discrediting the conclusions of IPCC reports that were based on said papers? Is your answer, truly, “well there are newer papers now, so that conclusion is still valid.” ??
Indeed, claiming McIntyre is right or a hockeystick exists is a false dilemma. There could technically still be a hockeystick increase in temperature. For this to be true you have to ignore historical evidence from many centuries of recorded history. Also, McIntyre isn’t paid to do reconstructions. The people in question are. That an unpaid retired person can find holes in the work of highly paid, highly regarded climatologists should at a minimum give you pause. If, as you say, McIntyre’s work is so easily ignore-able by those who have found “the hockeystick” in other work, why all the obstruction? Why the denial of FOIA requests? Why the insults? The way to respond to someone proving you wrong is to display how you corrected your mistakes in subsequent work. No one from the warmist side seems to do this, they just point randomly to “newer work that supercedes those old papers.” You cannot make this claim here without me directly referencing a specific paper that replaced MBH98-99 and/or corrected and improved on the method used while retaining the hockeystick shape.
That’s a misrepresentation of fact. The blogosphere is not caught up in personalities, it is caught up in Steig outright lying about what he did/did not do as a reviewer. Feel free to catch up in the story so this is clear to you, I’m sure the blog posts on these facts haven’t moved far down the main pages.
@ur momisugly sharper00:
No, you did not say that it is warmer now than in the medieval warm period, you 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.
Hockey stick: ______/
MWP: __/\___/
You obviously have some very odd shaped hockey sticks wherever you live. It is… odd, to say the least, if you claim that “I never said the MWP didn’t happen” and yet say that “we’ve got a hockey stick shape for global temperatures”. Just how *do* you square the two, anyway?
The biggest problem facing the “antis” is the number of avenues there are to track. The warmists have built up such a structure of bad data that it takes time to go through each and every one.
We will, it will just take time.
John Kehr
sharper00
“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.”
Which is very ironic since the hoockey schtick truly went away, last year I believe ’twas, when the mann himself found some of the missing MWP and reintroduced that into his schtick.
But I do agree multiple reconstructions really did demonstrate that pretty much everything was turned into a “hockey stick” graph by using the mannschtick method.
Well Sharperoo you have livened up the debate. Michael Mann certainly gets some stick from skeptics – some of it fair, some of it unfair. There is no doubt that his original work was just that, highly original. But it was flawed and SM has done the climate science community a great favor by putting his work to the sort of scrutiny that should have been applied by the peer reviewers before publication. Would the subsequent studies and the debate that ensued have occurred without his critique? I doubt it very much. It was not SM’s role to come up with any alternative reconstruction – it was up to the scientific community to get its house in order, open its data to scrutiny and meet the criticism with the sort of openness common across other scientific disciplines.
Up until the so-called climategate I took much of the science on global warming on trust. They led me as I am sure they did many others to seriously question the science. What was apparent from the leaked emails was the contempt that the individuals concerned had for those who criticized them and their willingness to gerrymander the peer review process by locking-out work they regarded as contentious. My own experience in the area of financial economics is that when such a lockout occurs (as it did in the finance literature in the 1970’s and 80’s) the discipline is put back in its development by a generation. Neither side of this debate is blame free of course, but there is too much easy recourse to ad-hominen attacks often delivered across the blogosphere by anonymous individuals who are not willing to put their name where their mouth is. It is this lack of honesty and openness which bedevils this debate – whether is is in concealing data, the manipulation of the publication process or being willing to say who you are when you put the knife in.
Fact 1: The massive majority of scientists are paid by governments either directly, or indirectly.
Fact 2: Those embrased within Fact 1 are behoven to their paymasters to keep food on the table and feather the nest, thus….
Fact 3: In the light of fact 2, they will write what the paymasters want to read, who will then disseminate scientific opinion, especially when a major part of their incomes come from government grants.
Fact 4: Politicians in a democracy will tell the people what they want to hear, and then carry on with their own agendas.
Fact 5: Enter AGW. “I/we will save the world”. Who can resist that? And we need the tax revenue. Therefore, “the science is proven. Shut up sceptics, Big Brother knows best”.
Fact 6: Non-democratic countries (with possible exceptions – but not within the G7) stick up a rude finger(s) sign, and carry on regardless, or simply ignore the whole shebang.
I really enjoy this blog, but I do beleive that the WAWT gently-gently approach is now insufficient to kick-start our political masters into re-evaluating the entire issue. See Fact 5, 3rd sentence.
Bugs Man is based in the UK. Diesel fuel today hit USD 8.38 per US gallon. Taxation will make it will go up again in April, to save the UK economy and the planet, but not necessarily in that order.
Now I am going to get political.
The AGW lobby is a spent force. To all governments: re-direct the funding towards regenerating the economy of your country, and stop funding the “proven science” free-loaders.
sharper00 says:
February 22, 2011 at 9:06 am
……….
I understand the base issue just fine – more outrage about a paper written over 12 years ago regarding “just so” interpretation of an email written 11 years ago and which was release almost a year and a half ago. ……
=======================================================
Sharp, no that’s not the issue being presented here. I’ll try to go slow. When trying to discern a topic of a writing, it is often useful to read the opening paragraph. It is common in many styles of writing to call it an “introductory” paragraph. I believe in this case, this approach applies. So, let’s see what Anthony wrote………
“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.
(emphasis mine)
Now, most normal readers of the English language would note that there isn’t an explicit mention to a paper in this paragraph. It is several sentences later that Anthony mentions MBH98. While the intent of Anthony’s inclusion of the reference may be interpretive, many would read it as providing a thing we like to call “context”. While most of us regulars are very well aware of the e-mails and papers wrote by Bradley, it very well could be that some readers aren’t as familiar with the works of Bradley and the e-mails, so it behooves Anthony to provide a modicum of background.
This issue in this posting, as I read it, is twofold, but related. One would be the elitist attitude displayed in the correspondence. The other would be the intentional withholding of information that would directly address the validity of a paper he helped publish! Sharp, this is disturbing to me, as it should be disturbing to all. The implications here are immense! Bradley is, in ‘a matter of fact” tone, discussing his intentional deception to another colleague. An intentional deception that deceived a great part of the world’s populous.
Now, are we clear as to what the issue and topic of discussion should be or do you require more detail?
Apologies for the typographical errors above.