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,
“You’re confusing the United States with the entire planet.”
No sir, the “bristleconeistas” have confused the US for the rest of the planet—teleconnect ring a bell?
Come on sharper00, are you gavin?
Gary Pearse says:
February 22, 2011 at 9:08 am
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 Even though there would seem to have been a thorough reading of these historical documents by several people it seems there is still more to discover.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.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
I agree wholeheartedly with your point, Gary.
Just want to point out for general interest (and the record) that the Vatican did not wait until the 1960’s to quietly exonerate Galileo.
Some important dates:
The Inquisition’s ban on reprinting Galileo’s works was lifted in 1718 when permission was granted to publish an edition of his works (excluding the condemned Dialogue) in Florence.
In 1741 Pope Benedict XIV authorized the publication of an edition of Galileo’s complete scientific works which included a mildly censored version of the Dialogue.
In 1758 the general prohibition against works advocating heliocentrism was removed from the Index of prohibited books, although the specific ban on uncensored versions of the Dialogue and Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus remained.
All traces of official opposition to heliocentrism by the church disappeared in 1835 when these works were finally dropped from the Index.
In 1939 Pope Pius XII, in his first speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, within a few months of his election to the papacy, described Galileo as being among the “most audacious heroes of research … not afraid of the stumbling blocks and the risks on the way, nor fearful of the funereal monuments”
A statue of Galileo is going up in the Vatican Gardens commissioned by Benedict XVI (Ratzinger)
Sharper 00 said:
My answer is that there are newer papers therefore continuing to attack old papers is a waste of time. It’s like going to a political blog and finding people still arguing over whether Gore or Bush won the 2000 election.
The older papers are relevant, as most of the newer papers still use the data and / or techniques of the older ones as references.
Regarding the creditworthyness of those dendrochronology/multi proxy studies leading to the famous hockey stick curve, it should appear to any observer that they are losing ground (at least in Europe) in scientific assessments of the global warming / climate disruption issue.
Indeed, the UK based Royal Society as well as the France based Academy of Sciences so to speak no longer really mention paleo climate reconstructions in their 2010 lines of argument of their continuing support to policies aiming at mitigating climate change.
It looks like many scientists got it all, following McIntyre / McKitrick demolitions of the paleo recontructions by Mann, Bradley, Briffa and the likes !
TimM says:
February 22, 2011 at 11:34 am
“REPLY: spoken like a true MWP and RWP denier, which is the crux of the problem – A”
Now now Mr Watts lets not drop down to the level of name calling! Really now, the “D” word? Tsk tsk tsk. We must wash your fingers off with soap for typing that one. Just be careful not to say it or you won’t like the taste.
—-
I personally LOVED Anthony’s use of “denier” appropriately for those who really do deny reality.
But even Watts is denying something important there. Until the Climate Liars came along, warm periods were called “climate optima.” We should restore that name, for it reflects the reality for the sake of living things.
Warmist hysterics are “Optimum deniers.” And that in two ways–denying that past optima were warmer than today, and denying us hope for a more fruitful Earth in our own time. They are willing to spend so much and do so much damage that they have crashed the world economy. And all in an effort to bring about conditions that would cause extinctions. See http://www.CO2science.org for the best collection of data on that.
Re Latitude says:
February 22, 2011 at 8:04 am
Seems Steve Goddard’s point might be that it is a hell of a lot harder to adjust an old newspaper headline temperature than one in an electronic data file?
sHx says:
February 22, 2011 at 9:19 am
From the Greenhouse Conspiracy video:
Prof. Wigley: (responding to questions about UHI effect.)
“There are a number of ways that one can account for that problem. The obvious way is just to eliminate those stations from the data set that you use to calculate the large area average temperature values.”
Yet the very opposite procedure became standard so as to manufacture an upward trend, for it was to turn out that only the stations NOT located in UHI affected areas would be the ones eliminated.
Re: sharperoo
I afraid you are displaying a severe lack of understanding on how science progresses and on how the IPCC works.
By your argument any paper in print should never be attacked since once it is in print it is an old paper. Or is there a time limit? If there is a time a limit could you please tell me what it is and how that time limit was calculated?
As for the IPCC, unless a paper is refuted in a peer reviewed manner they will use it to further their aims no matter how erroneous the paper is known to be.
Could you please point to any 2 of these reconstructions that are both independent and demonstrate coherency prior to 1870? If not then all you are presenting is a random series of squiggles that contradict each other prior to 1870.
“not clever enough” was what Madoff thought for years and years.
Sharperoo
“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.”
Actually, yes it does. It is clear that Manns method produces hockey sticks out of random data and that proper treatment of reasonable data sets do indeed make the hockey stick disapear.
Updated versions of Mann do not correct the problem.
It isn’t M&M’s job to have their own reconstruction. Pointing out that someone else has screwed up does not create some magic requirement that you re do it. Wrong is wrong whether we fix it or not.
Thread highjacks are such a bore. As are thread highjackers.
sharper00 says (February 22, 2011 at 10:54 am): “Apologies to everyone who addressed me but I don’t think the sharper00 V Everyone thread is what anyone rants to read.”
Au contraire. Whether he’s a paid troll or true believer, I quite enjoy watching him get shot down in flames. It’s one of the advantages of reading a blog that doesn’t ideologically censor commenters *cough*RealClimate*cough*.
It’s more entertaining, though, when the troll also tries to provide some of the references and, you know, science-y type stuff behind his claims (hint hint).
I’m off to make popcorn…
Rhoda R says:
February 22, 2011 at 11:57 am
Well, Sharperoo has managed to derail this thread didn’t he/she? Totally deflected the discussion from the idea that a (reportedly) serious scientist deliberately held back information and was arrogant about the ‘deniers’ not being ‘sophisticated’ enough to find it to a thread revolving around his/her (Sharperoo) own sweet self.
You know, now that you mention it, a “scientist” holding back information and arrogantly referencing other actual scientists that hold a differing opinion is worthy of discussion.
Good observation Rhoda.
Shampooroo
well, wrong. If you look at the state of the science as compiled by the IPCC you will see whole sections that rely upon suspect early papers. You will see that graphs or data lines from suspect papers persist. Climate “science” is primarily a HISTORICAL science. there are no controlled experiments, there is the uncontrolled experiment we are doing today with C02, but for the most part the science is historical science with some physics and stats thrown in. Paleo is (until recently) entirely a statistical effort with very little “climate” science. Work with GCMs to help with recons and forward modelling of proxies makes it a bit more physics based. The point is these flawed papers continued to lend more weight than they should and the methods they employ ( in certain cases) are suspect.
Actually wrong. If Mann says that he knows the temperature if the MWP was
13C +- .5C, and McIntyre points out that mann is over confident in his calculation
of CIs, then he has said something about the paleo climate. Namely, that it is Not known as well as people think. However, you are correct MANY people misunderstand Steve’s work to imply that there was a MWP that was warmer than today. His work has no such implication. His conclusion is very narrow. His conclusion is not a skeptical victory ( he wouldnt say it is). What is odd is that more warmists dont embrace his conclusion. That we are not as certain about the MWP as mann purports. Nothing turns on this conclusion. Mann for example, would conclude that we are maybe 90% certain that the MWP was cooler than today. McIntyre might say “its a coin toss” or “we cant tell”. Neither of those positions is inconsistent with the core science of AGW.
And you know the magic ingrediant is in all of those. I had a talk with Steve about this. To try to distill all his work down to one main insight. That insight was this.
Without bristlecones everything falls apart and we know much less than we think we know. Now, the interesting thing is this.
We know that we need a bristlecone to get a hockey stick. What should that tell a curious scientist?
1. if something is amiss with bristlecones, then we potentially have a problem. Our
answer is not robust.
2. We had better look more closely at this key bit of information. Down to the core.
its a precious bit of info. It better get a complete review.
3. Can we get new data from the bristlecones? update the proxies.
In a nutshell that is steve’s whole point. The methods, ALL methods, will take a HS and noise and produce a HS. duh. So, ya better take special care with the HS you feed
the system. Do more study of bristlecones.
Amazing, McShane and Wyner destroy an entire sub-discipline and people here still wish to discuss a particular paper based on the sub-discipline, dendrochronology. It isn’t valid. Tree-rings don’t have a strong enough temp signal to conclude temperatures within the necessary parameters. Bradley, by his e-mails, knew this, ……..“Whether we have the 1000 year trend right is far less certain (& one reason why I hedge my bets on whether there were any periods in Medieval times that might have been “warm”, to the irritation of my co-authors!). So, possibly if you crank up the trend over 1000 years, you find that the envelope of uncertainty is comparable with at least some of the future scenarios, which of course begs the question as to what the likely forcing was 1000 years ago. (My money is firmly on an increase in solar irradiance, based on the 10-Be data..).”
A submitted, peer-reviewed paper in which one of the authors admits privately that he doesn’t have much faith in the veracity of the paper. This is science? Quite obviously, by the off-hand tone and tenor of his correspondence, this seems to be an accepted behavior in the circle of climate alarmists. Dating back, at the very least 13 years ago. I suspect it goes back much further. How does anyone believe the science (of this alarmist climatology) is valid? It isn’t. How many more papers, submitted, reviewed, and accepted were only done so with the glaring errors hidden? Errors that would demonstrably invalidate the paper’s assertions.
Thanks sHx (9:19 am) for that fascinating video link.
It also shows how essential Mann’s original ‘hockey stick’ graph (MBH98-99) has been to the CAGW crusade (together with the 1998 El Niño event I think).
@steven mosher (see I can get your username right, it’s easy actually)
“Actually wrong. If Mann says that he knows the temperature if the MWP was
13C +- .5C, and McIntyre points out that mann is over confident in his calculation
of CIs, then he has said something about the paleo climate. “
No he hasn’t. All he’s said is something about Mann’s argument concerning paleoclimate. McIntyre has produced nothing that says what the climate was at anytime or anywhere, only critiques of arguments concerning it. This is his stated purpose (i.e. his site is “Climate Audit”).
“His conclusion is very narrow. “
I agree which is why I say above you can accept all most of what he’s been said and reach conclusions concerning paleoclimate other than what was claimed in this post.
Instead his work is habitually trotted out to support arguments far beyond its scope and then that already stretched position is further extended as some sort of vague disproof of AGW.
@Everyone complaining about thread hijacking: I neither encouraged nor wanted comment after comment addressing me and completely missing the point of what I said. I said above I wasn’t going to be replying to everyone and stuck to the topic I wanted to discuss.
Gary Pearse says:
February 22, 2011 at 9:08 am
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.
———–
Actually, Pope John Paul II not-so-quietly exonerated Galileo in 1992 – it made the front-page news. He acknowledged the errors made by the tribunal that had judged Galileo’s case. He also declared that Galileo’s teachings and cautions to the Church should be considered a guide to how to conduct relations between religion and science. He issued a formal apology in 2000, as a part of the apology for the many failings of the Catholic Church over its past 2000 years.
Apparently , according to Wikipedia (my apologies) “In March 2008 the Vatican proposed to complete its rehabilitation of Galileo by erecting a statue of him inside the Vatican walls” but these plans were later abandoned or postponed.
Hope we don’t have to wait 400 years for the Church of Climate Science to acknowledge its errors.
I like the approach taken by Tilo Reber who says:
February 22, 2011 at 9:20 am
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.”
Tilo: “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.”
++++++++++++++
The implications are interesting: It seems no one blogging here thinks the Hockey stick 1998 is valid. Sharperoo points out that there are later more accurate reconstructions (meaning the 1998 one was not all very skillful). Others point out that all the hockey sticks are deeply flawed, or rely on the same flawed data processed in a modified manner (MM 2009). If the 1998 Stick is inaccurate, unrepresentative, not skillful, debunked, over-ridden by more recent work or simply exposed, any plans for climate action based on the defective work should also be reviewed, correct?
As far as I have read thing topic, a great deal of the IPCC climate action plan was based on what everyone, including Sharperoo, agrees was deelpy flawed. I add ‘deeply’ because it is an unsupportable reconstruction that does not reflect temperature – its sole purpose and claim.
It has, in the words of science, been refuted. Conclusions drawn directly from its demonstrated errors, demonstrated by MM himself in 2009 with a much amplified MWP, must also be reviewed in the light of new information. Even in MM’s circles, the implications of his 2009 paper include a much larger natural variation that undermines many alarmist claims for the present temperatures.
That review has not happened at the IPCC.
I have read many mindless defences of the Stick. In whose interests are these defences written? What’s the point? Some suggest it is money, lots of it. That is a theory I have been unable to debunk so it remains my present consensus.
The deconstruction of MBH 1998 will continue until the grevious policy errors consequent to its publication and indeed glorification are similarly undone.
Sharperoo, your inexcusable defence of the indefensible actions of the self-named team render you similarly guilty, by proxy.
Mark Wagner says:
February 22, 2011 at 7:59 am
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.
Sociopaths lie for the following reasons.
[1] It validates their belief in their inherent superiority over you – I.e. – you are so easily fooled, gulled and led astray.
[2] The practice of deception is habitual, and the option of first recourse, as the truth would reveal the predatory nature of all the sociopaths relationships, and therefore must be hidden at all costs.
So there are at least two core reasons – 1. Narcisstic Self Validation, and 2. The playing out of a specific strategy for living in a world full of targets.
sharper00:
Instead his [McIntyre’s] work is habitually trotted out to support arguments far beyond its scope and then that already stretched position is further extended as some sort of vague disproof of AGW.
sharper00, it was the hockeystick Team, enc., themselves who were the ones who were rather absurdly claiming that the hockeystick only going back 1000 yrs. was some sort of strong proof for AGW, so it’s they who set that particular standard of disproof! Add another “zero” to your name.
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
Huh? If the basic work is bunk, the extensions and elaborations are bunk, too.
Steve McIntyre is blogging again
Nice to see. He’s thought provoking! And he accomplishes important things!
Meteorologists provide the most important data for building code called regional climatic data. That tells us as builders and energy providers the temperatures we are to insulate or provide energy for. Meteorologists also tell us in building code to reflect or protect from solar radiation or the exterior will be radiated by the high speed emfs.
Meteorologists don’t know that buildings are signed off as compliant without verification. The entire United Nation’s membership is blind to temperature on climate change, here is an example of what we missed in the calculator.
On February 20, 2011 the weather station was reporting 26 degrees F at 1 PM and the solar radiated building development was as hot as 125 degrees F. Look at the new high end community living with a lake view. The entire solar exposed side of the development is over 100 deg. F without emissions produced. That heats the atmosphere and contributes to climate change. Experiments in 7 provinces and 25 states produced the same results with buildings being impacted by solar emfs.
Global warming by man is very real.
Help me out Anthony. I have been through the threads but did sharperoo answer your “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.”
I must have missed it if he did!
REPLY: Did he answer? Not that I’m aware of. -A