Update 5 pm Eastern: 1,000 comments on thread at http://judithcurry.com, and some very “feisty” discourse in this new era of civility.
Since my post on the “RealClimate’s over-the-top response” of Gavin and the Team has been getting a lot of discussion, I thought it only fair to mention that Dr. Judith Curry dropped in to leave a note. She said:
For more fun and games with Gavin, see my latest post at Climate Etc “Hiding the Decline” http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/
Judging from comments like this one:
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“I’m calling it like I see it”
How brave of you.
My point is that by lowering yourself to insult, you block off all sensible discussion of specific technical points – if you are so certain in your thinking that no further discussion is required, then fine. No more discussion will occur. But it would have been far better for you to have had the character to allow for disagreements without being disagreeable (did you not pick up anything in Lisbon?).
…
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It seems there’s a veritable free for all going on there. Gavin’s having a little trouble managing in a format that he doesn’t get to manage. See:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/
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MattN says:
February 23, 2011 at 9:52 am
As I’ve said before, when the tree rings “lost correlation with surface temp” in 1961
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Matt, weren’t the tree rings correlated with only 9 years of temperature data in the first place?
It’s settled then. By consensus, the “Hockey Team” consists of a bunch of liars that will deny every piece of factual evidence showing their deception.
Espen: Possibly, sure. But it’s not presented that way in the “stick” is it?
Latitude: No idea.
Latitude says:
February 23, 2011 at 11:11 am
MattN says:
February 23, 2011 at 9:52 am
As I’ve said before, when the tree rings “lost correlation with surface temp” in 1961
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Matt, weren’t the tree rings correlated with only 9 years of temperature data in the first place?
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Lat, there has been so many different approaches to the treeometers, I can’t remember which approaches go to which work of fiction. The “9 years” rings a bell, but which incarnation and what context, I can’t recall. It seems it was in the SI of one of the papers.
Espen says:
February 23, 2011 at 10:02 am
Not necessarily. PCA and related methods are used more by statisticians and engineers doing signal processing. Degrees in mathematics are quite different. I do believe Gavin admits he does not know the concepts. If my belief is true, you have to wonder why he defends them knowing he does not have the requisite knowledge.
Mark
Latitude says:
February 23, 2011 at 11:11 am
Impossible to tell. A correlation is calculated over a stretch of data that contains noise (even if it is not well defined noise.) Any short period within that data can have just about any correlation even if the whole still has whatever correlation results.
Mark
I have seen a number of people comment on Gavin’s weak attempt to “defend” the whole “Hide the decline” debacle.
I don’t think that is what he was trying to accomplish instead I think he was hoping to hijack the comments with the hurricane chart, and course get in a few jibes at Dr. Curry.
The fact of the matter is that when the team decided to hide the decline they were committing scientific fraud. The teams defense of this is that they are not frauds, just incompetent, but the science (of AGW) is sound.
It is sad that Gavin’s method of defending himself and his team is somewhat worse then a four year old caught red handed breaking some rule or other trying to stay out of trouble.
And to think that he is the teams best option…
Having spent far too much time reading all of this stuff here and on JC’s site, I feel that I have to weigh in. Equating Dr. Schmidt’s remarks on JC to those of Gadaffi are a bit over the top. Now perhaps comparing them to Baghdad Bob……….hmmmmm.
Cold Englishman says:
February 23, 2011 at 3:07 am
That’s my girl: ‘Cool Hand Luke’! 😉
Mark T: you don’t have to know PCA to suspect that the way data is sampled is severly flawed… But you may be right – I guess I’m biased: I have a degree in a different branch of math myself, but I took a few non-obligatory statistics courses during my studies.
My point is that by lowering yourself to insult, you block off all sensible discussion of specific technical points – if you are so certain in your thinking that no further discussion is required, then fine.
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This from a man who rages against anything short of hero worshipping at rc and who puts criticism in a place called the bore hole. It must be painful to be gavin these days. He is completely unable to see the irony. Funny how his own complaints would be put in the bore hole if presented at rc.
Lat, there has been so many different approaches to the treeometers, I can’t remember which approaches go to which work of fiction. The “9 years” rings a bell, but which incarnation and what context, I can’t recall. It seems it was in the SI of one of the papers.
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That’s what I remember too James.
It’s been a while, but I “think” I remember reading that the tree rings were calibrated against only 9 years of temperature data.
Doesn’t matter though, the margin of error is larger than the temperature range they claim to get from them….
… and they had to pick and choose to even get the ones they did.
Complete waste of time………….
Holy moley, Batman. Apparently Climate Etc had a problem loading comments so JC opened a second thread for additional comments. Combined total comments is over 1,000 in 24 hours and still growing . Of course, part of the traffic was driven by Gavin losing the chiuauas of war. The local spca handled them with aplomb.
PS. chiuauas =alternative spelling of chihuahuas.
Bigdinny says:
February 23, 2011 at 12:10 pm
“Equating Dr. Schmidt’s remarks on JC to those of Gadaffi are a bit over the top. Now perhaps comparing them to Baghdad Bob……….hmmmmm.”
Agree! I did make that Gadaffi comment and, after some further thought I just equated Gavin’s comments with Bagdad Bob’s instead a while ago over at JC’s site.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/23/hiding-the-decline-part-ii/#comment-46848
The possibilities are endless. Monty Pythin’s Black Knight would also work… though maybe that should be saved for the BBC’s Richard Black. How about Richard Nixon?
Espen says:
February 23, 2011 at 12:46 pm
Maybe true, but insight into what PCA is really doing helps and that’s not something you’re going to pick up in a standard math degree.
You probably won’t even learn PCA unless you actually major in statistics. I didn’t, though I learned every thing else (signal processing) related – it was simply never called “Principal Component Analysis.” EVD and SVD are two methods for implementing PCA, btw, which you actually can learn in a good linear algebra class.
Mark
Latitude says:
February 23, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Complete waste of time………….
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As is most of the chasing around after their sophistry. McShane and Wyner destroy dendrochronology. Tree rings don’t agree with the last 50 years? 1st thermometer was invented in 1714. How long did it take to develop properly calibrated and distributed thermometers to compare against tree rings? And people believe that we can accurately assess temperatures 1000 years ago to a tenth of a degree? Its flabbergasting, the gullibility of some people. Well, if its on a graph, it must be true.
MattN says: February 23, 2011 at 9:52 am
“…when the tree rings “lost correlation with surface temp” in 1961, you cannot possibly then assume that there ever really was a correlation to begin with. Especially when you have absolutely no explaination for the loss of correlation.”
Hi MattN. For “the tree rings” I assume you mean a small percentage of groves confined to northern latitudes only. Trees closer to the equator do not evidence any divergence problem. For “cannot possibly assume … a correlation”, temperature correlations are robust wrt to the instrumental record for both groups up until ~1960 and non-divergent series (the strong majority case) thereafter.
What factors might give a scientist a measure of confidence that inclusion of a divergent series is justifiable? IF divergence is attributable to temperature rise beyond a threshold that affects the tree’s environment or physiology AND other paelo series in the reconstruction do not indicate past temperatures entered that regime AND the signal from the divergent series was broadly consistent with other data, the inclusion would be a distinct benefit (particularly where paleo data was sparse).
A long bow? Many potential causes of divergence have been suggested for each stand affected with no conclusion reached as to the real cause(s), so the first caveat above is a surmise only. However, it is certainly not “indefensible” as so many claim, particularly in light of improved proxy number, quality and coverage across the last decade resulting in independent reconstructions showing the same temperature behaviour WITH AND WITHOUT tree ring data. Science moves on. Improvements to MBH98 (a 12 year old paper) support its key conclusions.
David L says:
February 23, 2011 at 8:31 am
That is a rather poor supervision in my opinion.
Firstly, if you don’t report what you actually see – it can never be really replicated – can it? – as your equipment may be slightly different to someone elses? If everyone did that – we’d get nowhere very slowly!
Secondly, there is no need to ‘erase’ something that is so easily explained (as per your example). In your presentation, it would be more appropriate to say something like ‘this spike is there because of x,y,z and is ignored’ – it takes but a couple of sentences!
If you don’t do this – and later someone replicates your work and finds a similar spike, from their own equipment – you will be held accountable for false reporting/recording – and rightly so!
If that was one of my old supervisors from many eons ago – I’d have taken him/her to serious task!
It’s not right – it’s not clever – don’t fall into such bad habits!
and just to put it into a context you may be able to understand – in my line of work, if I don’t report what I find (because it doesn’t suit or whatever) and someone repeats the work later – it’s MY arse that gets sued! Whereas, if I report a ‘bad’ result, but use my judgement and a suitable professional explanation to ‘ignore’ it – I can’t be sued because I have brought it to everyones attention! Get it?
James Sexton says:
February 23, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Please let me show you my up-to-2007 graph of US real estate prices. The consensus knew they could never go down. Apparently the current scenario of decreasing values is simply a result of ongoing increases in value. That can sometimes fool little people like me. Of course, I was unable to see all the green shoots a while back too, so I must be exceptionally stupid.
Robert M says:
February 23, 2011 at 11:53 am
I have seen a number of people comment on Gavin’s weak attempt to “defend” the whole “Hide the decline” debacle.
The fact of the matter is that when the team decided to hide the decline they were committing scientific fraud. The teams defense of this is that they are not frauds, just incompetent …..
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It’s a common “defense” in breach of fiduciary duty claims. “We weren’t trying to rip off other shareholders. We just made some bad decisions, Your Honor”.
Well at least people can now make up their minds as to whether the guy is a fraud or an incompetent ….
…. or they could lean towards a third alternative, which happens to be my call – he’s both.
Dave H says:
February 23, 2011 at 5:34 am
Few people have done more to polarise the current “debate” than Dr Curry.
Yes, it does tend to get a little polarized when the principles of real science are put forth in comparison to an “anything goes except real science” CO2=CAGW Propaganda Operation. ‘Happens with a Good vs Evil confrontation, too.
James Sexton says:
February 23, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Tree rings don’t agree with the last 50 years?
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I don’t think they agree with anything in the real world at all.
Since we know the tree rings lost correlation with actual thermometers in 1961.
We know that they picked only the trees that matched the temps they wanted them to,
and threw the rest of the tree rings out. Which means they threw out the vast majority of trees……….and only found a very small amount of trees that showed the temps they wanted to……
If, I remember correctly, that the tree rings were only calibrated to 9 years of temperature records in the first place………..
Why is anyone talking about this at all?
….this is some kind of joke
Kev-in-Uk says:
February 23, 2011 at 2:28 pm
David L says:
February 23, 2011 at 8:31 am
That is a rather poor supervision in my opinion….”
I do agree! My purpose of the post was to show some evidence that academic scientists can be pretty cavalier with data massaging and still consider it honest. Nowadays I’m in big Pharma and every little bit of data is recorded for all eternity: good, bad, ugly, or otherwise. You can’t massage anything for any excuse. That’s what kills me about the team. They ought to try working in Pharma for awhile and see if they can get away with even the smallest bit of their nonsense.
David L,
Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, has said that
“The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review#Criticisms_of_peer_review
So if these problems persist in Big Pharma related science, imagine how things work in the wonderful world of the team’s ‘global climatology.’