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/
I read a great deal of the interchange last night and am happy to hear that eventually ‘ianash’ was blocked. After a couple of hundred posts I began skipping ianash entirely becaues there was no intention whatsoever to participate, merely draw cartoons.
Good call.
While valid points are made, I fear Dr. Curry is now really in the bulls-eye. Read the climategate emails and understand what will happen now.
Ammonite:
” For “the tree rings” I assume you mean a small percentage of groves confined to northern latitudes only.”
I am refering to Briffa’s reconstruction (Yamal?) that they are refering to that “lost correlation” in 1961, which is why they loped off the offending data.
“independent reconstructions showing the same temperature behaviour WITH AND WITHOUT tree ring data”
I am aware of ZERO reconstructions without tree ring data that show a hockey stick. Please point them out to us.
1) Just because you do not like it, you don’t get to ignore valid data. There is ZERO evidence that post-1960 data in that series was invalid. It just didn’t say what they wanted it to. So they ignored it like a dead racoon.
2) Again, because Briffa’s recostruction lost correlation after 1960, you HAVE to ask the question how many other times in the last 1000 years did it lose correlation. If you can’t answer that, then you have garbage data. It might be 100% accurate. Or it might be 100% innacurate. You don’t know. And that’s the point.
Ammonite,
The decline was deliberately well hidden. You can’t see what happened in this hockey stick…
…unless you look real close.
Matt, it’s 100% inaccurate…..
The test is can it predict in real time…
…if it can’t
No different than all of the 25 or so computer models………
“Matt, it’s 100% inaccurate…..”
Well, I’m sure at SOME point in that time frame it was an accurate account of temperature. Even a broken clock is exactly right twice a day, right? 🙂
Gavin said
It’s obvious that Gavin did say that E&E dispensed with peer review but has dispensed with substantive peer review, I’m curious as to how this is different from the AGW team had admitted to doing in the climategate Emails in regards to peer review? At first glance it appears the pot is calling the kettle black.
Sorry “It’s obvious that Gavin did say ” should have been “It’s obvious that Gavin did not say ” for the want of a preview button a post was lost!
MattN says: February 23, 2011 at 5:30 pm
I am aware of ZERO reconstructions without tree ring data that show a hockey stick. Please point them out to us.
Matt, I always have a sinking feeling when it comes to posting research links on WUWT. I am not aware of one single requestor showing the slightest evidence of looking any of them up and assimilating the information provided. I hope the links below will prove useful to you. The first relates to North America only and uses pollen for the reconstruction. The second covers the Northern Hemisphere (proxy data still being sparse for the SH) and compares reconstructions with and without tree ring data. Both approaches conclude that recent warmth is “likely anomalous” – read Hockey Stick.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/viau2006/viau2006.html
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/02/0805721105.abstract
MattN says:
February 23, 2011 at 6:24 pm
“Matt, it’s 100% inaccurate…..”
Well, I’m sure at SOME point in that time frame it was an accurate account of temperature. Even a broken clock is exactly right twice a day, right? 🙂
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Yep, that’s what I’ve been trying to get someone to help me remember.
I have it in my head, that the tree rings were calibrated to only 9 years of temperatures.
So they would be “right”, sorta, for those nine years. As good as I can remember, those nine years were in the late 1800’s.
“”If, I remember correctly, that the tree rings were only calibrated to 9 years of temperature records in the first place………..””
But as far as being an accurate proxy for temps, they are 100% inaccurate….
Ammonite:
Re: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/viau2006/viau2006.html
July temps only? Awesome. What about the other 11/12ths of missing data?
Re: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/02/0805721105.abstract
Watch the pea under the pod. If you don’t know what that means, you are not paying attention…
Dr. Curry is privileged to have Dr Schmidt posting in person on her blog. Does Dr Schmidt or even Dr Mann ever post on WUWT? We could have some really interesting discussions.
Why should Dr Curry have all the fun?
Moderators could delete posts containing the word “liar”to keep the discussions seemly, except that Drs Schmidt & Mann posts should not be censored or altered in any way.
[Reply: I fully agree. Drs Mann and Schmidt are always welcome to contribute an article. ~dbs, mod.]
MattN says: February 23, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Watch the pea under the pod.
Firstly, thank you for following the links provided. Not surprisingly pollen does not have a lot to say in winter, yet it does produce a hockey stick in summer. If you don’t like the examples given, feel free to conduct your own literature search, but remember: “just because you do not like it, you don’t get to ignore valid data.”
As for peas and pods, others are watching very closely on our collective behalf.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h483676101066104/
The timeline evidence suggests that AGW continues to fall slowly, basically one by one of the real scientists (ie Curry, Dyson, et al) changing their minds about it. It will never be instant old soldiers only fade away they say…..
Judith is walking a path of discovery, objective of/toward the outcome. Commendable and fearless.
The sun will shine bright on that day when the momentum, begun here, results in a broadly held realization that it was the knuckledraggers who had it right all along.
🙂
Muller thought the “hide the decline” was deceitful. Dr. Curry now openly criticises the Hockey Team. Gavin is acting like himself being angry and crying like a five year old. This may not be the end of the debate, but perhaps a new beginning for climate science where the rotten apples are being left out. Sorry, Gavin, but your posts read like what my four year old niece would say when angry. I cannot see how you can expect to be taken seriously as a “great scientist” after this ordeal.
Ammonite:
Not ignoring anything. I’m looking for the missing 11 months of data. Just as we we not declare 2011 the warmest of coldest year on record based on January data alone, I see no reason to pronounce 20th century warming was anamalous based solely on one month pollen data.
I believe Ammonites 2nd reference is to Mann 08.
Steve Mc did an analysis of this [http://climateaudit.org/2010/08/01/the-no-dendro-illusion/]
and a small extract follows – initially he is referring to the original hockey stick – MBH98
“In the terminology of M08, without bristlecones, they did not have a “validated” reconstruction as at AD1400 and thus could not make a modern-medieval comparison with the claimed statistical confidence.
Ironically, the situation in M08 appears to be almost identical. Once the Tilj proxies are unpeeled, Mann once again doesn’t have a “validated” reconstruction prior to AD1500 or so, and thus cannot make a modern-medieval comparison with the claimed statistical confidence.”
As people are aware, this issue has been in the blogs a long time.
At one stage Gavin was interviewed on collide-a-scape and a small section of comments at CA went as follows: Quote
Roger Pielke, Jr.
Posted Aug 5, 2010 at 9:49 PM | Permalink | Reply
Gavin responds:
http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/08/04/gavins-perspective/comment-page-4/#comment-13149
*
Brian Eglinton
Posted Aug 5, 2010 at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Reply
Thanks for highlighting this Roger.
Gavin makes 5 dot points to detail the handling of the Tiljander proxies.
In short
– lake sediments may contain climate related signals – in the case of Tiljander there were known issues,
– Mann et al (2008) used these proxies. In CPS method, local correlation fixes the orientation. If you have reason to believe this is wrong the proxy should not be used.
I will quote 3) in full:
“3) Since Mann et al (2008) were very aware of the potentially dubious nature of the modern portion of the Tiljander proxies, they performed their reconstructions without those proxies (and three others with potential problems) in sensitivity tests in the supplemental information (specifically Fig S8). Neither reconstruction (for NH mean (EIV) or NH land (CPS) temperature) is materially affected by the absence of the Tiljander proxies. This is the identical result to what you would have if you had a priori insisted on the opposite orientation of the proxies in CPS.
– the validation using tree rings but not Tiljander go back to 700AD (EIV method) and 400AD (CPS method)
– if people object to using Tiljander or think they are upside down – the non-Tiljander reconstructions in the SI shows it makes little difference.
– “Nothing stated in the RC posts or comments was incorrect.” Without trees & Tiljander, “these methodologies don’t allow you to say anything before 1500.”… “All validated reconstructions show late 20th Century warmth as anomalous over the their range of validity.”
By which we can say that if we reject trees & Tiljander, we have confidence the temperature has risen only in the last 500 years. I think this is my take home line from all this. The historical, large scale phenomenon supporting a MWP have not been addressed by these particular proxy studies.”
End of Quote
In other words – Gavin agrees perfectly with StevMc – that without Tilj & the trees, the study does not validly reconstruct back into the MWP. The paper arrives at its conclusion by careful selection of suspect proxies. Yes – Gavin agrees that removing them hurts the conclusion, but he carefully reframes the conclusion to “over the their range of validity”. But he hopes that this validity range being only to 500 years ago misses the casual reader.
Strangely – having tried to minimise the significance, he waded back into the issue over at Judith’s blog?
Craig Loehle says:
February 23, 2011 at 7:28 am
There are multiple issues, not just a choice of how to present a graph:
1.Subjective choice of trees/sites for sampling
2.Post-hoc dropping of “non-responders”
3.Linear response to temp assumption (which is actually known to be false.) which makes the inverse problem undefined.
4.Ignoring six sigma outliers like Yamal larch which heavily affect the result
5.Hiding adverse verification statistics (R-sq of 0.05 means you have nada)
6.Unjustified weighting (bristlecones 400x others)
7.Proxies different orientations (+ vs – temp indicator) in different time periods of the recon.
8.Choosing graph baseline to emphasize post-1980 “warm”
9.End point padding—even worse with instrumental data
10.Hiding the decline as discussed above
11.Thick red line for instrumental data to make it look “hot” and to hide lines underneath that are going down.
12.Repeated use of “robust”, “similar”, “reliable” with no quantification
Craig, very good post and bullet points the “bad” science well. All I would add is the amazing energy (years) spent by the “team” in not letting the science be replicated by refusing to release the data and meta data for so long, and the thousands of web comments by the “team” attempting to reduce all of the above to a simple debate on “how to present a graph” and “minor statistical differences” which are common to most papers. The entire picture is one big affront to the scientific method, and when used as a political wepon to attempt to steal from the people of the world with trillions of dollars in tax, centralize power away from individuals into the hands of unelected bureaucrats, then all I can say is “there should be a law”.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
February 23, 2011 at 5:22 am
“or fiddling while Rome burns….. or something else along those lines.”
Typo: surely “Romm”?
Gavin’s (hyper)reaction is entirely expected given that his little “team” is being attacked on two fronts now (the “Steig-gate” scandal and now more repudiation of Climategate and “hide-the-decline”). One wonders if he’s getting any “work” done at all at NASA/GISS – not that it matters…
Personally, the whole Gavin-Mann-Steig-RealClimate thing has become boring and cartoonish, but sadly emblematic of the entire sorry CAGW research establishment…
The hockey stick is scientific fraud. Gavin Schmidt is a poor scientist. Sue me.
I applaud Gavin for staying with the sinking ship.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5295/5474333318_d79c8022ee_z.jpg
It takes real courage to do what he’s doing.
For Ammonite: The “No-dendro illusion”: http://climateaudit.org/2010/08/01/the-no-dendro-illusion/
All you do is put TWO bad proxies in your reconstruction, that way, when you remove the dendros, you still have a stick.
Magic. Just like the guy on the street corner I saw working it last weekend.
Watch that pea and keep hiding the decline, baby…
Magnus says:
February 24, 2011 at 2:10 am
“… Sorry, Gavin, but your posts read like what my four year old niece would say when angry. I cannot see how you can expect to be taken seriously as a “great scientist” after this ordeal.”
I’m not sure the fact that Gavin may act like a child would by itself call into question if he’s a “great scientist”….
During my tenure in academia I noticed a lot of the academic researchers had a similar personality as compared and contrasted to “the real world”. It seemed the trend was that many of the most succesful academic folks had developed intellectual capacity far beyond their years, but experienced emotional arrested development at around the age of 5.
Gavin’s poor scientific arguments and unbelievably closed-minded biases may cast him out of the “great scientist” bucket.