NOTE: since this is clearly an important finding with far reaching implications, this will be a “top post” at WUWT for the next couple of days. I urge other bloggers to spread the word. – Anthony
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Just when you think the bottom of the Hockey Stick rabbit hole has been reached, Steve McIntyre finds yet more evidence of misconduct by the Team.
The research was from Briffa and Osborn (1999) published in Science magazine and purported to show the consistency of the reconstruction of past climate using tree rings with other reconstructions including the Mann Hockey Stick. But the trick was exposed in the Climategate dossier, which also included code segments and datasets.
In the next picture, Steve shows what Briffa and Osborn did – not only did they truncate their reconstruction to hide a steep decline in the late 20th Century but also a substantial early segment from 1402-1550:
As I’ve written elsewhere, this sort of truncation can be characterized as research misconduct – specifically falsification. But where are the academic cops? Any comment from Science magazine?
Steve also discusses the code underlying the plot and you can see how the truncation is a clear deliberate choice – not something that falls out of poorly understood analysis or poor programming.
In the comments, Kip Hansen posts the following:
In reference to Mann’s Trick….obliquely, yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on Zicam (a homeopathic nasal spray) ruled in part:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/health/23bizcourt.html?_r=1&hpw
The Supreme Court has said that companies may be sued under the securities law for making statements that omit material information, and it has defined material information as the sort of thing that reasonable investors would believe significantly alters the ‘total mix’ of available information.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the court on Tuesday, roundly rejected Matrixx’s proposal that information can be material only if it meets standards of statistical significance.
‘Given that medical professionals and regulators act on the basis of evidence of causation that is not statistically significant,’ she wrote, ‘it stands to reason that in certain cases reasonable investors would as well.’
Thus, hiding or omitting information, even if one feels it is ‘erroneous’ or ‘outlying’ (or whatever they claim) is still possibly fraudulent ( or in this case, scientifically improper) if it would ‘add to the total mix of available information’. Statistical significance is not to be the deciding factor.
In the case of Briffa and Osborn, no statistical fig leaf was applied that justified the truncation of data, so far as I can see.
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@Steve E and Richard Courtney
I have another objection to what the authors actually wrote in the paper when discussing the “divergence problem”.
While they do suggest a number of possible factors that may have lead to the (dendro vs instrumental) divergence in the 20 th century, they seems to ( a priori disregard any possibility that the divergence could be caused by non-anthropogenic phenomena.
While I have currently no indication that this was deliberately, I would think it has some significance for their discussion of the discepancy also found in older samples.
(Their only explanation being “age degradation” of those samples).
I would think this line of reasoning have quite some significance for their overall conclusions.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Smokey says:
Except that the evolution skeptics would say the exact same thing about evolutionary theory. So, we have evolution skeptics saying that evolution has been debunked, AGW skeptics saying that AGW has been debunked and, in both cases, all the respected scientific organizations like NAS saying otherwise.
So what was the difference again? (Oh right, I guess it comes down to the fact that Smokey is the ultimate authority on what theories have and have not been debunked! Really, why would anyone take the NAS seriously when they have Smokey?)
Tree interviews are next I’m sure.
Mr. Mann: “How do you like the danger high CO2 levels Mr. Bristle Cone?”
Mr. Cone: “Well these last 500 years have been great,, be sure to spell my name correct in the paper your to publish.”
Mr. Cone: “When do I get my check?”
Mr. Mann: “As soon as the new grant funds get washed.”
The truth burns, doesn’t it, Mr Shore? You can’t handle the truth!
Catastrophic AGW has been DEBUNKED.
Your risible attempts to demonize a benign, harmless and beneficial trace gas, by trying to convince people that it will cause runaway global warming look increasingly ridiculous as time goes on…
…Hey, where’d that runaway global warming go? It was here a minute ago! Kevin Trenberth told me so.☺
“Smokey says:
March 27, 2011 at 7:24 am”
Agreed! Where did it go? Venus, the “runaway global warming” poster child of AGW on Earth, isn’t happening, well, because, the current climate on Venus, is normal for Venus.
A proxy is only as good as its hindcast and forecast ability. If it correlates reasonably well with other proxies and actual observations, then the proxy is robust. If it does not, it is non-robust. What part of this basic tenet of good science is unclear to AGW proponents when using this particular set of tree ring data?
Phil. says:
March 26, 2011 at 9:11 pm
No Warmista dare speak the language of scientific methodology. Or maybe they are just too stupid to learn the language. I now see that you too cannot speak that language. You cannot understand what I have written because you do not have a clue how to use words such as ‘evidence’, ‘confirm’, ‘disconfirm’ and so on. Of course you think I made it up, you do not have a clue what I have said. Either that or, like all Warmista, you stay away from the language of scientific methodology because it is a major loser for you.
My points are as simple and straightforward as can be. You want to cite Briffa’s paper to excuse him. Excuse him from what? From my claim that he endorsed the hockey stick and the deception behind it. Yet all there is in Briffa’s paper is the claim that a divergence took place. There is no claim that it was important. In fact, a fair reading of the paper is that the divergence was not important. The word ‘evidence’ does not appear. Why? Because the divergence can only serve as evidence that tree ring data is not a reliable proxy for temperature. Briffa fails to make any judgement about the divergence; that is, he fails to say that it gives reason to believe that tree rings are unreliable. Another word Warmista cannot use or understand is ‘unreliable’. At best, at best, Briffa’s article is not serious science but a CYA operation. He is not even interested in his discovery of the divergence and has not a clue why it exists, as he says in the article. So, why publish the article if it is not a CYA operation?
Richard S Courtney says:
March 27, 2011 at 1:19 am
Spot on!
Normally you wouldn’t be into conspiracy theories but with the Team, you start to believe everything’s possible-
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/05/3155933.htm
as IPCC media release triumphantly proclaims-
“Science absolutely settled as satellite with data conclusively proving that CO2 causes global warming unfortunately fries in mid latitude troposphere and plunges into rising ocean. Acid levels mean indisputable data cannot be retrieved to finally foil deniers!”
Richard said,
“It is not good behavior late in a thread to repeat points that were refuted earlier in the thread. The clear purpose of the repetition is to mislead people who arrive late in the discussion and who jump to the end of the thread.”
Of course this is too common, is the alarmists primary tool and has been used in the greater dispute on AGW over days, months and years of the debate.
“It is not good behavior late in a debate to repeat points that were refuted earlier in the dispute. The clear purpose of the repetition is to mislead people who arrive late in the discussion and cause them to believe that far more of the AGW case remains intact than actually does.
I can’t think of a single attribution the alarmists have dispensed with.
They just keep trying to pile up more.
Polar bears, hurricanes, snow pack, Himalayan glaciers, sea temp, sea level, floods, droughts, fires, no snow-record snow, on and on and on.
Many have been egregious fabrications that alarmists will not acknowledge.
So as many have said, pull off all of the ginned up propaganda and what’s left is the defective core of the AGW case that McIntyre, w, Watts and others have exposed so that even the honest layperson can easily grasp.
But we live in an era where the defects are institutionalized with publicly funded participants breeding more dishonesty in hopes of avoiding or delaying exposure just long enough to escape personal loss. The wholesale absence of integrity, from local to international, has reached epic proportions.
I think the many adjustments made to the climate data constitute fraud on a scale of thousands of times that of any common embezzler. The leaders of the “Team” and the leaders of the IPCC should be prosecuted.
Liars lie and then lie some more.
How does that saying go?
“Oh what tangled web we weave when at first we practise to deceive.”
Something like that…
Or as my grandma would say: ” You talk out of both sides of your mouth. “
Cassanders says:
March 27, 2011 at 3:01 am
@Steve E and Richard Courtney
I have another objection to what the authors actually wrote in the paper when discussing the “divergence problem”.
While they do suggest a number of possible factors that may have lead to the (dendro vs instrumental) divergence in the 20 th century, they seems to ( a priori disregard any possibility that the divergence could be caused by non-anthropogenic phenomena.
That appears to be your bias (or lack of knowledge) showing, Briffa says for example:
“the reason is not yet known…….comparisons suggest that it may be associated with a tendancy towards loss of ‘spring’ growth response and, at least for subarctic Siberia, it may be connected with changes in the timing of spring snowmelt.” No attempt is made to link that with anthropogenic causes.
Theo Goodwin says:
March 27, 2011 at 7:35 am
Phil. says:
March 26, 2011 at 9:11 pm
No Warmista dare speak the language of scientific methodology. Or maybe they are just too stupid to learn the language. I now see that you too cannot speak that language. You cannot understand what I have written because you do not have a clue how to use words such as ‘evidence’, ‘confirm’, ‘disconfirm’ and so on. Of course you think I made it up, you do not have a clue what I have said. Either that or, like all Warmista, you stay away from the language of scientific methodology because it is a major loser for you.
What I criticized in your post had nothing to with scientific methodology it was your making up ‘facts’ to suit your argument which were not true!
For example, you said: “Where does it say that this divergence is clearly shown (or will be clearly shown) in our published graph. Nowhere! Why? Because they did not show it.”
In fact as I pointed out they showed it in Fig 2 and drew attention to it in the text!
I’m not going to repeat the whole of that post but many of the criticisms posted here are based on untrue statements like yours, Cassanders above etc. If you want to focus on scientific methodology, fine, but base it on facts not things you’ve made up.
Richard S Courtney says:
March 27, 2011 at 1:19 am
Phil.:
It is not good behaviour late in a thread to repeat points that were refuted earlier in the thread. The clear purpose of the repetition is to mislead people who arrive late in the discussion and who jump to the end of the thread.
Your post at March 26, 2011 at 9:11 pm is an example of such misbehaviour.
I wasn’t aware that you had refuted Theo’s mis-statements before they had been made, very clever of you. I suppose that goes with the omniscience which leads to your statements being the final word on any subject. You may be distressed to learn that I don’t regard them as such.
I and several other people have refuted your point in posts above. I copy two such posts by me below to save you and others needing to find them.
I don’t see any rebuttal of my posts there. Your idea that Proc Roy Soc is an obscure publication beggars belief! Your idea that Briffa published on the divergence problem in high rank journals such as Proc Roy Soc, Nature and Science in an elaborate plan to give cover for reconstruction papers to be published several years later borders on the delusional.
What is the world do Mann/Briffa/et al possibly hope to gain from lying like this? What’s in it for them? Money? Notoriety? What?
This is a pile of rotting rubbish. You clearly do not understand the basics of the scientific method. One validated counter example is all it takes to blow a theory completely out of water. Complete theoretical destruction is possible with one little inconvenient fact, just one more thin wafer.
Phil.:
Your comment at March 27, 2011 at 9:27 am is silly. Facts are what they are, and there relevance and accuracy is not affected by who reports them.
You are attempting to excuse the inexcusable. And those of us who value science reject your behaviour.
Richard
Phil. says:
March 27, 2011 at 9:08 am
If you want to focus on scientific methodology, fine, but base it on facts not things you’ve made up.
Ok, whatever, but now apply your criticism more importantly to ipcc CO2=CAGW “Climate Science”: methodologically, it’s not real science, and it just makes things up. The fact that it even exists as alleged science is what should bother you, not to mention the small matter of the grotesque Evil it represents and intends for Humanity.
For those of you wondering what any of these scientists have to gain by lying, let me list some possibilities. Their reputations and funding are on the line. Multi-billion dollar industries have been built around the concept of anthropogentic global warming (e.g. the carbon-offset trading industry to name one, is now huge). Many politicians and members of the IPCC have staked their reputations on the notion that the earth is about to melt down. What happens to all those people and their money if they allow themselves to admit that their whole case was built on a sand castle next to the ocean?
Maybe the bigger picture would help. Maybe perspective would help. Let’s try. How old is Briffa? My guess is that he is in the neighborhood of 60. How long has the tree ring data been diverging from temperature data. Everyone, including Briffa, agrees that it has been diverging since at least 1960. Now, put yourself in Briffa’s shoes and look back on his career. There has not been a day in his professional life that the tree ring data did not diverge from the temperature data. In other words, in his career as a researcher, Briffa never had a day when he collected data that unequivocally supported the claims of the hockey stick. Never, never, never. So, how could he stand by and let other members of the team and Al Gore use the hockey stick as evidence for the global warming that he had never discovered? Where is his denunciation of them? And what about an explanation of the divergence. He has said in print that he does not know why the divergence exists. Has he published an explanation? Isn’t that what one would expect from someone whose career is defined by this research? So, why no explanation? The explanation is more important today than it was ten years ago. Where is it? Why isn’t Briffa publishing and speaking about it? You know the answer. It is the same reason that no one on The Team will give interviews to sceptics. Everyone of them know that if they opened their mouths they could not but betray the cause of global warming.
Phil. says:
March 27, 2011 at 9:08 am
“In fact as I pointed out they showed it in Fig 2 and drew attention to it in the text!”
If you have a published hockey stick that was published before Climategate and that hockey stick marks the divergence, please show it here.
Joel Shore,
“Except that the evolution skeptics would say the exact same thing about evolutionary theory. So, we have evolution skeptics saying that evolution has been debunked, AGW skeptics saying that AGW has been debunked and, in both cases, all the respected scientific organizations like NAS saying otherwise.
So what was the difference again?”
All you have done is erect a strawman to be demolished. Do you really need an explanation of the difference (other than to take a dig at Smokey)?
Evolutionary sceptical arguments are based on argumentium ad ignoratium: haven’t found sufficient intermediate forms in the fossil records, random mutations can’t create new species etc. There are even those attempting to gather evidence that the speed of light was much higher in the past. The sole reason for this is to try and refute the age of the Earth. Whatever your views, this is not science.
AGW sceptics, on the other hand, include scientists producing research that calls into question the hypothesis of AGW, and produce evidence that is counter to their claims. These scientist are great in number, and include people like Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, Akasofu, Loehle, Douglass, Pielke sr, Baliunus, Scafetta, Dyson, Ball, Singer, Michaels, Lewis, Happer, Carter, McItrick, Tisdale etc.
Not quite a fair comparison really.
Phil. says:
March 26, 2011 at 9:11 pm
Theo Goodwin says:
March 26, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Phil quotes:
“During the second half of the twentieth century, the decadal-scale trends in wood density and summer temperatures have increasingly diverged as wood density has progressively fallen. The cause of this increasing insensitivity of wood density to temperature changes is not known, but if it is not taken into account in dendroclimatic reconstructions, past temperatures could be overestimated.”
“Wow, you do like to make things up!”
What are you talking about? I am quoting part of a passage that you quoted to me.
@Theo Goodwin:
The Left engages in semantic warfare all the time. We must resist.
One very old tactic I first learned about in 1964 while majoring in pre-postmodern Philosophy: the Left unhinges words from their usual meanings, then uses them as though they still carry their old meanings, my point being that eventually the words actually have no meaning – then they are really only noises, appearances, etc.; while they still sound and look like they have meaning to people who don’t realize that this tactic is being employed and who perhaps also trust the speakers/authors to be making sense and to be trying to help them and, of course, to “save the world”; but at this point the words are being used solely for their residual manipulative effect and not to further understanding or to help anyone, other than the authors who use this tactic. Their verbiage becomes only that, completely unhinged from any realistic rational meaning. Just as in their practice of “Climate Science”.
I’m beginning to wonder if the very authors who use this tactic, and their many other propagandistic tactics, even have the capacity to formulate or understand any “meaning” whatsoever other than, “If I say or do this, I’ll get that,” then repeated obsessively ad infinitum. It’s also an old story, Communistic, Fascistic, Totalitarian and even inherently infantile. I don’t think people with such a mental functioning really have anything better to do. Otherwise, why aren’t they doing it? Destroying the meaning of Science is simply not beneficial in the way they pretend. Why don’t they get it?