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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Sorry Rob, wrong. The other proxies only agree with the truncated dendro record if you include the Tiljander series upside down, as Mann did. Gavin Schmidt of RealClimate admitted as much.
I know nothing, and presume nothing, about the accuracy of the measurements in the dendro records for any period. However I expect any selection from the period to be supported by convincing arguments in its favour, not half-hearted footnotes that do not make it into the IPCC reports, and to be based on observations about the quality of the measurements or clearly identifiable confounding variables, not the fact that they do not agree with the instrumental record.
The dendro proxies diverge sufficiently from the instrumental record since 1960 to be discarded without further discussion – the new exposure of the deception over the 1404-1550 period adds little to the science, but provides another window into the methods and motivations of the Team.
At first, I had a bit of a soft spot for Briffa, because the emails showed him to be a bit concerned about his work being unhelpful to the cause, and then after the team ‘discussed it’ with him, he managed to go along with Mike’s Nature trick.
It seems I was wrong, and he must have been at it before they worried about the decline, or did he do it all at once?
Hmm, anyone find an email that now fits with what Steve has diligently discovered.
How many more ‘errors’ is he going to find? No doubt members of the team remain uncomfortable!
[/b] Hopefully that turns off bold.
Q: Why has this article got such a low rating? Are we being trolled?
[Reply: This site uses HTML, so you need to use the arrow brackets, not the square brackets. ~dbs, mod.]
REPLY: see this http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/19/my-biggest-pet-peeve-on-running-this-blog/
mpaul said…
It’s not a matter of “agreeing with the consensus.” It’s a matter of trying to identify that data that is a response to temperature rather than other stimuli. If you look at Briffa’s (try 2001)work you see that there are wide bands of uncertainty. If all the other data is going left and one set goes right then you can probably conclude the one that’s off by itself is a poor indicator.
Now if McIntyre can come up with a valid reason that Briffa should have left that part of the data in, then he should present it. Is there are reason that all the other data is the anomaly while this one set is correct?
Switching off bold and italics aparently escapes most though 🙂
David S… Nope, sorry. You guys are just looking for dirt where there is none.
Your arguments are saying that because there is a scuff in the paint the car is not road worthy. Over-the-top reactions like this suggesting conspiracy and academic misconduct over the tiniest of details in the long run undermine your position.
REPLY: You truly are delusional. Crap like this in the stock market lands people in jail. It is not “tiny details” when whole nations pay attention to the findings of the IPCC report, and the omission of these details changes the graph in a conclusive way. – Anthony
But what about all of the other hockey sticks over at RC? They roll out a new hockey stick as ‘evidence’ with monotonous regularity. Doesn’t matter that many have demonstrated that hockey sticks can be created from just any old data- bunch o’ pucks.
@Rob Honeycutt said:
Now if McIntyre can come up with a valid reason that Briffa should have left that part of the data in, then he should present it. Is there are reason that all the other data is the anomaly while this one set is correct?
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I can only hope you are being sarcastic here. If not, you are surely showing ignorance.
It is up to the original authors to: 1) show the entire proxy record; 2) make a case for excluding sections of the proxy; and, 3) clearly state what they did and why. None of this was done.
By the way, what is your explanation for throwing away some data and retaining the rest?
The good news is probably that these persons ended up in climate science and not in the nuclear power industry.
@ur momisugly Rob Honeycutt
You are a flying a plane, the flight plan logs mountain peaks on route at 10,000 feet on approach to the peaks data from 3 instruments show your altitude to be 11,000 feet, however one instrument shows 9,500 feet? Do you ignore the “outlier” and go with the consensus? Fairly sure you will climb until all instruments show that you will clear the peaks.
I am also sure that on touch down you will report the “outlier” instrument and insist on a full report as to the reason for the difference, rather than just insisting that the “outlier” instrument be removed?
Noelle says:
March 24, 2011 at 11:54 am
“This paper is 12 years old and it takes until now to report this? I find your accusation of politics hard to digest when your comment points grand conspiracy that is more than twelve year old .”
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Alger Hiss’s “grand conspiracy” was more than 12 years old when it was exposed by KGB files. Data embedded in the Climategate files helped McIntyre fill in even more of the blanks about this fraud beyond what he had already quite effectively exposed…
Perhaps Science magazine has an explanation. I’ll give them a week, then I’ll make this extremely well known.
Otherwise Science can say that they will withdraw Briffa and Osborn (1999), or rename their magazine.
Rob Honeycutt:
If I did ANYTHING like this in my job, I would be fired. In fact, most people would.
I do not see how ANYONE with any significant knowledge of science and/or statistics can view this as anything but illegitimate. Worst. Science. Ever….
Interesting how statistically insignificant is acceptable when talking about Climate reconstructions but not when talking about recent Global temperature rise, what happened to scientific consistancy?
Rob Honeycutt says:
March 24, 2011 at 5:15 pm
“Over-the-top reactions like this suggesting conspiracy and academic misconduct over the tiniest of details in the long run undermine your position.”
I have been teaching university courses in ethics, among others, for just over forty years. I understand that most people do not have the luxury of studying ethics. I give most people a pass on their failure to make ethical distinctions just as I give most people a pass on their failure to understand the limitations of computer simulations. However, when scientists conspire to hide forty years of evidence that their tree ring data cannot serve as a proxy for temperature and they do so because they want people to believe the falsehood that their tree ring data shows that temperatures are rising rapidly, the only possible conclusion is that THEY LIED TO PEOPLE ABOUT THE SCIENCE AS A MEANS OF PROTECTING THEIR GLOBAL WARMING NARRATIVE. There is no other way to slice it. Honest scientists would have published an article explaining that they had forty years of evidence that the tree ring data was unreliable. Honest scientists in possession of Briffa’s data would never have given their permission for publication of the hockey stick and would have sued Gore for his uses of it.
What has been done in reconstructing the hockey stick is totally irrelevant to moral judgement of The Team’s behavior as revealed in the Climategate emails. The immoral acts committed by the team were immoral at the moment they occurred and nothing that followed them can make them morally right.
Jeremy at 1:10: your characterization of the pharma industry is insulting and wrong. Feel free not to avail yourself of modern medicine, but keep your opinions about other-than-climate-science to yourself.
Rob Honeycutt says:
March 24, 2011 at 5:07 pm
mpaul said…
“If all the other data is going left and one set goes right then you can probably conclude the one that’s off by itself is a poor indicator.”
If this was the situation, then Briffa or The Team simply had not completed their analysis of data. They had no right to publish their article. If you have FORTY YEARS of data which indicates that your tree-ring data is no longer reliable then you must deal with that problem before you can use the tree-ring data as evidence in a publication. One thing you could do is publish the FORTY YEARS of evidence in the hockey stick article. But then no one would have given the time of day to the hockey stick.
“Rob Honeycutt says:
March 24, 2011 at 5:07 pm
………..It’s not a matter of “agreeing with the consensus.” It’s a matter of trying to identify that data that is a response to temperature rather than other stimuli.”
And Steve McIntyre has clearly identified another example why it is unreasonable to believe tree ring data is a credible proxy for reconstructing a temperature record.
The only correlation for the credibility of tree ring data is with the credibility of the ‘scientists’ cherry picking subsets of it to provide a narrative to support the global warming hypothesis.
jcrabb says:
March 24, 2011 at 6:06 pm
Interesting how statistically insignificant is acceptable when talking about Climate reconstructions but not when talking about recent Global temperature rise, what happened to scientific consistency?
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amazing, isn’t it
Rob Honeycutt says:
March 24, 2011 at 5:15 pm
“Over-the-top reactions like this suggesting conspiracy and academic misconduct over the tiniest of details in the long run undermine your position.”
There is no question that “hiding the decline” was morally wrong. They had FORTY YEARS of evidence that tree ring data was an unreliable proxy for temperature. Having such evidence they should not have used the tree ring data AS EVIDENCE that temperatures are rising. In creating the hockey stick, they lied about the evidence for rising temperature when they “hid the decline” and replaced the tree ring data with temperature data. That substitution was a lie. They made the substitution for the purpose of supporting the global warming narrative that temperatures are rising. When they committed the act, it was morally wrong and nothing that followed that act can make it morally right. Later reconstructions of the hockey stick are irrelevant.
They could have published the article and not hidden the decline. That is, they could have shown the actual tree ring data and not substituted the temperature curve for it. They could have explained that the actual tree ring data DIVERGES from the temperature data and no longer supports the global warming narrative. That would have been truthful. They chose not to tell the truth.
I watched a British archeology programe some time ago (sorry I can’t recall the name of the program).
In this program, the archeologists had a theory that an ancient causeway built over a marsh was rebuilt at intervals governed by elipses, as the dates they had determined seemed to align very well.
The program covered them doing lot more work to recover more buried wood from the peat. When the new dates came back the correlation of some of the data disagreed with their cherished theory.
I’ll never forget the comment of the bitterly disappointed archeologist – “Well, back to the drawing board”. That was the mark of a true man of science.
I wondered at the time what the “Team” would have done when presented with conflicting data. I think I know now.
I simply can’t do the detailed scientific scrutiny that you guys do. I’m just not qualified. What I do have is a very highly developed bullshit detector and it has been blaring like a British ambulance for more than a decade now over this AGW business. So while I have nothing to add to bring the truth to the fore, the least I can do is provide this site and McIntyre’s and a few others with a hundred bucks every month or so, that they might not starve while fighting the good fight. And I would hope that thousands like me would do the same. It’s VITAL that thousands do the same.
Thank you Anthony, Steve, Willis, Joe D., Monckton and the rest. You’ll win-out in the end and I’ll be proud to have done my part. I feel like I’m buying Victory Bonds!
Theo is CORRECT! ONLY an unscientific end-justifies-the-means blind LIBERAL would say otherwise. No real scientist would agree with Rob, et. al. If I’m wrong, please explain why. State your basis for truth.
Now, if they just supply a tree with say a 2,000,000 year ring history, well better they supply a represenative sample of the tree population of the earth, say,, 200,000,000 trees with 2,000,000 year tree ring histories.
They can study that information until the oil, gas, coal, and nuke plant material runs out and then get back to us.
Steve McIntyre uncovers another hockey stick trick – where are the ……
Here at World Spinner we are debating the same thing……