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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There have been a couple of comments here that Team members did disclose some of the shortcomings in their pseudo-science of tree ring interpretation.
I guess that’s either true or not.
However, no Team member is on record as stating the ‘science’ behind the Hockey Stick is at best thin and at worst is a complete fraud.
If you know one set of statistics is so wrong, or that it is completely meaningless, and you then attach another set of statistics from a completely different source, because part of the first set produces inconvenient results and you do not make this 110% clear, then you are committing scientific fraud. It is no wonder the Team members went to such lengths to hide the methodology of their ‘science’.
Anyhow, it is amusing to see the various alarmist comments defending the indefensible.
I can understand why the Australian Govn’t is breaking its neck to get a carbon tax in place, with a view to migrating to an ETS in 3 years, the “science” is falling apart faster than a Lancia.
Astrology and alchemy were not sciences but fields of study based on religion and superstition. In spite of that, they eventually gave rise to real scientific disciplines – astronomy and chemistry. (Disturbingly, 39% of the population still believe that astrology has a scientific basis)
Climatology likewise is not a science but a field of study in its infancy – and like astrology and alchemy, it has a palpable religious component, and lacks scientific rigour. Its practitioners do use and misuse scientific techniques.
Worse than that, as Steve McIntyre’s investigations reveal, they deliberately misuse them.
Lies, damn lies and tree ring data.
As one poster said, why is this rated as a 2 star affair!? seems odd, is someone in the opposition playing with the figures?
[…] Steve McIntyre uncovers another hockey stick trick – where are the academic cops? […]
Eric Anderson says: March 24, 2011 at 9:03 am
“It is hard to know whether they were intentionally deceptive or just so caught up in the “rightness” of their cause that they literally couldn’t see the discrepancies or couldn’t understand the implications.”
In the last few days I’ve been in the unfortunate position of having to read hours and hours of this climate modelling material in the hope of answering a simple question and from this I have drawn the following conclusions:
1. Before modern climate “science” there were a group of people involved in a very different kind of problem. That was how to interpret the new satellite imagery. Numerous papers from the 1960-70s seem to be premised on the need to try to make some sense of a thermal and visual images that began deluging the academics.
2. For obvious reasons, as the majority of these “pixels” were of open land and sea, the main groups interested in these pixels were those using the pixels to try to tease out information on the marine and terrestrial ecologies. So there are numerous papers trying to relate vegetation, desertification, change in landuse, etc. etc. to a pixel of information on a thermal/visual image.
3. It is also quite noticeable how many times the basic information on thermal “temperature” would be reinterpreted as indicating … water loss, disease, change in landuse. One reading interpreted to predict to up to a dozen different even contradictory outputs. Or to put it another way, the groups using this imagery seem to have been free to draw whatever conclusions they wanted so long as they could fill their papers with copious equations to impress the grant funding bodies.
4. Being “remote imagery”, there was very little attempt to verify the results of this “science” by direct experiment, and those that did do experiments provided very nebulous results (i.e. big clouds of mosquito dots on a graph where many lines could have been drawn through the cloud). Moreover, the simple nebulous linear relationships of the experimental results bore little relationship, both mathematically & in terms of complexity, with the complex equations that they were supposed to be demonstrating.
5. As a simple observation this pre-climate “science” provided next to no practical or useful information (at least I can’t use their stuff practically!)
So, in the 1970s we had a group of ecologically minded people, who loved big equations, but were short on tying this to actual experiments who were pre-occupied with interpreting satellite thermal data and trying to infer something about the environment. And then some bright spark must have realised that the relationship:
thermal data -> environment
could be written the other way
environment -> thermal data
And instead of using thermal data to predict the environment using their complex untested equations, they began using their complex untested equations to predict how changes to the environment would affect the thermal data and that opened up a whole new field which led to the global warming scam.
Key problems
1. It seems to me the political needs of NASA to try to find a civil excuse for its expensive satellite program ended up with a massive data push with little or no money to verify the results of the analysis. Megabucks for sticking a new satellite in space, minibucks for verifying any interpretations of this data.
2. The unquestioning adoption of “ecology” type methods and ethics (like removing outliers or is that outliars) and almost encouraging bias by those involved or at least seeing science as being part of politics.
3. The complete divergence of “theory” and theoretical modelling from experimental practice from real experience. The concept that you could create a theory and not need to test it in the field because it would just be too expensive to send people all over the world to check out what was happening in the field.
4. The unquestioning faith in the reliance of instrumentation … presumably stemming from the infeasibility of actually checking the thermal data from satellites. Because it was “too costly” became in this area “it is not scientifically necessary” to check your instrument sources, from which it became common practice just to accept the global temperature data without checking its provenance.
Below are a number of reminders about what the Team wants you to forget. It relates to CO2 and temperature.
If in the next few years we enter cooling then these climate scientists need to come out in the open and be honest and simply say that AGW has been falsified OR re-write the theory.
I’ve just had a play in photoshop. Here (hopefully) is the Briffa series. All I have done is flip it horizontally, vertically and move the layer around.
It’s worse than we thought: they haven’t yet mastered photoshop.
Now may I have my Nobel Prize, please?
Nick Stokes wonders “So what else should they have said?” and the obvious answer is that they should have mentioned the truncation in the earlier years too.
They didn’t mention it in the paper and therefore the results back to 1402 should have stood. Under what circumstances should those results have been dropped from that paper and any subsequent reconstructions (such as the IPCC report) in your mind?
Nick Stokes:
Your comment at March 25, 2011 at 12:05 am is silly: it is a proof that the ‘Team’ – and specifically Briffa – acted in a deliberately dishonest manner.
A lie that is often loudly stated is not corrected by the liar once having whispered the truth. The whisper only prooves that the liar knew he was lying.
Let me explain the matter in a manner that even you may understand.
The’divergence problem’ demonstrates that
(a) the tree-rings’ indications of temperature are wrong
or
(b) the thermometer-derived indications of temperature are wrong
or
(c) the tree-rings’ indications of temperature and the thermometer-derived indications of temperature are both wrong.
These are important findings because they indicate a need to determine which of the indications is wrong and why.
So, any paper that reports work which indicates the ‘divergence problem’ needs to provide a clear report and explanation of the the divergence together with a recommendation for work to obtain an understanding of the cause of the divergence.
But Mann, Braley, Hughes, Briffa, etc. did not provide that clear report and recommendation in their papers which presented the ‘hockey stick’ graphs. Instead, they tried to ‘hide the decline’. In other words they pretended that their work said the tree-rings’ indications of temperature and the thermometer-derived indications of temperature are both right. THAT WAS AND IS A LIE.
And – knowing they had lied – they needed to cover their nether regions in case the truth came out. So, as you report, they did. In the obscure paper you reference
(K. R. Briffa et al., Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 353, 65 (1998).)
they published a description of the divergence. So, now, whenever their lie is pointed out there are shills willing to say – as you do – that they did not lie because they published the truth in another paper.
I repeat, a lie that is often loudly stated is not corrected by the liar once having whispered the truth. The whisper only prooves that the liar new he was lieing.
Richard
Try again, sigh.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
I asked this a little while ago, but my comment appears to have disappeared.
Can someone please tell me what is teh thick black line asceding from the end of the dataset right hand end of graph (ascending rapidly hockey-stick like)?
Thanks
sorry, I forgot to mention that is referring to Figure 1
I was trained, many years ago, to teach small children. One of the things I learnt during this process was that small children have their own version of morality; If a child breaks one of his mum’s good tea cups, that’s not a biggie to a child, who reasons that it was just one cup, right?. If the same infant has an accident carrying a tray of teacups for his mum and break ten cups, that’s huge to the child that breaks them. Ten times worse than breaking one cup, in fact.
The Honeycutt version of morality is childish; the various members of the Hockey Team who indulged in those acts of fakery were adults at the time, so pleading a childish morality should apply for them is, well…childish.
And adults also learn to follow simple instructions, too 🙂 sarc off.
lock them all up
matt says:
March 24, 2011 at 9:06 am
My god they should be stripped of their qualifications and dishonoured publicly!
Perry says:
My god they should be stripped of their qualifications and dishonoured pubicly!
What? The ‘l is missing?
Noelle, you have it backwards. Those involved in this were accepted as innocent until the evidence proved them guilty.
They do actually mention these parts in the paper though.
“However, additional uncertainty may come from the earlier sections of the tree-ring data, because treering chronologies often exhibit a progressive degradation in statistical quality further back in time, a product of their diminishing internal replication (that is, series are often made up of fewer samples).”
and
“Unfortunately, these trees display a progressive increase in growth from the middle of the 19th century, which may be wholly or partly due to rising atmospheric CO2 levels. How can we distinguish the growth-promoting effects of warm temperatures from the possible influence of increasing CO2 and perhaps even other anthropogenic growth enhancers such as nitrogenous pollution? All show positive trends over the 20th century, and each has the potential to increase tree growth alone or in combination with others (regardless of whether that growth is limited by moisture availability or temperature).”
I personally don’t see what the problem is, perhaps someone can explain?
Nick Stokes says:
March 25, 2011 at 12:05 am
Theo Goodwin says:
March 24, 2011 at 6:36 pm
“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”
Yes, they could and they did. The Science paper in question looked at results from several papers, and for Briffa’s they referenced (available here):
K. R. Briffa et al., Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol.
Sci. 353, 65 (1998).
And in that they devote a who;e section to the decline, which begins:
“In s4, we referred to a notable correspondence between ‘hemispheric’ MXD series (averaged over all sites) and an equivalent `hemispheric’ instrumental temperature series. Despite their having 50% common variance measured over the last century, it is apparent that in recent decades the MXD series shows a decline, whereas we know that summer temperatures over the same area increased.”
And they went on to examine this in great detail, including Fig 6, which showed just what is shown here, but also broken down into contributing factors (with actual treering data). And yes, they go on to say:
“The implications of this phenomenon are important. Long-term alteration in the response of tree growth to climate forcing must, at least to some extent, negate the underlying assumption of uniformitarianism which under-lies the use of twentieth century-derived tree growth climate equations for retrodiction of earlier climates. At present, further work is required to explore the detailed nature of this changing growth – climate relationship (with regard to species, region, and time dependence). It is possible that it has already contributed to some degree of overestimation in published reconstructed temperature means – more likely only those that attempt to reconstruct long time-scale information.”
So what else should they have said?
They should have said that:
“A similar significant divergence is apparent in the period 1400 to 1550 where using our temperature methods the tree rings indicated very much colder temperatures than other proxies. The tree ring temperature inference only appears to correlate with temperature in the middle part of the period of interest. We are investigating why this occurs. However, for this paper, the temperature series from these tree ring proxies will be excluded until the variance from known temperatures is understood.”
Instead they deliberately hid the -larger- early variance as it showed the total invalidity of the tree ring data as indications of just temperature.
clarence wilson says:
March 25, 2011 at 2:51 am
I asked this a little while ago, but my comment appears to have disappeared.
Can someone please tell me what is teh thick black line asceding from the end of the dataset right hand end of graph (ascending rapidly hockey-stick like)?
Thanks
———–
According to the original paper it is:
“Instrumental temperatures (1871-1997) are in black”
However the paper mentions that other temperatures go back further in to the 17th and 18th centuary that aren’t included on that line:
“Others also incorporate the longest instrumental series stretching back into the 17th and 18th centuries.”
They shuold probably be sent to jail for not showing these older temperature records as well based on the majority of comments on this blog.
All on that day-
Want a peer reviewed compilation of tree ring data showing the effect of temperature? Click here.
Want a peer reviewed compilation of tree ring data showing the effect of CO2? Click here.
Tree ring climate prognostications are the modern equivalent of phrenology.
I see the trolls have voted this piece down to a 2-star rating. Oh, how they must wish it would just go away.
SteveE:
At March 25, 2011 at 4:52 am you say:
“They do actually mention these parts in the paper though. ”
No! They do not.
Indeed, you quote the pertinent “mention” in their paper: it says;
“However, additional uncertainty may come from the earlier sections of the tree-ring data, because treering chronologies often exhibit a progressive degradation in statistical quality further back in time, a product of their diminishing internal replication (that is, series are often made up of fewer samples).”
This does NOT say they deleted earlier data which did not conform to what they wanted: it says they have less certainty in the earlier data which they did present.
And, as you say, they wrote:
“Unfortunately, these trees display a progressive increase in growth from the middle of the 19th century, which may be wholly or partly due to rising atmospheric CO2 levels. How can we distinguish the growth-promoting effects of warm temperatures from the possible influence of increasing CO2 and perhaps even other anthropogenic growth enhancers such as nitrogenous pollution? All show positive trends over the 20th century, and each has the potential to increase tree growth alone or in combination with others (regardless of whether that growth is limited by moisture availability or temperature).”
That is a ‘get out clause’ because it does not report the decline. Far from the paper explaining the importance of a difficulty in determining “the growth-promoting effects of warm temperatures from the possible influence of increasing CO2 and perhaps even other anthropogenic growth enhancers such as nitrogenous pollution”, the paper hid the divergence.
And you ask:
“I personally don’t see what the problem is, perhaps someone can explain?”
Please read my post at March 25, 2011 at 2:42 am and the post by Ian W at March 25, 2011 at 4:55 am . They explain it.
Richard