UPDATE: After some late night insomnia, and re-reading Steve’s essay again, I have decided to make this introduction to his essay a “top post” for a couple of days. New stories will appear below this one.
Readers, I urge you to read and digest this story, because it forms the seminal basis for everything that is wrong with Team paleoclimate science: the hard earned field work of Russian field researchers whose inconvenient data was excluded, warnings from colleagues ignored, tribalism exposed, testimony self-contradicted, whitewashes performed, and in a hat-tip to Leibig’s Law, even a “reindeer crap theory”. As one CA commenter, Peter Ward, put it:
My 13-year-old daughter asked me what I was reading. I explained at a high level and showed her figure 4. She grasped it immediately. How can we get this figure publicised widely?
I urge every climate blog to pick this utterly damning story of forensic investigation up and make it as widely known as possible. – Anthony
By Steve McIntyre
In The Climate Files, Fred Pearce wrote:
When I phoned Jones on the day the emails were published online and asked him what he thought was behind it, he said” It’s about Yamal, I think”.
Pearce continued (p 53):
The word turns up in 100 separate emails, more than ‘hockey stick’ or any other totem of the climate wars. The emails began with it back in 1996 and they ended with it.
Despite Jones’ premonition and its importance both in the Climategate dossier and the controversies immediately preceding Climategate, Yamal and Polar Urals received negligible attention from the “inquiries”, neither site even being mentioned by Kerry Emanuel and his fellow Oxburgh panellists.
I recently submitted an FOI request for a regional chronology combining Yamal, Polar Urals and “other shorter” chronologies referred to in an April 2006 email – a chronology that Kerry Emanuel and the “inquiries” failed to examine. The University of East Anglia, which seems to have been emboldened by the Climategate experience, not only refused to provide the chronology, but refused even to provide a list of the sites that they used to construct the regional chronology.
This refusal prompted me to re-appraise Yamal and its role in the Climategate dossier.
Read the full story here: Yamal and Hide-the-Decline
============================================================
It appears the cardinals of deadwood at UEA and CRU have learned absolutely nothing.
Note to the person who’s running the BOT to keep posting one star like you did the last top post where over 1000 “1” star votes were logged (a new record). I have your IP address from the widget. If you keep it up, I’ll register a complaint with your ISP. In the meantime, “grow up”.
– Anthony
Not all paleoclimate reconstruction include Yamal tree rings. I wonder if anyone bothered to check.
The entire CAGW edifice is designed to eliminate modern energy production and the benefits that brings. What I find incomprehensible is that so many people are willing, even eager, to stake our energy supply and our civilization on something as unpredictable as the weather!
Ecclesiastical Uncle, these individuals you defend as “only doing their jobs” have been quite willing to promote themselves and their falsehoods at the expense of real people. Because of this Mother of all Scams, real people have lost property, lives savings, and loved ones.
Some peripheral employees might have truly been “only doing their jobs,” but the core group (Hansen, Mann, Jones, Trenberth, etc.) were wretchedly lying, while lapping up taxpayers’ dollars on a large scale.
I resigned from a large national US bank because I didn’t like what they were doing. Individuals are NOT hostage to their employers. Even the “little guys” that are not directly involved in the wrong-doing, but are knowledgeable about it, have a moral responsibility.
REPLY: – Money and fame.
2011 USA government funding of climate science – $2.48 billion
http://climatequotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/cc2011.png
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/rdreport2011/
The Nobel Peace Prize 2007
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , Al Gore
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/
[They should be stripped of the prize immediately].
What is far more interesting to me is this: With all the data that could be used (thanks to the revealing work at Climate Audit), combined with the penchant for meta-data re-hash so prevalent (and cheaper to do) in today’s research endeavors, why the deafening silence from other groups of climate researchers on this? Why hasn’t proxy and chronology experts chimed in with, “I don’t think so” submissions to the same journals Briffa can be found in? I find this silence compelling evidence for something much larger than “one tree grove” critiques. It is the back story, and the extent of that back story into the machinations of all climate research groups, that speaks volumes.
Could the back story be one of these?
1. We have a bunch of sissy climate capable researchers scared to disagree with each other.
2. We have a much larger bunch of researchers who have agreed to present a weak case purporting climate warming, or to stay silent when a weak one is presented, in order to save humanity from an unknown risk, or worse, in order to continue to grease the money machine.
3. Research in general has become lax in its response to minimally decent research because it is easier to do research at a lower standard.
The worst of it is, it could be all three, which is why it has become so difficult to turn this train away from the crumbling bridge ahead.
McIntyre’s detailed exorcism of Briffa’s Dendro-narrow tree ring fairies removes the Massive Yamal Post from its central location deep within the Temple of CO2 Warming.
Astonished Priests, [noting that their sacred constructions, (although now entirely unsupported), remained visibly erect], immediately huddled together in concensus building thankfulness for that which must certainly disprove the Law of Gravity!
Cheers
Big Dave
As a matter of routine, I hereby confess that I am an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
As the management of this blog will know, I had considerable difficulty in posting off my contribution and, in fact, sent off three versions, two of which have not appeared. (My internet connection has been very slow today.) In the last I altered ‘naïve’ to ‘disingenuous’. I also added the following paragraph:
And might not many of the failures to provide data in response to FOI requests and the like have been because they simply lost it? And because they eventually got round to looking for it amongst all sorts of discarded rubbish only to find it was in so much of a bxxxer’s muddle it could not be sent off, at least until it had been recreated or extensively cleaned up. Sloppy work and archiving rather than deliberate obfuscation?
Re: Verity Jones, April 10, 2011, 2:57 am
I agree that the devil was, indeed, in the detail and suppose that the fudges there got forgotten in the on-going work (and hubris) of creating the greater CAGW picture. There must have been moments when the chickens were coming home to roost when the UEA crew bewailed the fact that so much was being shown to hang on these trivialities.
Also, without surprise, I note the righteousness of Mr Jones’ indignation, which it seems is shared with many others. But nobody should be surprised to learn that I have difficulty in castigating the UEA crew as villains, worms, or whatever. They did what they did because of the institutional framework in which the Government had ensnared them. I expect all but a few of us here would have behaved in much the same way in the same circumstances. This is a somewhat uncomfortable realisation.
And as a purely practical matter, I doubt that those who voice righteous indignation will find themselves promoted to the rank of general in the CAGW war. Few friends will be made in the corridors of power by drawing attention to malfeasances that are the inevitable consequence of the institutional structures created there. And this war will be won by making friends and influencing people in these corridors.
Nevertheless, the steady pressure of a bunch of baying Rottweilers may help to force the required U-turn there in due course.
Re Richard S Courtney, April 10, 2011, 4:57 am
I am sorry q do not think I can agree with ‘Sorry, but No’. That seems to me to be plain wrong.
However, the Nuremberg trial comparison has made me think. What you are getting at is, I think, that, although only doing their job, the UEA crew were still acting improperly and have to be hauled over the coals. Mmm. They would defend themselves by claiming that they were only bending the truth a little and that such behaviour is commonplace amongst the politicians for whom they work. So, I suppose, if you shoot the crew, you shoot the lot. Well, now, that’s an idea …..
And ‘Why’ is not the question: more important is ‘How is such perfection to be achieved?’.
It depends on the person. For example, suppose someone homeless stole some food to feed his family. He is still a thief, but you have sympathy for him. Now suppose a rich millionaire stole some food to feed his family. Would you still have sympathy for him? Taking that one step further, suppose that same millionaire stole the only meal from a poor person, would you have sympathy for him then?
In each example, each person did something wrong. But only in the first do you avoid attacking the person. This shows that you cannot make a blanket statement saying to not attack the person. It depends on the situation. The scientists and lead activists are usually already rich. They are stealing food out of mouths because their work has made energy prices increase and food prices increase. Meanwhile they, like a person without a conscience, continue to push the idea so that they can live a rich lifestyle.
Extending my example to the story at hand, the two researchers, Stepan and Rashit, who did the grunt work and get no thanks in return, I’m not willing to attack. The ones on top, the millionaires, I am. The ones at the top aren’t just trying to feed their family, they are fair game.
This is what drew me into the fray, if you will. I started reading about paleontology and the accompanying climate reconstructions about 1960 and have continued the interest through today, still subscribing to two archaeology magazines. Ten minutes into AIT, my wife brought it home, and I had not heard of it, my wife turned it off, being unable to bear my loud criticism of the truncated and invented data being displayed. Somehow I came upon CA and WUWT and found I wasn’t alone in my aversion to the nonsense being passed off as science. The light of day being shown on the criminal activity of the AGW Prop Team is invaluable. Thank you, Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, and all who contribute in your venues.
On tree thermometers: did you know that…
http://notrickszone.com/2010/11/17/tree-thermometers-did-you-know-that…/
“they thought up the absurd excuse that the MWP was only a regional phenomenon”
Global warming is a regional phenomenon, as it is mostly happening in the arctic.
With or without tree-ring data (throw it out – all of it!) and we still get the 20th century warming…i.e. the Hockey Stick shape. Despite the skeptical rhetoric that the entire hockey stick is based on carefully selected (or unselected tree-ring data), that simply is not the case.
I would direct the open-minded skeptic to this story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8236797.stm
The Arctic, which is long be held to be the first and most sensitive area that will display global warming, had been undergoing a cooling for many thousands of years (likely following more Milankovitch cycles that created the Holocene optimum), until the 20th century, when the sudden uptick in temperatures occurred…Yamal tree-ring data or not.
See this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
The large spike in the 20th century is indicated across many paleo-reconstructions. Now, as to the question of whether or not it is caused by human activity…that is entirely a different matter.
Alexandre: Steve is not claiming all recons use Yamal. Did you bother to check?
Hypocrite.
Mark
Ecclesiastical Uncle says:
April 10, 2011 at 2:03 am
[emphasis mine]
With all due respect sir, and I mean that sincerely, it is incumbent on you to make the effort to understand the subject at issue before accusing anyone other than yourself of being disingenuous and naive.
Forgive my strong words but I find your comment incredible.
Ecclesiastical Uncle at 10:12 pm on April 9, 2011
“If blame has to be placed somewhere, I suppose it should be with Government.”
Government is empowered by the people, not the other way around, and ‘responsibility’ is a better word than ‘blame’, so I therefore don’t agree with your conclusion.
You have described what has happened in these tainted establishments well, but it is not sustainable; eventually, even the grants and subsidies will run out. It is a dysfunctional bureaucratic world; not the real world of science and engineering or of the Arts, where our awareness of the here and now is heightened by clever contrasts of fantasy and reality, where the audience can see the distinction between the two and are not left in confusion. A well functioning bureaucracy wouldn’t do what you have described either!
I have just been listening to “The Unbelievable Truth” (Series 7, Episode 1) on BBC Radio 4 today, a vaguely funny panel game, where the chairman confirms whether the information read out by contestants is true or false.
The chairman, David Mitchell confirmed (at 3:50 into the BBC clip, if you in the UK) that Aristotle stated that flies have four legs and such was Aristotle’s standing, that, for over 1000 years, no one else bothered to count.
Isn’t this what science is all about? Each of us needs to take responsibility. Some may actually count the legs on a fly; others may offer these ‘fly leg counters’ support, finance, and advice, access to the public or open discussion.
What is shameful is that some people: (academics at the UEA and elsewhere), the media (policy makers and presenters in the BBC and elsewhere) and governments and their advisors (all of them?) have done the opposite, using public money, and have up to now, been supported by their organisations and resisted open discussion.
Scientists do search for the truth, led by the evidence, not an agenda to “achieve some other end”. If a scientist misleads himself or others, then the design of the next related experiment will be poorer; useless even! This is why so many scientists are angry at what has been happening within Climate ‘Science’.
In research, there may be confusion before the revelation, but there are not several “particular truths”. If there is a difference of opinion, it means a lack of understanding, so open discussion needs to be encouraged, not closed down in a nasty way, as has been happening. If the aim is not for better understanding, then it is to mislead, which can lead on to condoning malpractice and assisting fraudsters. It has already wasted public funds.
There is no “absence of data”, so there should be no reason for it to be ‘political’, rather than scientific. The data exists; it is just that it cannot be released without the truth being revealed.
“We live in a complicated world!”
We do, but the world is complicated enough without this sort of activity being condoned; one version of reality is enough.
“The attacks on the work must continue, but do try and lay off the people!”
Ad hominem attacks ARE discouraged; they are not effective and waste resources. However, an academic paper’s authors need to be called to account. They will have written a paper to change the world’s perception, so the world needs to be able to question their ideas and expects answers that move the discussion forward, without the need to issue FOIA requests. This is even more true when the conclusions support the spending of $250 billion, in Europe alone, in Climate Change policies.
I agree with Richard S Courtney at 4:57 am on April 10, 2011:
“Acting under orders is NOT – and must always be prevented from being – a valid defence for any nefarious activity. Google Nuremburg Trials if you want to know why.”
Though, I think that there is evidence that they have been cooperating as well.
ferd berple says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:11 am
“they thought up the absurd excuse that the MWP was only a regional phenomenon”
Global warming is a regional phenomenon, as it is mostly happening in the arctic.
_____
And in skeptic’s minds it is just purely a coincidence that the Arctic has long been shown in GCM’s to be the area of the planet that will warm first when the effects and feedbacks of the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700’s is taken into account, right?
See, the problem is, if you accept that the Arctic is warming, and is the warmest in at least 2,000 years, as shown in these completely independent non-tree ring related studies:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8236797.stm
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2011/01/arctic-waters-warmest-2000-years/1
Then you’d have to find a mechanism to explain this warming. Search as you might (and climate scientists have searched and continue to search everyday), it’s tough to find one that doesn’t include the forcing (and related feedbacks) brought about by the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700’s.
The guy’s name is spelled
Liebig
R gates… rather myopic. Few argue an uptick in the 20th century. The tree rings, or other flawed proxies, are required to change the past to your liking, not the present. We have an actual temperature record for the present.
Mark
@ecclesiastical uncle
You need to consider the impact of the activist climate “scientists” on the poor. Not only the third world poor denied (in many cases) access to affordable and efficient energy but even the poor in developed countries. How many little old ladies froze to death in the UK in December 2010 because they were scared to run up their electricity bill even higher?
I’m sorry. There is no conceivable excuse for hyping up a warming of certainly less than the alleged 0.7 degrees in the C.20th into a potential “tipping point” catastrophe just to preserve their comfortable jobs and index-linked pensions.
The likes of Mann & Jones are just despicable.
If you want to explore the background to Yamal and all the rest, “The Hockey Stick Illusion” by Monfort is easy to follow and extremely well written.
Ecclesiastical Uncle (April 10, 2011 at 2:03 am),
It sounds as though the concepts of personal responsibility and individual integrity are entirely alien to you. But, in my experience, this is a common trait among “bureaucrats” (retired or otherwise).
I’m not a fan of ad hominem attacks. But, I absolutely believe in holding individuals accountable for their misdeeds.
It is my personal opinion that the entire world has been quantifiably defrauded by these schmucks and they should pay for their crimes. If you want to assign a dollar figure, start with the nearly $1 TRILLION (and counting) utterly wasted by the Kyoto Protocol:
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20100103072326/http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Kyoto_Count_Up.html
And, proceed from there:
http://sbvor.blogspot.com/2010/11/climate-money.html
The protests over Yamal are unfounded, and immaterial as far as the validity of the Stick graph is concerned.
The science of interpretation of tree rings requires a selection of trees which have rings which are temperature limited. Ignoring this scientific fact, as McIntyre has done, and picking trees at random is wrong.
Finally the Yamal chronology is not essential to show that global temperature is displaying a Hockey Stick.
Mark T
I wonder if moderation rules here allow this kind of “argument” you used.
He’s not saying that, nor did I claim that he said that. However, he implied that the Yamal proxy data is a game-changer in the existing paleodata. Has anyone here bothered to compare reconstructions with and without those “suspicious” data?
Alarmist Myth (propagated by R. Gates, April 10, 2011 at 7:14 am):
“The Arctic… had been undergoing a cooling for many thousands of years…until the 20th century, when the sudden uptick in temperatures occurred…Yamal tree-ring data or not.”
Scientific Fact (substantiated by directly cited peer reviewed science):
Both the Arctic AND the Antarctic are experiencing an on-going, uninterrupted 10,000 year cooling trend wherein the latest warming is demonstrated to be not even close to being outside the bounds of natural variation.
The citation links and more details are found below:
http://sbvor.blogspot.com/2009/10/recent-hysteria-arctic-now-warmest-in.html
http://sbvor.blogspot.com/2000/01/temperatures-over-time.html
More proof, it it was needed, that like some trees the ‘science’ of climatology is rotten to the core. Instead of being a mighty oak it nothing more than a withering dandelion, dying in the cold.
Pamela Gray says:
April 10, 2011 at 6:50 am
What is far more interesting to me is this: With all the data that could be used (thanks to the revealing work at Climate Audit), combined with the penchant for meta-data re-hash so prevalent (and cheaper to do) in today’s research endeavors, why the deafening silence from other groups of climate researchers on this? Why hasn’t proxy and chronology experts chimed in with, “I don’t think so” submissions to the same journals Briffa can be found in? I find this silence compelling evidence for something much larger than “one tree grove” critiques. It is the back story, and the extent of that back story into the machinations of all climate research groups, that speaks volumes.
Could the back story be one of these?
1. We have a bunch of sissy climate capable researchers scared to disagree with each other.
2. We have a much larger bunch of researchers who have agreed to present a weak case purporting climate warming, or to stay silent when a weak one is presented, in order to save humanity from an unknown risk, or worse, in order to continue to grease the money machine.
3. Research in general has become lax in its response to minimally decent research because it is easier to do research at a lower standard.
The worst of it is, it could be all three, which is why it has become so difficult to turn this train away from the crumbling bridge ahead.
The real answer is that McIntyre’s work is wrong, and he doesn’t know what he is talking about. This is an alternative hypothesis that you don’t entertain at all. This does not seem very scientific to me.
McIntyre’s work has been found wanting by scientists in a number of areas. His claim that the Principal Components Method used by the original Mann et. al. Hockey Stick paper created the Hockey Stick, was definitively shown to be faulty because McIntyre used an incorrect selection criterion. When the analysis proposed by McIntyre was carried out correctly, the Hockey Stick created out of noise disappeared. He has no background in tree ring analysis, and is not really qualified to criticize what was done by Briffa.
REPLY: Mr Adler. If your “everybody but me is wrong” mindset leads you to think Mr. McIntyre is “wrong” and “doesn’t know what he is talking about” then please have the courage to post it on on his blog and let him respond. I have admin privileges there, so I can assure you your comment will get posted. Post it just like you did here.
Until you do, I won’t have you making the arguments here. I’d point out that you have no background in “anything” climate , so by your criteria, you aren’t qualified to comment here on anything. James Hansen had no background in anything climate when he started, Mike Mann had no background in anything climate, their degrees lie in other fields…thus, your argument is absolutely ridiculous.
Go take your argument to Mr. McIntyre. Do it now. We’ll all be watching. Here’s the URL
http://www.climateaudit.org Comment system works the same way, but there is no moderation unless you use banned words, too many links, or excessive bloviation all of which will trigger the spam filter.
Even if that happens, I guarantee your comment will be approved there, because I will go fish it out for you.
If you don’t wish to, then don’t make any more comments here about Mr. McIntyre. – Anthony Watts