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
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Alexandre says:
April 10, 2011 at 11:35 am
I believe there has been some work on “the exclusion” of dendro curve. I suggest you search it out. It may not be as “honest” as you think.
Jimbo says:
April 10, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Principles of Dendrochronology
Goodwin’s Priniciples of Dendrochronology Number One:
Find an active or retired forester in the region. Ask them about the trees, the tree-rings, and the climate. Some of these guys are 100 years old, sharp as a tack, and are working the same area that ggggrandpa worked 500 years ago. They will explain much about the trees, the tree rings, and the environmental conditions that produced them. (Of course, Warmista will be challenged by the part about explanation.)
If no forester can be found, ask an owner of timberland…
If no owner of timberland can be found, ask…
I think that this week’s winner of the Internets is Dave Springer, for his lucid and concise explanations above.
Steve’s essay, which inspired this thread, needs a couple of re-reads, so he will have to win the Internets next week.
Ecclesiastical Uncle says:
April 9, 2011 at 10:12 pm
“All these people were merely doing their jobs – more or less well according to their abilities, the difficulties of the tasks and personal enthusiasm for the work.”
That’s true. You should google “Eichmann” to find out more about people doing their job.
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.
Re perilousfight April 10, 2011, 6.45am
This was hardly the Mother of all Scams. Rather it was a wretched little one that grew like Topsy! But I agree that it is a sad but true thing that so many of us are and will be poorer as a result, and that tax payers money is and will be wasted. But that’s hardly unique with governments. (And how does the CAGW mistake rank with other government cxxx-ups? One for the GWPF perhaps?)
Your resignation from your bank was clearly over a matter of principle. By contrast, the UEA crew, and probably others, do not seem yet to have been brought to see that any such issue exists for them.
Re TrueNorthist April 10, 2011, 2.03am
You’d better believe me –I do not understand anything! Of the detail, that is. And yes, I did have a superficial go at understanding, but found myself going glassy eyed. Since a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I have thought it wise to claim none.
And thank you for the salutation!
Re Robert Christopher April 10, 2011 7.26am
Thank you for your comments.
It is not my place to condone what has happened. Also, I doubt condemnation will achieve anything, so I do neither. In fact, I concur with the spirit of your dissertation while wishing that it was more purposeful in the context of the current CAGW war. In this, it will be best to face the reality that is, and that is what I have tried to promote in these posts.
Re martin brumby April 10, 2011 7.46am
I do not neglect the world’s poor as you said, and in fact feel it keenly because it causes an unnecessary threat to peace and stability. And I have spent most of my working life in a related field. However, I disagree that there is no conceivable excuse for the hockey team to do what they did. Plainly, they did it because they were under pressure to do so from an imperfect system. You have a right to think that inadequate. However, I doubt that, until recently, they ever felt it appropriate to examine the actions they took at the time and am not prepared to be so censorious. Ideally, Government should make the system work better or improve it. But I have no ideas on how this can be accomplished, I fear.
Sniping away at the team may create a feeling of weakness amongst the inhabitants of the corridors of power and this may help when someone, making friends and influencing people, sets about getting policies changed in a way climate skeptics would approve of. On the other hand, it may cause them to close ranks and refuse to negotiate. There has unfortunately been a sign, I think, that this is happening.
I have read the Bishop’s book. Investigative reporting!
Re SBVOR April 10 2011 7.50am
No, personal responsibility and integrity are obviously essential in a bureacrat’s career and are not alien to me. But, to parody Newton, for every government policy there is an equal and opposite government policy, and bureacratic actions are often about identifying the balance point between the opposing forces. So compromises abound and there is often, as in funding climate science, no indisputably right course.
I do not think you have valid reason to think I am alien in the way you say – a careful perusal of my admittedly intractable prose should not lead to that conclusion.
And thank you for the pointers to costs. (And see re perilusfight above.)
Re Mac the Knife April 10, 2011 10.45am.
I do not really understand your comments. If you disagree, have I got my facts about the goings-on at the UEA and elsewhere wrong? No one else has suggested so. And I offer no defense, only a probable explanation of how and why the events in question came to happen. The rest of what I have to say about your suppositions about my parents’ opinions of my descriptions of official behaviour would be repetition so see re martin brumby above.
On the whole I do not think I agree with the sentiments behind your questions about the state of modern society, although I think the trends are negative.
I note your refusal to be part of similar deceipts and find, when I think a little about it, at least one equivalent episode in my career. But my feeling is that it is not reasonable to expect that sort of conduct from everyone given the difficulties I experienced at the time of the episode. Gosh!
Dave Springer says:
April 10, 2011 at 12:13 pm
“SOMETHING is making the earth’s surface 39C warmer and it must be either or both of the fact there is an atmosphere and global ocean.
[…]
This is where the atmospheric greenhouse comes in.”
Not necessarily. Thermodynamics suffice.
http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/Understanding_the_Atmosphere_Effect.pdf
R. Gates says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:34 am
“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.”
So now it’s AGW since 1700? Maybe that’s the new narrative. In fact, what’s tough is to show that the 40% increase in CO2 is responsible for the warming. Let me show you part of a comment on Jennifer Marohasy’s blog:
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2011/03/total-emissivity-of-the-earth-and-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/?cp=2
Comment from: Bob R March 29th, 2011 at 12:15 am
” I am not an expert in the subject but it would appear that the NOAA and Mouna Lua data sets are highly reliable. I then began a long but ultimately rewarding study: recognizing the stochastic nature of the time series (I(1) and I(2) respectively) I faced I attempted both first and second order regressions looking for what I presumed would be a high degree of sensitivity of temperature to changes in CO2 concentration.
The answer is there is none. I have followed it up up by lagged studies – there is no relationship. So I scoured the climate science literature to find an experimental design or some satisfactory explanation for this lack of association. There is plenty of
reference to the high correlation between temperature and CO2 but that is not good enough. There is a high correlation between temperature and the salaries of first division footballers. It means nothing – it would only mean something if
variation in temperature could be shown to be positively correlated with changes in footballers salaries. They cannot.
The climate science literature is silent on this problem.”
Alexandre (April 10, 2011 at 1:31 pm) sez:
“Here’s one available dataset, at the NOAA website. Feel free to look for others of your preference.
No one has shown any problem with these independently calculated series.”
Just because so-called “Journalists” have deliberately hidden the evidence does not mean the evidence does not exist. The fact is that all the land based temperature datasets have been demonstrated (via peer reviewed science) to contain about a 30% warming bias:
http://sbvor.blogspot.com/2009/09/warm-bias-of-about-30-in-ipcc-reported.html
R. Gates has just left the reservation! GCM’s produce lots of useful output. ;O)
The famous reindeer-cr*p mail:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/11/does_the_worlds_fate_depend_on.html
Alan Clark
It’s ok not to understand scientific papers. My law degree does not allow me to go much further than yourself, I suppose.
But the Yamal issue here is about denying the warming. It is said that the Yamal data, which is supposedly flawed, is all that produced the (again supposedly) false warming. Look at these graphs: the first is a hockey stick, the second is the “real” temperature when you exclude Yamal data.
So, if you are ok with “the warming”, then the Yamal issue at hand can be dismissed.
SBVOR
Wasn’t it the CRU scientists the ones who had “hidden the decline”? I don’t know about these journalists mingling with data availability.
Anyway, you’re saying “the warming” itself is a fiction?
And, within the CAGW totalitarian political religious cult, it is PURELY a coincidence that perfectly natural Milankovitch Cycles have EXACTLY the same effect?
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Paleoclimatology_Evidence/
Alan Clark
Sorry, the link to the graph I mentioned on my previous post seems not to have worked. Here it is again:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/yamal-eps.jpg
RACookPE1978
The divergence between tree rings and temperature in recent decades has been discussed in published literature for quite a while, now.
ZT @ur momisugly April 10, 2011 at 12:20 pm
No, I do not think the dendro data should be dismissed. What I tried to argue up there was that dendro data is consistent with non-dendro.
Pre-1400 proxies are scarce in general. If you exclude dendro, it will be scarcer still. But this is already another issue that is not related to Yamal.
R. Gates says:
April 10, 2011 at 7:34 am
“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?”
Do you not understand what physical hypotheses are? Climate scientists of any and all stripes have no set of physical hypotheses that can be used to explain or predict temperatures in the Arctic. No physical hypotheses means no science. It means guesswork along the lines of Ptolemy’s indefinitely large number of epicycles that he thought he could use to explain and predict the observed paths of the planets. If you think I am wrong, you have one very simple way to prove it: produce the physical hypotheses. You cannot do it, nor can any climate scientist, for the simple reason that they do not exist. Climate science is in its infancy. At this time, all climate scientists should be discussing how best to gather data that can be used to test actual physical hypotheses in forty or fifty years.
“Alexandre says:
April 10, 2011 at 11:35 am
BTW, the recent warming is vastly documented by instrumental data, so there is no need of the Yamal data to show this warming at all (need reference here?).
Other no-dendro reconstructions:
All-ice core reconstructions show the warming.
All-borehole reconstructions show the warming.
All-speleothem reconstructions show the warming.
But you’d better stick to the lying/hypocrite/general ad hominem reasoning. It’s more promising to your case.”
__________
Wow…hey big Al, methinks you doth need to chill a little. Just out of curiosity: did you even read the CA post in its entirety?
It seems that you and all the other posters in the leaking dingy (pun intended) of said, “…the recent warming is vastly documented by instrumental data, so there is no need of the Yamal data to show this warming at all (need reference here?)…” have missed the point, the goal, schucks bukeroo you’re not even in the stadium! :-0
You and your ilk are / have made denegrating comments concerning SM’s excellent work; it makes you sound pedantic while at the same time confirming the old Sam Clemens line that ends with, “…opening your mouth and proving them true”
Go back, do your due-diligence, and then come back and make a contribution to the discussion that is on-point…THANK YOU.
Alexandre says:
April 10, 2011 at 11:35 am
Mark T
Quoting you:
He’s not saying that, nor did I claim that he said that.
Excuse me? Your exact words were “Not all paleoclimate reconstruction include Yamal tree rings.” Now you’re just plain lying.
I said (as you noticed):
Never said you did that, either. However, this is a post by Steve (prefaced by Anthony) in which you are accusing us of not understanding this simple point. Had you actually read Steve’s post (I did,) you would have seen that he does not make any such claim nor is such a claim implied, which tends to imply nobody here is under that misconception (you are the only one that has not read his post apparently,) which begs the question, why make the statement “Not all paleoclimate reconstruction[s] include Yamal tree rings”? Nobody here thinks this is the problem.
When you have actually read Steve’s post, then maybe you will get a little respect in this regard, but clearly you do not understand the point of Steve’s post.
Who cares? When have I said anything in disagreement with recent warming? If you had read Steve’s post, you would understand that this has nothing to do with that. I’ve already noted once that we have a temperature record for that, can you not read? I’d suggest a trip to fallacyfiles.org to investigate the terms red herring or straw man. Your use of them suggests ignorance of both.
Similarly, your links to the other reconstructions are pointless and do not address anything related to Yamal. I should point out, btw, that M08 does indeed use Yamal for the 1000 year reconstruction. The others only go back about 500 years, which again misses the point of Yamal, and certainly misses the significance of Steve’s post.
Nothing I have said comes close to an ad hominem. While you are over at fallacyfiles, why not look up that term as well? As for your hypocrisy, you still have not read Steve’s post and yet you are still accusing us of ignorance. Sorry, hypocrite, but that’s what you are. And, your follow-up to the original post is still, IMO, a plain lie.
Mark
Uh, up till the first blockquote the lines were supposed to be cut… just failed to do so.
Mark
Something I’ve yet to see addressed among all the dendroclimatology business is this:
The tree rings relevant to the studies were correlated against June, July and August land temperature records (see Tim Osborn’s email of 28th April 2006 “684. 1146252894.txt”). Thing is, nearly all of the posited warming in the temperature record in this part of the world comes in the winter months, when there’s no tree ring growth to correlate against.
So where’s the real value in this field of study in assigning CO2 a leading role in raising global temperatures to scarily high levels?
Am I missing something glaringly obvious?
Alexandre says:
Sooo… how does this help? The mere fact that it has been “discussed” does not yet change the fact that calls into question the use of tree rings, particularly those that are suffering from so-called divergence, as proxies for temperatures.
I love how you defenders of the faith think merely discussing this problem makes it go away. You understand so little of the statistical implications you are willing to simply buy into myth after myth in defense of your pet theory.
It is really silly, actually.
Mark
Alexandre says:
Law? Your grasp of logic should be much greater than it is.
No it is not. Read Steve’s post. Really, is it that hard to do?
Nope.
Irrelevant.
Not even remotely close.
Read Steve’s post. I understand the math may be difficult, but his writeup does not depend upon math, just a chronology and relevant implications.
Mark
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:…
Amen. Anecdotally, after reading Jeff Id’s description of Climate Science’s statistical methodology in handling tree ring proxies, at the same time when Steve M. was analyzing Briffa’s Yamal “materials and methods”, it was apparent that “it could all come down to one tree!” – which I also rather sarcastically posted somewhere around here right when Steve found out about YAD061, at which point my mind blew up good, real good!
From there it only gets worse. And since CO2=CAGW Climate Science is really only a massive Propaganda Op., it will keep getting worse until it is rightfully crushed.
The most ridiculous thing I found with Yamal is the treerings’ total non-correlation to any of the local thermometer records (1880-2000) and treerings’ non-correlation with each other, whereas all the thermometers agree very nicely with each other. One would have expected Briffa et al to have shown and explained this basic check with thermometers.
This comparison is visually obvious, just like the “hide-the-decline” cutoff, you don’t need to understand statistics to see this one.
One tree-ring to rule them all, indeed.