Ric Werme writes in comments:
When I realized the Climategate 2009 Emails went back many years, one of the first things that occurred to me was there might be Emails from John Daly. He died before I became involved in the online climate debate, and that’s one of my main regrets. I won’t repeat one of Phil Jones’ comments from then, except to note Phil’s a rather nasty guy.
Two interesting Emails mention Daly. One I’ll excerpt in Willis’ most recent post.
The other is the following Email from Daly about tree rings. A lot of his writing style reminds of Willis’ – simple, direct and informative.
I’ve reformatted things to post better here and deleted most of the long list of people Daly sent this to. I left a few of the more obvious or meaningful names.
3826.txt:
date: Tue Feb 13 09:05:58 2001
from: Keith Briffa
subject: Fwd: Re: Hockey Sticks again
to: wigley
Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 21:47:57 +1100
From: “John L. Daly”
To: Chick Keller
CC: “P. Dietze”, mmaccrac, Michael E Mann, rbradley, wallace, Thomas Crowley, Phil Jones, McKitrick, Nigel Calder, John Christy, Jim Goodridge, Fred Singer, k.briffa
Subject: Re: Hockey Sticks again
Dear Chick & all
[I think Chick Keller wrote:]
the first is Keith Briffa’s rather comprehensive treatment of getting climate variations from tree rings: Annual climate variability in the Holocene: “interpreting the message of ancient trees”, Quaternary Science Reviews, 19 (2000) 87-105. It should deal with many of the questions people raise about using them to determine temperatures.
Take this from first principles.
A tree only grows on land. That excludes 70% of the earth covered by water. A tree does no grow on ice. A tree does not grow in a desert. A tree does not grow on grassland-savannahs. A tree does not grow in alpine areas. A tree does not grow in the tundra We are left with perhaps 15% of the planet upon which forests grow/grew. That does not make any studies from tree rings global, or even hemispheric.
The width and density of tree rings is dependent upon the following variables which cannot be reliably separated from each other. sunlight – if the sun varies, the ring will vary. But not at night of course.
cloudiness – more clouds, less sun, less ring.
pests/disease – a caterpillar or locust plague will reduce photosynthesis
access to sunlight – competition within a forest can disadvantage or advantage some trees.
moisture/rainfall – a key variable. Trees do not prosper in a droughteven if there’s a heat wave.
snow packing in spring around the base of the trees retards growth temperature – finally!
The tree ring is a composite of all these variables, not merely of temperature. Therefore on the 15% of the planet covered by trees, their rings do not and cannot accurately record temperature in isolation from the other environmental variables.
In my article on Greening Earth Society on the Hockey Stick, I point to other evidence which contradicts Mann’s theory. The Idso’s have produced more of that evidence, and a new article on Greening Earth has `unearthed’ even more.
Mann’s theory simply does not stack up. But that was not the key issue. Anyone can put up a dud theory from time to time. What is at issue is the uncritical zeal with which the industry siezed on the theory before its scientific value had been properly tested. In one go, they tossed aside dozens of studies which confirmed the existence of the MWE and LIA as global events, and all on the basis of tree rings – a proxy which has all the deficiencies I have stated above.
The worst thing I can say about any paper such as his is that it is `bad science’. Legal restraint prevents me going further. But in his case, only those restraints prevent me going *much* further.
Cheers
John Daly
–
John L. Daly
`Still Waiting For Greenhouse’
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Thanks Dave Dardinger. Those saying that tree rings cannot be used to estimate paleotemperature, talking about variable growth rates in their back yards, etc., are only showing their ignorance. There have been many smart, honest folks working on this for many years, and they have produced quite a few useful studies. The hockey stick is something altogether different, of course.
There is nothing wrong with proper scientific analysis of proxies such as tree rings – what is wrong is that the authors DID NOT perform a proper scientific analysis but fudged everything to achieve a desired outcome – the proof of this is indeniably in the fact that they terminated a data series – the bristlecone tree rings – when it trended in an “inconvenient” manner and replaced it with data that suited their purpose.
A real scientific paper would have shown the inconvenient data as well and advanced a theory as to the reasons instead of hiding it.
Deception is a lie no matter how you try to spin it.
I would add another ‘nutrient’ that leads to better growth and wider tree-rings – Carbon Dioxide, but they they wouldn’t want to talk of raised levels of CO2 in the past.
The team were told of these issues not only by John Daly but also by a botanist (in the original climategate emails).
It is unfortunate but these climatology PhD’s know less about tree growth than a jobbing gardener who failed his high school diploma.
“Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.” quote from: Stephen Vizinczey, An Innocent Millionaire
Whilst I do not like asserting allegations of dishonesty I do consider that there is a strong case that the use of tree proxy data goes beyond incompetence and boarders on dishonesty. Daly has cited many of the variables that influence the gowth of tree rings and these would have been known to any competent scientists. Others have addeds to the list nutrients particulry soil nutrients being another obvious factor and of course our friend CO2 and soil erosion.
The reason that I consider that this boarders on dishonesty is that not only should the short comings noted above be apparent to the Team as soon as they noticed the divergence proble, they were fully aware of the short comings of the tree proxy data. Given that divergence, it followed as clearly as night follows day that if tree proxy evidence is sound, the recent temperature record is wrong, or if the recent temperature record is correct then tree proxy data is unreliable and.or the divergence is due to a combination of both.
The Team were therefore well acquainted with the short comings and unreliability of the tree proxy data they knew there was a problem with the proxy and yet still chose to run with it. In my opinion thius goes beyond incompetence and as noted boarders on dishonesty.
When I first started researching AGW, it was the late great John L Dalys site that convinced me of scepticism.
Those who haven’t done so, should visit the site and gain the pleasure of reading the very many useful (even today) articles there.
There are even a few “Open reviewed” papers there.
Regards the Greening earth Society article mentioned, I believe it is called “What’s Wrong With the Surface Record.”
http://www.john-daly.com/ges/surftmp/surftemp.htm
John West says:
November 23, 2011 at 9:43 am
“I wonder what the factors were in said acceptance of the theory; climatology being relatively new therefore the average climatologist was younger, less experienced, & more naive; it told many exactly what they already ‘knew’ (man is bad, burning fossil fuels is bad) and therefore played to their world view;”
Same thing happened with Arming America by Bellesiles. His book played to most historians world view, so they all turned a blind eye to what they should have known was pretty dodgy history and heaped awards upon Bellesiles until an amateur internet historian pointed out the flaws. I don’t think it’s a problem of youth. Academia seems to be broken. Maybe this is what happens when people with tenure get to decide who else deserves tenure. Maybe after there’s no one left to debate you lose critical thinking skills.
oops my bad. In my earlier comment (2:05pm) I said the article in question was called “what’s wrong with the surface record.” (an excellent article)
In fact, it is “The Hockey Stick: A New Low In Climate Science”
http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm
My apologies
Nice post, Ric. Daly’s website was the first skeptic site I found and followed.
The first “research” I ever did was for an alpine ecology class I took in Switzerland, when I was 18 years old. I measured tree rings in the Norway spruce from altitudes of 400 meters to 2000 meters. I got a bell curve, with the fastest growth at 1300 meters. As John Daly pointed out, the ring width depended upon a group of factors. Competition for space from deciduous species at 900 meters resulted in the same growth rate as seen in pure stands in the much colder 1800 meter environment. Heck of a temperature proxy!
Ken Coffman says: :”It’s a crying shame that John Daly and Michael Crichton are not here today to see the castle walls finally falling down. RIP.”
The walls won’t come down until we can get the crooked politicians’ hands out of our pockets and stop the spending to promote AGW. Find out who opposes AGW before you vote. Hint: Obama is a Warmist. A LOT of Republican candidates are Cryptocrat-Warmists,
Another variable which affects tree rings is CO2. More CO2 = more growth.
This recent U of M study documented a 26% increase in the rate of tree growth when CO2 was increased from from about 380 ppm to about 570 ppm. Here’s a youtube video about a smaller scale experiment with trees given even higher levels of CO2, which saw even greater increases in growth. Here’s time-lapse photography of a similar experiment using cowpeas, with similar results.
From that we can also infer that the ~100 ppm increase in CO2 since WWII is probably responsible for at least an approximately 15% increase in tree growth rates, world-wide, and probably similar improvements in general agricultural productivity.
Think about the fact that O2 is 21% of the atmosphere, but CO2 is measured in parts-per-million. The two gasses are, after all, in some kind of biological equilibrium. So why is there so much O2 and so little CO2? It is because there’s a lot more photosynthetic plant life on earth than O2-consuming animal life. Plants have used up just about all the available CO2, and their growth is constrained, more than anything else, by the chronic shortage of atmospheric CO2.
In a better world, John Daly would be considered to be a great Australian and lauded for his tireless efforts to seek out the truth. Instead he is virtually unknown in his own country and we get bottom feeders like Flannery. A sad sad world.
Daly’s book, “The Greenhouse Trap”, written way back when this whole sorry saga began in the late 1980s, remains valid, topical and anticipated much of the arguments that would unfold in the following decades….and retains pride of place in my library.
Thanks a lot Ric.
This email shows Daly’s mettle, commonsense, and truly scientific attitude – as always. Daly has inspired me all along; I used his work extensively for Circling The Arctic; when I finally get going on a skeptics’ wiki for climate science (if nobody has beaten me to it, or taken over the wiki I still have under wraps, or cleaned the Augean Stables aka Connolley’s Wikipedia legacy) I shall dedicate it to John Daly.
I think the hockey stick might be considered a prime example of Voodoo Science. Even the series of curves presented had the appearance of multiple uncorrelated samples of random noise.
E-mail #1359
From: Phil Jones
The Jury service sounds a pain. I’ve been called a couple of times over the last 10 years but managed to get out of it both times. I just said I had meetings to go to (which was true once), the second I said the new students were coming in late September. The fact that I have little to do with U/Gs didn’t seem to matter.
What a civic minded fellow.
Lucy Skywalker says:
November 23, 2011 at 5:07 pm
Thanks a lot Ric.
This email shows Daly’s mettle, commonsense, and truly scientific attitude – as always. Daly has inspired me all along;>>>
Lucy,
I too am a fan of Daly’s, but I’m a huge fan of yours too. Given the topic of discussion here (beyond Daly himself in general) is Daly’s criticism of the tree ring data, I think it would be revealing to a lot of new comers if links to your devastating criticism of the Yamal tree ring data were posted in this thread. I was already a confirmed skeptic by the time I read your article on Yamal, but frankly, that was the first time I thought to myself “these people have GOT to be kidding if they think they can get away with this”. Alas, they just kept going.
But the fact of the matter is that while “the team” is clearly on the defensive, there is something to their claim that things our out of context. For new comers to the debate, in fact they are. Your crushing rebuttal of Yamal puts all the e-mails we are reading now about what “the team” knew about the tree ring data and the manner in which they used it anyway strongly suggests that not only was Daly right, but that they knew it, and the gymnastics that they went through that wound up using just 7 trees, and weighting the data 50% to just one of them are, in your words as I recall, “scandalous”.
That is precisely the context that I for one would like to see people reading those e-mails in.
I like your comment that Phil is a nasty guy given the comment on Daley was a private one he didn’t send it to the world, the person who stole the emails did, can you really complain than someone is “not a nice person” while committing a public personal attack on them.
Reconstructed changes in Arctic sea ice over the past 1,450 years
• Christophe Kinnard,1
• Christian M. Zdanowicz,2
• David A. Fisher,2
• Elisabeth Isaksson,3
• Anne de Vernal4
• & Lonnie G. Thompson5
Nature Journal name:
Nature
Volume:
479,
Pages:
509–512
Date published:
(24 November 2011)
DOI:
doi:10.1038/nature10581
Received
24 December 2010
Accepted
21 September 2011
Published online
23 November 2011
Arctic Sea Ice own Hockey Stick!!!!
Anthony, mods,
If I may, I think the “context” issue is, in fact, a huge opportunity. Reading those e-mails for those of us who have followed the climate debate for any length of time and/or have any technical background at all, is as black and white as it can get. For a lot of people however, they are just confusing. We read an e-mail from “Phil” to “Michael” about a “trick” and we know exactly what they are talking about. For the uninitiated, what goes through their minds is “who is Phil? Is he important?”
There are a lot of great articles on WUWT and on other sites as well, but they’ve faded with time. There’s too many of them to link all articles to all issues of course, but for each topic that is discussed in both ClimateGate 1 and 2, there are a few absolutely stellar articles out there that put the whole discussion in the context that is required.
As an example, this thread is about tree rings. Lucy absolutely crushed Yamal, as did ClimateAudit, but for a lay audience with little background in the science or the issues, it is Lucy’s article that I tell people with a real interest to have a look for. There’s so many on Michael Mann’s hockey stick that one can’t count them all, but I’m certain that there is a gem or two out there. Two links, one to Lucy’s article and another to one that crushes Mann’s hockey stick would provide all the context one needs to read those emails and think.. holy sh*t, it is a fraud after all, and worse than we though.
Similarly, other topics in the two sets of emails ought to be grouped together for discussion, and for the new readers, one or two of the gems we’ve read over the years on WUWT and other sites for people to review and put things in context would be possibly the biggest weapon we could have right now to what has become the last refuge of the scoundrels, whining about emails being out of context.
I’d volunteer some of my time for a project like that. Not nearly as fun as torturing trolls which I would sorely miss, but I think we’re at a tipping point here. Butting the trolls off the bridge might be fun, but it seems to me that this is an opportunity to bring the entire bridge down upon the trolls and their task masters.
Years ago (before 2003 and after 1998), I became interested in desert temperatures (specifically Death Valley, thanks to John Daly). One of the predictions of greenhouse theory is that dry regions, like deserts and polar regions, will show the effects of CO2 warming more than other areas. This is because CO2 effects are masked by water vapor, so dry regions are the “canary in the mine” signal of GW. Unfortunately, during the hot year of 1998, Death Valley had a cold year–third coldest in fact. I stored my data away and didn’t check Death Valley temperatures until recently. The current data show that 1998 is still a cool year, but something has changed. The temperatures now shown for Death Valley weren’t as I remembered them. So I pulled out my old data and checked. Below is a comparison of these datasets. The first graph is the pre-2003 plot of my saved data (check John Daly’s plots for a comparison). The second plot is the current GISTEMP values. In the third plot, I overlay the two datasets. Apparently Hansen’s been busy “correcting” these temperature values during the last few years.
http://jamesbat.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/dv-all.jpg
The linear trend slope of the pre-2003 data is 0.0143 °C/year and the current data has a linear trend slope of 0.0192 °C/year.
Have fun trying to figure out the temperature modification algorithm. I tried to check the original B91 forms (Anthony provided a link a while back, but that link isn’t valid now) and that’s a lot of work. Too bad there isn’t a fancy OCR program that will scan these forms. The two years that I checked don’t match either dataset.
Jim
Steve,
You have it all wrong about who sent what to “the world”. Read, and learn:
http://www.john-daly.com/cru/emails.htm
And while you’re learning, learn to spell the late, great John Daly’s name right.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/30/yamal-treering-proxy-temperature-reconstructions-dont-match-local-thermometer-records/
Found it! For those with any question in their minds as to what all the e-mail discussion about tree rings is really about, there’s your link. Lucy’s article puts all of those e-mails into their proper perspective by shining cold hard light on the Yamal travesty (the kindest words I have for it) and the article has links in it as well to additional material on both Yamal and the original Hockey Stick.
Read those, THEN read the various e-mails. That will be the “context” anyone needs to see what those e-mails are clearly saying.
Stacey says:
November 23, 2011 at 8:29 am
…trees do not grow on mountains where there is a thin layer of soil over rock…
News for you Stacey, trees wil grow out of a crack in cliff face and as far as alpine areas go, the next time I am in the high country I will tell the Snow Gums they have no right to be there.
Like many others here, I too discovered John Daly’s informative site, a beacon of enlightenment in the dark ages of advocacy climate *science*.
What about a post on tree rings by Lucy Skywalker, Anthony?
You talk like an abuser whining about the victims of his abuse having the impudence to disclose your abusive behavior to other people who can object to it. Phil’s sin was to engage in such “nasty” thinking, whether or not he communicated such “nasty” thinking and “nasty” behavior to any other people. Perhaps this concept is alien to your personal experience, but there are other people who do not even consider thinking much less making such remarks in privacy or public. So, yes, it can be entirely appropriate or even a duty to make a public disclosure of behavior which is abusive and inappropriate.
Furthermore, the “person who stole the emails” may very well be the person or persons with custodial responsibility yet violated the FOIA and a number of other laws by stealing, destroying, and converting to their own personal use the e-mail which were the property of the government, university, and the taxpaying public. Perhaps you should be asking the Norfolk Constabulary why they have not taken any actions against Phil Jones and his co-conspiirators for their roles in misappropriating the e-mail, converting it to their own personal use, and destroying it.
David Hoffer (and Beth), I feel honoured and… er… gobsmacked… thanks.
Quick links: here are the three articles I did on Yamal, from my own website:
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/Arctic-Yamal1.htm
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/Arctic-Yamal2.htm
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/Arctic-Yamal3.htm
The bit that currently tickels me is the graph in the last of these links, towards the bottom, showing the seasonal temperatures of Salehard. Now believe it or not, I have not learned to master even Excel. whoops, admission! (lack of time etc) but I use Scientific Method and ingenuity and, well, sometimes Grace intervenes. In this case, the Salehard graph was supplied by The Ford Prefect of Climategate II fame (email to Phil Jones). Thanks TFP.
This graph to me is the most stunning admission of UHI I’ve seen- difference between DJF and MAM, JJA, SON. It’s a big tip on how to do a rough and ready REAL correction for UHI to records.