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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The Pulitzer Prize given to Bellesides is an excellent counterpoint to the “scientific consensus” argument. It illustrates the corruption, groupthink, and bias in Academia in fields dominated by the “anointed.”
Smokey says:
November 23, 2011 at 8:11 pm
Steve,
You have it all wrong about who sent what to “the world”. Read, and learn:
http://www.john-daly.com/cru/emails.htm
You beat me to the punch Smokey, but well done! If ever there is a Sceptic Hall of Fame established my great adopted fellow Tasmanian John L Daly should be the first inductee. His August 2001 email exchanges with Phil Jones provide an early revelation of the bullying, blustering and failure to admit mistakes mentality that has become so endemic throughout the IPCC AGW Greenhouse Industry.
John’s scrutiny of their efforts was a model for the many who now monitor the machinations of the politicised scientists pushing the scam. With the usurping of the scientific peer review process, John provided his site to others with alternative views who had been frozen out by the new restrictive “pal review” instituted by the cabal of UNIPCC AGW proponents. He was a shining beacon in a very dark time and his site remains a most valuable resource for anyone seeking the truth and all explained in language any lay person can understand. Vale John L Daly!
Reading tree rings is the same as translating Chinese using Websters English Dictionary you know that both represent a form of communication but which way is up ?
And why do Climate Scientists think the trees they study are called wild trees to begin with vs plantation trees? No one knows much of anything about both above and below ground “microclimate” or “metadata” conditions for each of the trees used in tree ring studies over hundreds and even thousands of years. In addition, apart from the problem with “stripbarks” recording “0” temperatures in the same tree used to allegedly record other temperatures, dead trees of the same species in the same areas dying at different times have recorded “0” for temperatures for at least ever since they’ve died and disappeared. Average that! And, teleconnections? Apparently almost anything can “teleconnect”, at least until it doesn’t.
Even the idea that ring width records a volume of tree growth in any particular wild tree is dubious, imo. I’ve seen many individual trees and “crumholtz” at altitudes around 8000 ft. and lower with roots much larger than the “tree”. Each wild tree even looks different from the others. But at the least, by now I’m not going to trust any “Climate Scientist” to smooth away all of the natural variables via their alleged “skill” and “robust” findings.
If there’s anything “unnatural” going on in climate, it is the “method” used by the postmodern, postnormal, pre-Enlightenment Climate Scientists.
Steve says:
November 23, 2011 at 7:56 pm
While others have answered this well, you addressed this to me, so I’ll reply. Humble apologies for the duplication.
1) There is plenty of other evidence that Phil is a nasty guy.
There are no other similar comments from other people in the released Climategate Emails. When Steven Schneider died I saw no comments that rose to Phil’s comments about Daly’s death. Of course, I only saw messages to a wide audience.
2) “stole the Emails” implies a break-in. I’m still waiting for the investigative report. I suspect there was no break-in, though I’ll grant you whistle blowers may use illegal tactics. A defense that the Emails were related to publicly funded research would be interesting, but I’m not familiar enough with British law. “Stole” also implies removing something of value. As far as I know, the original Emails are still spinning away on a CRU diskdrive. Well, those that weren’t illegally deleted, of course!
3) If you want to come up with a document from public sources describing why Phil Jones is a nice guy I’ll take the time to write up from public sources why he isn’t a nice guy. Copyrighted sources are okay, we’d only be using small excerpts.
4) Hint: For any web searches you might do, be sure to spell Daly’s name right.
—–
Smokey, thanks for posting that John Daly link, I’m sure I’ve read it, but not for a couple years.
>>Spector
>>dendrothermometry is highly questionable and dendrochronology
>>is an established accurate dating method.
So they keep saying.
But if my wood sample in some ancient artifact, was influenced more by pests, bacteriums, and light / root competition, than it was by the global climate – then how can I compare its tree rings with a reference sample, especially when that reference sample may have been growing thousands of miles away??
Tell me how this works. Please, I ask you….
.
As Ken Coffman “publisher of the “Slayers” unorthodox-science/CACC politics book “Slaying the Sky Dragon” says (23rd November at 7:56 am) “ .. It’s a crying shame that John Daly and Michael Crichton are not here today .. ”. I don’t know about Michael Crichton but John was a sceptic who was highly regarded by those on both sides of the debate.
One of his articles that I frequently refer to is “Stephen Schneider Greenhouse Superstar” (http://www.john-daly.com/schneidr.htm). This discusses Schneider’s infamous suggestion in 1989 that scientists were at liberty to decide for themselves about whether or not to tell the truth about the causes of climate change. Only 11 years before, in 1978, Schneider had been expressing his concerns about interfering with Nature in order to prevent an imminent ice age but seems to have decided to switch to the Catastrophic AGW gravy train after the “coming ice age” one ran out of steam. It appears that he thought it wise to hedge his bets in 1984 with “‘It is conceivable … that about a 10 percent sustained change in cloud cover … could bring on … an ice age.’ (Schneider and Randi Londer, The Coevolution of Climate and Life, 1984, P. 216) .. ” (see “To Love And Regenerate The Earth: .. ” by Don Weaver – http://www.scribd.com/doc/32250379/SURVIVAL-OF-CIVILIZATION-BY-Don-Weaver Page 392).
Anyone interested in more on Schneider can have a look at my series of 6 comments on 19th Feb. on “Blizzard stories from the National Weather Service” (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/15/blizzard-stories-from-the-national-weather-service/).
Of course Schneider fully suported Dr. Michael Mann’s “cause” (as he repeatedly referred to it in those Climategate2.0 E-mails) and his PR team at RealClimate.
In my opinion John Daly, despite being a sceptic of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change (CACC) hypothesis, would have given no more support to John O’Sullivan and his team of “Slayers” or their unorthodox-science publishing organisation Principia Scientific International than he did to Schneider. There’s more on the “Slayers” at Professor Judith Curry’s “Letter to the dragon slayers” thread (http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/15/letter-to-the-dragon-slayers/#comments).
Best regards, Pete Ridley
I think what’s really missing here is the failure to assess the effects of a god-like figure like Barack Hussein Obama who came along and literally slowed the rise of the oceans and “healed” the planet in a little less than 3 years.
This is heavy-duty quantum mechanics we’re talking about here, people. We are not qualified to comment.
Daly’s letter is overstated by a lot. Sure, lots of things affect tree ring width. I could list a dozen more. So what? What matters is the size of the temperature effect relative to all the other effects. Which his letter says nothing about.
REPLY: Explain then, how hundreds or thousands of years later one goes about determining that specific years in a tree’s life were a response specifically to temperature, and not rainfall, available nutrients, cloudiness, reindeer crap around the base or something else. – Anthony
Sorry to learn that John L Daly has gone. His book was the first to give me idea of what was going on. But there are other great Australians like the late Lance Endersby. His book “A Voyage of Discovery” is available from 595 Sydney Road, Coburg Vic 3058. His simple article in Engineers Australia April 2008 told the simple tale of how the upper sea temperatures and CO2 levels are interrelated. If the ocean starts to cool then CO2 levels will go down. That article plus Ernst-Georg Beck’s “180 years of CO2 analysis” is all that is needed to scotch the IPCC’s claims as out and out misinformation. The rest is global brain-washing