I had a brief email exchange with Professor
Dear James,
This is fascinating. I had no idea these emails were in the public domain.
In general Steve has gotten most of this right. There really is a problem
with the trees not being sensitive to temperature after about 1950. My
current best guess is that the higher CO2 since then has caused greater
warming at night (which is corroborated by minimum temperature trends,
since minimum temperatures usually occur at night). Trees respire more
at higher temperature, so they lose carbon when nights are warmer
than average. So their ring width has not increased as much as it would
have if the warming had been uniformly distributed over the diurnal cycle.
I think this is all published now so it should be possible to set the whole
record straight. But I did indeed feel at the time that Mike Mann had not
given me a straight answer. So if there is a response written, it won’t be
one defending Mike.
Jeff
Cheers,
James Padgett
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Steve Garcia says:
November 29, 2011 at 10:51 am
“Actually, as to empirical studies, the Hätteneschwiler, Schweingruber and Körner 2006 paper “Tree ring responses to elevated CO2 and increased N deposition in Picea abies” (http://tiny.cc/v6fve) does this for spruce trees, for elevated CO2 and Nitrogen. That is not the only environmental change that needs to be looked at, but it is at least a start.”
Yes, it is a beginning. I am glad someone is beginning empirical research on tree rings.
“I agree. NONE of the claims of tree rings as proxies – no matter how suggestive or reasonable sounding – should be considered valid until the ALL the underlying assumptions are empirically tested – and quantified. Prior to that, it is no more science than Plato and Aristotle conjecturing back in ancient Greece – it all sounds good, but it isn’t science.”
Absolutely, the fact that non-empirical work is passed off as empirical work is one of the two great scandals of the Hockey Stick. The other is the magical statistics identified by McIntyre.
No wonder they thought hide “hide the decline” did not matter; it was an empirical matter and they have no understanding of empirical matters at all.
“My current best guess is …” still just a guess.
Empirical data is validated only by measurements, not by speculations.
@Theo Goodwin 11:10am:
A true tale:
I worked 7 years in industrial R&D, and one project was an ongoing prototype machine that was used to test principles. Amazingly, for the first few years my chief scientist did not do empirical tests using the scientific method. Whenever there were problems, he would use his understanding of all the complexities to direct us toward solutions – but there was always a lot of spinning our wheels, because many of his “solutions” happened to be hip-shooting (which only became obvious later on). Eventually they took him off that project and put someone else in his place. The first thing the new scientist did was to begin creating a matrix of what happened when ONLY one parameter was changed at a time. Within a few weeks we had a large display board that was quantified (even visual, it turned out). When problems came up, we were almost instantaneously able to identify which parameter had slipped out of adjustment. Though both were PhD level scientists, one was a hipshooter and one was a methodical scientist. In a complex environment with scores of parameters, the method man’s science worked.
I see that experience as a direct parallel to climate science, since both are complex environments with many variables – and because the solution isn’t to go on a scientist’s speculations on what is going on, but to identify what happens when each parameter changes. Needless to say, climate science has not done its homework – yet. I am very hopeful that some day that will change. Who knows? Maybe once climate scientists do their homework they might find the hip shooters are right. I am convinced they will find the hip shooters are wrong. The Team is no more than a bunch of statistics-crunching desk jockeys, who revel in flying all over the world attending conferences and pontificating. What is needed is method men, empirically solidifying the “known” – so that, for example, water vapor is not a “great unknown greenhouse gas.” When enough knowns have been worked out, climatology will be a science; until then it is kind of like astrology. Blame that on Mann and Jones et al.
(Perhaps The Team should even be called “The Astrologers.”)
Until they get the numb nuts out – the hip shooters – they are just in the way. But more than just in the way, events have conspired to put the numb nuts in the ear of policymakers, whom the numb nuts have convinced to destroy the western economies, based on the hip shooting. THIS is why skeptics like myself are so hyper about getting these idiots out and putting real scientists in – and getting rid of the IPCC, out of which no good can come. It is a case of “When will they put actual adults in charge?” (Michael Mann, you know of whom I speak…)
JPeden says:
November 29, 2011 at 10:47 am
“Gail Combs says:
November 29, 2011 at 10:07 am”
Dittos. http://gustofhotair.blogspot.com/2009/04/analysis-of-australian-temperature-part_16.html
I got to Lowe’s site last night while looking for night time minimums. But it’s only Australia, dontcha know, so it doesn’t “fit”.
__________________________________________
At least it is ACTUAL DATA from ACTUAL MEASUREMENTS. Of course climate scientists wouldn’t know what actual in field measurement s ARE, much less how to make them. /snark>
@Theo Goodwin at 11:10 am:
Correct. When they saw the divergence, first hand, they should have stopped and asked “What does this mean?” (Perhaps they did ask – not for the science but for their agenda – and that is why they needed to hide the decline; like Judith Curry, it did “the cause” no good to put out there, for all the world to see, that there was a divergence problem. The original Climategate emails clearly showed them conspiring to not let it “weaken the message.” DO note that Briffa was strongly against this action, but in the end he crumbled under Mann’s boot heel.)
Asking “What does this mean, would have led real scientists to institute new empircal studies to identify the reason behind the divergence. Leaving such a narrowly-focused area unclear – how in the WORLD is that science – when they were the supposed top people in their field, it was their responsibility to eliminate the uncertainty of the divergence. Leaving it to others is just not cool. Hiding its very existence from the policymakers and public was even worse.
But, being mere desk jockeys, as you say, they had no understanding of empirical matters at all. That has become more and more clear in reading the emails. Show me ONE empirical paper – listed in the emails or elsewhere – that was authored by a Team member. They were all only “reconstructors.”
Steve Garcia says:
November 29, 2011 at 12:10 pm
@Theo Goodwin 11:10am:
A true tale:
I worked 7 years in industrial R&D, and one project was an ongoing prototype machine that was used to test principles. Amazingly, for the first few years my chief scientist did not do empirical tests using the scientific method…..
____________________________________
YES!
I was considered a great “trouble shooter” Yet all I did was go out to the plant floor and ASK the operators what was going on, what had changed… When necessary another guy and I would set up and run fractional factorial experimental designs. This was before computers were available so the number crunching was done with hand calculators. (ARGHhhhh) It was well worth it though. We got clear pictures of what was causing problems to happen.
This hand waving and calling it “Science” makes me sick.
Yes, Gail –
It is amazing when solid work is done, because it can be then used in the real world. I like to remind people that engineering is science, too – the term I was taught is “applied science.” But I take it one step further and say that when it is nailed down 100% it stops being science and becomes engineering. And the corollary to that is that until it is engineering it is just playing around with lab equipment or running around in fields. That in no way, though, puts engineering above theoretical science (the non-engineering side of science). It is just that the purpose of science in the first place is to serve mankind in a practical way. The discovery aspect is only a phase on the way to making it all work – and nothing but empirical results are important toward that end. Theories are nice and models are nice – BUT DO THEY WORK? Until they work they are farts in a windstorm.
One of the scientists with whom I worked (Oxford educated) was really good about taking what he called “intuitively correct ideas” and coming up with finding ways to prove them out. He knew the difference between what sounded right and what was proven to BE right.
MUCH of what an engineer does is knowing what does not work. Much of what a “scientist” does is finding reasons why an idea won’t work. Sometimes that takes experiments. Sometimes he can run it through his mind and see enough clear flaws to reject the idea. In Prof. Severinghaus’ emails, one can see that he saw flaws in the premise of tree ring proxies, due to the divergence problem and it alarmed him.
I think the divergence problem should actually be called the Divergence Paradox. What Severinghaus saw was a paradox – something that didn’t fit. And when paradoxes exist, something in the underlying paradigm (or stated premises) has to be wrong. It is then important to find out what premises are wrong.
Steve Garcia says:
November 29, 2011 at 12:10 pm
Very well said. I endorse every word.
I would add that “noble cause corruption” or something like that resides in the hearts of the Climategaters. I believe that they saw that the nascent field of climate science presented many opportunities for political gains and they took advantage of the infant and bent it to their ends.
My main reasons for believing this are two: 1) not one of The Team has the instincts of a genuine empirical scientist and 2) they have produced 99% hype based on 1% empirical science and all of that science was inherited. They inherited items such as tree ring width as proxy for temperatures but never investigated its empirical foundations and then made outrageous claims on the basis of it, claims such as those found in the Hockey Stick.
What skeptics have been trying to do and are trying to do is simply to call attention to the non-existence of the science that underlies mainstream climate science today. There is no empirical justification for using tree ring width as a proxy for temperature. That claim has been established beyond reasonable doubt. Yet skeptics cannot get the attention of the MSM or mainstream climate science and get them to address the matter. All we need is a fair hearing.
By the way, I worked in situations similar to the one describe. I managed models for some time and my most difficult task was explaining to the engineer users that the model is not a description of reality. Then I had to explain to them how to observe the behavior of the models and how to create those matrices that you describe above so that we could have rational debate about what a model run shows.
As a forester with 30+ years experience, let me add a few words about tree ring width. Radial growth of trees (and height for that matter) is driven by available resources during the growing season, a growing season that varies from year round in the case of Eucalyptus species, to only a month or so at the tree line or edge of the tundra. The key resources are: solar radiation, water availability, nutrients, and temperature. Because trees are mostly very long lived, outcrossing higher plants that are unable to migrate south for the winter, they became genetically adapted to the prevailing “environmental” conditions of the region in which they reside.
However, consider that many tree species live for many decades, some for many centuries, so have the genetic capacity to sustain, survive, and reproduce effectively under a wide range of temperatures, dry/wet cycles, and other weather phenomena. To cut to the chase, excepting for those trees forced into genetic dead ends with limited population sizes, trees contain tremendous amounts of genetic variation that enable them to survive for long stretches of time under highly variable conditions.
In my experience, tree ring width is limited primarily by available water, and by pandemic insect attacks (which reduces the ability of surviving trees to take up water and nutrients). Droughts and insect epidemics often run for several years, showing a characteristic reduction in tree ring width. Density of stocking is also important. 400 trees per acre won’t affect ring width much when the stand age is say, 20-40 years but eventually, competition between trees within the stand becomes intense and ring width drops dramatically. In cooler years in the temperate zone, tree growth is also reduced, but in my experience this is due more to increased cloud cover (less solar radiation). Tree radial growth can also be abruptly halted from unseasonably early (or late) hard freezes, but we rarely see this more than a year or two consecutively.
Thus I concur, but for different reasons, that trees make lousy thermometers.
@Theo 12:44 pm:
My understanding is that this all goes back to Hansen, to Lovelock’s Gaia concept, the “Small is beautiful” (SIB) ideas of EF Shumaker, plus the types of people who went into the environmental earth sciences like oceanography – all basically adherents of Gaia and SIB. (The “coming ice age” concept of the middle 1970s came from Woods Hole and from East Anglia.) I think that nearly 100% of the participants came into the field with the idea that mankind was raping the natural world. The Gaia and SIB concepts included the idea that the Earth as a consciousness would some day strike back. Lovelock came up with the concept ironically just as the U.S. Congress was passing the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. If you are old enough, you know what real pollution is (and it ain’t what we have now!). Lovelock’s ideas were going to come from someone at that time, if not him. The SIB principle is what much of the goals of the warmers and the IPCC is based – to shrink western technological society to the backyard organic farmer level – a completely unsustainable concept in a world of (then) 4 billion or (now) 7 billion, without lowering the population to 1 or 2 billion. But the warmers don’t understand that what they propose is magnitudes worse than Stalin’s 35 million dead. Every aspect of what they want is to return the world to pre-Inustrial Revolution times – and that simply isn’t possible without a horrible killing off of people.
Along with the above ideas, let us not leave out the Malthusian “genius” of Paul Ehrlich, who predicted we’d be out of iron, coal, oil, copper, land, food. Ehrlich did not give any credence to future improvements in crop yields or oil finds. We are, in fact, no worse off now than when he spouted those dire predictions of gloom and doom. We are probably better off now, since so much of he world’s prosperity has actually increased since he wrote in the 1970s. I wouldn’t have believed then the world could sustain 7 billion, but here we are.
So, these folks have all that running around in their heads – all Chicken Littles, feeding off each other and denying the evidence all around them. It is my definite impression that they WANT the world to collapse, to prove their mentors’ predictions. I think they expect it any day, very much like the 2012 end of the world stuff or the Jamestown people.
That seems true.
If not true 100%, then at least not far wrong. But don’t forget that to them it is not hype – it is what they believe: The world stands on the brink. But since Malthus, the world has had people rending their clothes about this. This just happens to be the first time they’ve been in a position to affect government policies.
Actually, not true. The proxy has been fairly reliable and documented. It is only that it is not always linear that has caused problems.
As Craig Loehle points out in his paper, if today’s warming is not reflected in the tree rings, then what does this tell us about such periods as the MWP and the Roman Warm Period? If it has flattened out since 1950 or 1960 (actually declined by 0.4C, based on the linearity assumption), then the linearity in the 900AD-1400AD period has to be in question, too. it suggests that the MWP may have been as warm or warmer than today – and that the tree rings wouldn’t even tell us. THIS is one of the real big problems for climatology – a really big deal.
Without linearity, is the tree ring proxy status endangered? I think so.
Funny how drudge work actually produces real results, isn’t it?
So trees are sensitive to a few parts per million of CO2 only after 1950?
If I had presented the ‘Hockey Stick’ graph in college I would have received an F.
Splicing different data sets, i.e. proxy vs measured on the same graph is outrageous or dishonest at worst.
@Jeff Severinghaus;
“Trees respire more at higher temperature, so they lose carbon when nights are warmer than average. So their ring width has not increased as much as it would have if the warming had been uniformly distributed over the diurnal cycle.”
This is BS (bad science) All plants lose carbohydrates in cooling or colder conditions, more or less. Tree rings are a proxy for overall growing conditions. The soft thicker part is the “summer ” wood and the hard thin part the “winter” wood. Tropical woods have little or no rings.
If the tree rings are thinner after the 1950s, then the growing conditions in that area have become less favorable. pg
treegyn1, you missed something out. Trees are by nature, in the business of begetting more trees. One can spend ones wealth on horizontal and vertical growth, increasing ones resistance to storms and increasing total photosynthetic area.
However, trees are long lived species and ‘know’ that generally the odd are poor that any but a tiny fraction of their seeds will make it into mature, fertile trees.
In evolutionary terms, what should a mature, storm secure, tree do when the weather is optimal for seeds to grow?
My guess is that trees sense and remember the past weather and then calculate which is the most appropriate balance of resources between seeds and growth.
@Peter H. 6:29 pm:
Peter – I am no fan of the Team or Micheal Mann, but in attempting the goal of multi-century temperature records, there simply is no other choice but to splice together proxies and instrument data. I do give Mann due credit for attempting something on so vast a scale. In saying that it doesn’t mean I think he got it 100% right, and the MM2003 paper shows that he did not get it right.
I think Mann – and anyone else who tries it – should present each proxy separately as fully as possible, then show how each proxy was homogenized to allow for merging the data, and, finally, to show the end result. Not only that, but each data set should have also been presented in its raw data stage and all adjustments applied should have been clearly labeled and explained. In this way any variations in the trends of each proxy would be clear to all who looked at the paper, and then everyone (most of all the authors) could peruse anomalous periods or trends for possible errors in methodology.
What Mann basically did – transparency-wise – was to dump all the data into a black box, and then VIOLA! out came some numbers and graphs. And anyone trying to replicate had several layers of adustments, all of which were unidentified. In addition, the actual data used was not revealed, so we had a paper with a pretty picture, and none of what went in nor what happened inside the black box was revealed. It was Wizard of Oz shazzam-ship.
That wouldn’t have been so bad, if he had kept good records of the data used and the methods applied, so that when others wanted to peruse it and possibly replicate all or parts, then he could have simply sent them a Zip file. As I understand it the journal’s rules required this, so it all should have not even had to involve Mann, anyway – only the journal.
But as for merging proxies with instrument data – I do see it as necessary – if for no other reason than to show that in the overlap period the trends are the same (thus providing confidence in the other periods) and that the constants used to size the curves are correct.
which is corroborated by minimum temperature trends,
since minimum temperatures usually occur at night
No they don’t. They usually occur after dawn when solar insolation exceeds outgoing LWR.
That a professor in a climate related discipline doesn’t know this is troubling.
DocMartyn says:
November 29, 2011 at 7:20 pm
treegyn1, you missed something out. Trees are by nature, in the business of begetting more trees. One can spend ones wealth on horizontal and vertical growth, increasing ones resistance to storms and increasing total photosynthetic area.
However, trees are long lived species and ‘know’ that generally the odd are poor that any but a tiny fraction of their seeds will make it into mature, fertile trees.
In evolutionary terms, what should a mature, storm secure, tree do when the weather is optimal for seeds to grow?
My guess is that trees sense and remember the past weather and then calculate which is the most appropriate balance of resources between seeds and growth.
Sorry Doc, but trees aren’t anthropomorphic. You are correct that the successful stands of trees that we see in natural forests are the result of successful sexual reproduction between the most genetically adapted individuals of the preceding generation. Thus, trees contain an extremely complex set of genes that allow such reproductive success under the widely ranging climatic and environmental conditions that occur on decades- and centuries-long time scales.
Like many higher plants, those successful genotypes evolved the capability (necessity) to produce large numbers of seeds when they do flower because of the low success rate of seeds (it’s a cold cruel world out there). But, trees do not have brains and thus, do not “know” what they are doing. They possess the genetic capacity to respond to various environmental cues that stimulate flowering, the most common of which are abundant sunlight and drought.