Some background from the original “hide the decline” from Steve McIntyre here
Despite relatively little centennial variability, Briffa’s reconstruction had a noticeable decline in the late 20th century, despite warmer temperatures. In these early articles [e.g. Briffa 1998], the decline was not hidden.
For most analysts, the seemingly unavoidable question at this point would be – if tree rings didn’t respond to late 20th century warmth, how would one know that they didn’t do the same thing in response to possible medieval warmth – a question that remains unaddressed years later.
He writes now in Hide-the-Decline Plus
Indeed, they did not simply “hide the decline”, their “hide the decline” was worse than we thought. Mann et al did not merely delete data after 1960, they deleted data from 1940 on, You can see the last point of the Briffa reconstruction (located at ~1940) peeking from behind the spaghetti in the graphic below:
Detail from Mann et al (EOS 2003) Figure 1. Arrow points to Briffa series peeking out from behind the spaghetti
Had Mann et al used the actual values, the decline would have been as shown in the accompanying graphic:
Figure 3. Re-stated Mann et al (EOS 2003) Figure 1 showing the decline.
Had Mann and his 13 co-authors shown the Briffa reconstruction, without hiding the decline, one feels that von Storch (and others) might have given more consideration to Soon et al’s criticism of the serious problem arising from the large-population failure of tree ring widths and density to track temperature.
Read the whole article Hide-the-Decline Plus
Make this known far and wide.
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FergalR gets the
Gold on the foremast this time.
So many Mobys.
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Jeez. How much worse can it get!?
Sounds like Briffa wasn’t a team player and didn’t understand cause and deflect.
I dont know if 1479 has already been covered, but it gets worse..
From: David Rind
To: Jonathan Overpeck
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 16:43:08 -0400
Subject: Re:
Cc: Keith Briffa , rahmstorf@ozean-klima.de, Bette Otto-Bleisner
, cddhr@giss.nasa.gov, joos ,
Eystein Jansen , “Ricardo Villalba” ,
t.osborn@uea.ac.uk
Leaving aside for the moment the resolution issue, the statement should at least be
consistent with our figures. Fig. 6-10 looks like there were years around 1000 AD that
could have been just as warm – if one wants to make this statement, one needs to expand
the vertical scale in Fig. 6-10 to show that the current warm period is ‘warmer’.
Now getting back to the resolution issue: given what we know about the ability to
reconstruct global or NH temperatures in the past – could we really in good conscience say
we have the precision from tree rings and the very sparse other data to make any definitive
statement of this nature (let alone accuracy)? While I appreciate the cleverness of the
second sentence, the problem is everybody will recognize that we are ‘being clever’ – at
what point does one come out looking aggressively defensive?
I agree that leaving the first sentence as the only sentence suggests that one is somehow
doubting the significance of the recent warm years, which is probably not something we want
to do. What I would suggest is to forget about making ‘one year’ assessments; what Fig.
6-10 shows is that the recent warm period is highly anomalous with respect to the record of
the last 1000 years. That would be what I think we can safely conclude the last 1000 years
really tells us.
Al Gore @ur momisugly 11.24 pm
Probably this response would do for that question…………………….. in relation to love in using public funding poorly………………
Babe, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet (1974) Bachman Turner Overdrive
Looks like the error bars need error bars…
It’s a spectacular own goal really this. If they’d just left that whole series out with the argument that it didn’t track temps (though that would raise questions over other proxies, but that’s a different matter) then they’d have been fine.
SIgh. Science at it’s best apparently.
Hidden in plain sight!
Even Gavin at RC, notorious for his ability to argue black is white, will have trouble providing ‘a reasonable explanation’ for this.
“Make this known far and wide”
Well, I’ve done my best by being the first commenter on Deltoid’s latest ‘Open Thread’. Within the hour they will be coming out of the woodwork with bad breath and foam on their lips so if anyone feels like riding to my support like the US cavalry, feel free:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/12/december_2011_open_thread.php
“Worse than we thought.” Makes a great headline. Something ‘the team’ must recognise.
Friends:
I have been watching ‘Climategate 2.0’ with interest and have made no comments on the emails because they state the case I have been making since the early 1980s; viz. ‘climate science’ needs to be returned to the practices and methods of real science.
I write now to point out what I consider to be an error being made by commentators.
‘Hide The Decline’ was wrong. It was absolutely and unpardonably wrong. Hence, revelation of any additional detail cannot be “worse than we thought” because it is not possible to be worse than absolutely wrong.
‘Hide The Decline’ is the same scientific fraud as the ‘Piltdown Man’. In each case, selected parts of two different items were spliced together to provide a misleading scientific indication. This is scientific fraud of the worst possible kind.
It does not matter one jot whether one of the selected parts of one of the items was deleted at 1960 or 1940: the important issue is that the misleading splicing was deliberately conducted and is a scientific fraud.
A claim that the deletion date makes it “worse than we thought” invites argument about splicing dates which can only obscure the fact that the splicing is unforgiveable whatever the date of the splice.
Richard
What was that quip about State Penn, then? Is there a cell big enough for these sobs. This climate fraud was used to give the OK to a wind farm in our community and which has torn it apart. My blood boils.
Perhaps it reflects a “tipping point” in the paleo-climate community’s attitude to doing honest science. If the data post 1940 cannot be explained then neither can the pre 1940 data.
If you are going to delete post 1940 data then you might as well delete pre 1940 data all the way to 1000AD, unless you are acting dishonestly.
Richard: While I respect the point you make, I still feel that there is a difference between (e.g.) stealing $1 and stealing $1 000 000, but maybe that’s just me… Personally I am getting quite punch drunk from reading all this stuff emerging from the e-mails. Dunno whether to cry or laugh (both hysterically, of course). It is without a doubt worse than I thought, and I thought it was pretty bad… 🙁 I at least thought that these pple, while misguided and arrogant, had some honour in believing their own nonsense… Now I know differently. No honour at all. Unbelieveably sad…
Over and over and over yet again the alarmists are caught fudging the data or just plain making up non-scientific scare stories and calling it science. And yet, so many people in the western world believe in their heart of hearts that the planet is warming and mankind is the cause!
I just don’t understand. Is it that truth really does not matter to most people and data is only useful when it proves one’s own myths?
“Man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest” ~ Paul Simon
Richard S Courtney says: December 1, 2011 at 1:52 am
I write now to point out what I consider to be an error being made by commentators.
‘Hide The Decline’ was wrong. It was absolutely and unpardonably wrong. Hence, revelation of any additional detail cannot be “worse than we thought” because it is not possible to be worse than absolutely wrong.
Fair point, perhaps Anthony can put the “worse than we thought” in inverted commas and emphasise Richard’s point in the head text.
How come nobody ever talks about the Holocene Optimum? 1000 years is a cherry picked figure, 6000 is cherry picked the opposite way:)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
I recommend readers to visit the Eos Forum paper itself, and use magnification themselves to verify Steve’s picture. When you do this, it is, er, mindblowing to see how the incriminating evidence is there, in the paper itself, when we apply a simple forensic technique – attend to the details – that are cleverly made unnoticeable at the ordinary scale.
Note too that the grey is the “uncertainty” attendant on Mann 1999. Note too that there are many other suspiciously truncated lines, whose provenance we can detect by referring to the colour chart. Note too that it is mainly PSEUDO-DATA from models that rises along with the temperature record (which is also vulnerable to recent UHI)
@richard S Courtney says:
December 1, 2011 at 1:52 am
////////////////////////////////////
Up to a point I agree with your observation.
However, I do consider the period to have a bearing on the confidence that can be appled to the proxy. Eg, if at around this time there were 150 years worth of instrument temperature records for the area in question, if there was a divergence between tree rings and just 1 year, one might reasonably conclude that tree rings were a good proxy, had been well tuned to the instrument record and the divergence of just 1 year was an outlier.
However, what we have here is a very different issue. Of the 150 year record, we have a divergence for 60 years, ie., for more than 1 third of the period. This is no outlier. Further, one imagines that the errors associated with temperature records grow wider the further back in time one goes. Put another way, the most recent 60 years is likely to be the most accurate years of data. So what we have here is divergence with the best and most accurate 60 year period of the data.
This would suggest that there was either at the very least a tuning error and the proxy should be tuned to the last 60 years of the data, or if that made nonsense then the conclusion would inevitably be that the proxy is wholly unreliable PERIOD such that the entire proxy should be thrown out.
I consider that any reasonable scientist in this situation would conclude that the proxy was not reliable and should be wholly disregarded, and that no reconstruction of events earlier than the instrument record could be made using that particular proxy.
Thus the issue here is why did these scientists not throw out the proxy? Why did they go ahead and make a reconstruction based upon what was so obviously a patently flawed and unreliable proxy?
Richard S Courtney says:
“‘Hide The Decline’ is the same scientific fraud as the ‘Piltdown Man’. In each case, selected parts of two different items were spliced together to provide a misleading scientific indication. This is scientific fraud of the worst possible kind.”
Shouldn’t that read Piltdown Mann ?
Not that it matters much when you can plug in any random number set and STILL generate a hockey stick….
Looking at this the other way around, If we assume for a moment that the tree-ring reconstruction is correct, would this not imply that it was the station record that was “played with” past 1940?
Best,
J.
This need addressing. I want Warmists here to give me an answer.
As time progresses we are being made aware of more and more data that has been ignored, altered or twisted to exaggerate the political goal of carbon control. These liars are not worth the ‘scientist’ label.
Have you found a graph in that flaw?