Email 2383 contains further evidence that everyone in the world of paleoclimate knew the Hockey Stick was a duffer.
From: Tim Barnett [[2]mailto:XXXXXXXXXXX@ucsd.edu]
Sent: 11 October 2004 16:42
To: Gabi Hegerl; Klaus Hasselmann
Cc: Prof.Dr. Hans von Storch; Myles Allen; francis; Reiner Schnur; Phil Jones; Tom Crowley; Nathan Gillett; David Karoly; Jesse Kenyon; christopher.d.miller@noaa.gov; Pennell, William T; Tett, Simon; Ben Santer; Karl Taylor; Stott, Peter; Bamzai, Anjuli
Subject: Re: spring meeting
not to be a trouble maker but……if we are going to really get into the paleo stuff, maybe someone(s) ought to have another look at Mann’s paper. His statistics were suspect as i remember. for instance, i seem to remember he used, say, 4 EOFs as predictors. But he prescreened them and threw one away because it was not useful. then made a model with the remaining three, ignoring the fact he had originally considered 4 predictors. He never added an artifical skill measure to account for this but based significance on 3 predictors. Might not make any difference. My memory is probably faulty on these issues, but to be completely even handed we ought to be sure we agree with his procedures. best, tim
It’s interesting how much evidence there is now that the Hockey Stick was known to be a problem. Perhaps readers can help collate a list of emails making this point.
NAS panel review of hockeysticks prompted by McIntyre and McKitrick.
#1104 -Heinz Wanner – on reporting his NAS panel critique of Mann to the media.
I just refused to give an exclusive interview to SPIEGEL because I will not cause damage for climate science.
#1656 Douglas Maraun – on how to react to skeptics.
How should we deal with flaws inside the climate community? I think, that “our” reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann’s work were not especially honest.
#3234 Richard Alley
Taking the recent instrumental record and the tree-ring record and joining them yields a dramatic picture, with rather high confidence that recent times are anomalously warm. Taking strictly the tree-ring record and omitting the instrumental record yields a less-dramatic picture and a lower confidence that the recent temperatures are anomalous.
Paleoclimate and hide the decline
#0300
Bo Christiansen – On Hockey stick reconstructions
All methods strongly underestimates the amplitude of low-frequency variability and trends. This means that it is almost impossible to conclude from reconstruction studies that the present period is warmer than any period in the reconstructed period.
Ed Cook #3253
the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).
#4133 Johnathan Overpeck – IPCC review.
what Mike Mann continually fails to understand, and no amount of references will solve, is that there is practically no reliable tropical data for most of the time period, and without knowing the tropical sensitivity, we have no way of knowing how cold (or warm)the globe actually got.
[and later]
Unsatisfying, perhaps, since people will want to know whether 1200 AD was warmer than today, but if the data doesn’t exist, the question can’t yet be answered. A good topic for needed future work.
Rob Wilson – 1583
The palaeo-world has become a much more complex place in the last 10 years and with all the different calibration methods, data processing methods, proxy interpretations – any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently have. These many be more honest, but may not be too helpful for model comparison attribution studies. We need to be careful with the wording I think.
#3234 Richard Alley – on NAS panel and divergence
records, or some other records such as Rosanne’s new ones, show “divergence”, then I believe it casts doubt on the use of joined tree-ring/instrumental records, and I don’t believe that I have yet heard why this interpretation is wrong.
#4758 Tim Osborne – Criticizing other people for doing the same thing
Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data ‘cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it! If we write the Holocene forum article then we’ll have to be critical or our paper as well as Crowley’s!
#0497 – Phil Jones UEA – Scientists don’t know the magnitude of past warming.
Even though the tree-ring chronologies used have robust rbar statistics for the whole 1000 years ( ie they lose nothing because core numbers stay high throughout), they have lost low frequency because of standardization. We’ve all tried with RCS/very stiff splines/hardly any detrending to keep this to a minimum, but until we know it is minimal it is still worth mentioning.
#0886 Jan Esper on his own reconstruction – also hidden decline
And the curve will also show that the IPCC curve needs to be improved according to missing long-term declining trends/signals, which were removed (by dendrochronologists!) before Mann merged the local records together.
Tiim Osborne 4007
Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were
Tim Osborne #2347
Also, we set all post-1960 values to missing in the MXD data set (due to decline), and the method will infill these, estimating them from the real temperatures – another way of “correcting” for the decline, though may be not defensible!
#3234 Richard Alley
Unless the “divergence problem” can be confidently ascribed to some cause that was not active a millennium ago, then the comparison between tree rings from a millennium ago and instrumental records from the last decades does not seem to be justified, and the confidence level in the anomalous nature of the recent warmth is lowered.
I think the best way to sum up all of this is a quote from a guest post at tAV and DieKlimazweibel by Bo Christiansen:
Where does all this lead us? It is very likely that the NH mean temperature has shown much larger past variability than caught by previous reconstructions. We cannot from these reconstructions conclude that the previous 50-year period has been unique in the context of the last 500-1000 years.
Of course we all know that the IPCC reports differently.
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I do hope that someone here with a subscription to the WSJ pastes this article into the comments section on Mann’s pathetic whimper of a letter.
[Reply: You don’t need a WSJ subscription, just sign up and log on to comment. ~dbs, mod.]
Also, for fun and profit, can we start referring to this particular scandal as “Hide the Mann”? That is essentially what all of these “scientists” are discussing here: limiting Mann’s presence in the future without excluding him all together since excluding Mann would simply be admitting what skeptics have been saying all along.
Ed Cook in 4241.txt
In response to Rob Wilson discovering that RegM provides a hockey stick when fed randomly generated time sequence data.
Meant “time series” not “time sequence” in my last comment, if it matters. In this case it might mean the same thing.
“Judge a man by the company he keeps”
Surely this applies to science to as in “Judge a scientist by the scientists he mixes with.”
Will scientists with good reputations want to be associated with AR5? Will they be happy to have their names printed in the same list as Phil Jones “the serial liar” and M Mann? At some point this will become a serious problem, maybe it already is a problem?
Do real scientists want to work for the IPCC?
How about the ones who contributed last time, are they happy to leave this mess unresolved?
Crosspatch,
Nice.
Well, it seems they’re on to us:
#2960
So, if we show Keith’s series in this plot, we have to comment that “something else” is responsible for the discrepancies in this case. Perhaps Keith can help us out a bit by explaining the processing that went into the series and the potential factors that might lead to it being “warmer” than the Jones et al and Mann et al series?? We would need to put in a few words in this regard. Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates.
But I don’t know why they’d get that idea:
#5017:
I just downloaded your powerpoint presentation from your server and looked at it. Very nice job! It really covers many of the issues regarding proxy uncertainty and tree rings.
It is also really important not to let the instrumental people off the hook, especially after that debacle just published on by Thompson et al. in Nature concerning the SST corrections or lack there of.
The recent Eos article by Vecchi likewise shows how much uncertainty remains in the instrumental SST fields. So it is increasingly clear to me, as I believe it is to you, that the climate data homogenization methods used can contribute significantly to the uncertainty in the reconstructions even when the proxies are typically assigned pretty much all blame. So while we need to be completely honest about the many large uncertainties in our tree-ring data and reconstructions, the instrumental data mob needs to be equally honest and upfront about how they are contributing significant uncertainty to the reconstructions as well. This is especially important at the lower frequencies, which makes time-scale dependent calibration even more difficult to objectively assess.
But after all, we’re just amateurs who, according to Jones, are retired, with lots of time. Considering what they think of actual, you know, experts, though, we get off fairly easy:
I mean, just because a guy is a “Professor, Tree Physiology/Biochemistry, Forestry & Environmental Management, University of New Brunswick” (i.e, in an area of the world where forestry is very important) says
#3219:
I would add that it is the exceptionally rare dendrochronologist who has ever shown any inclination to understand the fundamental biology of wood formation, either as regulated intrinsically or influenced by extrinsic factors. …It would be a major step forward if dendrochronology could embrace the scientific method.
That doesn’t mean the team can’t slime him:
Rod’s comments are remarkably ignorant and insulting. I suggest that he stick to what he knows best and not claim that he understands dendrochronology and its methods. That way he would not sound so stupid. To suggest that dendrochronology does not embrace the scientific method and is as biased as he claims verges on libel. Of course, Rod has the right to his opinion. It is just a shame that he chooses to expose his ignorance of dendrochronology in such a negative way.
Actually, as a student of history, it appears that dendrochronology is about as scientific as reading the entrails of sheep.
Sorry, but that last paragraph is mine, the preceding was from Ed “Swearingist Scientist Evah” Cook.
BTW, 1469 is also a doozy concerning tree rings:
“A substantial number of the sites across Canada are in the boreal forest but nowhere near latitudinal or elevational treeline. The boreal forest is complex and should not be catagorized by a blanket “temperature sensitive” description regarding ring widths”
When Mann wrote his forthcoming book, he didn’t think these ghosts out of the past would arise to haunt it. Reviewers will be able to quote them, and this thread, to rebut claims he makes therein.
John Shade says:
December 5, 2011 at 8:45 am
…Of the various sins of omission and commission that these emails reveal, the sheer irresponsibility exposed by such as the above quotes is a great source of dismay. The irresponsibility lies of course not in the quotes themselves, but in the subsequent silence in the public square on the part of those who made them. The blatant promotion of the hockey-stick by the IPCC and such as Al Gore led to, as an all but inevitable consequence, the deliberate, profound frightening of children. To fail to protect children from such abuse represents an abdication of a basic adult responsibility. This was and is not ‘scary fairy tale’ level for the children, although the ‘science’ may be at that level. This was and is a level at which damage to their sense of wellbeing and security can be expected….
___________________________________
This reminds me of the 1950’s -1970’s nightmares caused by the thread of nuclear disaster via the cold war where kids were taught to hide under their desks and people built underground “Bomb shelters”
On the other hand Goldman Sachs went a step further and just starved kids to death outright in 2008. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/27/how_goldman_sachs_created_the_food_crisis?page=0,1
(WTO agreement on Ag was ratified in 1995)
Number of hungry people, 1969-2010 Graph: http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/10/images/hungry_timeseries.jpg
The death of children under the age of five peaked at 9 million in 2008 then dropped to 7.6 million children in 2010.
“Hunger and malnutrition are the underlying cause of more than half of all child deaths… Most would not die if their bodies and immune systems had not been weakened by hunger and malnutrition moderately to severely underweight, the risk of death is five to eight times higher.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_Agriculture_Organization
One could almost say the the commodities futures speculators lead by Goldman Sachs, managed to murder by hunger by about a million children.
The only thing the “investors” behind CAGW are interested in is money and power. People mean nothing to them. We are cattle to be used or destroyed as they wish. There are plenty of references to statements made about “Too many people”
Do you think the hedge funds and University Endowment funds and corporations rushing to “invest” in farmland in Africa and South America to profit from carbon credits, give any more of thought to the natives they push off the land than the American settlers did a hundred and fifty years ago?
The transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869…..
Ironically the Railroad Barons that fostered the slaughter of the buffalo, are often the ancestors of those we see today buying third world farmland.
Luther Wu says: December 5, 2011 at 9:55 am:
“Amazing how little courage is displayed among the members of the scientific community.”
I agree. You may or may not have noticed that the name Mann, Michael is missing form both the “To” list and the “Cc” list. What odds will you give me that Dr. Mann’s name also was NOT on the “Blind Copy” list?
Jean Parisot says: December 5, 2011 at 9:33 am.
Very good. I believe you’ve covered everthing.
Question: How many “climate scientists” does it take to deflate an ego the size of Dr. Mann’s?
Answer: Give me a minute, I can’t seem to stop laughing.
I am hoping that a team of unbiased scientists will write a book about the holes in just the science that all these emails have surfaced. Not a hatchet job but a very scholarly analysis of how the science was so poor. There is too much just for the taking to let this opportunity slip by.
Poor old Michael Mann after the cascade of inside opinion now seeing the light if day! You can almost feel sorry for him. But not quite!
Oh, the schadenfreude almost hurts!
Alix James says:
December 5, 2011 at 10:31 am
. . .
Rod’s comments are remarkably ignorant and insulting. I suggest that he stick to what he knows best and not claim that he understands dendrochronology and its methods. That way he would not sound so stupid. To suggest that dendrochronology does not embrace the scientific method and is as biased as he claims verges on libel. Of course, Rod has the right to his opinion. It is just a shame that he chooses to expose his ignorance of dendrochronology in such a negative way.
Actually, as a student of history, it appears that dendrochronology is about as scientific as reading the entrails of sheep.
Dendrochronology and dendro-haruspication are really quite different. Dendrochronology is a useful (and really, a scientific) process that counts tree rings and develops regional patterns of ring-development over time. It is handy for many things including calibrating C-14 measurements, and directly dating structures that include logs. Used properly only religious fundaentalists with fixed ideas about the planet’s age dislike it.
Haruspication using tree rings is different. It purports to tell you why that tree grew as it did, when it did. When, as in the case of the Yamal data, you use too few trees to derive a regional pattern, well that isn’t science any longer. “Guess work” would be a superior term.
Here is a reponse to a question about Osborne’s email from gavin.
Tim Osborne #2347: “Also, we set all post-1960 values to missing in the MXD data set (due to decline), and the method will infill these, estimating them from the real temperatures – another way of “correcting” for the decline, though may be not defensible!”
Speak to us about the context of that.
[Response: Read the whole email. Osborn is using RegEM to do a reconstruction of temperature using his MXD tree ring data. The method as programmed by Tapio Schneider produces a record that is equal to the real temperature series where they exist and the imputed values elsewhere, for both the MXD data and the temperature reconstruction. If you don’t include MXD data post-1960, they will be imputed by the RegEM algorithm (based on correlations and covariance from where there are both sets of data). – gavin]
Hilariously, considering the JAXA IBUTU(?) satellite results, it seems that the West absorbs more CO2 than it emits already, so the >100% has already been achieved.
Jean Parisot says: (You know, about letting the Wall Street Journal they were listening to another Madoff.)
Well, I tried. Before I could find the correct link at WSJ.com to post your suggestion that the WSJ should see that the Science Is Not Settled, a compatriot beat me to it.
WSJ.com
Jeremy Poynton wrote: 8 minutes ago
He copied the entire article and it got online. The comments to Mann are a mite hostile, I must admit. Kinda like they were talking to Scrooge.
Merry Christmas, and any other holiday that makes you smile. Grampa.
John Garrett says:
December 5, 2011 at 8:08 am
Unbelievable— and here I thought Wall Street was the ground zero and citadel of hypocrisy.
I think you are being unjust to Wall Street. They may be many things but they are rarely hypocritical. They’re a bunch of smart guys who are unabashedly in pursuit of making loads of money and who have repeatedly demonstrated that they will do anything they can get away with to do it. When the government forced them to issue millions of mostly worthless subprime mortgages, they did what smart guys do, they found a way to make money off them. In the Congressional hearings in the aftermath of the 2008 debacle, one of the leading government regulators testified that as the derivatives market blossomed to the doom threatening level, they had all the legal authority they needed to bring it under control, but chose not to because their financial models, similar to climatic GCMs, showed a rising trend extending out to the horizon.
I doubt there are many of us who would not be more willing to engage in risky behavior with our money if the government allowed us to keep any profits but promised to cover any of our losses. BTW, for anyone who might want to believe that we are moving closer to resolving the world’s financial mess, I recommend going to the U. S. Debt Clock site
http://www.usdebtclock.org/#
Go to the lower half of the graphic and look at the number under “Currency and Credit Derivatives”. For those who have difficulty dealing with large numbers that’s $761 TRILLION, more than 15 times total global GDP. When the next cascade of defaults occurs there won’t be anything close to enough money in the whole wide wonderful world to stop it.
Reading all this good work done by diligent sceptics makes the AGW deceit very obvious but who else is reading it? I mean who else in a position to do something about it e.g. the Royal Society; they must be aware of what’s going on..
I sometimes feel like Kevin McCarthy at the end of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version). Thank God for WUWT – a refuge of sanity.
@Colin Porter December 5, 2011 at 9:12 am:
The real story is that climatology is a REALLY new scientific “discipline” (don’t choke on that word too much), and like any new science, it is in the period where it is still getting its feet under it. This is the period where they are supposed to be reporting to the public in terms like, “So far it seems that…” and “We are still piecing it together, and will know more later, as we solidify what we know.” Unlike other new sciences, climatology was accepted without having to prove itself, Immediately everyone in it was an expert. (By “immediately” I mean within the first 75 years.)
And with the “-ology” the public assumed since it wasn’t “astr” -ology, and that public pronouncements were solidly researched and vetted, not just something pulled out of people’s bums.
What they really needed to be doing was proving every way but Sunday that tree-rings are excellent proxies, and especially that the divergence problem (which underlay the “hide the decline” effort) was solved. And they needed to empirically test out the re-radiance issue of CO2, determine in 20 different studies WHAT the UHI for individual cities and towns are, and to prove the assumption about ice cores (that the ice in any one level has not been contaminated).
And most of all, they need to simply do studies that falsify forcings other than anthropogenic CO2 as the cause of whatever warming there is. And, after the CG2.0 emails, there is much more doubt that warming is even happening.
Right now it is a science based mostly on untested hypotheses, and they need to admit it. By pretending that the know things which are only guesses or assumptions, they are not only giving their own -ology a bad name, but science in general.
So, yes, it does appear that they “know fuck-all.” But at the same time, that is why science studies things – to get past that stage. Honesty helps.
Tim Osborne e-mail #2347
Also, we set all post-1960 values to missing in the MXD data set (due to decline)…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
What intrigues me is the “Decline” after 1960. Here is a “hopefully” accurate chart of temperature from “Continuous data” http://justdata.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/continuitybysectors1900-2009.jpg
There was more variability in the data before 1960 then after 1960
Here is one of the CAGW graphs of temp and CO2 http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/zFacts-CO2-Temp.gif
It shows an increase in CO2 of about 80 ppm. So how do trees response to an increase in CO2? They increase height and biomass. Increases in CO2 also mean more drought resistance. So why the heck would the trees used by Mann (Briffa) respond with a DECREASE in growth?
Response of spruce to 700 ppm CO2: http://www.co2science.org//subject/l/summaries/ltspruce.php
Another long term study shows a gradual increase of SHRUBS at the tree line, (Calif?) This may be the reason for the decline – COMPETITION! (Darn, I lost the reference @ur momisugly CO2science)
Also of interest:
(The elevation limit for shrubs would also change similarly to that of the tree line)
Cyclical Environmental Change Depicted in Lake Sediments of Northern Russia
…The last 2500 years of the sediment record was strongly indicative of fluctuating limnological conditions… http://www.co2science.org//articles/V7/N16/C2.php
A completely separate study showing the typical Warm and cool periods.
The more I have read of the CG2 emails, the more I view Mann as the bully in the clique of Climate Science. You can see it in how hard and unwavering his rebuttles are in those few instances where teammates raise a concern. He really comes off as being an anal orifice to those around him.
Couple that thought with the back channel, Mann not included, emails that flew around, sighting his errors in science and approach.
I guess to advance your career in Climate Science, you are required to toe the line according to Mike. That way you get to sit at the cool table in the cafeteria, you get recommended for good jobs.
I’ll bet the atmosphere in on the Team is pretty frosty now that their back-biting is coming to light. (see what I did there? that was punny)
Duster says:
December 5, 2011 at 11:39 am
Well said.
My family cuts 20 cord of wood every year, and has in the same wood bush since 1976, so I’m quite familiar with tree rings.
It was always fun as a kid to count back through and try to reconcile what the rings said with what our recollections of the weather was like. Of course, there was that year the eastern tent caterpillar ravaged the land, stripping trees so that June looked like November. I’m sure the scientists take stuff like this into account, right?
DCA says:
Speak to us about the context of that.
[Response: drivel from gavin]
Tut, Tut – gavin tries to defend the ‘not defensible’, but doesn’t do a very good job!