Tom Nelson has another Climategate 2 email well worth reading
Dendrochronologists get spanked by guy with expertise in tree physiology and wood anatomy
“However, there are bounds to dendrochronology, as there are to every field of investigation, and the discipline has spilled over way outside of those bounds, to the point of absurdity.”
“What troubles me even more than the inexactness attending chronological estimates is how much absolute nonsense — really nothing but imaginative speculation — about the environment of the past is being deduced from tree rings and published in dendrochronology journals.”
“…but dendrochronology has persistently rejected walking the hard road, that of understanding the fundamental genetic and environmental factors controlling wood formation. As I see it, the peer review process in dendrochronology must be fundamentally flawed to allow such publications. Physiologist remain to build any real confidence in their ideas of how environmental factors influence tree ring formation, and dendrochronologists therefore are not at all justified in pretending that they do.
The bounds of dendrochronology will be extended, as will confidence in dendrochronological reports, when your group stops pretending that it knows the answers before it has done the needed research. Again, I am troubled by your group that it shows little humility, no genuine desire to discover the truth.”
The writer of this email:
UNB | Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management | Rod Savidge
Areas of expertise
Tree physiology
Wood anatomy
Plant
cell biology
==================================================
This, IMHO, is why Mann’s rendition of the hockey stick is unsupportable, its all speculation based. Anyone who knows Liebig’s Law understands this.
Mann’s tree reconstructions are known to be statistically crap, and even if they weren’t, the assumption that these trees primarily measure temperature is an absurd speculation.
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*Spanked*
From a very aptly named Dr Savidge…
Future generations will refer to the act of being called academically to account as “to be savidged” 🙂
Yet when these people try and speak up the response is inevitably “but he’s not a climate scientist”
I was given A.W.Montfords ‘The hockey stick illusion’ for Christmas, a cracking good read for anyone who doesn’t have it already. What with that, and the above post,it’s hard to imagine how there’s anyone left in the world who doesn’t know that the hockey stick is a stinking crock of…
HNY everyone! I hope everyone who comments here had a wonderful, peaceful, & happy holiday season with their family & friends 🙂
This is a very interesting post, & has enlightened me further on tree ring data. It’s nice to see such forthright opinion being expressed to a colleague!!!!
Here’s my question: Did Rod Savidge ever say any of this out loud? Did he make his views known publicly?
I don’t know the answer to my question but I’ll make the general observation that it seems like too many scientists have been too quiet when they see the warmists trashing real science. Statistics and dendro would be two obvious areas. The consensus would seem a lot less consensusy if all of the objections to and problems with the shoddy science of the Team would be aired in public. It shocks me that they’ve gotten practically a free ride for 20 years. Other scientists need to stick up for their disciplines in public and call out shoddy science when it appears. The stakes are too high not to.
Healthy skeptical opinion from a professional scientist, I bet that didn’t go down well at the time.
I’ve always thought that the climate science community have been using dendrochronology in much the same was as a drunk uses a lamp-post, more for support than illumination.
Thwack!
Next up: Alarmists start investigating whether Savidge is connected to Big Oil.
Like building a Caribbean Cruise Ship with ice blocks. What a fantastic sight–what a spectacular and inevitable demise.
Tree runs rings round Mann.
What a sap.
Sorry, it’s all the whisky at ne’re’day ……………………. .
All Warmists reading this will be doing so with their heads deeply buried in the sand!
Sadly no rebuttals will be seen because the Manns, Jones’ and Hansens are in denial in order to gain their beloved Grant monies.
Interesting that the recipient of the ire is the owner of a company, DendroPower, which develops software for modelling relationships between climate change and tree growth.
I wonder whether a few folks would comment on whether historical proxy data can distinguish between the following:
EXAMPLE:
Winter temperature 0C
Spring temperature 12C
Summer temperature 18C
Autumn temperature 10C
Average annual temperature 10C
and:
Winter temperature 4C
Spring temprature 10C
Summer temperature 16C
Autumn temperature 10C
Average annual temperature 10C.
if plant growth is affected by:
i. A need for winter cold to rechargethe batteries.
ii. A mild/warm spring to promote pollination
iii.A warm and sufficiently rainy summer to promote growth.
I am asking these questions not because I know the answers but because it is important to make folks aware if seasonal temperatures, as opposed to annual ones, are critical for growth; as well as seasonal, not annual, rainfall.
After all, if these spats are going to take place publicly, best if the contextual information is also made equally available, eh?
MIchael Mann, Briffa and co.should have taken the legitimate criticisms by John L Daly of the Cook et al study of the Tasmanian Huon Pine as an early warning to be far more diligent and circumspect before they tried on their “hide the decline” Hockey Stick tree ring shenanigans!
“This CO2-enhanced growth is quite independent of temperature.
Personal communication with three of the authors, (Trevor Bird, 20-Jan-93, Mike Peterson and Brendan Buckley 24-Jan-93), confirmed that no allowance or correction had been made for CO2 enrichment. Cook et al attributed the recent huon pine growth entirely to greenhouse-induced warming and no part of their paper made any mention of the strong likelihood that the recent growth may have been caused wholly, or even partly, by increased CO2 fertilization from rising atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The Cook et al study was interesting in it’s treatments of climates over the last 1,000 or so years, but by pandering to the global warming scare in such an unscientific manner, the rest of their work was largely overshadowed. It is not only the Cook team who lacked scientific rigour in their tree study (insofar as it related to the late 20th century), but part of the blame for such bad science should also attach to the reviewers of the paper and to the editors of `Science’ journal itself for accepting such fashionable, but also unsupported, claims so uncritically.”
http://www.john-daly.com/huonpine.htm
Ouch. Spanked with a very big wood thing with leaves.
This has a ring of truth to it. Sorry. Bad pun.
It always seemed weird to me that the climate reconstructions I saw from 1960 until Mann et al showed an MWP and an LIA. Then Mann comes along with an entirely rewritten history of civilization, and no one is supposed to notice. I have been stunned by the accepting naivete of scientists who assume the peer review process was due diligence in vetting the rats from the system. Mann et al belong in prison.
That is the central reason why the Hockey Stick Theory is utterly unsupportable. Trees != thermometers from the past. Additionally trees from one small location != representation of global conditions of climate.
The whole proxy temperature record taken from measuring tree rings is completely bogus and not even worthy of serious consideration as a high school science project. The fact that entire national budgets, at a time of USA + EU austerity, could be collapsed on the back of this crap is truly terrifying.
Are there any rational adults left? How have we become so dumbed down, and so passive as to have allowed these extremist reality deniers get a grip on power?
Wow. Interesting find, thanks for bringing it to our attention: “Climategate 2 – the gift that keeps on giving… ;-D
So again – this is an answer expressed to a few people – but thereafter we’ve heard nothing in the public on this topic (the lack of a fundamental basis for these assertions) for whatever reason….. I wonder what this guy thinks now following release of these emails?
If there is even a half-decent journalist out there, here’s a great story… Just interviewing the guy would be a great start….
I seem to recall numerous comments here over the years questioning the validity of using tree ring width as a proxy for atmospheric temperature. Many commenters proposed that other factors were probably more important to the growth of a tree…like rainfall for example, or even wild animals relieving themselves on the base of the tree.
So what would we know?
“Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree” !……….
…………..So what would we know?
After clicking on the link and reading the email thread, near the bottom is this chestnut from the alarmist,
“Surely that is a good thing to do, but while you are going about doing
>that, we have wonderful opportunities to help people manage our earth
>more kindly and realistically. We think these kinds of questions are
>equally important, if not more important as we are likely to destroy our
>planet unless we learn quickly what the trees have to say about our
>past. Even though you disbelieve that we can read the earth’s history
>from tree rings, we have our part to play in the scientific world. Yes
>we need to learn from people like you, but fortunately few scientists
>consider us as ignorant and out of communication with “true” science as
>you.”
Which basically means,
“No we haven’t done the actual experimental research and that would be neat, but there are other uninformed scientists who already believe our crap, so we do not have just justify ourselves to a real tree expert who can see through our crap.
Good day.”
The Hockey team should do jail time for fraud!
Man savaged…
To the tune of ‘Modern Major General’
By Gilbert and Sullivan (Pirates of Penzance)
I am the very model of a modern climatologist
I’m partly statistician, partly palaeo-phrenologist
I’ve temperature readings from thermometers coniferous
my data are the same (or not, well, maybe) as Keith Briffa has
I bought them from a bloke who brought them hotfoot from Siberia
and mixed them with some algae from the mud in Lake Superior.
When counting different isotopes I’m really in my element
and sucking up to journalists from Guardian Environment
I know what makes the treerings from Siberia to the Rockies tick
And I can make spaghetti and transform it to a hockeystick.
My data’s got dark matter that would shatter a cosmologist
I am the very model of a modern climatologist
H/T Geoff Chambers
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/4/9/the-modern-climatologist.html
Ouch!
kcom (January 3, 2012 at 3:40 am) asked if dendrochronologists have ever openly criticized Mann.
Well, Steve McIntyre’s experience suggests they have not…
http://climateaudit.org/2008/10/15/the-silence-of-the-lambs/
This email could be hugely significant, as it blows away Mann’s hokey schtick in just a few sentences.
I hope someone could ask Savidge for his permission to shout his email from the rooftops – it needs to be sent to that useless idiot Chris Huhne for a start, as he’s determined to ruin our economy here in the UK with his useless ‘green’ initiatives.
Oh, one more thing: c’mon Rattus, how can you wriggle out of this slaying of The Team(tm), their useless ‘science’, and therefore the whole AGW crock?