This will be a top sticky post for a day or two – new stories appear below this one.
In the over 7,000 published stories here on WUWT, I have never used the word “liar” in the headline to refer to CRU and the Yamal affair. That changes with this story.
I’ve always thought that with CRU, simple incompetence is a more likely explanation than malice and/or deception. For example, Phil Jones can’t even plot trends in Excel. In this particular case, I don’t think incompetence is the plausible explanation anymore. As one commenter on CA (Andy) said
“I suspect the cause of all this is an initial small lie, to cover intellectual mistakes, snowballing into a desire not to lose face, exacerbated by greater lies and compounded by group think. “
Given what I’ve witnessed and recalled from the history of the Yamal affair with Steve McIntyre’s latest investigation, I’m now quite comfortable applying the label of “liar” to the CRU regarding their handling of data, of accusations, and of FOIA.
In my opinion, these unscrupulous climate scientists at CRU deserve our scorn, and if UEA had any integrity, they’d be reprimanded and/or shown the door. But as we’ve seen with the handling of the Muir Russell sham “investigation”, key questions to key players weren’t even asked about key points of evidence. For example, Muir Russell didn’t even bother attending the one interview (April 9) in which Jones and Briffa were supposed to be asked about paleoclimate. So UEA/CRU will probably just try to gloss this over with another lie too. – Anthony Watts
McIntyre: Yamal FOI Sheds New Light on Flawed Data
Phil Jones’ first instinct on learning about Climategate was that it was linked to the Yamal controversy that was in the air in the weeks leading up to Climategate. I had speculated that CRU must have done calculations for Yamal along the lines of the regional chronology for Taimyr published in Briffa et al 2008. CRU was offended and issued sweeping denials, but my surmise was confirmed by an email in the Climategate dossier. Unfortunately neither Muir Russell nor Oxburgh investigated the circumstances of the withheld regional chronology, despite my submission drawing attention to this battleground issue.
I subsequently submitted an FOI request for the Yamal-Urals regional chronology and a simple list of sites used in the regional chronology. Both requests were refused by the University of East Anglia. I appealed to the Information Commissioner (ICO).
A week ago, the Information Commissioner notified the University of East Anglia that he would be ruling against them on my longstanding FOI request for the list of sites used in the Yamal-Urals regional chronology referred to in a 2006 Climategate email. East Anglia accordingly sent me a list of the 17 sites used in the Yamal-Urals regional chronology (see here). A decision on the chronology itself is pending. In the absence of the chronology itself, I’ve done an RCS calculation, the results of which do not yield a Hockey Stick.
In today’s post, I’ll also show that important past statements and evidence to Muir Russell by CRU on the topic have been either untruthful or deceptive.
The Relevance of Yamal
The Yamal chronology is relevant both because, since its introduction in 2000, it has been used in virtually all of the supposedly “independent” IPCC multiproxy studies (see an October 2009 discussion here) and because it is particularly influential in contributing an HS-shape to the studies that do not use bristlecones.
IPCC AR4 Box 6.4 showed the eight proxies which have been used the most repetitively (this wasn’t its intent.) Of these eight proxies, Briffa’s Yamal (labelled “NW Russia”) is shown with the biggest HS blade, larger even than Mann’s PC1 (labelled here as “W USA”). See here) and tag yamal.
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Figure 1. Yamal Chronology in IPCC AR4 Box 6.4. Labelled as “NW Russia”
In previous posts, I’ve satirized the “addiction” of paleoclimatologists to bristlecones and Yamal as, respectively, heroin and cocaine for climatologists. (In pharmacological terms, upside-down Tiljander would be, I guess, LSD, as the psychedelic Mann et al 2008 is indifferent as to whether proxies are used upside-down or not (cue Jefferson Airplane‘s insightful critique of Mannian statistics.)
Although Yamal and Polar Urals had been long-standing topics at Climate Audit, they first attracted wide attention in late September 2009, when measurement data became available for the three “regional chronologies” of Briffa et al 2008 (Taimyr-Avam, Tornetrask-Finland and Yamal).
The 2008 Taimyr-Avam and Tornetrask-Finland networks were dramatic expansions of the corresponding networks of Briffa (2000), but the Yamal network, which was already much smaller than the other two networks, remained unchanged. Analysis of the previously unavailable Taimyr data showed that Briffa had added measurement data from several Schweingruber sites into the Taimyr-Avam regional chronology (a point not mentioned in the article itself.) Since there were a number of Schweingruber sites (including Polar Urals) in a similarly sized region around Yamal, it seemed almost certain that CRU would have done a corresponding regional chronology calculation at Yamal.
This raised the obvious question of why. Ross posed the question in a contemporary op ed as follows:
Combining data from different samples would not have been an unusual step. Briffa added data from another Schweingruber site to a different composite, from the Taimyr Peninsula. The additional data were gathered more than 400 km away from the primary site. And in that case the primary site had three or four times as many cores to begin with as the Yamal site. Why did he not fill out the Yamal data with the readily-available data from his own coauthor? Why did Briffa seek out additional data for the already well-represented Taimyr site and not for the inadequate Yamal site?
The question applied not just to the Khadyta River site in the original CA post, but to Polar Urals and other nearby sites. These questions resulted in considerable controversy at the time. CRU protested their innocence and posted a lengthy response on October 29, 2009, denying that they had ever even “considered” use of the Schweingruber Khadyta River site, discussed in contemporary Climate Audit posts. In a submission to Muir Russell, they later denied ever re-appraising their Polar Urals chronology.
The Climategate dossier was released in November 2009, a few weeks after the Yamal controversy. As Fred Pearce observed in The Climate Files, the Climategate dossier begins with Yamal and ends with Yamal. Pearce also observed that the word “Yamal” occurs more often than any other “totem” of the disputes, even more than “hockey stick”. Nearly all Climategate documents with unbleached dates were copied after my Yamal posts and Yamal measurement data dominated the earliest documents.
The Climategate dossier revealed that CRU had, after all, calculated a Yamal-Urals regional chronology as early as April 2006. (CG1 – 684. 1146252894.txt). The present FOI request referred to this email.
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Read the entire story at Climate Audit here. It is a MUST READ for anyone who has been following Climategate.
My sincerest congratulations to Steve McIntyre for the perseverance to finally get this issue brought into the sunlight.
UPDATE: New visitors might need a primer for this story –
YAD06 – the Most Influential Tree in the World by Steve McIntyre
Sept. 30, 2009
http://climateaudit.org/2009/09/30/yamal-the-forest-and-the-trees/
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From before Climategate, I’d pretty much concluded that venality and megalomania were running rampant. After years of being rebuked by temporizing lukewarmistas, it’s nice to see the plain bare-faced obvious truth finally being acknowledged.
Peter K;
I use Ixquick / Startpage (alternate names) as an anonymous search engine, and got ~12K results in 0.31 seconds. The first is:
Early-on straight talk. Pity it wasn’t more widespread.
Heh. I see the WUWT filters haven’t been revised to accommodate this new awareness yet.
Brian H,
I appreciate the tip on your search engine. Google and its gathering of browsing data is beginning to get on my nerves. I had a link to a search engine based in Denmark, one which doesn’t keep any records of browsing histories.
Probably Roger enclosed his search argument in quotes and Peter didn’t.
So you’re saying that the invalidation of the Hockey Stick(s), thus showing that modern temps are absolutely within the “normal” range of the Holocene, was meaningless? Interesting. What do you think would be more meaningful in this debate?
Don’t miss Montford’s valuable summary of the Yamal issues…. it really makes me wonder about what was going on in the heads of Briffa, Jones, Mann, et al in the fall of 2009 just as the previous “crisis” about the Yamal data boiled, and in the period when someone we know only as “FOIA” decided to make the first Climategate release of emails:
Excellent Summary of Yamal Issues at Bishop Hill
@smokey (7:30 am)
I think you’re wrong about what “Upside Down Tiljander” means. Yes, there were two major events, in the latter part of the Tilajnder series, that created a FALSE SIGNAL in the lake sediments, but they did not completely invert those sediments. Apparently, they just added a whole lot of mineral component to individual layers of the sediments, thus making the percentage of organic matter look small.
This is the way Tiljander et al interpreted the data from their own work.
Warm periods result in 1) more growth of plants, and therefore more organic matter being produced on land, and therefore more organic matter being deposited in lake sediment (at least as a proportion to the total weight of sediments); and 2) Less Ice accumulation in the winter, and therefore less ice melt in the spring, and therefore less flow of water, and therefore less erosion of mineral soils by streams, and therefore less deposition of minerals in lake sediments (both in absolute terms, and as a proportion of total weight of sediments). So, for a combination of two reasons, both of them very reasonable, lake deposits laid down during warm periods will have a higher percentage of organic matter in them (they will also be thinner layers, strictly because of reason # 2 above).
However, Tiljander et al, apparently, could not measure the percentage of organic matter in the sediments directly. Instead they relied on the fact that sediments with a higher concentration of minerals have a higher “X-ray density” (I don’t quite understand what that means – did they shoot X-rays at the sediment and measure how much was absorbed, or do the sediments naturally EMIT X-rays, or what?) but they were clear that X-ray density, whatever that means, had a strong positive correlation to mineral content of the sediment layer, and therefore a strong NEGATIVE correlation to ORGANIC content of the sediment layer. And high organic content, as discussed in the previous paragraph, is associated with warm temperatures. Therefore, X-ray density, the actual thing that was being measured here, was NEGATIVELY correlated to temperature.
(By the way, I can’t remember who, but someone here commented that the entire Tiljander series was irrelevant because it was a proxy for WATER temperature, not air temperature. The preceding two paragraphs should clear that up for you. Even though the ultimate measurement is underwater, the events that influence the measurement happen on land. The Tiljander series IS, in fact, irrelevant, but not for that reason; see the next paragraph.)
Now, the explanation for the corruption of the Tiljander data, and the effect that it had. Two man-made events in the 1900s caused unusually thick layers, comprised of a high percentage of minerals. In 1930, peat ditching and forest clearance, and in 1967, the rebuilding of a bridge over part of the lake. Tiljander et al were well aware of these events, and of the fact that they caused a false signal in the data. There was a VERY high X-ray density during those two years (and somewhat lower X-ray density, but still well above the series average, throughout the last 70 years of the record). By the theoretical relationship between temperature and inorganic content of sediment, this would indicate lower temperatures during that period (and particularly low in 1930 and 1967), IF one did not throw out the last 70 years of the record as totally unusable. And that was exactly what Tiljander et al recommended, ignoring the post-1929 portion of the record, because those two events had made it worthless as a proxy for temperature.
Now, here’s where (I think) Mann erred. Somewhere in their paper, Tiljander et al published a graph of X-ray density in their lake sediments, with high values toward the top and low values toward the bottom, as is the standard. But remember that high X-ray density indicates low temperatures. Mann probably saw this graph and immediately recognized that it looked a lot like his own hockey-stick. But the only reason it looked anything like his hockey stick was the two events in the 1900s that artificially increased the mineral content of the sediments – without those events, it would have been pretty flat throughout the 20th century. He probably didn’t read the paper thoroughly, and never realized, until Steve pointed it out, that what he was actually seeing was an INVERSE temperature graph. If it proved anything (and because of the 20th-century disturbances, it did not), it was that temperatures FELL dramatically during the 20th century. But Mann, embarrassed by M&M’s thorough debunking of his treering-based hockey stick, and the resultant slap-on-the-wrist by the NAS, was desperate to cherry pick a hockey stick that didn’t depend on bristlecone pine trees. And Tiljander et al’s graph of X-ray density looked tailor-made, so he cherry-picked it (and likely gave it a huge weight in his analysis).
When Steve and others started pointing this out after Mann published, Mann took another look at the Tiljander paper and immediately realized that he had seriously screwed up. But instead of admitting his error, he claimed that he understood all along what the Tiljander data meant. He arrogantly used that line about multivariate regression, which meant basically, it really doesn’t matter which way McIntyre THINKS the relationship should work – I ran it through multivariate regression, and the sign of the coefficient came up positive, with a high t-ratio, and there was a high R-squared so it MUST be valid.
But there was nothing at all valid in Mann’s work. The dataset was hopelessly corrupted over the period of interest, and even then, actually showed the exact opposite of what he intended to show. Though we, on the skeptic side of the argument, don’t think CO2 has much influence on temperature, we at least acknowledge that the effect, if there is any, MUST be positive. NOONE recognizes a theoretical NEGATIVE effect of CO2 on temperature, or any physical mechanism by which this can be accomplished, yet that is exactly what Mann “proved”. Which is why Steve (correctly) points to this a prime example of a spurious relationship. No causal relationship in this direction can exist in the physical world, yet a statistical analysis makes the two seem related.
“Upside-down Tiljander” refers to the fact that, properly interpreted, the measured proxy (X-ray density) in the Tiljander lake sediments is INVERSELY proportional to the temperature, and therefore (if you believe that CO2 drives temperature) you would expect to see X-ray density go DOWN in recent decades, but Mann, unaware that he was really looking at a negative temperature proxy, cherry-picked the wrong data set, failed to realize he had to invert it, and (as expected) got another upturned hockey stick. (Actually, had Mann realized he had to invert Tiljander to get temperature, he would have just thrown out the dataset entirely, and would have eventually found another dataset that showed a hockey stick pointed in the right direction.)
Note that I’m oversimplifying Mann’s work. There were actually 19 different proxies used in the paper, and only 4 of them were the Tiljander data sets. But all four of them graphed as a hockey stick (when not properly inverted), while only one of the remaining 15 looked anything like a hockey stick. So there were 14 showing no hockey stick at all, one showing an upturned hockey stick, and four (if properly interpreted) showing an inverted hockey stick. So the straight average of the 19 proxies is a very-slightly bent (but definitely downwardly bent) hockey stick. So Mann’s paper, if it proves anything, proves global COOLING.
Seriously, sometimes I think Mann is really a mole for the SKEPTICS, intentionally coming up with research that is full of holes for the skeptics to expose, and acting as the very epitome of the arrogant scientist when challenged. With all due respect to Steve, Ross, Anthony, Jo Nova, Lord Monckton, etc., I don’t think anyone has done more to discredit CAGW than Mike Mann. Except perhaps the unknown Climategate leaker. Or Al Gore. I just hope the rest of the hockey team doesn’t figure it out and kick Mann off the team. Kinda hard to do, though, I guess, since he’s pretty much the team captain.
Regards
Trevor
Trevor,
I believe you’re mistaken. The human caused problems with tiljander made it correlate better to the calibration period when inverted. Mann’s comment that his algorithm was “invariant” to the sign of the predictor, or whatever he said, means that the algorithm automatically flips the series if it correlated better upside down. Mann knew it was effectively upside down and as usual used careful wording to avoid answering the question.
What I find amusing is the fact that the Yamal area sample was used to show Global warming and now Yamal is the area where huge gas fields are being exploted producing more CO2.
Strange old world isn’t it.
anybody know if CRU have responded to this?