McIntyre gets some new Yamal data – still no hockey stick

Steve McIntyre writes:

Yesterday, I received updated Yamal data (to 2005) from Rashit Hantemirov, together with a cordial cover note. As CA and other readers know, Hantemirov had also promptly sent me data for Hantemirov and Shiyatov in 2002. There are 120 cores in the data set, which comes up to 2005. I’ve calculated a chronology from this information – see below.

How interesting it is that the Hantemirov data in green, diverges from the CRU 2008 “Hockey Team” data in red. No wonder they had to “hide the decline”. The trees lie!

Give it up fellows, your cover’s blown.

I was going to run a larger excerpt of Steve’s latest post, but these two comments on the thread seem to sum it up pretty well.

morebrocato: Posted May 15, 2012 at 9:29 AM

It is utterly fascinating to me to see that Steve McIntyre and the folks at RealClimate have essentially the same rundown of events, yet in the way it’s presented and framed, you’d think they have nothing in common.

You state:

“A URALS regional chronology had been calculated as of April 2006. This was a version of the regional chronology which remained unchanged for many years” and then he ‘concludes’: “The regional chronology has not been a “work in progress” for years.”

But the reply is:

This is a very clear statement that of what he thinks (or rather he thinks he knows). But the reality of science is that finished products do not simply spring out of the first calculation one does.

So it’s absolutely true that this whole ‘late-night-at-the-office’ thing was indeed had by the Briffa et al researchers when the new data came in, and it could be assumed that they did (as you say, “99.9%”) similar calculations (the differences are meaningless) that perhaps showed identical results to your charts posted here and earlier regarding the wider regional Urals-Yamal data set.

So then, when Steve McIntyre sees the results of the ‘insta-reconstruction’ he immediately throws it out there… (one camp says this is the ‘a-ha’ moment of voluminous data, the other says ‘not-so fast’).

People generally try something, find something wrong, try something else, fix one problem, test something else, deal with whatever comes up next, examine the sensitivities, compare with other methods etc. etc. All of those steps contribute to the final product, and it is clear that the work on this reconstruction is indeed ongoing.

So the question then becomes… What gave the original researchers the idea that there’s something wrong with the data, rather than thinking this new data instead challenged their original findings? I suppose we’ll see the flags that were raised when the actual paper comes out in October (which will be a fascinating thing itself), but it could boil down to simply the thought that the presently measured temperature record (and its recent HS shape) should either be matched in the cores, or there may then need steps to be taken to refine the sample in an Esper-ian Mann-er.

In my head, isn’t that the only way they could come up with the idea that it’s going to take ‘too much time’ to go through the data? Otherwise, why do the initial ‘insta-reconstruction’ in the first place if you know in advance the large number of samples are going to need to be filtered.

When it finally comes out, it will be interesting to see if these same methodologies described in that paper were applied to the smaller Yamal area/cores. Perhaps they won’t be because of an ascribed anomalously high value of the site itself in supplying unvarnished windows into regional temperature. But, whatever that site selection methodology is, it still would then have to be applied to the other sites in the regional chronology (though it is on record in at least one place that on site-selection alone the Khyadyta River passes muster).

To continue…

For an analogous example, the idea that the first simulation from a climate model would be a finished product is laughable – regardless of the existence of that original output file. It would obviously be part of the work in progress. Although science is always in a work in progress in some sense, it is punctuated by milestones related to the papers that get published. They stand as the marker of whether a stage has been reached where something can be considered finished (though of course, it is always subject to revision).

My thought here (which I’ve been having a lot lately), is when new science revises and/or corrects old science, there should be some sort of acknowledgement of an incorrect or unadvisable procedure from a previous paper that henceforth should be avoided– included in the new stuff, no? It could/should be easy to say that the original MBH paper relied on substandard data and/or methodologies— particularly when corrected in future ‘milestone’ publications come out, regardless if they ‘confirm’ the original. It would be great for climate science communication if this happened, but unfortunately there’s too much poison in the well because only folks like Steve McIntyre figured out ‘publicly’ what all the climate scientists were conversing about often (in the climategate emails). The same thing could be said about the early Yamal papers.

I guess scientists have at least some right to hold onto their own data until their ready to publish it, and Gavin may be right about the ‘insta-reconstruction’ not constituting ‘adverse results’ that went unreported, but that depends on what comes out as the grand dendro methodology we’re all waiting for. But, in all this, it begs the question of why bother publishing the 2008/9 paper on Yamal? Even the researchers themselves would have known that that paper was near irrelevant compared to what the larger regional chronology would say when they ever got it done. For all the talk that NW Siberian dendrochronologies are such minor players in modern Climate Science, there certainly seems to be quite an apetite for even re-hashing that data occasionally while the Big One is tinkered with back at the lab.

In summary, McIntyre is wrong in his premise, wrong in his interpretation, and wrong in his accusations of malfeasance. – gavin]

It’s like there’s a “Connect the dots” game going on, but at the same time, it’s an M.C. Escher drawing or some optical device…

“A ha! I have found a rabbit! No, you idiot… You’re staring right at a duck”.

To Gavin’s credit, in situations like these it’s best to award the benefit of the doubt to the scientists themselves who are describing their own work/motives. However, they do have a high burden of explanation for their methodology.

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Nosmo King Posted May 15, 2012 at 9:33 AM

It must be really humiliating to “The Team” that they, with their grants and tenured positions, are getting eaten alive by Steve and a few others — the real scientists in the discussion — who work for the love of the truth and not much else.

Keep up the amazing work, Steve! You may not think of it in these terms, but you are doing a huge service to millions of people who, without your noble efforts, might fall victim to the tyranny of what it is the warmists are truly trying to achieve.

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Read Steve McIntyre’s latest here

UPDATE: Richard Baguley of the UK writes to me to advise of this post on Suyts Space, which is quite interesting:

Why Are Dendro Shafts So Straight?

I am perpetually flabbergasted at the outright denial of scientific facts by alarmists.  When I comment on alarmist blogs and the conversation turns to dendrochronology, I point out the facts that bristlecone pines have a very limited temperature growth range.  I’ll include a picture from the Treering Society(pdf).  The reason for this is two fold.  One, to demonstrate the very narrow range of the growth in terms of temps and time (the right side of the graphic) and then 2) to give the people with biology backgrounds something to mull over what this graphic is actually stating, which I’ll get to after my main point. (and how it relates to the left side)

We see that we have no lower bounds (or upper for that matter) of the regional temps.  So, the sensitivity to temps are constrained within this narrow margin of time and temps.  Even if all of the other factors going into tree growth were quantified to such an exacting purpose as to be able to pick up on a few 1/10ths of a degree (they are not) the physical limitations of growth means we would see see a flattening in the plotting of temperatures.  No extremes could be plotted because the trees are incapable of divining such a signal.

He goes on to demonstrate how – well worth a read here.