This post will be a sticky top post for a day or two, new stories will appear below this one.
By Andrew Montford & Harold Ambler
May 24, 2012 4:00 A.M. in the National Review – reposted here with permission
Climategate, the 2009 exposure of misconduct at the University of East Anglia, was a terrible blow to the reputation of climatology, and indeed to that of British and American science. Although that story hasn’t been in the news in recent months, new evidence of similar scientific wrongdoing continues to emerge, with a new scandal hitting the climate blogosphere just a few days ago.
And central to the newest story is one of the Climategate scientists: Keith Briffa, an expert in reconstructing historical temperature records from tree rings. More particularly, the recent scandal involves a tree-ring record Briffa prepared for a remote area of northern Russia called Yamal.
For many years, scientists have used tree-ring data to try to measure temperatures from the distant past, but the idea is problematic in and of itself. Why? Because tree-ring data reflect many variables besides temperature. Russian tree growth, like that of trees around the world, also reflects changes in humidity, precipitation, soil nutrients, competition for resources from other trees and plants, animal behavior, erosion, cloudiness, and on and on. But let’s pretend, if only for the sake of argument, that we can reliably determine the mean temperature 1,000 years ago or more using tree cores from a remote part of Russia. The central issue that emerges is: How do you choose the trees?
It was the way Briffa picked the trees to include in his analysis that piqued the interest of Steve McIntyre, a maverick amateur climatologist from Canada. The Climategate e-mails make it clear that McIntyre earned the public scorn of the most powerful U.N. climatologists, including James Hansen, Michael Mann, and Phil Jones, while simultaneously earning their fear and respect in private.
McIntyre noticed a few problems with the way Briffa chose the sampling of Russian trees, and he wrote to Briffa requesting the data Briffa used in a published tree-ring paper. Briffa declined. And so began a four-year saga involving multiple peer-reviewed journals, behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Briffa and his closest confidants, and a Freedom of Information Act request on the part of McIntyre that appears to be on the verge of being granted. Even without the final set of data, however, McIntyre has shown beyond the shadow of doubt that Briffa may have committed one of the worst sins, if not the worst, in climatology — that of cherry-picking data — when he assembled his data sample, which his clique of like-minded and very powerful peers have also used in paper after paper.
It was already known that the Yamal series contained a preposterously small amount of data. This by itself raised many questions: Why did Briffa include only half the number of cores covering the balmy interval known as the Medieval Warm Period that another scientist, one with whom he was acquainted, had reported for Yamal? And why were there so few cores in Briffa’s 20th century? By 1988, there were only twelve cores used in a year, an amazingly small number from the period that should have provided the easiest data. By 1990, the count was only ten, and it dropped to just five in 1995. Without an explanation of how the strange sampling of the available data had been performed, the suspicion of cherry-picking became overwhelming, particularly since the sharp 20th-century uptick in the series was almost entirely due to a single tree.
The intrigue deepened when one of the Climategate e-mails revealed that, as far back as 2006, Briffa had prepared a much more broadly based, and therefore more reliable, tree-ring record of the Yamal area. But strangely, he had decided to set this aside in favor of the much narrower record he eventually used.
The question of Yamal had rightly come up when Briffa was questioned by Climategate investigators. He told them that he had never considered including a wider sample than the one he went with in the end, and hadn’t had enough time to include a wider one. However, the specific issue of the suppressed record appears to have largely been passed over by the panel, and Briffa’s explanation, like so many others given to the Climategate inquiries, appears to have been accepted without question.
But the ruse has now been shot to pieces, by the recent decision from the U.K.’s information commissioner that Briffa can no longer withhold the list of sites he used in his suppressed regional record for the Yamal area. The disclosure of these sites has allowed McIntyre to calculate what the broad series would have looked like if Briffa had chosen to publish it. He has shown that it has no hint of the hockey-stick shape that Briffa’s cherry-picked data indicated.
Two and a half years after the initial revelation of the Climategate e-mails, new controversies, on the part of the scientists and the investigators involved, continue to emerge. Many of the players involved are desperate to sweep the scandal under the rug. However, their machinations have only succeeded in bringing renewed attention to their questionable science and ugly behind-the-scenes shenanigans, reigniting hope that more complete and more independent investigations — on both sides of the Atlantic — will yet be performed.
— Andrew Montford is the author of The Hockey Stick Illusion and the proprietor of the Bishop Hill blog. Harold Ambler is the author of Don’t Sell Your Coat and the operator of the blog talkingabouttheweather.com.
lazyteenager;
I was under the impression that the trees chosen for analysis were geographically situated to avoid these kinds of extraneous influences and to be especially sensitive to temperature only.>>>>
Could you please describe the conditions and/or evolution that would result in a tree being insensitive to changes in precipitation? Pestilence? Disease? Animals foraging? Late frost?
And also, could you explain how the sensistivity to winter temperatures is incorporated into the tree rings?
The Cause is greater than the sum of the parts.
Indeed this is the case, but they do not avoid these issues they merely attempt to select trees that minimise rhe extraneous influences. The problem being that since we are talking about historical data no one can know if temperature is the ONLY influence even at these trees (usually on the tree line). The much bigger issue however is the selection of trees in your analysis. Any statistician will tell you that in doing your survey you either sample all the trees at the location of interest, which is usually not possible,or you take a random sample. What you do not do as a scientist is randomly sample the trees, analyse the data and then select only those trees that give you the “right” answer.
There has been no explanation from the scientists on this team as to why YAD061 was uniquely selected out of all the other trees in that area to build the chronology, and therefore the supposition must be, in the absence of any other plausible explanation, that it was because it was the only one that gave the right answer.
If you are a climate scientist and having difficulty with this: imagine a drug trial in which 10% of the cohort died from side effects, 89% showed no change and 1% were cured. If the drug company based its FDA submission on the 1% (ignoring the other 99%) would you think this was a) sensible b) understandable or c) fraudulent
LazyTeenager, if that’s the case, which it is, then the main core of the methodology (and analysis/discussion) made out by Briffa should have dealt with such matters. If I understand Muntford (and McIntyre) correctly, Briffa holds his cards rather close to his chest in that respect.
We’ll never get a unbiased inquiry from the cli-sci community. They can’t. They’ve already cast their lots.
By their advocacy, they’ve caused unspeakable harm. They will either convince the world of their madness, or they’ll stand trial for their crimes against humanity. Here is just one of the many things alrarmists bring us….. my apologies to the people who typed this before me….. https://suyts.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/these-animals-are-committing-crimes-against-humanity/
Andrew – “the most important event that will actually initiate legal restitution by aggrieved persons/corporations/governments for losses
Wholeheartedly agree!
Perhaps some of the very knowledgeable and astute readers can help us understand what the linkage back to these debunked statements are, and how the policy decisions, and other generally fraudulent transaction that lead on from them can be attacked?
It seems to me that hurting them in the pocket is a direct response to them lining them in the first place. Any comments?
@lazyteenager “Geographically situated”? LMAO!! Man, were YOU sold a bill of goods…. He he he he… Now, I know that you are a LAZY teenager, but you should consider changing your nom-de-plume to CRAZY teenager, because if you really think that humidity, precipitation, soil nutrients, competition for resources from other trees and plants, animal behavior, erosion, cloudiness and MORE can be CHOSEN, you are some kind of nut. Are your heroes Tree Whisperers? heh.
LazyTeenager says:
May 24, 2012 at 11:12 pm
” I was under the impression that the trees chosen for analysis were geographically situated to avoid these kinds of extraneous influences and to be especially sensitive to temperature only.”
And you believed them???
gregole –
the MSM, including the CAGW gatekeepers, Revkin, Black et al, have all ignored the entire McIntyre/Yamal revelations. even people with no scientific education like me are now able to at least partly grasp the meaning and importance of McIntyre’s analyses.
Bish – and his humourful offsider Josh – have helped in the translation. many thanx as ever to WUWT and all who participate in this investigation of a malicious, nihilistic, scientific hoax, whose very name – CAGW – is taboo in scientific, political and mainstream media circles.
@lazy teenager
That idea is part of the supposed theoretical basis of dendroclimatology.
But (like so much of climatology) it has never been experimentally shown to be the case. It is simply a matter of faith.
It is a difficult argument to make that an individual tree, purely by virtue of its geographical position, will somehow lose all its genetic capability to respond to all the other variables that are otherwise strong influences apart from temperature. It’s an even harder argument to make that, even if the former were true that the tree growth would exactly match – and be determined in exactly the same way as – the climatologists choose to calculate average temperature.
WRT your disobliging comment about Montford..(with a ‘d’, not a ‘t’)
It might help if you arose from your lethargy and read his next sentence. Whether the tree rings respond as claimed or not is not the central point of the narrative. How only a very small amount of the available data was chosen to be used…thereby overemphasising the contribution of one single anomalous tree.
Montford knows this stuff very well…you can read his excellent book ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’ for a thorough and scholarly exposition of dendroclimatology and the whole sad and shabby story of the HS saga of which the Yamal controversy is a part.
And it is the fact of the anomalous behaviour of the tree in question (see graphs above) that shows that the idea of position leading to only a temperature influence is at best an over-simplification. Because whatever it is that YAD061 is responding to..it is not the same as its near neighbours. It cannot be temperature alone.
And on a purely anecdotal level I note that the recent few days of warm weather in SE England have produced bounteous growth in my garden…trees included. But it is the six weeks of pouring rain that preceded the last three days that have had just as much influence as the temperature today.
Some of the Climategate emails are worth reading agin here. Remember, you can search for Climategate grepper then enter the email number.
1483.txt
date: Mon Nov 3 18:28:04 1997
from: Keith Briffa
to: Tom Wigley
thanks for the info. Actually this is a chance for me to to mention that we have for the last few months at least, been reworking the idea of looking in the Schweingruber network data for evidence of increasing tree growth and hence ,potentially at least, evidence of changing tree(read biomass) uptake of carbon.
The results are dramatic – not to say earth shattering because they demonstrate major time-dependent changes – but changes that are consistent in different areas of the network. We have regionalised over 350 site collections , each with ring width and density data , age-banded the data so that we look only at relative growth in similar ages of trees through time and recombined the standardisd curves to produce growth changes in each region. Basically growth is roughly constant (except for relatively small climate variablity forcing) from 1700 to about 1850. It then increases linearly by about up until about 1950 after which time young ( up to 50 year old) basal area explodes but older trees remain constant . The implication is a major increase in carbon uptake before the mid 20th century – temperatue no doubt partly to blame but much more likely to be nitrate/Co2 . Equally important though is the levelling off of carbon uptake in the later 20th century. This levelling is coincident with the start of a density decline – we have a paper coming out in Nature documenting the decline . In relative terms (i.e. by comparison with increasing summer temperatures) the decline is represented in the ring width and basal area data as a levelling off in the long-timescale inrease ( which you only see when you process the data as we have). The density data do not show the increase over and above what you expect from temperature forcing.
I have been agonising for months that these results are not some statistical artifact of the analysis method but we can’t see how. For just two species (spruce in the western U.S. Great Basin area and larch in eastern Siberia) we can push the method far enough to get an indication of much longer term growth changes ( from about 1400) and the results confirm a late 20th century apparent fertilization! The method requires standardizing (localized mean subtraction and standard deviation division) by species/age band so we reconstruct relative (e.g. per cent change) only .
We have experimented with integrating the different signals in basal area and density(after extracting intra ring ring width and density data where available) within a ‘flat mass’ measure which shows a general late 20th century increase – but whether this incorporates a defensible relative waiting on the different components (and what the relative carbon components are) is debatable. We now need to make some horrible simplistic assumptions about absolute carbon in these (relatively small) components of the total biomass carbon pool and imlpications for terrestrial and total carbon fluxes over the last few hundred years – and beyond! Without these implications we will have difficulty convincing Nature that this work is mega important.
There are problems with explaining and interpreting these data but they are by far the best produced for assessing large scale carbon-cycle-relevant vegetation changes – at least as regards well-dated continous trends. I will send you a couple of Figures ( a tiny sample of the literally hundreds we have) which illustrate some of this. I would appreciate your reaction. Obviously this stuff is very hush hush till I get a couple of papers written up on this. We are looking at a moisture sensive network of data at the moment to see if any similar results are produced when non-temperature-sensitive data are used. You would expect perhaps a greater effect in such data if Co2 acts on the water use efficiency .
……………………………………
Tom Wigley was having trouble with the troops at this time. Read the whole of this one – just a para given here from 0880476729.txt
“When scientists color the science with their own PERSONAL views or make
categorical statements without presenting the evidence for such
statements, they have a clear responsibility to state that that is what
they are doing. You have failed to do so. Indeed, what you are doing is,
in my view, a form of dishonesty more subtle but no less egregious than
the statements made by the greenhouse skeptics, Michaels, Singer et al. I
find this extremely disturbing.
Tom Wigley”
He was writing to a team of 11, which was mainly of germanic origin with a couple of anglosaxon acolytes, under the header “Invitation to Influence Kyoto”.
Jan Goudriaan, Hartmut Grassl, Klaus Hasselmann, Jill Jäger, Hans Opschoor, Tim O’Riordan, Martin Parry, David Pearce, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, Wolfgang Seiler, Pier Vellinga.
Poems are made by fools like me, but only Mann can fake a tree
Lazy Teenager
I visited the library of our local Norman Cathedral last week in order to research original material fior an article i am writing on the 13th and 14th century climate in England.
I was intrigued by the tree ring report I saw dated 1999. Detailed below are my notes on this;
“Tree rings-Saw two reports from a Government organisation undated but probably from around 1999/2000
Tree rings in Cathedral to be dated and measured against English template from Midlands dated from 882 to 1810. Two graphs drawn. Earliest records 1810-low and 1820 high. Great peaks-favourable weather around 1825 to 1855
Low points around 1860. Similar sets of peaks 1875 to 1890. Little variation from then until the last record taken from trees around 1975. (see my hand drawn graph)
All above taken from timbers from Law library and 2 other cathedral buildings. Similar set taken from timbers of Archdeacons house dates from 1186 to 1404. The report seems primarily concerned with dating of timbers but mentions broad and narrow rings as representing climatic conditions-but notes younger trees such as oaks grow differently to older ones and that local conditions affect them greatly.
Also depends on growing season-April to October here but differs elsewhere. Good growing seasons have relatively wide rings, poor growing seasons have very narrow rings and average rings in average years. Accurate to around 40 years.
See books ‘Tree ring dating and archaeology (bailie 1982) or ‘A slice through time’ (bailie 1995)
Obviously at that time tree rings were considered primarily as a tool for dating timbers and the climatic information was secondary and imprecise.”
Notes End
I had always been under the impression that tree rings were intended primarily for dating but could give some general pointers on the generalties of a growing season such as the moisture levels.The date of the report-from a quasi Government Agency dovetails with the timing of MBH98 which catapulted tree rings into a sphere they were never intended to inhabit-that of being a temperature proxy accurate to fractions of a degree.
Whether this promotion to the top league of science was solely precipitated by the Hockey stick/IPCC reports or whether there had been a general growing tendancy to use tree rings beyond their original purpose of dating, perhaps someone here has the background knowledge to tell me.
tonyb
Looks like a bad weekend for the ‘team’.
LazyTeenager says:
May 24, 2012 at 11:12 pm
“I was under the impression that the trees chosen for analysis were geographically situated to avoid these kinds of extraneous influences and to be especially sensitive to temperature only.”
Aside from the difficulty in finding a tree that doesn’t respond to changes in water and nutrient supply there is an obvious error in your impression.
One tree is very different from the others. Therefore either:
1 These trees are not indicative of temperature over their region and so certainly can’t be extrapolated over the world.
or
2 There were chosen for the exact opposite reason than the one you thought.
Personally, I suspect the one tree that grew more than the others was the benficiary of an ursine nutrient deposit and that Briffa is lacks the technical expertise that permits an understanding of the probability of such an event.
This information is so important. Not just for putting the record straight but for proving CAGW is purely a political card to tax and control. This should be bread and butter to the MSM, they love a good tear-down political story. So where the F*** are they? I know there are some reporters out there doing their best. The rest of them need a good kick in the pants.
Earlier I had said that mann and schmidt had thrown briffa under the bus. I was clearly wrong… it was a logging truck.
LazyTeenager says:
May 24, 2012 at 11:12 pm
” I was under the impression that the trees chosen for analysis were geographically situated to avoid these kinds of extraneous influences and to be especially sensitive to temperature only.”
They were also chosen for their ability to “teleconnect
Keith (One Tree) Briffa. I wonder he still has a job. Other Climategate Emails showed that Briffa did not collect the data himself but relied on some Russian scientists to do the tree cores. I believe they were concerned that such a small sample of their data set was used.
@Tex
And not forgetting John Daly (Still waiting for the Greenhouse), who’s dearh was greeted as “cheering news” by Phil Jones (http://www.burtonsys.com/FOIA/1075403821.txt)
I found this part interesting: “and the results confirm a late 20th century apparent fertilization! “
Above “Don’t know whether to suggest sticky post anymore as this story will surely be developing rapidly but still the most important (concrete) event that will actually (be able to) initiate legal restitution by aggrieved persons/corporations/governments for losses”
This is why MSM won’t touch it, especially Revkin etc.(although RC has commented I must say)
This is REALLY weird
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/05/fresh-hockey-sticks-from-the-southern-hemisphere/
especially since RECORDED temperatures by GISS, CRU SST and UAH in the SH have not risen in the last 50 years especially in Australia. This is no doubt a fabricated paper in response to Yamal LOL This could really prove to be a MAJOR embarrassment to the TEAM
Just because you don’t like the data, you don’t get to ignore it as “invalid”.
And here I was thinking that science was about others trying to replicate your work. Why are Warmists so baffled that we remain sceptical despite the alleged mountain of ‘scientific evidence’?
Phil Jones reply to Warwick Hughes
Hide the decline, I’ll hide behind that, FOIA and so on…………This is the closed science of climate research.