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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.
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The first comment on this post by Rhoda R sums up the fundamental issue:
Virtually the entire AGW or ACC scientific basis is flawed because the basics are flawed, and seriously flawed.
As an analogy, computer systems depend on the lowest level and build on it (ie. hardware interface, I/O, graphics cards, etc.). I write code in a high-level language that depends on the function and security of the low-level code. If there is a flaw in the low level code then all the work I put into the high level stuff will fall apart. But low-level computer code can be fixed, which would likely not break the high level code.
The difference between something like computer programming or other engineering endeavors as opposed to climate “science” is that they can’t “fix” the fundamental low-level flaws without completely starting over. In engineering you can trace back all of your steps and test each section separately, however with theory you have to build your new theories on old ones. If all the intermediate steps were testable and verifiable, fine. However, in climate “science” the earliest steps are flawed, and a group of people are obfuscating the flaws and actively defending against the discovery of the problems.
Simply repairing the hockey stick flaws will not make everything that has been done since then suddenly work, because repairing the Yamal problem makes the entire theory (hypothesis, conjecture, whatever) disappear. All of the work done since would be shown to be faulty and incorrect. An obvious analogy at this point would be the work done on Piltdown Man… where is it today? It too was based on flawed initial work, or in that case, fabricated. Take away the base and the entire house of cards collapses. And don’t kid yourself, theoretical sciences ARE houses of cards.
People who actually care about Science with a capital S are more concerned about getting it right than their personal beliefs, passions, and environmental or political wishes. This is why so many of “us” are incensed by the entire Yamal and hockey stick debacle.
Maybe human emissions of CO2 are harmful, maybe they’re not. Those who believe they are can only argue from faith, because the “science” has been shown quite convincingly to be fundamentally flawed, and therefore useless.
Mann and Briffa believe they are unfairly targeted by “skeptics”, and that is their basic problem. All anyone is asking for is the same kind of proofs and transparency that would be expected in any other scientific endeavor, and that has not been forthcoming, in fact it has been evaded and stonewalled.
I am a “skeptic”, but not by choice. Again, I started my own investigation into AGW with the belief that we were harming our planet. However, my search for convincing evidence turned up nothing credible, and much that is NOT credible. And yeah, I’m FURIOUS at the Yamal issue, because it has seriously damaged the public’s faith in Science, and will continue to do so until it is resolved.
Lazy Teenager says:
“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.”
So now that you know how Briffa and the Team really choose their data, are the scales finally falling from your eyes?
tonyb says:
May 25, 2012 at 12:48 am
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) ”
Exactly.
That’s why I don’t take much credence in tree thermometers.
Having spent over 15 yrs of my early working life in Horticulture and a further 2 years in Forestry.
You can get a whole block of trees, of the same type, and of the same age. Once that block of trees has been felled. You can see a fairly large variation in the tree rings.
You’ll see a mixture of wide and narrow tree rings right through out a block. Some trees can be a lot healthier and faster growing than others. Depending on a number of factors including:
Terrain, Tree density/spacing, Various soil moisture conditions/ soil nutrition,, shading, disease.
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.
You are under a mistaken impression.
Is Montfort unaware if this or is he just being sneaky?
You are also under the mistaken impression that Montfort performed Steve McIntyre’s analysis rather than writing an article commenting on it.
Briffa found the Tree of Knowledge! Give that man a Nobel Prize.
I wouldn’t call Steve McIntyre a “maverick climatologist”. I’d call him an experienced statistical analyst and refer to the Hockey Team as “non-statisticians” and “deeply conflicted amateur propagandists”
Lazy Teenager – welcome back, not seen you around much lately – missed the laughs.
Perhaps you should brush up on your reading skills – you must have missed this bit –
“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?”
Then have a look at the graphs – do you notice an odd one out? That should give you a clue as to what the post is about,. It is independent of the question of the accuracy of trees (from any location) as thermometers.
Conveying to people who don’t read climate blogs every day what is unfolding in the realm of climate science is an acute challenge. That is one reason that I was so pleased that Andrew, with his acknowledged gifts, said yes to my request that we put this piece together. It is our agreed-upon belief that right now constitutes an important turning point for Steve McIntyre specifically and climate science generally, and this guided us in our writing.
Okay, for those of us who don’t have a background in statistics, can someone (briefly) explain why this one tree would even be included in the data sample as it appears to be an outlier; and, given that it was included, how could one sample have such a large impact on the results? Shouldn’t the statistical tools eliminate or mitigate the impact of such outliers?
When the story broke on ClimateAudit I posted some data from two stations near to Yamal at:
http://www.climatedata.info/Discussions/Discussions/opinions.php?id=3283134733594426905
They show no sign of a ‘**ckeyStick’,
Steve and Lucia have both shown that if you generate random data but with the same autoregression as tree ring data and select data which matches the recent temperature rise you get a **ckeyStick. This does not, of course, prove that if tree ring data produces a **ckeyStick the data are random. What would clinch it for dendroclimatology would be if the tree rings selected for their correlation with recent temperature were more strongly correlated with each than with the rejected tree rings. Does anyone know if this has been done?
LazyTeenager:
I was under the impression that [the trees were selected from magical places that only experience variances in temperature]…Is Montfort unaware if this or is he just being sneaky?
– – – – – – – – – –
Why should Montford be aware of your post-normal impressions? (That was a week before the floods)
Casting my eye over the ten graphs presented, it looks to me that there is some small correlation in POR051/081/111 and YAD121….but YAD061 stands on its own showing a steep rise after 1975(ish). Had others in the series shown a similar effect, we can be sure they would have been icluded. The fact that ONLY YAD061 shows a steep rise and merging the others doesn’t, tells me that this was deliberately selected to ‘prove’ Mann’s hockey stick.
The very public exposing of these shenanigans can’t happen quickly enough. The US EPA has officially identified CO2 as a pollutant and is actively working on regulating it. The ramifications are enormous, immediate, and deadly. When the wealth of nations is used to tilt at wind mills, other priorities are neglected.
gregole says:
May 24, 2012 at 8:22 pm
I’m not posing this as an argument for authority, I am merely pointing out that numerous notable, knowledgeable, credible authorities on climate and statistics have been vocally calling these people out. And the mainstream media has all but absolutely ignored anything but climate alarmist clap trap.
But the problem really isn’t the media. The problem is the folks that sign the checks that fund this kind of useless dreck. It’s quite obvious that there is no accountability in the federal funding of research grants. These charlatan “climate scientists” are merely gaming the system, and gaming the system quite well, I might add.
They are merely placating the desires of politicians who have friends and family who can make million, if not billions, of dollars from programs to contain a problem that is uncontainable, if it even exists at all. If there were no money involved, this would all end before you stop reading my comments.
@lazy teenager
Obviously the one-true-tree grows alone on a grassy knoll in Yamal.
John Fleming says:
May 24, 2012 at 10:16 pm
Does this mean that Australia’s Carbon Dioxide Tax will not need to be introduced after all?…
___________________________________
Since when has any politician ever back tracked? Once a law is passed it is cast in stone especially if it is a tax. Think of the major amount of upheaval and crime caused by US Prohibition. The law, abolishing alcohol manufacture, was in force from 1920 to 1933. The Federal Government bureaucratic machine put in place to deal with the “crimes” committed is STILL with us today.
The original Bureau of Prohibition ultimately evolved into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) was a branch of the Treasury. It has moved from the Treasury Department to the Department of Justice to a branch of the FBI back to the Treasury Department and now has been transferred to Homeland Security and is infamous for the fiasco called “Fast and Furious”
And that quote is not from Fox news but CBS.
So never expect a bureaucracy (or tax) once in place to ever disappear. It might happen but don’t bet on it.
Too bad “Bootlegging” energy is much harder than bootlegging alcohol.
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.
========
No, that is not the case. The trees were chosen because they had a high correlation with average GLOBAL temperature as calculated from thermometers. The argument being that this made then a good proxy for average global temperatures prior to thermometer data.
However, these same trees do not correlate well with average REGIONAL temperatures in the place where they grow. This is strong evidence that the trees are not correlated with temperature at all, that they match the global average simply because of chance.
As such, all the climate papers that have been published that are based on this methodology are suspect. This is a huge number of papers affecting a large number of climate scientists. They are fighting tooth and nail over this issue because it could well end a number of scientific careers.
@lazy teenager… I moved to Maryland in ’09. If I wanted to know what the temperature was like here in ’99, which trees in my backyard would I take cores from? Likewise, if I wanted to know the WORLD WIDE TEMPERATURE 600 YEARS AGO… where should I start coring?
See, when put this way, the Emperor, finally, has no clothes!
re: Lazy Teenager
The question you should be asking is: “Why did YAD061 — after 150 years of stagnant growth — suddenly have a sudden surge when the trees around it did not?” Clearly, it would seem that something OTHER than temperature was the cause. For me, it seems likely YAD061 had been growing in the shadow of another tree for 150 years, and when that tree died and fell over, YAD061 suddenly got better growing conditions. If anything, YAD061 should have been eliminated from the study as an outlier.
@ferd-ster! You said it much more eloquently & scientifically than I did, congrats!
I find that this is all terriby discouraging. We seem to have man made global warming because the data is being manipulated by men.
I have read, quite consistenly, about data being manipulated repeatedly, and it seems to always fit the needs of the ‘team’. Being sceptical of sceptics, is there a source that has concentrated its efforts on documenting raw data, adjusted data, the source of the adjustments and the reasoning behind the adjustments?
If that existed, perhaps it would focus the message sceptics are trying to push.
Ex. Today (May 22nd 2012) at JoNova they found that the raw satellite data for sea level rise has been adjusted.
Has there even been a case of adjustment that goes against the ‘team’? I have not heard of any, but surely it must exist somewhere?
MattN says:
May 25, 2012 at 3:46 am
Just because you don’t like the data, you don’t get to ignore it as “invalid”.
======
It appears mann et al solved that problem. They labelled the data “censored” instead. Not really invalid at all, simply hidden. The decline then became an incline.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.ca/2009/11/censored-folder.html
Where are the lawsuits? If British Industry that paid for carbon offsets were to band together and sue the government and Briffa et al, for billions in fees paid out on fraudulent science.. would that not bring the issue to a head? The process of discovery, getting at the very basis of the goverment decisions(science used), should be enlightening.
Mike Lewis says:
May 25, 2012 at 5:43 am
“Okay, for those of us who don’t have a background in statistics, can someone (briefly) explain why this one tree would even be included in the data sample as it appears to be an outlier; ”
Certainly. As Lazy Teenager has explained, this tree – and this tree alone – fits all the criteria for accurately reflecting the true temperature record, unspoilt by all the other contradictory factors mentioned in the article.
Now, why didn’t Briffa just say that when asked why he never used a larger sample?
GogogoStopSTOP says:
May 25, 2012 at 6:54 am
If I wanted to know what the temperature was like here in ’99, which trees in my backyard would I take cores from?
====
You wouldn’t take them from trees unless you were sure that the tree species used C4 photosynthesis. Unlikely, because most of the plants in the world are C3 and the grow fastest in the spring when moisture is plentiful, not in the summer when temperatures are higher.
Look at your garden. In the NH it is spring and most of the trees will have already grown noticeably since winter. They will grow very little more as summer progresses. Even less if it is a hot summer. This is a direct result of C3 photosynthesis. Trees are not a proxy for temperature. They are a proxy for moisture.
It is the C4 species that grow best in summer when temperatures are higher and moisture is lower. Thus your lawn (c3) grows fastest in the spring, and crabgrass (c4) takes over in the summer.