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.
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I remember having an argument with a warmer about the Medieval Warm period and how the Greenland Ice core records show Greenland at least was warmer than the “present” time (2000? 1998? whatever). A good bit warmer. I was told you cant take Greenland as a proxy for world temperatures. However it seems you can take one tree in Yamal.
It is no wonder that scientists are concerned.
It’s heartening to see Andrew Montford, who explicates these issues better than anyone, getting his work in front of a much wider audience. Thanks also to Harold Ambler, with whom I’m not quite as familiar, although if Andrew is working with him, that tells us a lot.
One of the larger influences upon the tree ring growth of any single tree in a forest is the amount of competition for sunlight from adjacent trees. A grove of young saplings that are only pencil sized in diameter might have 5,000 to 10,000 trees per acre. As they all grow, the healthier, best positioned, trees grow a bit faster, overtopping nearby competitors. Those competitors eventually die off.
If several competitors are overtopped and die off in a short period, the overtopping tree will show a significant increase in tree ring growth for a time as it rapidly expands its crown into the crown space of its dead competition. (According to Briffa, that will be a warm period.) Eventually, however, that same tree will be faced with more competition, as the crowns of trees farther away begin to compete for its sunlight. By that time, the population per acre could be down to 500 to 1,000 trees per acre.
The same process recurs, only this time the trees that are being overtopped and dying off as a result might be 2 to 4 inches in diameter, rather than pencil-sized. Perhaps the initial tree discussed here doesn’t make it, in that round, but assume that it does. Until its competition is again bested, its tree ring growth will have steadily narrowed due to the surrounding competitors impinging upon its crown and stealing some of the available sunlight. (According to Briffa, this would be a cold phase.)
Then our winning tree’s crown again crowds out its nearby competitors, and its own crown is able to expand into the newly-opened spaces left by the dead and dying competitors, and tree ring growth accelerates once again. (Creating yet another Briffa warm period.)
Of course, virtually none of this process is temperature dependent. Granted, tree ring growth will accelerate when the weather is warmer (to a point, as one commenter stated), but to determine whether that has happened, one must examine a lot of tree rings in a single area, to sort out the overtopping process described above. By examining many trees, you can control for the overtopping effect because the weaker, overtopped, trees will also show greater tree-ring growth during the warmer period relative to their usual growth rate. (Ironically though, Briffa did the opposite, cutting the number of trees to one, thereby ensuring that the overtopping effect cannot be sorted out from any other cause of growth.)
Ultimately, if a tree reaches 3 to 5 feet in diameter, and is still situated in a healthy stand of competitors, as is typical, it will find itself in a stand of mature trees numbering 10 to 30 trees or so per acre. If the number is high, its growth rings will be growing slowly, and vice versa. Thus, whether or not an adjacent tree dies will determine whether Briffa will find the succeeding decade or so to be warm, or cold. In a mature stand such as this, a severe weather event, one that takes down two or even three competitors at one time, could free up the surviving tree so that its tree rings grow substantially faster than previously for several decades. (Making it a perfect Briffa tree, but an extremely poor indicator of temperature.)
Many loggers, and certainly any forester, could have cleared this up for Briffa, had he asked, though perhaps he already knew all of this, and cherry picking was the objective, rather than science.
For example, this shows why trees are not proxies for temperature.
http://museum.state.il.us/pub/grimm/Publications/2006%20Huang%20et%20al%20P3.pdf
During the last glacial period, C4 plant abundance decreased dramatically during the pine phases when precipitation increased, indicating that increasing precipitation overrode the impact of low atmospheric pCO2, leading to expansions of C3 plants.
Ally E. says: @ur momisugly May 25, 2012 at 1:59 am
….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.
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The people who OWN the press control the press. In the USA that is J.P.Morgan among a few others.
http://newsandtech.com/dougs_page/article_f3a45be0-4717-11df-aace-001cc4c03286.html
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Morgan-Buys-Newspapers9feb17.htm
Ally E. says:This should be bread and butter to the MSM, they love a good tear-down political story. So where the F*** are they?
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Agreed, but the CAGW crowd have successfully framed such dissent as being akin to questioning gravity. Most journalists in the environmental field have gone entirely native – and many will have entered that area entirely because they were believers in the first place.
For any major newspaper or TV station to do a demolition job on CAGW would be to entirely trash the output of most of its journalists for the last decade or two and make the whole organisation look extremely gullible at best.
The political fallout for such a media outlet could also be dire as they would, in most countries, be blowing a hole in government policy (and angering a lot of wealthy advertisers to boot). How many editors of media outlets are going to risk that for a story they might be unconvinced about in the first place and would probably fear might be too technical for many of their readers to grasp anyway?
It’s a horrible Catch 22, most outlets won’t have the guts to go for the jugular of CAGW while ever that’s a risky thing to do – it probably won’t become a safe thing to do without a substatial proportion of the MSM taking it on in the first place.
Lazy Teenager now reveals his true assessment of the average intelligence level of those who frequent this forum.
Harold Ambler says:
May 25, 2012 at 5:31 am
Conveying to people who don’t read climate blogs every day what is unfolding in the realm of climate science is an acute challenge…..
________________________
Thank You!
YAD061 – an obvious outlier. Unbelievable the level to which these clowns will stoop to build their false narrative.
Very sharp and well written article. Unfortunately the problem, again, remains the same: the vast majority of the population don’t know and will never hear of the tremendous work of McIntyre and several others including Watts for information dissemination, because the mainstream media (the biggest part of the problem) just won’t bother, let alone report more of the facts and less of the sensationalistic factoids out of official press releases from the authorities.
Reasonable Skeptic says:
May 25, 2012 at 7:09 am
I find that this is all terriby discouraging. ….
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Why do you think there has been such a fuss about FOIA to get the raw data? Why do you think Phil Jones said he lost the raw data and why do you think New Zealand’s ‘leading’ climate research unit NIWA said A goat Ate my Homework.
We can suspect they are playing games with the data but if we do not have the raw data and the actual adjustments we can not PROVE they were unethical even though all adjustments are down for the past and up for the present.
This WUWT gets into the arguments a little bit toward the bottom comments. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/17/an-analysis-of-the-central-netherland-temperature-record/
The RC site is a model of Climate Science. The replies have been cherry picked to shown only the results that fit the theory. The Team runs the RC site as a model of how they report Climate Data. Only publish the results that show what you want to show.
Ferd Berple states: “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.”
While it’s true that most plants, including trees, put on significant top growth in the spring, is it true that trees also put on most diameter growth in the spring, i.e., tree ring growth? I doubt that is true. Early growth of trees is fostered by nutrient stored in the root system over winter. In summer, the top growth subsides and root growth is significant in many plants, including, I suspect, in trees. Over summer, tree diameter could, and I believe probably does, increase significantly.
“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.”
Well and good- but the coin of the realm is consistency in methodology. It makes no sense that you find LESS trees that meet the above criteria the closer you get to the present, it should be much harder to find ideal trees in the past, you should have more samples of current trees than ancient trees. Briffa produced the opposite, and the question is why. He was demonstrably inconsistent on what trees he chose over different epochs, he needs to have an explanation for why. If he had loosened his criteria for the past that at least would make sense- lack of candidates. But he did the opposite, given a greater surplus of candidates he chose a smaller sample size.
Rod Everson says:
May 25, 2012 at 8:48 am
Ferd Berple states: “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.”
While it’s true that most plants, including trees, put on significant top growth in the spring, is it true that trees also put on most diameter growth in the spring, i.e., tree ring growth? I doubt that is true. Early growth of trees is fostered by nutrient stored in the root system over winter. In summer, the top growth subsides and root growth is significant in many plants, including, I suspect, in trees. Over summer, tree diameter could, and I believe probably does, increase significantly.
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Rod, it ain’t necessarily so. That’s the whole point. Different trees grow in different ways, and that varies again under different conditions. They also grow differently at various stages in their lifecycle, for example with regard to root growth vs top growth.
It has been said many times, but I will say it again – without serious input from biologists – including active foresters – these guys are the equivalent of pimply youths in the basement shooting down opponents in virtual war games, and yelling “I won the war! “
Okay, so now Yamal has been discredited due to cherry picking. The North American bristlecone pine series by Graybill has also been discredited due to the work of Lena Ababneh. The Tijlander series has been conclusively shown to have been used upside down. If the reconstruction people cannot use any of those series, then there simply is no hockey stick. The peer review process has been shown to be a farce.
When we get into the instrumentation era most of the twentieth century rise is due to adjustments. All of the rise from 1998 is due to adjustments.
Arthur Dent — “… the 1% (ignoring the other 99%) would you think this was a) sensible b) understandable or c) fraudulent”
You forgot the most applicable answer to the drug / AGW analogy: d) profitable.
It sure would be nice to have more info regarding YAD061 (and other Yamal larches). The Yamal peninsula is not some pristine environment, devoid of other lifeforms and devlopment. Yamal has, more recently, been used extensively for reindeer herding and petroleum development. Is YAD061 being fertilized by reindeer droppings or urine? Is it near some type of structure for petroleum extraction or transport? In other words, have all extraneous effects been ruled out?
References: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=yamal+reindeer&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C29&as_sdtp=
…is there anyone that believes you can get temperatures from tree rings?
I consider that it would be suitable for these errant scientists such as Briffa, who have purposefully contrived to mislead and basically do not know the difference between the truth and lies, to strip then of any degrees that they have. Reduce them in the ranks so to speak.
Gail Combs says – “We can suspect they are playing games with the data but if we do not have the raw data and the actual adjustments we can not PROVE …”
We deniers (eye rolls) need to quit playing by AGW claimers’ rules. Science mandates methods and guidelines be followed. We [SNIP: Only once per posting and only if accompanied by a /sarc tag. We are not adopting the term for ourselves. -REP] need to demand AGW players follow Science.
No data, No evidence, No work shown, No Science, No AGW.
And AGW players you don’t get more Taxpayer $$$$$ for “No”.
One tree’s worth of data to collapse western capitalism, one tree? Is it not a fact that when doing a survey of any type, The larger the sample the more likely it will be representative of the entire group. Paring down the sample when you don’t like the results is cherry picking. This behavior is unethical. Period.
As we all know, the UK’s Guardian newspaper is not the most accurate and reliable source when it comes to climate matters. However, this article from just over two years ago on Yamal, Briffa etc is a real doozy.
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=yamal%20yad061%20briffa%20mann&source=web&cd=6&sqi=2&ved=0CF8QFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fenvironment%2F2010%2Ffeb%2F09%2Fyamal-climate-tree-ring-data-withheld&ei=hLm_T8f0N8ey8QPaoLXUCg&usg=AFQjCNFklt6bRf0NBkWCAitKZhC99Shd4w&cad=rja
30 studies show that tree growth is closely correlated with CO2 levels:
http://climatesanity.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/correlation-coefficents-sorted-by-t.gif
A particular species of oak tree, for example, quercus quercus, will grow to the same size in the same amount of time in different temperature regimes. Thus, temperature has little effect on growth. It is the increase in harmless, beneficial CO2 that is greening the planet.
Steve McIntyre deserves a medal and/or a prize.
At the very least, he deserves the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and/or the US Congressional Gold Medal
He will never get it from the Obama administration. But a President Romney could do far worse than to make such an award in his first days in office. It would be an appropriate positive prelude to lowering the boom on a AGW climate crowd employed and funded by US Taxpayers.
Romney (on Jan 29, 2013 – Freethinker’s Day, Thomas Paine Day) :
Who should be on the stage with Steve McIntyre at such a ceremony?
What other real prizes or medal has Steve earned?