![most-influential-tree-350[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/most-influential-tree-3501.jpg?quality=83)
It seems that in the latest publication from CRU’s Keith Briffa, they decided to leave out those elements (The most influential tree in the world) Steve identified that led to the Yamal Superstick.
Have a look at this remarkable graph below.
McIntyre writes:
Unreported by CRU is that they’ve resiled from the Yamal superstick of Briffa 2000 and Briffa et al 2008 and now advocate a Yamal chronology, the modern portion of which is remarkably similar to the calculations in my posts of September 2009 here and May 2012 here, both of which were reviled by Real Climate at the time.
In today’s post, I’ll demonstrate the degree to which the new Briffa version has departed from the superstick of Briffa 2000 and Briffa et al 2008 and the surprising degree to which it approaches versions shown at CA.
Figure 3. Comparison of Briffa et al 2008 superstick to yamal_trw chronology of Briffa et al 2013. Both in z-scores.
[…]
…the next graphic shows the two CA calculations that had been so reviled by CRU and Real Climate (the green chronology of Sept 2009 and the May 2012 calculation with updated information from Hantemirov). I think that I’m entitled to observe that the B13 chronology is more similar to the two reviled CA calculations than it is to the Briffa et al 2008 superstick. Needless to say, this was not reported in CRU’s recent Real Climate article. 
Figure 4. Comparison of B13 Yamal chronology to CA (Climate Audit) calculations.
omnologos points out this missive from Gavin Schmidt on RealClimate:
The irony is of course that the demonstration that a regional reconstruction is valid takes effort, and needs to be properly documented. That requires a paper in the technical literature and the only way for Briffa et al to now defend themselves against McIntyre’s accusations is to publish that paper (which one can guarantee will have different results to what McIntyre has thrown together).
Looks like that guarantee expired.
Commenter ianl888 quips:
@Steve McIntyre
From Fig. 4 above:
it’s quite obvious that in 2009 and again in 2011, you shamelessly plagiarised Briffa 2013
Easily the worst sin in the academic book, run a close second only by disrupting the space-time continuum in order to perform the plagiarism
Too Funny! To prevent this from happening again, we need to establish a Pre-plagiarism Crimes unit, complete with a minority report. /sarc
Read Steve’s full report here: http://climateaudit.org/2013/06/28/cru-abandons-yamal-superstick/
Whatever happened to the divergence problem? SkS claims that during the past 2 decades trees have grown more slowly due to AGW. Instead, Briffa’s latest reconstruction shows steady temperatures. Did he get traded?
Briffa should go the extra distance, and make right the great wrong done to McIntyre, and publicly apologize and acknowledge McIntyre’s contribution to the issue.
Inscription in Ashbourne church, Derbyshire (on a monument to the five-year-old Penelope Boothby): ‘She was in form and intellect most exquisite. The unfortunate parents ventured their all on this frail bark (barque), and the wreck was total.’
We can only hope it will prove so with this bark.
@ur momisugly Jtom “Sorry, but this won’t change anything.”
I’ll differ with you here. Being a scientific paper that is technically a refinement of previous work, I can see how Briffa 2013 won’t have an immediate impact on the public consciousness or the public debate. One is reminded of the Saturday Night Live sketches with Emily Litella
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Litella
where she would end up saying, “Never Mind”.
The silence of the warmists will be slow in coming, but the silence will come. Perhaps one day the silence will be deafening. I’m a geologist. We’re a patient lot. We have time. and beer.
170 years, temperatures still flat.
Manfred says:
June 28, 2013 at 8:28 pm
“No warming for 100 years at Yamal”
and Bill Illis says:
June 29, 2013 at 5:07 am
So, where’s the big high-latitude Arctic warming?
Obviously, tree rings are now proven to be poor temperature proxies. But that proof was already implicitely presented by Michael Mann.
Help please. I come here with a mind uncluttered by climate knowledge. What issue was in dispute? Reference site would also be kool. Thanks.
I was hoping someone else as ignorant as I of statistics would ask this question.
The vertical axis is labeled z-scores, which is a dimensionless value. A high z-score, I think, indicates that the data is badly skewed (not a bell-curve) and therefore should be considered suspect? Is that about right? I make the assumption that the “oberved” value is the average temperature. In other words, a high z-score simply indicates that it is likely you have gigo?
Mikeyj says:
June 29, 2013 at 9:24 am
Help please. I come here with a mind uncluttered by climate knowledge. What issue was in dispute? Reference site would also be kool. Thanks.
Rick Werme has a guide to past postings. Here is the relevant background.
http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/cat_the_yamal_deception.html
I have been convinced for some time that Keith Briffa is Foia.
King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.)
I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.
A big tip of my hat to Mr. Briffa, whose Wikipedia article, when last I looked, didn’t include this 2013 paper.
I’ve added a mention on the Talk page.
And a very big kow-tow to Steve McIntyre.
But isn’t it sad that this is how we do science in the twenty-first century – at the behest of the socialist power-leeches.
Auto
Sorry – it’s from Luke ch15:v7.
Spoken like a true geologist. In the rocks, we’ve seen it all before. The planet couldn’t still have the general climate it does after all it’s been through, if there weren’t mechanisms in place to keep it so.
The warmies think going from 187 to 400ppm of CO2 over 150 years is “unprecedented”? Did they ever wonder where the CO2 in those long-ago 2000ppm atmospheres came from? And where it went back to?
Give Walt and I a few beers and some time, and we can probably come up with an answer of some kind.
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Check out some of the tabs at the top of the page and some of the sites listed at the right.
A quick summary of the issue addressed in this post would be that Michael Mann used Briffa’s work with tree rings to produce a graph of past and projected future global temperatures. It’s best known as “The Hockey Stick”. Steve McIntyre and others took a closer look at the data behind “The Stick” and discovered that they were trying to stick it to us. Among the problems was that the analysis of one particular tree ring, Yamal 06, was blown way out of proportion.
Now Briffa himself has yanked the rug out from under Mann and “The Hockey Stick”. Without “The Stick” the justification for all the political stuff going on to prevent “Climate Change” is mute.
(Again, that’s a quick summary as far as I understand it. There are lots of details and events that could be filled in.)
Here is the new GRANT SCIENCE THEORY – not C02 but CFC that cause Global Warming . .
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217979213500732
The vast bulk of the atmosphere is composed of N2 and O2, non-radiative non-GHGs. They are unable to dispose of sensible heat except through evaporative loss from the top of the atmosphere. Only GHGs can radiate energy to space. Hence, in their absence, the atmosphere would heat until it could “boil” away enough mass to counterbalance solar irradiation.
Hence GHGs are cooling agents which preserve atmospheric mass. The Warmist (and Luke-warmist) positions are 180° wrong. As usual.
Ya-malpractice equals Catastrophic Mannmade global warming and it’s more than fun to know that even Briffa now recognizes this. Good for him. 🙂
Hah! Blaming a tree for the hubris of so-called climate scientists.
Kev-in-Uk says:
June 28, 2013 at 5:27 pm
“…I can’t remember the film/whatever from which this comes but IMHO ‘Death’s too good for them!’ is the most appropriate quote…”
BBC television production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, maybe? It’s what the Vogon captain says when contemplating Arthur’s review of his poetry.
Brian H says:
June 29, 2013 at 12:12 pm
“Hence GHGs are cooling agents which preserve atmospheric mass.”
It seems plausible and likely that in the reductio – no atmosphere at all, add a little CO2 – the GHE would make surface temperatures warmer than without it. However, that does not necessarily mean that the warming effect persists in the current climate state. The relationship of surface temperature to CO2 concentration could look like this.
Hence, suggesting that additional CO2 has little or no effect, or even cools the surface, at this time is not necessarily equivalent to denying that the GHE exists. You could be correct, that the radiative cooling dominates at the current state of the system. Indeed, this appears likely, since the sensitivity of CO2 to temperature is manifestly positive.
Thus, there is zero doubt that increasing temperature increases atmospheric CO2. If additional CO2 then increases temperature, there is a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop and, at the least, we should be seeing wide ranging oscillations in temperature and CO2, if not outright instability.
So when are they going to admit that the new graph means there was NO HEATING in the 20th century?
Downdraft says:
June 29, 2013 at 9:29 am
I was hoping someone else as ignorant as I of statistics would ask this question.
The vertical axis is labeled z-scores, which is a dimensionless value. A high z-score, I think, indicates that the data is badly skewed (not a bell-curve) and therefore should be considered suspect? Is that about right? I make the assumption that the “oberved” value is the average temperature. In other words, a high z-score simply indicates that it is likely you have gigo?
A z score is merely a standardized means of describing the difference between a given measurement or set of measurements and a given mean value. In tree rings, in order to eliminate the individual vagaries of how a specific tree grows, you measure all the rings, then use a z-score or dimensionless measure to make the data comparable to similar data from other trees. You are not looking for the same growth rates but instead the same variation in growth rates. The dimensionless number is critical because even looking at a single tree, the tree grows “slower” with age – at least the rings tend to be thinner. A simple calculation shows that very young trees can grow much “faster” based on the width of each added ring and yet lay down far less mass (an order of magnitude less) than an older, much “slower” growing tree. I would in fact rather see tree rings standardized by area rather than thickness.
Concerning”skewing” of data, that in and of itself is no reason to suspect the data. The distribution of wealth in the US is profoundly skewed and that is simply reality. There’s no reason to suspect that there really are fewer “poor” or many more “rich.” People living under bridges outnumber the Gates’s and Walton’s by the thousands. So skewing in and of itself is not bad. It simply means the statistician has to mind their p’s and q’s when working with the data. Certain tests assume normality and a significant departure can affect the reliability of a statistical analysis, a drum Steve McIntyre and others have been beating for years.
Also, no, the “observed value” is the thickness of tree rings, not temperature. The argument is that in a polar or near-timberline the environmental factor that has the strongest effect on tree growth is temperature, thus the discussion of tree growth as a “proxy” for temperature, that is the proxy values change in a correlated fashion with criterion of interest. Theoretically, and empirically, if there is a significant shift in regional temperature the tree line will move in accordance. Cooler and established trees will continue to grow but seeds will only germinate at lower, warmer, elevations. Warmer and young trees may appear upslope from their parents.
@tgasloli,
nope, basically no warming at all.
The ONLY warming that exists in the surface record was CREATED by Hansen and his cronies..
@ur momisugly AndyG55 says:
June 28, 2013 at 9:09 pm
Compare the latest Briffa to GISS or HadCrud, and you can see just how much Hansen et al have adjusted down the historic surface temperature record.
I hope someone goes back and corrects those records some time soon.
And the BOM records in Australia too. They need the “adjustments’ removing to give a picture of reality.
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The same needs doing re the NZ – NIWA historical climate record which Jim Salinger “adjusted” – Salinger learnt his skills while at CRU I believe.
and the effect of Urban warm zones.
KenB says: “I’d like to congratulate Keith Briffa in getting to grips with science not political agenda …”
Agree with the sentiment – but congratulate Keith when he has given due recognition to Steve. In research circles, cross-referencing is hard currency and plagiarism is fraud.