Those of use that have Twitter accounts know that in the past couple of weeks, Dilbert creator and cartoonist Scott Adams has been delving into the question of who has the more credible arguments: Climate Alarmists or Climate Skeptics? One of the issues being discussed was “Mikes Nature Trick” and Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit tried to help Scott Adams understand what actually happened.
Unfortunately, like many issues in the climate world, unless you have some “inside baseball” knowledge, such things often cause eyes to glaze over as is the case with Scott Adams.
Mann manipulated data in ways both large and small. Mann's Nature trick was to splice proxy data to 1980 with instrumental data after 1980 to calculate the smoothed value. This was different trick to brute deletion of adverse data as in IPCC diagram.
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) January 17, 2019
clearly tastes vary. This post, which you described as one of your favorites, was described by Scott Adams as "impenetrable nonsense" – a little unfairly IMO.
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) January 17, 2019
I don’t blame Scott Adams for finding the issue impenetrable, it’s an obscure trick, which is why it got past peer review in the first place and ended up in the IPCC report as “the hockey stick”.
When I read the “impenetrable” comment, I immediately thought that we need to do a better job of communicating the issue, and taking a cue from the beloved “Dilbert” way of doing so, I worked directly with our resident cartoonist, Josh, to do just that.
What follows is the result of that collaboration, along with some relevant links. (Click image to enlarge)
It is important to note that in the above cartoon, Josh focuses on the “near present” part of the hockey stick, and it’s not the entire graph with the long flat blade going back to the Medieval Warm Period and before. It focuses entirely on the fact that the tree ring temperature proxy data in modern times (from about 1980 onward) didn’t cooperate with the viewpoint of the science paper authors (it went in the wrong direction) so they truncated it and used an entirely different dataset in it’s place – surface thermometer readings. Imagine the penalties that would occur in the stock market and financial world if somebody pulled a trick like that to present data for public consumption.
The cartoon is entirely for helping Scott Adams see exactly what we see, it is presented with respect, and in a visual language that I hope helps.
Here is the famous Climategate email that revealed what was going on:
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxxDear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.Cheers
PhilProf. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
Links:
Keith’s Science Trick, Mike’s Nature Trick and Phil’s Combo
Cartoonsbyjosh (consider a visit to the tip jar for the time Josh spent making this cartoon)
UPDATE: 1/22/19 8:10 AM PST
here are original sources for Josh cartoon. Blue tree ring diagram is cartoon of Briffa tree ring reconstruction: see https://t.co/KbL6r7CtG8. Orange version is cartoon of Briffa series as altered in WMO figure (green) discussed in hide-the-decline email https://t.co/X8CIwADQvg pic.twitter.com/wmF2GGC638
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) January 22, 2019
2/ over the years and over various papers, a variety of techniques were used by Briffa, Mann and others to "hide the decline" in Briffa's tree ring data. Less discussed code in Climategate mentions "Artificial Fudge Factor" – another trick to hide the decline.
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) January 22, 2019
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The other ‘trick’ was convincing otherwise rational people, that tree rings could be used as a proxi for temperature. Why? Because there are so many other variables that can effect tree-ring growth, that temperature is probably the very last thing being recorded.
This images comes from a forestry site, but I don’t think they realise it completely destroys the notion of treerings being used for either dendrothermology or dendrochronology….!
It did not take long to go from being a Scott Adams fan to not liking him at all, for me.
His manner has become thoroughly detestable recently.
Same! At this point he’s simply become an agitator.
I’ve been watching.
Feel sorry in a way, it seems he might be discovering that he’s been on the wrong side of history for quite some time now.
If I am listening to his periscope live, and he talks about climate, I always throw in the comment
READ ANTHONY WATTS
Don’t know if he ever sees it.
This calls for a classic music video: Hide the decline
Classic!
Hide The Decline II is making the point about the deceit even better:
Sorry, couldn’t resist. A personal favorite which brings back memories from that period: I’m a denier!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx-t9k7epIk
Keep fighting the good fight!!
Excellent cartoon, Josh.
The distillation of something that appears complex, down to it’s essence.
That is the primary skill of a good (political) cartoonist.
The crying shame is that the matter ever became political in the first place.
I saw this video, it was a bit annoying. Adams’ analysis of the use of the word ‘trick’ isn’t entirely off base, people could use it innocuously in the manner he claims. But, the problem is this isn’t innocuous, it is literally a ‘trick’ to hide unfavorable data in both instances. Further, this seems to be the only portion of the climategate emails he focuses on. I recall several mentions of attempts to avoid FOIA requests by hiding behind IP, and I also recall the HARRYREADME file, and the repeated instructions to avoid incorporating all temperature data in there that might capture medieval warming. Not to mention the search for ‘missing heat’ to explain ‘the pause,’ which if I recall correctly wasn’t even widely admitted as even happening at this point by this crew. And then, if Adams is so concerned with word choice, there’s Michael Mann’s repeated use of the phrase ‘the cause’ to describe what he and others are doing. It’s supposed to be research, not a ’cause’ with an agenda. If word choice is subject to analysis, it would be nice to see Adams take a look at that one.
There’s a hell of a lot more to climategate than he seems to realize, there was no smoking gun conspiracy confirmation, but it definitely showed shenanigans a few orders of magnitude above typical, every day academic backstabbing going on. Not to mention multiple attempts to obfuscate and otherwise hide data and methods from scrutiny.
Facts and details cannot be accurately analyzed in isolation.
Having a bunch of weak evidence does not equate to strong evidence, not in every case anyway.
But there is a mountain of evidence pointing in one direction, and some of it is very strong indeed.
When Messi does a trick it is replayed all round the world. His tricks are works of wonder.
When Mann does a trick it “hides the decline”. His tricks skulk in the shadows leaving us wondering why he hides.
Except we now know.
.
❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶
❶①❶①
❶①❶① . . . The recent Slowdown – on trial . . .
❶①❶①
❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶
.
If you think that “Mike’s Nature Trick” is “impenetrable”, you should see what Alarmists get up to with statistical hypothesis testing of the recent Slowdown.
Alarmists have started a legal battle, in an effort to convict the recent Slowdown of a serious crime. The crime in question is, “impersonating a real Slowdown”. This heinous crime carries a maximum sentence of 20 years of watching Al Gore “documentaries”.
The trial is about to begin. We have managed to get our “climate reporter”, Sheldon Walker, on to the jury hearing the case against the recent Slowdown. We asked Sheldon if he thought that it was “fair”, for him to be on the jury? Sheldon replied, “Is it “fair”, that Alarmists won’t admit that there was a small, temporary Slowdown, that doesn’t have any significant long-term implications for global warming”?
Sheldon is prepared to go to extreme lengths to help his friend. He has taught himself to text message with his toes, using a cellphone that is hidden in his shoe. Sheldon will be sending us text message “reports” from inside the room where the jury members are deliberating. These text message reports will be limited to 160 character per text message (Sheldon refuses to use Twitter), so Sheldon will use abbreviations where necessary.
https://agree-to-disagree.com/the-recent-slowdown-on-trial
Re:
They didn’t just truncate it and substitute a different dataset in its place.
That’s would be bad enough. In fact it’s what Hansen & Sato do for sea-level data, but Hansen & Sato use contrasting colors, and accurately label the graph, and don’t try to hide the splice points. Theirs is honest scientific malpractice:
http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/SeaLevel/SL.1900-2018.png
What Jones, Mann etc. did was far worse. It was dishonest scientific malpractice.
What they did was deliberately deceptive. They matched the colors of the two different kinds of data, mislabeled the graph, and even rounded the splice points to hide the fact that the graphs were spliced.
I tried to explain this to Scott Adams, via Twitter, but I don’t know whether he saw it:
https://twitter.com/ncdave4life/status/1086051869909229568
https://twitter.com/ncdave4life/status/1086055247762599936
https://twitter.com/ncdave4life/status/1086053900128579584
https://twitter.com/ncdave4life/status/1086102451529371648
Heck..we all get overwhelmed or swamped by impenetrable arguments that occur in fields we are not experts in.
Most of us are experts in one field or another so its incredibly frustrating but who has the time to study a new field and become one of the top ten experts ?? not me, that’s for sure.
So we decide based upon other factors..the integrity of the person, the motives. Their reaction to criticism is a big tell.
I have a lot of time for A.Watts, Tallbloke and Heller
There is a fairly new podcast called Red Pilled America that covered the Climategate issue in a lot of detail and made it very simple for people to understand.
https://redpilledamerica.com/blog/demo-home/episode-7/
Interviews with the 4 main players who broke the climategate story including Anthony Watts himself.
Without having yet read all the comments (life is short…) this is brilliant ridicule.
And ridicule is nearly as effective a disinfectant as sunlight.
This cartoon is both.
*1
“I don’t blame Scott Adams for finding the issue impenetrable, it’s an obscure trick, which is why it got past peer review in the first place”
No, the reason it got past peer review is because no one seriously reviewed it. The team wanted it prominent, so it went through.
Re: “I don’t blame Scott Adams for finding the issue impenetrable, it’s an obscure trick,” and Political Junkie: “He has said several times that it is impossible for a layman to make sense of climate debates. I suggest that one can learn whom to trust.”
One of the things that frustrates me greatly is the seeming desire of some very knowledgeable skeptics to explain everything exactly correctly and in great detail. If the public and responsible politicians are to understand the issues, there has to be truncated, fundamentally accurate summaries, suitable for a sixth grader to understand. These summaries should be prefaced by a link to the more accurate and detailed study and a statement saying the basic principles of the summary are correct, but in the interest of aiding in understanding some subtleties have been simplified.
One example of an overly complicated presentation are Roy Spencer’s monthly presentation global temperature climate anomalies. 98% of the population has a zero understanding of anomalies. No doubt, they are more meaningful than raw data. However, would it really be that hard to say that January’s (2019) temperature was .X degrees lower than December’s (2018) and that January’s 2019 temperature was .X degrees higher than the 2018 January temperatures. Then the anomalies could also be attached, and it could be explained that they are more scientifically useful than the raw temperature comparison. I am not picking on Spencer; there are many, many other examples I could give.
When I wrote my post dealing with whether the Climategate inquiries exonerated Michael Mann, it drove me crazy trying to be accurate with what should have been minor details, and I have spent a lot of time dealing with climate issues. Those who don’t have hundred’s of hours to examine the issues are left rudderless.
So, I believe that Adams is about 98% correct and that the responsibility for his confusion should be placed substantially on the knowledgeable skeptics who fail to write, concise, simple explanations of their work. Of course, the intrinsic complexity of the issue as well as the efforts of warmists to muddy the issues are also substantial contributors to the problem.
I would add that my viewpoint is informed by my experience as a trial lawyer. Once you go above the heads of people, they stop listening and give up. It is the responsibility of the information provider to understand his audience and make sure the information is intelligible to that audience.
A concise and accurate summary would be to simply state that the shenanigans of those in the climate science orthodoxy is completely unscientific and undermines their credibility, and the conclusions they reach are suppositions and exaggerations that amount to confirmation bias and BS.
Unfortunately it takes a lot more work to refute nonsense than it takes to spew it, and the emotional arguments made by the alarmists cause emotional distress in the credulous masses that cannot be undone by logical refutations made calmly and succinctly, whether or not those refutations are terse and concise, or wordy, comprehensive and thorough.
If you are a trial lawyer, you may have experience in the difficulty of overcoming emotional arguments, in the minds of people who do not know who to believe, with mere logic and facts.
“A concise and accurate summary would be”
The best summary I can think of is to tell people that CO2 is increasing but temperatures are falling, which is just the opposite of what the Alarmists claim will happen, which is that temperatures will rise along with the rise in CO2. Events are not unfolding the way the Alarmists say they will unfold. Therefore, the Alarmists’ predictions are wrong.
CO2 UP, Temperatures DOWN!
Here is a short piece with cartoon that I had a friend draw:
http://safehaven.com/article/13085/political-science-dogma
Back in 2009. Cartoon in 2008.
The karma runs over the dogma every time!
Thank God. The light has dawned.
A simple cartoon, fewer words is better.
This is how we reach people.
I love Judith Curry, but she drives me crazy with tangled explanations.
Can’t win the argument with that.
Scott also remarked that the 600 million year history does not prove anything about CO2 and temperature.
But, I think he missed the point that it shows there are many other factors, stronger factors.
It seems like that could turn into a simple cartoon.
Scott Adams ought to check recent history instead of worrying about what happened millions of years ago.
If he did, he would find that over the last three years CO2 has increased, yet the global temperatures have dropped 0.6C. How does that happen if CO2 is the temperature control knob, Scott?
According to the CO2 CAGW speculation, when CO2 increases, the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere increases. But that isn’t happening, Scott. Get some of your alarmist friends to explain why their hypothesis is not reflected in reality.
Tom:
“If he did, he would find that over the last three years CO2 has increased, yet the global temperatures have dropped 0.6C.”
Indeed on UAH (V6) it has.
It has also risen 0.5C since 2012.
That is what the ENSO does.
Big EN cherry-picked to give you your -0.6
LN cherry-picked by me to give a +0.5.
It’s called natural variation.
Seems you are not aware that GMT never has and never will go up monotonously.
And certainly that 3 years or even my 6 years maketh not a long term trend capable of picking out the effect of an added ~ 0.03C as a function of CO2 forcing.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/uah6/from:1979/to:2018/plot/uah6/from:1979/to:2018/trend/plot/uah6/from:2016/to:2018/trend
And guess what?
UAH (V6) still lies above the long-term trend.
“According to the CO2 CAGW speculation, when CO2 increases, the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere increases. But that isn’t happening, Scott. Get some of your alarmist friends to explain why their hypothesis is not reflected in reality.”
No, you should understand the above.
Just as a matter of fascination.
What on Earth could make you think that a 3 year trend after a large EN would reflect the linear trend of 39 years?
What do you think the ups/downs on the above were caused by?
“Just as a matter of fascination.
What on Earth could make you think that a 3 year trend after a large EN would reflect the linear trend of 39 years?”
Well, I look at the big EN of 1998 (per UAH) and see how the temperatues fell after that big EN and I’m assuming the temperatures are going to do something similar after the big EN of 2016 because I don’t assume CO2 is the control knob.
The UAH satellite chart:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_December_2018_v6.jpg
You can always see the “natural variation” when it appears to undermine your pet hypothesis, yet the same “natural variation” magically becomes invisible when you wish to pin the charges on CO2.
Until you can show, empirically, that it is CO2 that is driving whatever trend du jour, it’s ALL “natural variation.”
“…such a nice simple graph” which happened to show exactly what they wanted it to show.
Regarding the MWP and LIA, if these were local to Europe as some climate alarmists claim, the issue this raises is that to give a flat ‘hockey stick’ would require there to have been an exactly balancing amount of cooling over the rest of the world. I suppose that’s not impossible but it does seem unlikely. When you take that into consideration, the local phenomenon argument seems less plausible.
Edward Thorpe, in “Beat The Dealer”, described the same sort of “mathematical trick” used by blackjack dealers. They peek at the next card. If it helps the dealer, they deal that card out honestly. If it HURTS the dealer, the dealer surreptitiously deals a second card, upping his own odds. The “trick ” is fraudulent and dishonest for BOTH the blackjack dealer and for Michael Mann.
There’s a word for it: fraud. Plain and simple. And who knows, perhaps those chickens wil come home to roost one day.
I am now blocked by Scott Adams for saying apologists for hide the decline, and suggesting he read three books about it that might change his mind.
https://twitter.com/SciSpen/status/1087828163219111936
(one book by Fred, a very pro climate activist Guardian/New Scientist journo)
Thats funny, should be credited to Mann as another peer review.