by Judith Curry
To date, I’ve kept Climate Etc. a “tree ring free zone,” since the issues surrounding the hockey stick are a black hole for conflict and pretty much a tar baby, IMO. Further, paleoproxies are outside the arena of my personal research expertise, and I find my eyes glaze over when I start reading about bristlecones, etc. However, two things this week have changed my mind, and I have decided to take on one aspect of this issue: the infamous “hide the decline.”
The first thing that contributed to my mind change was this post at Bishop Hill entitled “Will Sir John condemn hide the decline?”, related to Sir John Beddington’s statement: It is time the scientific community became proactive in challenging misuse of scientific evidence.
The second thing was this youtube clip of physicist Richard Muller (Director of the Berkeley Earth Project), where he discusses “hide the decline” and vehemently refers to this as “dishonest,” and says “you are not allowed to do this,” and further states that he intends not to read further papers by these authors (note “hide the decline” appears around minute 31 into the clip). While most of his research is in physics, Muller has also published important papers on paleoclimate, including a controversial paper that supported McIntyre and McKitrick’s analysis.
The question I am asking myself is what is my role as a scientist in challenging misuses of science (as per Beddington’s challenge)? Why or why not should I personally get involved in this? Is hiding the decline dishonest and/or bad science?
Explanations, interpretations, and misrepresentations of “hide the decline”
Realclimate describes the issue as follows:
Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “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) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.
Steve McIntyre has quite a different intepretation. With regards to Briffa 1998:
Despite relatively little centennial variability, Briffa’s reconstruction had a noticeable decline in the late 20th century, despite warmer temperatures. In these early articles [e.g. Briffa 1998], the decline was not hidden.
For most analysts, the seemingly unavoidable question at this point would be – if tree rings didn’t respond to late 20th century warmth, how would one know that they didn’t do the same thing in response to possible medieval warmth – a question that remains unaddressed years later.
Briffa et al 1998a (Nature 391): During the second half of the twentieth century, the decadal-scale trends in wood density and summer temperatures have increasingly diverged as wood density has progressively fallen. The cause of this increasing insensitivity of wood density to temperature changes is not known, but if it is not taken into account in dendroclimatic reconstructions, past temperatures could be overestimated.
With regards to the IPCC TAR:
In a post-mortem a few weeks later, Coordinating Lead Author Folland wrote that, although a proxy diagram was “a clear favourite for the Policy Makers summary”, the Briffa reconstruction “dilutes the message rather significantly”, adding that this was “probably the most important issue to resolve in Chapter 2 at present”. Mann wrote that “everyone in the room” agreed that the Briffa series was a “potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we’d like to show”. Briffa recognized there was “pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more ’”, but expressed many caveats, in particular that the proxies were not responding the way that they were supposed to and that that the recent warmth was “probably matched” 1000 years ago.
Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates. I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder! (Mann Sep 22, 0938018124.txt)
And on and on, McIntyre provides substantial documentation for his analysis.
With this context, the media has continued to completely misrepresent the situation, being inconsistent with either the RC or McIntyre analyses. Tim Lambert provides a summary of recent inaccurate media statements, here is a common example:
4 February 2011, Investor’s Business Daily: The ClimateGate scandal was a direct result of scientists — and we use the term loosely — at Britain’s Climate Research Unit and others, such as Michael Mann, conspiring to manipulate data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.
The obvious inaccuracy of such statements and their easy refutation distracts from addressing the substantive issues raised by McIntyre.
Bad science and/or dishonesty?
There is no question that the diagrams and accompanying text in the IPCC TAR, AR4 and WMO 1999 are misleading. I was misled. Upon considering the material presented in these reports, it did not occur to me that recent paleo data was not consistent with the historical record. The one statement in AR4 (put in after McIntyre’s insistence as a reviewer) that mentions the divergence problem is weak tea.
It is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data in figures shown IPCC AR3 and AR4, and the 1999 WMO document. Not only is this misleading, but it is dishonest (I agree with Muller on this one). The authors defend themselves by stating that there has been no attempt to hide the divergence problem in the literature, and that the relevant paper was referenced. I infer then that there is something in the IPCC process or the authors’ interpretation of the IPCC process (i.e. don’t dilute the message) that resulted in the scientists into deleting the adverse data in these diagrams.
McIntyre’s analysis is sufficiently well documented that it is difficult to imagine that his analysis is incorrect in any significant way. If his analysis is incorrect, it should be refuted. I would like to know what the heck Mann, Briffa, Jones et al. were thinking when they did this and why they did this, and how they can defend this, although the emails provide pretty strong clues. Does the IPCC regard this as acceptable? I sure don’t.
Can anyone defend “hide the decline”? I would much prefer to be wrong in my interpretation, but I fear that I am not.
State of the paleoreconstruction science
This raises the issue as to whether there is any value at all in the tree ring analyses for this application, and whether these paleoreconstructions can tell us anything. Apart from the issue of the proxies not matching the observations from the current period of warming (which is also the period of best historical data), there is the further issue as to whether these hemispheric or global temperature analyses make any sense at all because of the sampling issue. I am personally having a difficult time in seeing how this stuff has any credibility at the level of “likely” confidence levels reported in the TAR and AR4.
I am really hoping that the AR5 will do a better job of providing a useful analysis and assessment of the paleodata for the last millennium. However I am not too optimistic. There was another Workshop in Lisbon this past year (Sept 2010), on the Medieval Warm Period. The abstracts for the presentations are found here. No surprises, many of the usual people doing the usual things.
I view paleoclimate as a really important subject in the context of understanding climate change. I have no interest in warmest year or warmest decade; rather we need to understand the magnitude and characteristics and causes of natural climate variability over the current interglacial, particularly the last 2000 years. I’m more interested in the handle than the blade of the hockey stick. I also view understanding regional climate variations as much more important than trying to use some statistical model to create global average anomalies (which I personally regard as pointless, given the sampling issue).
I don’t want to throw the baby away with the bath water here. But this whole issue is a big problem for the science and has been an enormous black eye for the credibility of the IPCC and climate science. I suspect that many denizens will be on board with my assessment and are very familiar with McIntyre’s analysis. I would be particularly interested in hearing from any defenders of these global paleotemperature analyses by Mann et al.
If there is a problem, lets get to the bottom of it and fix it.
Efforts to hide the decline largely destroyed public credibility in climate science.
But the pawns involved are not to blame. The responsibility lies much closer to the top of the research food chain.
Efforts to hide the decline largely destroyed public confidence in climate science.
Prove it ,Oliver. I doubt it ‘largely destroyed’ your ‘confidence in climate science’,because you had little anyway.
Nick,
I have no idea what Oliver’s level of confidence in climate science was prior to the “hide the decline” revelation, but I can say that I was a reasonably firm believer in “the consensus” up until I began paying attention (around 2006) to the ongoing battle McIntyre was having with the Realclimate group over the hockey stick. By 2007, having seen the unbelievable disingenuousness of these key defenders of the hockey stick, I was becoming truly sceptical. Sceptical not so much in the sense that I discounted the potential for GHGs to cause serious warming, but sceptical in that I felt I should place zero faith in anything a hockey stick defender had to say, regardless of their credentials. I know that the folk associated with Realclimate have probably done much worthwhile work, but I was also certain that they would spin and obfuscate shamelessly to defend shoddy work.
By 2009, when the climate gate emails were leaked, with their “hide the decline” revelation being just one among many, for me it was just confirmation of behaviour long suspected from following the hockey stick wars. However, it should be remembered that climategate drew the attention of many people to the fact that there were serious sceptics for the first time, and that there was also some very dubious conduct on the part of mainstream, IPCC sanctioned climate scientists. I suspect that the pathetic excuses being put forward to explain the why “hide the decline” isn’t really as bad as it appears, are right now playing the same role in converting a new wave of neo-sceptics that the hockey stick wars played for me.
So I wouldn’t be so dismissive of the power of the ongoing, absurd excuses being offered to explain away “hide the decline” to convert a new generation of unbelievers.
Jim,
Entirely agree, I was a staunch AGW believer right up until sometime 2008 – and (other than not doing any research to get a deeper level of knowledge) I still cant understand why! In talking to family and friends, the only reason they seem have a pro-AGW slant is because they (like me) hadn’t followed anything other than media reports on the matter.
‘Hide the decline’ is as damning as the Team’s continuing inability to play ball with the rest of civilised science.
I also have to agree with Jim West. My firm ‘belief’ in AGW had already been undermined by some extremely bad papers about mosquitoes, arthropod borne disease, and the effect a warmer Earth on wildlife (I am a biologist). But, I assumed these were just opportunists jumping on the gravy train and that the problem was with the journal review process, not AGW.
But the Climategate emails made it all too clear that there was no science at all in all these famous papers in Nature and other ‘prestige’ journals. Rather, all the sound and fury appeared to be generated by an unscrupulous cabal eager for grant money, fame, and lots of CO2 generating trips to warm and pleasant spots where they could regurgitate their story to a corrupted press and conniving politicians.
As far as I can tell now, many of the assumptions of AGW appear to be false, nothing that one reads on climate change from Nature to Drudge is reliable, and no one has a clue what is happening with the Climate.
Exactly, well put!!!
Late reply…
Dave, your last paragraph is where we all should be at this point.
Some laugh at skeptics as “deniers” about CO2 and GHGs. But their ridicule should be turned right around and aimed at the supposed science as it has been presented. With them using tricks and hiding declines, just HOW are any of us to know anything for real whether there even IS warming? Too many stations show flat or declining trend lines in the raw data – even ones that have large increases in the adjusted data.
What was done by the hockey stick team in hiding the decline – is there any reason we should accept their other graphs and conclusions, when they might just as readily “hidden” other declines – and in the case of the MWP, e.g. – hidden INclines, as well.
In other words, if we can’t believe them – Muller won’t believe anything they write or wrote – how do we know anything about climate? And as everyone is coming to ask, “If tree rings diverge now, of what use are they as proxies, and if tree rings aren’t included, what does that leave us as to believing the temperature reconstructions tell us anything at all?”
We may be back almost to ground zero.
Well it sure destroyed mine! I am not a climatologist, and I had just assumed that the evidence for AGW was conclusive. I downloaded the emails out of curiosity….. and I was totally gobsmacked!
I was then doubly gobsmacked (if that is possible) when people started to claim that nothing was wrong – that the Nature trick was only a trick in the sense of something clever. How amazing is it, that to the best of my knowledge Nature has never corrected that paper, and yet the trick has been exposed by the Daily Mail!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235395/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-Climate-change-emails-row-deepens–Russians-admit-DID-send-them.html
Something has to have gone badly wrong when the Daily Mail corrects Nature on a science story!
Jim;
My timeline is very close to yours. And the stench of disingenuousness had about the same effect.
The hiders and excusers are skeptics’ best recruiters.
Oliver Manuel: “But the pawns involved are not to blame. The responsibility lies much closer to the top of the research food chain.”
You are to gracious. The pawns have plenty of motivation in the form of taxpayer funding, ensuring their continued employment, more research equipment, and computing power. Thus the pawns are just as responsible.
Take away the pawns funding and we soon see who the dedicated scientists are and those scientists who actually believe GW is real; since the rest of the pawns will leave in droves for greener $$$.
U.S. Congress should defund all Climate work at NASA, since it interferes with their primary job, and is duplication of NOAA.
I agree, Darren.
But the pawns, including Gavin Schmidt (below), are not at fault.
But the problem has been growing – out of public view – for several decades, probably in annual budget negotiations for federal research agencies at the top of the research food chain.
E.g., between the President of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Chair of Appropriations for Science and Technology in the US House of Representatives.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
As a former NASA PI for Apollo samples, I requested answers in 2008 (before secret efforts to “hide the decline” became public) to the following questions, orally and in writing, at a gathering in the NAS building that included the President of the National Academy of Sciences and the then-Chair of Appropriations for Science and Technology in the US House of Representatives:
Why did UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – and US federal research agencies like NASA, DOE, NOAA, NSF, etc. – work together to promote this web of mis-information:
1. CO2 from the tail pipes of Western economic engines caused global warming.
2. Earth’s climate is immune from the cyclic changes in sunspots and solar activity.
3. Hydrogen fusion in the Sun bathes planet Earth in a steady and unchanging flow of heat.
4. Solar neutrinos from Hydrogen-fusion in the Sun oscillate away before reaching our detectors.
I do not understand the motives for these actions, but therein is the key to the debate over anthropologic global warming and the havoc it has wrecked on our economy.
These questions are still unanswered.
Oliver K Manuel is right – there are no poor soldiers only poor generals.
The problem is simple – as is the solution. When, in 1993, the IPCC first wrote the forerunner of the “Principles Governing IPCC Work”, the very first words were:
The key words are open and transparent. The IPCC also stated:
This is saying clearly that it the government members of the IPCC that call the shots. However, no one can seriously suggest that any previous assessment by the scientists that undertook them has been open and transparent. We only know anything about the last, AR4, because Steve McIntyre filed an FoIA request for the Government and Expert Reviewers Comments. We then learnt a lot more from some brave individual that released the UEA emails.
So with all that has happened is AR5 going to open and transparent? Not if the scientists get their way. This is the instruction on the AR5 WGI website:
It is not the IPCC practice. It is the practice of the ad hoc volunteer scientists in the working groups who are supposed to work to the IPPC Principles. What in effect they are saying is the paying public can make all the fuss they want once the Summary for Policymakers has had the “media blitz”, which one IPCC Bureau member urged the InterAcademy Council to call for on page 102 of its public Comments.
Not only is it not the IPCC practice, IMHO it is no longer lawful for any public authority in the European Union refuse to disclose these to anyone in the world unless they can show that it is in the public interest that these completed documents, which have been distributed to hundreds of other people should be withheld from the paying public until after the “media blitz”.
I have asked the British Minister of State for an undertaking that the first AR5 WGI draft scheduled for delivery to government “focal points” on 16 December 2011 will either be published by our Department for Energy and Climate Change immediately or made available to any one that requests it.
Government “focal points” are also entitled to have a copy of all Expert Review comments and I have asked for the same undertaking for those on the first draft which should be consolidated by 16 April 2012.
Such is the Internet oversight of climate science today that the certainty that any liberties taken by the scientists will be very publicly ventilated. We might then expect a more balanced Assessment Report in which the controversies are properly recorded.
What Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer should have put into his amendment was to cut off funds to the IPCC unless it fully enforces its Principles and Procedures – specifically publishing drafts and comments when complete, and web casting all IPCC and Working Group formal meetings. Who could argue against that?
David Holland,
Your conclusion is absolutely spot on. I wonder, however, if the IPCC is capable of such openness in its current form? Perhaps if the entire executive of the IPCC were replaced then your hopes could be realised….it’s certainly an intriguing idea.
I think if enough of you in the USA lean hard enough on your political representatives you might persuade the US government to insist that the IPCC rules of openness and transparency are followed as well the IPCC rule that Expert Reviewers should have access to any data not available in the published papers that are cited by the Lead Authors.
Making payment of your IPCC dues conditional on the scientists following the rules might even get through the Senate where just stopping the funding may well not.
Sorry David, you’re barking up the wrong tree with me. I’m an Aussie, writing from Brisbane! Believe me, we have problems of our own, with our current government now proposing a carbon tax that they think will persuade the rest of the world to do the same.
Oh dear.
I really have a problem with the analogy that paints scientists, who pride themselves as, and really should be the most imaginative and against-the-grain thinkers the world has…. as petty soldiers who simply do the bidding of generals.
Soldier != Scientist
Scientist != Soldier
It will always be so.
From a UK perspective, the public credibility of climate science has not declined very much (about 75% of people surveyed by the BBC shortly afterwards thought climate change was a reality) BUT the effect of “climategate” as a whole has been an increase in the number of people who feel the worry is exagerated and those who had little faith in the science before have become more resolute. There has been a sense that the scientists involved were naive and inarticulate in choosing misleading words, but not currupt. This seems a typically British approach to understanding senior decision makers (those “closer to the top of the food chain” are too befuddled and disorganised to be currupt), and very different from the views expressed here about the divided opinions amongst US citizens, which is interesting for me to grasp.
http://mitigatingapathy.blogspot.com/
I wouldn’t trust anything that comes from the BBC regarding this issue. They have an agenda and a history of bias.
Prior to Climategate there were very few skeptical articles in the media. This has now changed significantly. Skeptical comments at sites that support the ideology (such as the Guardian) have also increased markedly.
Since the release of the e-mails, I have met many, many people who have changed their point of view. Whether Climategate is the most valid reason to become a skeptic is another matter altogether.
I don’t think the BBC has a history of bias and their agenda is one of working out what equal representation might mean. The survey was commisioned by the BBC, but undertaken by an independent organisation, with over 1000 interviews. Unless you are suggesting a conspiracy, the survey seems reliable AND a reflection of the people I meet at Football or down the pub.
As for The Guardian, there is a problem with so called Astroturfing and, more intriguing, US citizens make up a large chunk of the “skeptical” posters (based on spelling, language differences, cultural references, saying “as an American..”) which reinforces the sense that it is a coordinated campaign.
I have no axe to grind on the matter – if 75% had said climate change is a myth, my department would probably get more money to communicate its findings better!
http://mitigatingapathy.blogspot.com/
It’s good to see someone with a bit more credibility (i.e. yourself) taking a line on this issue- it’s something that’s bothered myself and others for a while; the ‘divergance’ and the sensitivity of the proxies to short/medium term temperature fluctuations (in fact the recent divergence if anything suggests a marked INsensitivity).
Personally i also refute the linguistic explanation surrounding the ‘hide the decline’ and ‘trick’. I’ve never used such terminology in my career as it is open to mis-interpretation and can be seen as unprofessional.
I’d have had far more respect for them if they’d just said that they were just having the equivalent of an off-line chat and had bodged the terminology, rather than try to defend it and pass it off as common scientific parlance.
Labmunkey:
“I’d have had far more respect for them if they’d just said that they were just having the equivalent of an off-line chat and had bodged the terminology, rather than try to defend it and pass it off as common scientific parlance.”
I think the problem they face now is that any admission of that kind would destroy their careers and, quite possibly, result in criminal prosecution. Remember, there has already been huge amounts of taxpayer money spent on various desperate “low – emission” schemes in the name of the hockey stick graph.
quite- and they’re far beyond the point of no return for such an action- they just should have taken this line from the start!
You know it’s past your bed time when you spell your own handle wrong. Sigh.
A Freudian slip to “Lab Money”?
An excellent and some what surprisingly frank analysis/discussion of the `hide the decline’ issue. It is really not that hard to get your head around. It amazes me the lengths that various scientists have been gone through to deflect attention from this issue.
Anyone with the most basic scientific training should recognize the problem. That the IPCC report should have failed to recognize the problem (the hide the decline issue, but more importantly the implications for paleo-temperature reconstructions) is sufficient to raise doubts in the scientific impartiality of the IPCC reports. If this is susposed to be the gold standard, then heaven (or hell) help us scientists.
With respect to Mann, Briffa, Jones et al. and all the other scientists that defended the original study and the hide the decline issue, as a geologist it strongly calls into question their impartiality as scientists. This then reflects on all of their other published work, and indeed the organizations that they work for (also the many researchers that work in their shadows).
If a scientists breaks the very thin ice of impartiality then it irreparably fractures their standing in a proper functioning scientific community. That this hasn’t happened in the climate science community is perhaps the most cause for concern
Philip Finck
Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources
Exactly. If this hasn’t happened, is climate science a properly functioning scientific community? The answer has to be no.
I’m glad Dr Curry has just deleted the worst of the personal attacks that defaced this thread. But they were interesting in this respect: this is exactly the kind of abuse directed at anyone questioning any aspect of IPCC-anointed climate science on the blogosphere for many, many years. Having seen Dr Curry’s concern for truth and honest debate on all aspects of the science so far, to see her attacked in this way on hide the decline is extremely revealing. The corruption spreads from the centre and the infection of the blog attack dogs is something rotten.
Climate science proved itself corrupt in its reaction to McIntyre to McKitrick from 2003. In Dr Curry’s words in Feburary 2011 we have the one champion of true science making herself visible from within the camp. Such courage will transform the scene beyond recognition – in time. What happens in the meantime, God only knows!
Sorry, I am with Muller. Many low frequency reconstructions calibrated to temperature by the original authors should have been included, but were not. Some of the newer papers tossing a thousand plus reconstructions together without proper evaluation of the individual reconstructions are psuedo-science. One should know the limits of one’s meta data!
There are multiple issues, not just a choice of how to present a graph:
1.Subjective choice of trees/sites for sampling
2.Post-hoc dropping of “non-responders”
3.Linear response to temp assumption (which is actually known to be false.) which makes the inverse problem undefined.
4.Ignoring six sigma outliers like Yamal larch which heavily affect the result
5.Hiding adverse verification statistics (R-sq of 0.05 means you have nada)
6.Unjustified weighting (bristlecones 400x others)
7.Proxies different orientations (+ vs – temp indicator) in different time periods of the recon.
8.Choosing graph baseline to emphasize post-1980 “warm”
9.End point padding—even worse with instrumental data
10.Hiding the decline as discussed above
11.Thick red line for instrumental data to make it look “hot” and to hide lines underneath that are going down.
12.Repeated use of “robust”, “similar”, “reliable” with no quantification.
You have gone significantly over the line with this post. Accusations of dishonesty are way beyond a difference of opinion on how a graph should be displayed.
If you thought that a single, smoothed graph of estimates of paleo-temperature told the whole story of paleo-climate reconstructions is far more a failing at your end than it is the authors involved. How can a single graph say everything that can possibly be said?
Summary graphs are by their very nature, summaries. The graphs you pick out were summaries of various estimates of what paleo-temperature estimates from the literature were. It is therefore not surprising that they show only the reconstructions where the authors had confidence that the reconstructions were actually of the temperatures.
Problems with modern divergence – which only applies to the Briffa et al curve in any case – are issues to be dealt with in the technical literature, as they still are.
The quote from the emails on the ‘dilution of the message’ was related to a completely different issue – the fact that Briffa et al’s initial reconstruction did not have very much centennial variability at all (the version of the graph that was being discussed is here: http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/ipcc_tar_zero.png ). You are being misled if you think that is related.
One can have a difference of opinion in how to present a graph, and that depends entirely on what point you want to make. If you want to make a point about multi-decadal temperature changes in the past, it makes sense to include estimates of those temperatures and the uncertainties. It doesn’t make much sense to include annual estimates, or seasonal estimates, or parts of the curve that the originators think doesn’t reflect actual temperatures (for whatever reason). The only issue is to ensure that the graph is sufficiently documented so that these choices are clear (which in the WMO report they were not sufficiently so, but were fine in the IPCC graphs).
But to ascribe a difference of opinion to dishonesty is to remove yourself from any sensible discussion on the topic. Perhaps if I was to find a graph in one of your papers which I thought didn’t show some aspect of the data I was interested in, and then accuse you of dishonesty? Would you react well to that? This is exactly the same.
How can you claim to be building bridges, when you are so busy burning them?
Gavin, the field does not need any more summary graphs of this nature. They have done an enormous disservice to climate science and its credibility. Continuing to defend these kinds of graphs is beyond anything I can understand. Leaving out that data and putting a “likely” confidence level on conclusions from that data is bad science, anyway you slice it. If you don’t like dishonest, try misguided and pseudoscience. There is no way this is defensible scientific practice. I really hope we don’t see any more of these kinds of graphs, in the AR5 or elsewhere. I’ve tiptoed around this one long enough, I’m calling it like I see it.
Well done Judith.
It is unbelievable to read Gavin trying to defend the indefensible (you shall not hide data) by his usual method of obfuscation and misdirection.
Dr. Curry, there is more here than is noted in your post. Not to make your eyes glaze over, but in order to avoid a circular argument wrt models, the lack of a long term temperature data set where an average temperature could be reasonable computed, the paleo work is a necessity for attribution. Without attribution the whole IPCC meme of its Bayesian attribution, cannot be supported at the levels quoted.
You state : ” I am personally having a difficult time in seeing how this stuff has any credibility at the level of “likely” confidence levels reported in the TAR and AR4.” But within the framework of the IPCC this would extend it in to the area of attribution.
While I agree with some of what Gavin stated, in terms of loss of confidence, the climategate emails are worse in context. It is not as Gavin states a simple disagreement of a graphical presentation. That is but one issue and as you have noted, there is much disinformation around. Nor is Gavin’s comment that: ” Problems with modern divergence – which only applies to the Briffa et al curve in any case – are issues to be dealt with in the technical literature, as they still are. ” a good summary of the issue of the noted problems with the different reconstructions. But I would note the tense that Gavin used is the same that Dr. Briffa used, and that is that these are issues, as in unresolved issues.
That is why I disagree with Gavin about you stepping over some imaginary line. The real problem is that a line was stepped over. It was the line of trust. This does not mean that when the answers are known, that Briffa et al, will have to be right or wrong, it does mean the “on message” write-up of attribution has problems.
“I’m calling it like I see it”
How brave of you.
My point is that by lowering yourself to insult, you block off all sensible discussion of specific technical points – if you are so certain in your thinking that no further discussion is required, then fine. No more discussion will occur. But it would have been far better for you to have had the character to allow for disagreements without being disagreeable (did you not pick up anything in Lisbon?).
For a useful analogy, let’s take a different figure, say, figure 4 from Webster et al (2005):
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5742/1844/F4.large.jpg
This shows a big increase in cat 4+5 hurricanes from 1970 to 2000. But why is it cut off at 1970? Surely it can’t be because the data is poorer prior to that? No, it must be that the pre-1970 data doesn’t support the thesis of the authors, they must be hiding the decline! I insist that the ‘adverse data’ be shown on all graphs, and that anything else is highly misleading. And without any further thought, it must be dishonest – because how is it possible that anyone could have an opinion on how to display data that differs from mine without being dishonest? Pseudo-science!
You see how easy this kind of stupidity is? What is point?
Good one Gavin, brilliant argument.
I’ll let others judge. But your method of argument in the top post and the conclusions you draw can be argued and drawn for any subjective decision about pretty much any presentation of complex data. Once you do it based on your prior prejudices against one set of researchers, the flood gates are open to apply it to anyone. We therefore end up with a situation where any difference of opinion is put down to dishonesty, and the process of objective scientific analysis has been tossed to the wolves.
You see your stance as brave, while in fact it is just lazy. I’m sure your students are proud.
Brilliant defense. Anyways, I’ll take lazy and prejudiced over dishonest, if you insist.
Gavin’s got an excellent point here.
Along with the Y2K “error” found that impacted global temperatures by what – nothing?, this issue is one that has been elevated in blog discussions WAAAY out of perspective.
Judy, what you are doing is disingenuous. As a Ga Tech grad in EAS, I’m embarrassed.
Jen, are you saying that hiding the decline is an appropriate or justifiable practice? Are you saying that the incessant defence of that practice lends credibility to the field or those working in it? If so, then I agree with you that you should be embarrassed and implore you to return your degree at the earliest opportunity.
Most of the people who are outraged about hiding the decline have misunderstood, what was done. They think that we have evidence of declining temperatures and that this evidence is hidden. They do not understand that the problem is in what the issue does for the credibility of paleoclimatic temperature records, not in what we now about the temperatures of the hidden period. The correct interpretation would never have lead to the furore.
The decision is foolish in afterthought and the explanation given by those who made the decision seems to indicate that it was also made for wrong reasons. When the paleo data contains features that speak against its reliability, the right choice is not to hide them, but to show them and explain why they are not so serious. If that cannot be done – then they are so serious.
How stupid the decision was should by now be evident to everyone. Arguing against that observation only worsens the situation. From the point of view of science, we need better easily accessible analysis of the paleo data than we have now available. The doubts on the reliability of the paleo temperature series are wide spread also within the main stream climate science community. Many in this community appear to think that the situation is worse than it would be without any of this data. Some of the best known climatologists here in Finland have hinted in this direction also in public.
It is also true that the two best known groups in Finland that produce raw data for paleoclimatic analysis disagree with the conclusions of the temperature reconstructions. They are not statisticians, but it tells also about the problems. One of the groups has analyzed tree rings in Lapland and the other lake sediments.
“They think that we have evidence of declining temperatures and that this evidence is hidden.”
Who around here do you think still thinks that, or has ever thought that?
Well said, Pekka.
It is completely obvious that that is the most common interpretation outside the community that follows matters in detail. Look at this quote from Judith’s post
“4 February 2011, Investor’s Business Daily: The ClimateGate scandal was a direct result of scientists — and we use the term loosely — at Britain’s Climate Research Unit and others, such as Michael Mann, conspiring to manipulate data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.”
It is clearly about hiding the decline in temperature, not in a proxy time series. The same is true everywhere.
Pekka,
Nobody here thinks that, at least, not that I’ve seen.
Perhaps some journalists etc do, but since when did they count?
It seems to me that it’s become yet another strawman – you misunderstand ‘hide the decline’, ergo you know nothing – end of discussion.
Peter,
I tried to tell it clearly that I am not making that statement on the readers of this blog. “Some journalists” is a much better proxy for the wider audience, which is still interested enough to form an opinion.
Pekka,
What does it matter what some journalists think, write or say? They generally get most other things wrong anyway.
Pekka, at this point I think the landscape has changed somewhat. Now the landscape seems dominated by those that fully understand the implications of the “hide the decline” “trick” and those that don’t give a rat’s.
There does seem to be a persistence of low-grade enviro-journalists, some of whom still trot out the “declining temperatures” assertion, but I think that this is more indicative of a much broader problem with the standards in journalism today and the guff that exists between the environmental journalists’ scientific understanding and the motives of the scientists/pseudo-scientists they either hero-worship or (cripplingly uncritically) pen-push press releases on their behalf.
It is worth checking the comments sections on news pieces where this miscommunication occurs, to see if the misunderstanding is corrected there by subscribers/regulars. In my anecdotal experience, this invariably happens.
It may not always – obviously I cannot say for sure – but I find that in general there is a far greater level of scientific understanding among the public than among the journalists. This is markedly the case at the Guardian, where the leanings of news pieces are diametrically opposed to the dominant views expressed in the comments.
From http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/19/fred-singer-on-the-best-project/
“However, the most serious revelation from the e-mails is that they tried to “hide the decline” in temperatures, using various “tricks” in order to keep alive a myth of rising temperatures in support of the dogma of anthropogenic global warming”
Although several people pointed out that this was wrong, it has not been corrected.
@louise
I am baffled as to why most of your contributions here are complaints about remarks on another blog entirely. Why do you not post about them over there?
PS – I have seen pictures of both Anthony and Judith. They are not the same person.
Is Fred Singer a “low-grade enviro-journalist” and if so, why is he guest posting at WUWT?
If he’s not a “low-grade enviro-journalists” then this comment of his shows that this particular interpretation of “hide the decline” is still spouted as if it’s true and whips up a storm (as intended).
Might misleading be a better term?
Judith Curry.
You obviously disagree with the recontruction, or you would not have started this thread.
Can you post data describing a trajectory that you believe represents the warming in the last one thousand years, as you accept it?
That’s not really the point of the thread (though i understand your question).
Splicing and omitting data is not sound practice- hence the ‘discussions’.
Can you post data describing a trajectory that you believe represents the warming in the last one thousand years, as you accept it?
Because handwaving and just plotting a curve with metaphysical insights as Judith “accepts it” is just so much better than faulty statistical methods that retrieve bad proxy data, innit?
I just don’t get this point. I get this kind of comment everytime. “If you don’t think that it is X, then tell me what it is”. Well, you know, sometimes if we want to be rigorous and scientific, we have to answer “I DON’T KNOW”. But this is perhaps too honest and so little useful politically… I mean, it’s so much more exciting to say that we do know what’s going on and it’s the white man’s fault (or Rush Limbaugh, or Osama, etc.)
“I’ll take lazy and prejudiced over dishonest, if you insist.”
Well, apprently, there’s no need to choose.
Touche, the first clever comeback that I’ve spotted :)
Judith
Its great that you have lured Gavin out to play. Freedom to debate is not something he offers dissenters at RealClimate. Why is that Gavin?
Ed
There are lots of dissenters at RealClimate.
Why write such an easily disproved notion?
Jeffrey – Name one. Just one – and post an example here of a dissenting question that was asked.
Roger Pielke Jr. comments there all the time.
Linking to individual comments isn’t possible, but there’s a search box on the 1st page. Happy hunting.
Jeffrey –
Bull puckey. RPJ “may” comment there sometimes, but I also know there are times when he’s been moderated too. Why?
Linking to individual comments isn’t possible, but there’s a search box on the 1st page. Happy hunting.
So you have no answer and you’re too lazy to go look for one. Others manage to link to RC comments – what’s your problem?
This is how you do it – I picked a thread and a comment within that thread at random –
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/02/ee-threatens-a-libel-suit/
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=6956#comment-201415
If you’re gonna lie to me, then learn how to do it better.
Gavin is trying to make this out as a judgment call about the presentation of complex data. But that is a distraction from the really incriminating evidence. Phil Jones wrote that he completed the task of attempting to “hide” the decline. The word hide indicates a deceptive intent, not a judgment call about the quality of the data. It appears that almost the entire climate (so called)science community has defended this data hider and he has been reinstated to his position as head of a major climate science research institution. The lack of outrage by the climate science community at his reappointment destroys the credibility of nearly all research produced by the climate science community. Once caught hiding or defending hiding, the climate science community can never be trusted. It doesn’t matter how many proxy studies back up Mike Mann’s hockey stick, we have no reason to believe they were not also hiding important data.
I reread Gavin’s response three times. All I can say is “Huh? What?” AS
As a Georgia Tech graduate in Mathematics, I am happy to see that
the call them as I see them attitude I remember still exists two
decades later.
Also I am reminded that the party who sounds angriest is the
one who is losing the argument.
Sadly you stoop to character assasination instead of reasonable discussion. After seeing a little of what goes on at The Open Mind, RC, and others I for one am not surprised.
What this shows to most of us is that you do not have a defense of the scurrilous activities that have been occuring. You can only continue to try and circle the burning wagons.
Bravo Gavin,
Controlling the message to the bitter end. You are a gallant and loyal soldier to the cause. Faced with overwhelming odds, even gallant soldiers clips run out and their positions are overrun.
Mann 98 is indefensible.
Was it Patton who once said, “Right or wrong, my country”
Steven Decatur, arount 1818
Gavin,
Had the hurricane graph to which you refer contained earlier proxy data to reconstruct the period prior to 1970 and then used the post 1970 actual hurricane data spliced on the end to hide a divergence with the proxy data, would you be OK with that? Would you consider that to be misleading, especially if it wasn’t made crystal clear what was being done?
You’re a fine scientist Gavin – but I suggest you might want to leave the political chicanery to others rather than call your own judgement into question in this manner.
As to strictly technical points, Gavin, about that subdirectory in the raw MBH98 data labeled “CENSORED” that held proxy data directly contradicting the MBH conclusion and was excluded from the paper …
You appear to be so wedded to the defence of an indefensible cut/splice/smooth that you perceive even wholly warranted criticism of the practice and its delivery as a personal sleight.
Oh well.
I’m sorry, Gavin, I missed that. Did you say that cutting, splicing and smoothing tree ring proxy data with the instrumental record in order to “hide the decline” in tree ring proxy temperatures and a decline in the correlation between the two is.. good, honest, scientific practice? Or.. not?
Gavin said: “This shows a big increase in cat 4+5 hurricanes from 1970 to 2000. But why is it cut off at 1970? Surely it can’t be because the data is poorer prior to that? No, it must be that the pre-1970 data doesn’t support the thesis of the authors, they must be hiding the decline! ”
– I think most folks here agree on this point, as we agree the decline should not have been ‘hidden’. Does that mean you, Gavin, are in agreement now?
Actually, since Gavin is a NASA guy, I would have figured he knew how long satellites have been making measurements in the infrared. Maybe not. Therefore, the decline was not hidden.
From what I’ve seen, Gavin is not a master of the term “analogy.”
Oh quite to the contrary. I watched the entire IQ2 debate where Gavin went on and on with his analogy about climate scientists being CSI investigators to an highly intelligent audience that paid over $50 a ticket to watch and judge an intellectual debate. He was then shocked when he lost the debate after disrespecting the intelligence of his audience with his childish run on analogy. Gavin understands analogy perfectly he just doesn’t know how to use it and when.
Judy –
Gavin actually asked a good question – sorta. There is intermittent satellite data back to 1964. Although it might not be considered useful for publication purposes.
Hurricane experts have been fairly emphatic about when the satellite data were sufficiently reliable to analyze hurricane intensity. We chose 1970, but apparently the methods of actually analyzing hurricane intensity were not consistent or adequate in some regions of the globe until 1980. So the criticism of our data set was using some data and analyses that were no good (no one criticized us for not attempting to go back into the 1960’s). Not exactly an analogous situation to the tree rings.
That assessment is correct Judy. The analogy to the tree rings is bogus. 1970 is also the first really complete year that the North Eastern Pacific has data. If the study were updated (hint hint) through 2010, a starting point of 1980 would have at least three decades worth of data, sufficient to examine some aspects of short term climate.
However, Judy criticized Klotzbach (2006) back then for not using enough data — but praised Elsner et al. (2008). I would describe Judy’s position on length of tropical cyclones records as “evolving”. Yet, she readily admits the uncertainties and does not hide the declines.
Judy – I didn’t mean to criticize. I “was” curious, though since I know there was “some” data in the 60’s.
Dr. Schmidt,
You are really the last person in the blogosphere to lecture anyone about lowering themselves to insult.
The real question is why are you doing this to yourself?
There is a treatment for cataracts practiced in the third world. A doctor comes into a village and treats everyone that suffers from cataracts. A thorn is used to pierce the lens of the afflicted, the cloudiness drains, and sight is restored. The doctor collects his fee and leaves town.
Now we might graph this over time and obtain some insight into the treatment. It is quick, inexpensive and delivers results quickly. We might also splice onto the end of this graph the results of conventional first world cataract surgery, which will show that the trend continues and sight is restored.
However, the third world treatment has a result not shown on the graph. After the doctor leaves town, those treated begin to lose their sight until they are completely blind. Since we don’t really know why this is we left it off the graph, because it doesn’t fit the rest of the data.
After all it is simply a matter of opinion that we should have shown the decline in sight on the graph. We did make note of it in the detailed notes in the original case study.
Now perhaps you feel the cases are different. One deals with cataracts, the other with temperatures. And since the result of the first is blindness in 100% of those treated, we should have made the problem more obvious.
After all, in the temperature record, it isn’t like we are talking about a complete overhaul of the industrial and economic base of our economy and hundreds of trillions of dollars in global taxes administered by the UN. What possible harm could come from that?
Gavin, the graph you claim as an analog does not involve the pre-1970 period, whereas the “hide the decline” graph in question does involve the post 1960 period. The graphs are not analogous.
Exactly. There is no analogy in Gavin’s “analogy”. The “hide the decline” graphmakers were leaving off (inconvenient) data that exists in the timeline they were graphing. The hurricane example above doesn’t leave off any data in its timeline. Score one for JPeden.
Correct me if i’m wrong but your analogy doesn’t hold- on one hand, ‘temperature’ data that didn’t fit the official line was left off a graph, on the other it’s just a scaling issue.
I understand the degree of interpretation required in these sorts of studies is an unavoidable by product, but if this had to be done then surely a different data set should have been used to avoid precisely this sort of conversation?
Or am i missing the poin.
This is not a good analogy, in the case of paleo proxy, the fact that they diverge for recent temperature cast doubt on their validity, because they diverge from the most accurate record we have (the recent one).
In the case you mention, the “hiding” occur at earlier date, where the records are poorer. It means that the curve is not as long as what we could wish, showing only a very short time and thus maybe insuficient for drawing any info about evolution of frequency of strong hurricanes. It does not transform the confidence we have in the actual huricane frequency shown though.
But as you, I see a that a line has been crossed. The line is between doing science for increasing knowledge, and doing science for pushing a theory/worldview/agenda/policy (your choice).
The line between the two is not always clear, but in this case, I think that Judith has shown to be on the former side, and you (together with the IPCC and the Team) have shown to be on the later side.
This is not immoral to be on the second side.
But there, you do not benefit from the reputation of total objectivity that science usually enjoy. You will have to demonstrate objectivity and robustness and defend it, they will not be granted for free….And imho, tree ring proxies for reconstructing global average temperature do not pass the robustness test.
The problem with your pathetic analogy is that it is fairly easy to argue that we didn’t have comprehensive or acurate records in the past (such as cyclones pre-1970). However the actual case being discussed is that the modern tree ring proxies, taken with the utmost scientific care, show behavior that does not correspond to the temperature record. So it is the utmost level of scientific malfeasance to attempt to characterise their prior behavior as reliable in any way.
Another sad truth about your “argument” is that fact that rebuttals pointing out the immense flaws in your argument would have been deleted at FauxClimate by your team of anti-science moderators.
“My point is that by lowering yourself to insult, you block off all sensible discussion of specific technical points – if you are so certain in your thinking that no further discussion is required, then fine. ”
Speaking of the devil, what are you doing in RealClimate then? You are deleting or moving every critical technical points to the borehole. You are allowing only those comments in, where you think you have a good answer to, or which pleases you. That is not discussion, that is propaganda.
At least Judith is letting your comments in, but as far as I can see, you already have deleted Judy’s comment from RealClimate.
Thats hypocrite and arrogant, IMO.
Oops, this particular comment was actually not deleted. I was looking on a wrong thread. Apologies.
But still, there are plenty of other examples. Why delete critical technical points from RC?
Mr. Gavin,
You might have a valid point with your “For a useful analogy, “; except you propose it as if those claiming Global Warming have never been found manipulating charts’ appearances to hide those – all so inconvenient truths.
If you want to have an honest and meaningful discussion and debate on Global Warming vs. playing a pseudo victim card with your analogy; then start calling out those who have been manipulating the weather station temperature data (NCDC/NOAA) being used by the pro-pundits of Global WArming to claim increasing global temperatures over time.
Please don’t feign the data hasn’t been manipulated, since it is obvious that the number of Weather Stations was reduced over time by not entering monthly data for specific stations, with a preference to reducing stations in colder locations. Unless of course you feel it is valid to compare bushels of Apples to baskets of Oranges to branches of Bananas to sacks of grapes to handfuls of nuts; then draw a conclusion on which one tastes better.
While you are at it, how about calling out those who keep morphing the entire GW debate (as in Global Warming, Global Climate Change, Global Climate Disruption, Global Climate Challenge) in unprofessional / unscientific attempts to head-off any counter arguments? Or do you approve of the tactic of using a “moving target” to prevent/derail discussions and debate?
Same goes for the SPIN on Global Warming being solely caused by man-made CO2 to man-made CO2 being a contributing factor to CO2 being only an initiator to whatever the latest CO2 claim is. All of the aforementioned SPIN being done to cover-up the fact pro-pundits of Global Warming ran into cold-hard science, physics, and observable facts that ran counter to or conflicted with their previous claim on man-made CO2’s effect as a Green house gas.
BTW: Any chance you ask Al Gore to come help shovel some of that white flaky Global Warming… ;)
For readers who have never had the pleasure of “debating” a Politically Correct interlocutor, please save this series of posts from the infamous Dr Schmidt.
His clever verbal ripostes are straight out of the PC manual, from the entry: “Exposure of midconduct, how to respond.”
In a nutshell, the standard PC rsponse when misconduct is exposed is:
Admit Nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
The counter-accusations should be personal. The more personal and scurrilious the better. Attack motivations. Attack personalities. Attack, attack, attack. Use the “in crowd” to exclude critics. Sneer.
This short manual of PC tactics should help as you encounter more of their ilk.
For a clearer view of these tactics, if you can stomach it, visit their own websites.
For those following along at home, the linked graph is from this paper …
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/309/5742/1844.full?sid=8e9aed61-22ae-48f4-a66c-fffb9d012793
… which includes the following words:
We deliberately limited this study to the satellite era because of the known biases before this period (28), which means that a comprehensive analysis of longer-period oscillations and trends has not been attempted.
Speed –
Perhaps, if we look more closely, we’ll find this in the “Hockey Stick” papers somewhere:
“We deliberately limited this study to the period before 1960 because of the known divergence before this period, which means that a comprehensive analysis of more recent data and trends has not been attempted.”
But, I suspect we won’t. (grin)
Gavin,
You know as well as I do that 1970 was chosen because that was when we had global satellite data. Your appeal to motive is rather pathetic! Is that the best you can do?
PW
That was exactly the point of Gavin’s post…
A clever argument by false analogy.
The core of the problem is the cavalier attitude with which you dismiss the divergance problem as an “issue to be resolved.” In fact, the divergence problem renders the entire project of treating tree rings as temperature proxies as a hypothesis that needs proving–not a presumptively valid methodology pending further analysis.
Frankly, I think its insulting to our intelligence that you try this intellectual sleight of hand. Yet you get all huffy when people respond by saying they feel they’ve been deceived.
Sorry, but an air of moral superiority isn’t going to carry the argument for you any longer.
And if we throw out all the tree-ring data, where does that leave us? Is there any historical record of the climate that is usable, or are we left with only trying to predict the influence of the rising CO2-levels by our understanding of the basic physics involved?
You’d rather use data that is known to be wrong than no data at all? Because not having such data would screw up the models?
Bizarre and very dangerous.
No, that is definitly not what I am saying. But I am interested in the following: If we take that the tree-ring data is flawed, where does that leave us? Is there any other usable proxy data? Or do we do projections based on physics alone? And in the first case – what does that proxy data tell us about todays temperatures? And in the second – what does our understanding f physics tell us will be the consequence of increasing CO2? I.e. when the tree-ring data is bad, what do we actually then know?
This discusses the various types of proxies.
Yes, but it does not give the consequence for the theory of AGW. Which is what I am interested in, and what I hoped some knowledgeable person here could give me an answer to.
You’ve hit on the reason why these guys cling so ferociously to tree-rings. The evidence for AGW is not the result of scientific experiments, but theory and proxies. In a court of law, these would be considered “circumstantial evidence”. It is weak evidence, and every proxy that is eliminated makes the case weaker.
Circumstantial evidence convicts people, though. You have to educate yourself and make your own decision.
But if we disregard the tree-rings and other proxies, we only have the physical models of how the greenhouse effect works. And these models tells us that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that if it is increased, the temperature will go up, does it not?
Thanks, Professor Curry, for addressing Gavin so directly and clearly.
You offer him escape. He viewed it was a bridge he could cross to conquer his tormentors.
Keep up the good work!
Good to see you trying to boost your ‘mate’ Richard Muller. He has been making ludicrous claims for years now and frankly, has little if no credibility whatsoever in this area.
And how much money will he and you extract from this Berekely Temperature gig? You know the one, partly funded by Koch Industries…
You do know the CRU was initially funded by BP and Royal Dutch Shell…. Don’t you?
Tallbloke: Wasn’t one of the panel members, possibly on the Muir-Rueell panel also a BP exec?
For anyone else with a favourite conspiracy theory about CRU, there’s a list of CRU funders at the bottom of the CRU history page at CRU’s website. You can cherry pick funders to fit any Weevil Scientists narrative you want. Big Gummint’s in there, too. Knock yourselves out, they ain’t exactly a big secret. A bit like the Divergence Problem that anyone could have found in the peer reviewed literature for many, many years.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
It would be an incredibly convoluted way of going about making not very much money by going to all the trouble of setting up a special institute, publicising it, doing a lot of work, then trousering the loot with nobody noticing. Might as well go to Fred Cock and ask for a sub.
But then. Didn’t ex Vice President Gore do something similar a while back?
H’mmm…..
I watched Muller’s lecture. He seemed to make some good points to me and to be an articulate and credible speaker. And he has some documented credentials that I have checked.
Can you point out specific things that you are unhappy with about it? Or do I just assume that a blanket condemnation from you should be good enough for me to ignore his arguments?
Well, for me a blanket condemnation by ianash is as good a reference as one can get. I guess it means I have to watch Muller’s lecture after such a convincing endorsement (ianash dis-approved) ….
Ianash, please don’t leave. The forum will not be the same without you…/s
kai, what’s the betting that this new Berkeley temp group already ‘know’ what the answer to their study will be?
Fuller can talk – he just cant do climate science.
And your qualifications for making this judgment are exactly what?
Umm, actually Ianash, as we’ve never met, to my knowledge, wouldn’t it actually be more accurate to indicate that I can write. BTW, you are correct, I don’t ‘do’ climate science. But I like to read it.
anash
Here is the flow chart of government “funding”
Tax from Companies and Individuals => Governments => Funding
Where does ALL the government funding comes from?
Reminder: Governments do not produce wealth.
JC: ” I would be particularly interested in hearing from any defenders of these global paleotemperature analyses by Mann et al.”
Ok, sounds like you’re interested in having a constructive discussion and would like to understand where they (the “defenders”) are coming from.
JC: “Continuing to defend these kinds of graphs is beyond anything I can understand.”
Hmm, guess not.
Happy to hear your views on the analysis, but don’t use the graphs.
Great point!
So much prejudits…
I don’t see a conflict in those two quotes. Well let’s combine them into a single sentence:
I would be particularly interested in hearing from any defenders of these global paleotemperature analyses by Mann et al, as such a defense is beyond anything I can understand.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Judith,
Agreeing to disagree is one thing. Calling other scientists dishonest and pseudo-scientists is quite another. That breaks down any constructive discussion that could have been had.
Why be so strident and accusative? How does that jibe with wanting to build bridges?
I agree with John N-G (http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/#comment-45778 ), esp re the need for summary graphs and presenting the evidence with the highest confidence. I also agree with him that it would have been better if it had been better explained how the figure was arrived at. But broad brush accusations of dishonesty lower your credibility (with scientists at least).
But if a scientist stuffs up on an important issue with significant consequences and then either because they don’t understand, or don’t want to admit their mistake don’t man up (as it were), at some point other scientists need to call them out.
Do you think they were wrong in their analysis and their presentation of their findings? If so have you publicly told them they should, in the interests of the reputation of all scientists, withdraw their results?
Bart
I find it incredible that you believe Judith is the one losing credibility with (real) scientists here. The specious rationalizations offered in defense of this deception bring climate science into contempt and ridicule by anyone not so blinded by devotion to the cause that any offense against scientific integrity can be excused, rather than allow the dilution of the “message” .
And yes, deception is the only appropriate word, this was not an accident, and was done for the intention of deceiving the readers. The accusation of dishonesty is made fairly, and is self evidently true. I urge Judith not to resile from it.
Verheggen-
“But broad brush accusations of dishonesty lower your credibility”
Taking the decline out, splicing temp records in, etc was all done because the original graph weakened the case – they had to doctor it to change it’s interpretation. That’s all documented.
In what area of science does doctoring a graph to change it’s meaning fall within sound scientific principles?
” Dishonest” is an accurate description Bart.
If you marketed a Prospectus in which you deleted an inconvenient section of a graph, and replaced it with a different but more convenient graph, you would be on the receiving end of a lawsuit for false and deceptive conduct. No doubt about that.
You do have to be obsessed to defend conduct which is plainly fraudulent in any world other than climate science.
Dr Curry,
“Continuing to defend these kinds of graphs is beyond anything I can understand.”
That really is the crux of the matter. It’s OK to make a mistake, so long as you’re prepared to admit it and fix it. Not to recant would appear somewhat churlish, but hell, some people are just too proud to say sorry. But to go on and on defending the indefensible, long after it has been pointed out in many different ways exactly why it is indefensible, is something else entirely.
I believe the ongoing defence is perfectly easy to understand, but only if we allow a role for either dishonesty, or at least self deception. Gavin is strongly denying the former, so it must be the latter.
BRA-VO!
I hope there wont be an AR5. Better reread Lord of the Rings, or some other fantasy book. I am not interested in paying any more tax to these people. Whether birds fly into mountains, or frogs die of jumping too high because of some scenarios from a computer, is of no concern to me.
“If you don’t like dishonest, try misguided and pseudoscience.” – Judith A. Curry, February 22, 2011 at 7:41 pm
“Pseudoscience is a meaningless word.” – Judith A. Curry, February 22, 2011 at 6:15 am
What a difference
a day13.5 hours makes.In which case JC’s response to GS was at the correct level
Gavin, I disagree with you.
To build bridges, both sides will have to admit their mistakes.
Like, the sun isn’t made of iron after all?
(sorry, couldn’t resist)
Gavin;
As per my statement below, you should really know when to give up. You simply make matters worse every time you defend on this topic. I would kick my student assistant half way down the beach (metaphorically speaking) if they even considered such an action.
Shame!
“With respect to Mann, Briffa, Jones et al. and all the other scientists that defended the original study and the hide the decline issue, as a geologist it strongly calls into question their impartiality as scientists. This then reflects on all of their other published work, and indeed the organizations that they work for (also the many researchers that work in their shadows)”.
Failing to mention in a Summary for Policy Makers that one key data stream supplying justification for claims that it has not been warmer for 1,000 years has serious problems–going out of one’s way to make sure that information is not available to policy makers–is characterized accurately by Judith.
Your credibility is not going in the direction you would like, sir.
You have gone significantly over the line with this post.
What are you going to do, Gavin, present a lawsuit towards Judith?
I find this tone of Gavin pretty remarkable, specially coming from someone who didn’t like the tone of another letter from E&E, asking for a retraction of Gavin’s criticisms of it.
I guess free speech and free criticism only works one way, that is, Gavin’s way. How sad.
Gavin,
Given that the MBH98 graph has caused so much misinterpretation since its appearance, you would surely agree that it would make sense to publish the same graph, restoring the “missing” paleo proxy data and removing the temperature series at the end. Your temperature series can then be placed on a separate graph alongside, with an explanation as to why the “hide the decline” controversy was mistaken. This would surely serve everyone’s stated purpose of making the science more clear – it would also be very easy to do.
The next IPCC assessment report would be the perfect place to do it, thus avoiding a repeat of the political confusion caused by the original graph.
What do you think?
Saad, where have you been the last 7 years. The entire Mann paper is faulty math. Have you not studied the decentered PC work of McIintyre, the bristlecone problems, and on and on?
Bob, I completely agree with you and I have studied Mcintyre’s analysis of MBH etc some depth, including the PCA analysis and the verification issues, but this was not my point.
The point at issue as far as I see it is that the MBH98 graph in TAR was the piece of “evidence” that was brandished by most politicians as the rationale for carbon taxes, wind farms, mercury light bulbs and all the other costly and inefficient burdens we tax payers are now saddled with.
To me it would be a very powerful symbol if the instrumental “splice” on the hockey stick were removed and the proxy data restored. The temperature graph can still be shown separately, but I think there would be a veritable Tsunami of “we were duped” from the world of politics if their main weapon of persuasion was shown to have been a “trick”, to use prof Jones’s words.
It’s a much easier sell to show the visual sleight of hand that was used by the hockey team on MBH98 than it is to try and interest politicians in the more sophisticated statistical chicanery involved – Mann et al knew that the dry stats would make the pollies eyes glaze over, hence the pretty hockey stick graph.
…..oops….PC analysis or PCA, not both :-)
Well said Saaad, and good idea, but some how I don’t think the Hockey team is going to like it! :-)
I’m guessing you’re right, but there was no harm in trying.
Gavin writes:
“Summary graphs are by their very nature, summaries.”
How can you summarize that the tree ring data that you have collected for the last forty years shows a decline in temperatures when your thermometer data shows a rise. You cannot summarize a conflict. You have to announce that the last forty years of data undermine confidence in the earlier tree ring data. Anything less is not scrupulously honest.
I’d like to thank Gavin for reminding me of the utter lack of contrition exhibited by the RC and CRU crews on hiding the decline.
I look forward to seeing the same cropped data series presented in AR5. After all, to remove or alter such an iconic series might lead me to infer there was some deceptive about the way it was represented. And about the people defending it.
Gavin, there are excellent references on how to make graphs to accurately inform. I highly recommend “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” by Edward R. Tufte. Be sure to read the discussion of misleading graphicsAs for the graphics in question, if you prefer gross incompetence as an explanation, I don’t think it helps your case.
“It is therefore not surprising that they show only the reconstructions where the authors had confidence that the reconstructions were actually of the temperatures.
Problems with modern divergence – which only applies to the Briffa et al curve in any case – are issues to be dealt with in the technical literature, as they still are. ”
It is statements like this couplet that give rise to the accusations of your pathalogical dishonesty. Given the divergence from temperature, there is no justification for the confidence assigned to the reconstructions.
We know that. So did your Teammates. That is why they tried to hide the divergence.
You know it as well. You are too smart a man not to understand. You are simply too dishonest to admit it, and arrogant enough to think that you will get away with it.
The ease with which you dissemble is disturbing.
Gavin: “Problems with modern divergence – which only applies to the Briffa et al curve in any case”.
This is of course not true. There have been many tree-ring series which do not match the hockey-stick shape, thereby diverging from the favored narrative. Of course most these are never used in any reconstructions, but simply discarded.
One can of course get rid of the divergence problem by choosing only the series which fit the intended/expected result, as has been done repeatedly, but this is cherry picking in its purest form.
And cherry picking is not science.
Gavin said “It is therefore not surprising that they show only the reconstructions where the authors had confidence that the reconstructions were actually of the temperatures. ”
Does Gavin see himself and his allies as gods who look down on data and decide that the bits they like are true and the bits they don’t like are false?
Given that they can’t explain the decline, how can they know which bits of the record are accurate and which aren’t.
Of course, they can’t.
Gavin
Why are you justifying rather than correcting the chicanery exposed by ClimateGate emails?
Deleting contrary evidence and claiming > 90% likelihood for what’s left, is so obviously unethical, that doing that in financial statements would land you in jail. That you defend this practice is so contrary to objective science that you show yourself wedded to your pet theory, regardless of evidence.
Have you criticized those who opened the windows to defeat the air conditioning during Jim Hansen’s global warming advocacy at the June 1988 Senate Committee?
Where are your objections to 90% of the USHCN weather stations having Urban Heat Island siting problems causing errors > 1 deg C? See http://www.SurfaceStations.org Have you insisted on correcting all the weather stations located near air conditioners or asphalt?
In the mean time, US oil production peaked in 1970 and has dropped from >3 million barrels/day to 1.8 million barrels/day. The US now imports over 62% of its fuel consumption. The International Energy Agency (2010) reports conventional (light) global crude oil production peaked in 2006, and will not increase through 2035. Lloyds of London warns of a global fuel (“energy”) crunch beginning in the 2012-2015 period. Jeffrey Brown & Sam Foucher show that the rate of increase in China and India’s oil imports will consume ALL global oil exports by 2025.
Where is there any serious evaluation by NASA of the rapid decline in available liquid transport fuels (“LIGHT OIL” not bitumen) compared to supporting IPCC’s wildly optimistic warming scenarios? The greatest harm caused by your arguments is that you are distracting Congress from this real severe decline in available liquid fuels that will very soon cause a massive economic crisis – far beyond the 2008 disruption.
I can only conclude that NASA’s climate division is so thoroughly corrupted, that I support Congress’ efforts to strip all funding to analyze anthropogenic global warming, and return NASA to its original scientific mission.
I encourage all readers to raise this issues with their Congressional representatives and Senators.
Gavin Said:
Perhaps if I was to find a graph in one of your papers which I thought didn’t show some aspect of the data I was interested in, and then accuse you of dishonesty? Would you react well to that? This is exactly the same.
Well, it sould only be the same if Judy hired a PR firm to run a web site to defend her study.
“Problems with modern divergence – which only applies to the Briffa et al curve”…
Really?
“How can you claim to be building bridges, when you are so busy burning them?”
I don’t speak for Dr. Curry, but Gavin, those bridges are not for you to cross. They’re not burning, still, they are utterly useless for you, because they lead in a direction you are unwilling to follow.
That said, the best course of action for you and the Team you are intentionally attaching yourself to is to simply step down. It would be better for both science and the political cause you are trying to promote.
For science it would certainly be better, as your personal contribution is minuscule so far. There are thousands of climate scientists who could do a better job, so you need not worry about your work being discontinued. Also, being a mathematician, with your modeling skills you could easily find a rewarding job in industry, admittedly with a somewhat stricter work schedule and less leeway for political blogging during office hours. Also, expect your computational models for industrial processes being audited every now and then, at the very least before their introduction to manufacturing or business where large sums of money are at stake. Finally, this move would make some contribution to restore the credibility of climate science and science in general in the eyes of the general public.
It would also be better for your cause, as you lack even the most basic political skills. It is never good to mix science and politics, as it harms both badly. Of course scientists are entitled to their political opinions as private persons, but that should be kept painstakingly apart from their role as a scientist. As what you are actually doing is quite the opposite, your resignation would serve as a most needed warning for future generations of scientists. You should not deny them this enlightening experience.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/22/realclimates-over-the-top-response/#more-34555. For more of Gavin’s increasingly bizarre behavior. There is a growing sense of desperation in the alarmist Fuhrerbunker.
Old news, Ken.
Here’s the relevant news report.
“It doesn’t make much sense to include annual estimates, or seasonal estimates, or parts of the curve that the originators think doesn’t reflect actual temperatures”
This is the problem. At this point the scientist in question is at risk of inserting their value system (or being perceived to do so) and should go out of their way to assure others of the precautions taken to guard against this possible corruption of the outcome.
Gavin,
Why do you think you are in a position to tell others that they have gone “over the line” in a debate? Do you think you are the arbiter of the line? Especially given your recent post on E&E?
Your style of debate is repulsive
“Honesty pays, but it don’t seem to pay enough to suit some people.”
— Frank McKinney Hubbard
Gavin:
Your obfuscation and personal attacks on Dr Curry are reprehensible.
The facts are
(a)
The tree-ring proxy data indicated declining temperatures after 1960.
(b)
The thermometer-derived data indicated rising temperatures after 1960.
These facts indicate that
1.
The tree-ring proxy data are wrong
Or
2.
The thermometer-derived data are wrong.
Or
3.
Both the tree-ring proxy data and the thermometer-derived data are wrong.
Those findings are the only significant results of the MBH studies that provided the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graphs. And they are important findings.
But the MBH papers did not assert those findings. Instead, those papers used ‘graphology’ to “hide the decline” in temperatures after 1960 that was indicated by the tree-ring proxy data. And the ‘climategate’ emails prove that the ‘graphology’ was not merely incompetence but was “Mike’s Nature trick” being used to deliberately misrepresent those findings.
So, “Mike’s Nature trick” was either corrupt scientific practice or pseudoscience: there are no other possibilities.
Please remember that I have continuously complained at the splicing of the two data sets from the first week after publication of MBH98 (i.e. since long before the McIntyre demolitions of the MBH studies).
Indeed, you left a closed Climate Science discussion forum (of which we were both Members) in a huff because you could not cope with my pointing out your egregious scientific errors.
Your obfuscations, posing of straw men and throwing insults like confetti do not – and cannot – distract from the fact that “Mike’s Nature trick” was either corrupt scientific practice or pseudoscience. In my opinion, the only hope you have for a way back from where you are is to abjectly apologise for having done it, and that hope may be forlorn.
Richard
“group that hid the decline”
“not in the discovery mode, they were in the reporting mode”
Poor Mr. Muller.
Gavin,
honestly, one can strive to bring bridges, but not please over this disgraceful episode. Let’s get over it with some acknowledgement that is should no have happened, and that it shouldn’t happen again. Dishonesty and similar adjectives refer to subjective states, and are clearly debatable. Trying to convey a non-diluted message might be a “noble cause”. However, the thing was not done well at all, and in fact backfired (the backfiring started in 2002-2003, and continues backfiring). One does not have to subscribe all words said against the CRU Team or Mann to agree that the episode had better not happened at all.
This quote from Briffa in the main thread – “The cause of this increasing insensitivity of wood density to temperature changes is not known, but if it is not taken into account in dendroclimatic reconstructions, past temperatures could be overestimated” should have ended …”underestimated”. Briffa and Mann wanted their tree rings to show coolth 1000-1300 relative to warmth in 1950-2000; the tree rings for that later period showed coolth not warmth, which had to be hidden in TAR and AR4, because it was likely they also showed coolth instead of the actual warmth in the MWP. Briffa was either being as disingenuous as Mann or showing equally poor grasp of English. The real problem of course is that tree rings are lousy proxies for temperature.
There will always be a need for summary graphs, in all branches of science, for communicating the main points to a broader audience. I have seen, and continue to see nothing wrong with using a summary graph, intended for a broader audience, to show only that segment of data with which the scientists have confidence.
The divergent data post-1960 fits into the category of less-reliable data, as does the Briffa time-series that is deficient in long-term variability (Gavin is right that this was the subject of the ‘dilution’ email.) I have no objection with any of the figures mentioned in the post.
I do, however, object to insufficient explanation of how the figures were constructed, and why. Even Gavin agrees that the WMO figure was poorly documented. I go farther, and agree with you that there was insufficient discussion of problems with reconstructions in the IPCC TAR and AR4 reports. The authors should have been more even-handed.
Regarding the “likely” statements, the problem there is that the IPCC reports are written primarily by in-field experts. The NAS Hockey Stick panel, by contrast, was a mixture of in-field and out-of-field experts, and the committee did not bestow on the in-field experts the assumption that their methods were reliable. The NAS panel produced a more credible document because of it, one that is still quoted by **** and **** alike (insert your favorite catch-all terms). This is a structural problem with the IPCC, not a problem with the IPCC authors themselves.
Judith, please be more specific when you say “any defenders of these global paleotemperature analyses by Mann et al.” If Mann et al. thought that their original hockey stick analysis was a sufficiently accurate temperature reconstruction, they would not have spent the following decade trying to come up with better reconstructions.
John, the more recent reconstructions still suffer from the same problems: uncalibrated proxies, and statistical models that make no sense in terms of calculating hemispheric or global average temperature anomalies.
You betray complete ignorance of any of this literature. “Statistical models that make no sense in terms of calculating hemispheric or global average temperature anomalies” – got a cite for that?
Another zinger, I’m dying here.
Hey, I just asked for a justification for your sweeping statements. Perhaps you think that the new ‘blog science’ can dispense with old fashioned concepts like references? I obviously have much to learn.
My detailed justification of this statement will be forthcoming at another time, in fact I will make it the subject of a thread at Climate Etc. sometime in the near future.
Of course it will.
You are a Pit Bull, aren’t you?
I’m delighted to hear that you are looking forward to it.
Dr Curry,
I am at a loss to understand what Dr Schmidt thinks he is achieving here. My first encounter with the hockey stick sent me searching the web for information and I was, at first, delighted by my discovery of Real Climate. However, after few weeks reading I saw that the bullying and bluster towards anyone who dared to question the Party line was a symptom of something deeper, a commitment to a flawed paradigm that could allow no dissent because one failure would cause the whole thing to softly and silently vanish away. Hectoring and bullying make me suspicious — not being able to follow the science beyond a basic level I have to judge the scientists by their words and actions.
Dr Schmidt, as a layman I find your attitude to dissent so pathological that not only do I distrust your climate opinions, I wouldn’t let you sell me a pound of sausages.
Persuasion to the Real Climate point of view is possible only if those who write there, and here, remember that people are suspicious when reasonable questions about disputed science are met by an extraordinary exhibition of affronted pique and wounded amour-propre such as the one above. Most important, remember that people react badly to bullies. Speak softly and bear the sword of good science, otherwise you will persuade no-one.
Julian Flood
Well said, Julian. I know we shouldn’t necessarily judge the message by the messenger, but sometimes, the two are related.
“Dr Schmidt, as a layman I find your attitude to dissent so pathological that not only do I distrust your climate opinions, I wouldn’t let you sell me a pound of sausages.”
Very nicely put. The Team have lost all credibility as
scientists, and act purely as activits and propagandists.
Which again makes me wonder: How does someone who
has so clearly made the move from scientist to activist
retain their credibility as scientist? In my mind you
cannot be both, because a scientist is supposed to follow
the truth whereever it may lead him/her, whilst an
activist has a predefined agenda.
Julian, it looks to me like Gavin asked for elaboration. He was practically asking to be corrected in his statement that she “betrays complete ignorance of any of this literature.” It’s her blog, let her state specifics and make specific references, if she has them.
It sounds like something that could be countered pretty easily to me, but hey, I’m just a layman like yourself. But whatever your occupation, when one wants to get things straight, one is direct.
Speaking as a layman, I am delighted that Gavin has posted here, since it allows us to see how vapid Curry’s replies are.
This is brilliant! Two heavyweights of climate science finally face to face in the public arena. Are we finally about to have the debate we were all told was “over”? I certainly hope so!
I know, right? Curry looked pretty helpless when it was just her and the other scientists. She had to get some non-experts in here from WUWT or it would have started looking like a rout!
Wouldn’t it be more helpful if everyone tried to check their sarcasm at the door and addressed the issue at hand?
Anderlan, what are your views regarding the ethics of “hide the decline” and the hockey stick graph?….and can you express yourself without any sarcasm or personal attacks?
Easy, Gavin. I hope you are bearing in mind that it’s only because of academics like Dr. C that the term “climate science” is not regarded as an oxymoron.
Well said Craig!!
It is thanks to the efforts of Judith Curry, Eduardo Zorita, Hans von Storch and like-minded honest and objective ‘warmist’ climate scientists that many ‘deniers’ like me hesitate to dismiss climate science as “horoscope science” and climate models as “astrological charts”.
I still make a practice of distinguishing climate “science” from climate science.
Schmidt’s deranged bluster speaks of an incomplete theory of mind – he clearly cannot understand the damage he does to his cause every time he writes a word outside his own echo chamber.
Do we now have a cite for:
> Statistical models that make no sense in terms of calculating hemispheric or global average temperature anomalies.
?
It’s a cliffhanger, willard. The blogospheric equivalent of “tune in again next week for another exciting episode of…”
Gavin,
Try Mann’s Nature article where a few sediment cores off long Island became (I hate to say it) a global tropical cyclone hockey stick. Please defend what I think is one of the worst Nature articles I have ever read. Imagine if these sedimentary sites were matched with TC hits in the NATL (pretend they were met stations). How many TCs would it have found? How many winter NE’ers?
And, BTW, we chose one data source for our paper on TC intensity. Turned out that we should only have used since 1980. References for that if w]you want. But I suppose we could have gone back pasting these satellite images since 1970 (0r 1980) with a bristle cone here, a coral reef there and come up with a global trace of whatever for a 1000 years.
I have no real argument about using various proxy data to reconstruct things but I think that one has to take it on the chin and look carefully at what errors andre and what endless defense of questionable data and statistics has done to the field.
It 2 a.m. in Bangkok and I am going to bed.
I think your appeal to motive, statements about crossing a line are out of place and have done and continue to do immense harm. That is not a legacy I would like to have.
PW
And why wouldn’t the scientists have any more or less confidence in the data post 1960? because they don’t agree with instrumental record? To my mind, this is sufficient justification to have no confidence in the entire time series before 1960 as well.
Try actually reading the papers on the subject, and perhaps you would be less confused. Start with briffa et al (1998):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6668/abs/391678a0.html
Briffa et al (2001):
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/jgr2001/Briffa2001.pdf
or
D’Arrigo et al (2007):
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/fac/trl/downloads/Publications/divergence2007.pdf
But if you think that the divergence problem makes Briffa et al (2001)’s reconstruction unreliable for whatever reason, go ahead and ignore it. It doesn’t affect Moberg et al, Ljundqvist 2010, Mann et al 2008 or Osborn and Briffa (2006). And it doesn’t make Briffa dishonest.
Great, thanks for the references, glad to hear that divergence is no longer a problem.
I think if you just go right to the source and ask one of the original authors of MBH, you might gain some particular insights and reaffirm that your instincts were correct about the validity of these “hockey stick” reconstructions.
Dr. Bradley, how certain are you in your MBH paper going back 1000 years?
Dr. Bradley: “….but we could only do this back to about 1700. Whether we have the 1000 year trend right is far less certain ….”
http://climateaudit.org/2011/02/21/we-could-only-do-this-back-to-about-1700/
Your losing what shred of credibility you had left Judy. Gavin offers you science. You offer snark and defensiveness.
How about you review the papers rather than trying to excite the denialists?
No, he offered papers on tea leaf reading. And it seems the alarmists are the ones that are animated. How radical that Dr. Curry is against intentionally misleading graphs.
She is chumming and you know it. This is old news, regurgitated by Curry to stir up the natives.
“…stir up the natives.”
Such insensitive language, ianash. Sounds like something Rudyard Kipling would say. Do you really think someone with your colonialist mentality should be the first outsider to visit the mysterious aquanaut-people of Sri Lanka? And we’re talking about Sri Lanka, ianansh–a country with a cruel history of Western imperialist exploitation. Not to mention the carbon footprint of your journey and the high-carbon, Westerner-needs, logistics strain your stay would place on Sri Lanka’s flood ravaged infrastructure.
Save your money, ianash, and stay home–send a contribution, instead, and confine your volunteer work to needs within cycling distance of your residence.
It’s about eco-trips, ianash, not ego-trips.
Oh Archie, turn the tv off for a while. Stop watching Glenn Beck. Your brain will thanks you for it.
You know, ianash, one of my little tricks that I employ with you is to provoke you into making remarks that are so repellent that they stand, unadorned, as stink-bomb monuments to your trollery. Another trick is to keep you going until it becomes clear to all that you’ve been out-classed.
Mission accomplished, once again.
Curry – perhaps you need to take Tallblokes teeshirt off – it seems to have strangled your brain and also removed any hope of reconcilliation,
Don’t forget reconciliation has another dictionary definition. A more scientific one. It is the totting up of all the sub totals to see if they match the headline figure.
In climate science terms this means checking that the sub-hypotheses and claims stack up to the main claim that:
Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.[7] It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent (except Antarctica)
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/spms2.html“
Have you checked with the Vice Chancellor about my letter? Did it arrive?
Thanks for the information, I’ll email his secretary this morning for a copy.
Do ask the VC if we can share….
The VC’s PA has responded, and the matter is in hand.
Ianash, you forgot to include “funded by Koch…” in your last reply. That is now required in all attacks on “deniers” by defenders of the faith. Please remedy this deficiency immediately, and, please, read your emails, didn’t you get the message ?
@j.curry
“Great, thanks for the references, glad to hear that divergence is no longer a problem.”
Instead of this “answer” I would have appreciated an argument on Gavins point:
What about reconstructions with data (also tree rings!), which show no divergence problem?
Isn’t that the definition of cherry picking? Avoiding the data that refutes your hypothesis and simply pointing at data that doesn’t?
Hypothesis: All swans are white
Observation: One black swan.
Rebuttal: But look at these 100 white swans!
edit: “All swans are *white*”
Too little sleep lately :)
Au contraire.
Reminding of Judy to look at the full body of paleoclimatic evidence isn’t at all “cherrypicking”. And by the way, MBH fits very well to this body.
Can you cite only one reconstruction, which doesn’t show a hockeystick (shaft spaghetti-like or not)? Seeing the endless discussion of the “ancient reconstructions” of Mann or Briffa in skeptic blogs is pointless, because since then we have so many hockeysticks, the Mac’s have to work much harder to refute them.
My point still stands. We found a black swan, and all the white swans you point at don’t make the black swan go away.
I still do not understand your swan-analogy.
What is the white swan? The hypothesis, that recent warming is unprecedented in the last 1000 years? Or the hypothesis: “Our Tree ring data before 19xx are reliable.”? Choose yourself, I paraphrase the discussion:
MBM and Briffa said: “We observed white swans.”
Curry: “I don’t trust your observation method. I’m not convinced, the swans are white.”
Gavin: “But we have a lot of examples, where unequivocally white swans were observed.”
Curry: “Mann, Briffa, IPCC are dishonest”
Others: “Can you prove? Have you references?”
Curry: “I have to read and will answer later.”
Others: “Did you observe a black swan?
Curry: sigh
(By the way: Your black and white swan example show some insight in theory of scientific knowledge and Sir Karl Popper. Please take into account, that even it were true that the methods of Mann and Briffa were false, then it’s not logical to suppose the opposite of their findings to be true.)
Here’s a better paraphrase:
MBM and Briffa: “We’ve observed white swans.”
MBM and Briffa: “Oops, my bad, we just saw a black swan. Let’s just ignore it.”
Curry: “Wait a second. You guys found a black swan!”
Gavin: “The black swan doesn’t count! I’ve got three more white swans to show you right here!”
Curry: “You guys aren’t doing science. You’re either being obtuse or disingenuous.”
Gavin: “Stop calling me names! You don’t know what you’re talking about! You’re a mean person! My feelings are hurt and you’re ignorant!”
As I see it, we’ve got one dendro proxy that was used to assert that recent warming is unprecedented. But it didn’t cooperate, and diverged from reality. Other similar dendro series may not have been observed to diverge from modern reality, but the *one* failing dendro series casts doubt on the utility of *all* dendro series.
If you believe trees can tell us about ancient temperatures, you cannot simply cherry pick the trees you want to use as thermometers.
Put another way, with hind casting, let’s say I found a dendro series that perfectly matched the past 10 years of recorded temp data. And it just so happened that this dendro series showed that 1200 AD was 200C hotter than today. Obviously we wouldn’t assert that the obviously false signal was true simply because it matched up with modern data for some period of time.
Trees are not good thermometers, and the one “black swan” has shown that. While you may be able to cherry pick “white swans” that *look* like good thermometers with the data we have, I’ve got no confidence that it means they will continue to be so in the future.
@ jere
Ah, now I understand your swan-analogy, but I can’t agree. The main reason is, because as a scientist you have always to regard the full body of evidence. You are allowed to dismiss data only, if you have good reasons, that they are not reliable. So if I adept your point of view, all you can do is to dismiss the results of Mann and Briffa, but after that you have to look at the rest.
I’m sure, you will not agree to this point and maybe you will have good arguments.
But I would be glad, if you could say, you understand also my point of view.
Best regards
@andreas:
I do understand your point view, but I think that the “full body of evidence” metric is of doubtful utility. Let me use a different scientific topic to demonstrate->
The “full body of evidence” on diet and nutrition is generally in support of a low-fat/low-calorie diet. However, this is mostly because the study there has been notoriously myopic, concentrating on finding more support for their theory, rather than on falsifying it. We’ve got hundreds, upon hundreds of studies that have been done, and found some sort of support for that theory, but the truth, as documented by Gary Taubes in “Good Calories, Bad Calories”, is that these observational studies are terribly, terribly flawed, and when evidence has been found that the hypothesis is wrong, it’s been carefully ignored.
So, the problem here is that negative results are either ignored, or suppressed, and anything with the slightest support is touted to the hills. This is a significant flaw in the pursuit of science. And because of this, because people in the science of diet and nutrition ignored this flaw, and based on a “preponderance of evidence” and the precautionary principle, our health authorities have suggested for the past 40 years that we eat less fat, and more carbs, we’ve suffered through four decades of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other chronic diseases related to carbohydrate intake. The *best* of intentions here caused *incredible* harm.
Back to briffa’s dendro, I get the feeling like they’re dismissing data not because of “good reasons”, but because it does not support their hypothesis. As for “look at the rest” (which I assume means other lines of evidence), I’m happy to look at it, but it doesn’t strike me as particularly convincing. I want someone to look *really hard* for a black swan. I want them to spend an entire lifetime trying to falsify their own hypothesis, looking for any shred of data that might prove them wrong. I want them to be constantly thinking about how they could be incorrect. And if despite all of these attempts, they fail to falsify themselves, then I’m going to be convinced.
As a fairly well informed layman, I must say, I’ve got the distinct impression that many of these researchers (Mann in particular), aren’t interested in the least in falsifying themselves. Now, this may not be true of all AGW researchers -> maybe Mann is just a particularly bad apple -> but there you have it, that’s the public perception.
andreas –
I would suggest you read some archaeology texts – preferably those written before 1998. Although most of the ones written after that date still show the evidence, they also include disclaimers wrt GW/CC. It’s how they get published. Even when the evidence directly contradicts the pro-cAGW statements.
Andreas, you need to look a little harder at the reconstructions, if you simply accept what you are told at face value you miss a lot of information. The reason that other reconstructions show similar results is that with exceptions, they all use the same subset of proxy data. Many in fact use the MBH98 PC1 as a proxy itself, which is kind of insane when you think that people like Gavin think that this is “independent” !
Also, in many reconstructions, the methods used are quite specifically designed to select and heavily weight proxies that do fit the modern temperature record, regardless of whether they are indeed actual temperature proxies (can we say, contaminated lake sediments or strip-bark bristlecones ?).
You can find many dendro proxies that show the late 20th Century decline, in fact I assert that the majority probably exhibit that behaviour, however those dendro proxies are rarely included in reconstructions, with the result that, as noted above, the same small subset of data ir re-used over and over again. And, what is worse, in some cases the original data has been re-sampled with differing results, and in at least some such cases the reconstructions use the older sets if they show a more significant 20th Century response. Examples, bristlecone pines (Linah Ababneh’s more modern and comprehensive data collection looks nothing like the earlier Graybill samples that oversamples strip-barks), yet Ababneh’s data is NOT used; and the Polar Urals proxies, same problems. Such behaviour HAS to be called disingenuous at best, deliberately deceitful and dishonest would however be a better description. Gavin, defends such behaviour, which speaks absolute volumes about his commitment to the deceit.
Mann et al 2008? You just kidding right?
Where is Briffa?
On holiday. Yamal Peninsula. The trees are warm there at this time of year.
Ever see “Weekend at Bernies” ?
Dr. Schmidt,
Is it not incredibly ironic that the this sort of conversation cannot happen at your Soros funded blog?
Thank God real climate doesn’t let this sort of conversation happen, which basically consists of Judith Curry launching unsourced ad hom attacks against various scientists, with piling on by random posters.
Thus far, Judith’s justification consists of:
Some might think that justification might *preceed* an attack, or at least be part of it …
Yeh, because being against obvious deception needs additional justification.
Yeh, because being against intentionally misleading graphs needs a lot of justification.
I agree dhogaza.
This superficial blast of hyperbole by Curry will be instantly disregarded as rubbish by one and all as decreed by Darth Gavin.
“These are not the droids you looking for”
Once again you are proven right.
Hail to the REALCLIMATE
Zorro
It won’t be ignored by the voters who control Congress, which controls the purse strings of the nation. CO2 and AGW is about money. As the funding dries up the house of cards will crumble. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
Where are her ad hominem arguments? Do you know what an ad hominem argument is?
Mark
Dhogy,
You are soooo right. I too am thankful that Realclimate provides a safe sand pit for right thinking little commissars like yourself to play in, away from all that corrupting free debate that adults engage in.
well said Jim well said.
I agree too.
High five!
Go Team Skeptic!!
If you are in too much of a hurry to troll away that you fail to read the article, which contains more than adequate justification for Judiths claims (which are not ad hom in any way – dishonesty is dishonesty, ad hominum doesn’t come into it), how about leave the discussion to us grownups
Jesus wept ! The dhogaza complaining about ad hominem attacks ! The fool doesn’t know anything else. He is stunningly ignorant of science and appears to know nothing of honesty or ethics. If it wasn’t for the howlers he comes up with you’d have to think him a badly programmed bot set up by Fenton, but even they aren’t that stupid, are they ?
Push off Hog, stick to Realclimate (ha!) where the claque of sycophants can cheer you as you fearlessly attack those who are denied the opportunity to respond.
A complaint about “ad hom attacks” coming from you Dhogaza is laughable.
NOT Soros funded, it’s TAXPAYER funded.
RC is not taxpayer funded. NASA is, however.
Mark
And, as NASA employees are running RC during work time….
Gavin,
the papers that wave their arms and suggest the decline is anthropogenically caused?? Isn’t AGW amazing? It can cause anything that supports your meme, as long as you are not required to show explicit data and observations as support for the suggestion!!
RE: “briffa et al (1998):”
The AGW virus can be recognized by the following signature
–
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj
–
…
It currently appears that patient zero was an IDL program known as “FOI2009/FOIA/documents/harris-tree/briffa_sep98_e.pro”.
…
http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s5i64103
Andrew why are you still repeating this garbage. I pointed out on another blogthat a later programme does not have any fudge factor
ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION ;****** APPLIES A VERY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION FOR DECLINE********* comments:
see:
recon_tornyamataim.pro
this seems to be the later version of your files:
densadj=reform(rawdat(2:3,*))
ml=where(densadj eq -99.999,nmiss)
densadj(ml)=!values.f_nan
Note no yearlyadj no valadj
This is an interesting comment. Gavin invites JC to ignore Briffa 2001, which is good in a way, because this is the point I think she was trying to make – namely that the Briffa series should not have been used at all in the WMO and IPCC reports because the divergence suggested that its growth was affected by factors other than temperature. As we know there is little or no evidence to suggest that this factor is restricted to the post-1960 period, and there was certainly none at the time of the WMO report and TAR. Leaving the pre-1960 section in was therefore misleading.
The other papers Gavin cites strike me as a red herring. We are discussing the treatment of the Briffa series in summary reports. These other papers are therefore irrelevant.
Yes, throwing sand in JC’s face, I think.
It’s a tactic that might work against a non-scientist, of course…
[Look at my fabulous peer-reviewed evidence!]
Since everyone’s wading in on this thread, I’ll just add my 2 cents: this needed to be said, Judith, well done.
Of course, the hockey stick graph was a political tool and has served that purpose admirably.
Have you actually READ the Ljungqvist paper? I Google’d for the original graph as shown in paper (I have read the whole paper), and this is what it looks like:
http://i54.tinypic.com/11wd2r5.png
(note that the last proxy based 10 year average is from the 90’s so there is actually not much missing incline in the proxy data)
Ljungqvist also states that:
“”a very cautious interpretation of the level of warmth since AD 1990 compared to that of the peak warming during the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period is strongly suggested.”
Which is a reasonable statement since proxies are no thermometers therefore they are not comparable. You compare proxies against proxies and thermometers vs thermometers, period. And I think Ljungqvist is the best judge on his data.
But what instantly happened was that some blogs like SkS plotted crutem on top of that with a Mannian smoothing to show a huge overpronounced incline and declared this as a hockey stick. IT IS NOT A HOCKEY STICK IF YOU LOOK AT THE ORIGINAL PAPER.
And I dont see almost any other of those “hockey stick”‘s (like Moberg) to show “unprecedented” temperatures unless an apples to oranges -comparison with thermometers is being used.
Sorry G,
Mann 08 is nearly as ugly as Mann 98. Tiljander is your first clue. Carry on…
Do not assign homework. If you can’t defend the matter in your own words, you do not understand it. And we doubt that you understand it.
But isn’t multi-variable statistical analysis able to separate the times when one variable affects the desired dependant variable from the times when it doesn’t by the use of priciple component analysis?
The point being that temperature is not the only variable affecting tree ring growth, but the statistical methods can pick out when it does. I have colleagues (I am not that familiar with the statistics) who have used similar methods to resolve different variables effects on a final dependent variable. So I find that saying that because of the divergence problem, then the whole of dendochronology warrants no confidence is unjustified.
Exactly, since the PCM method should separate out the temperature, the fact that there was a divergence is extremely significant. Any factors other than temperature that were causing the divergence should have been filtered out, leaving only temperature, which should have shown no divergence. But there was a divergence, so the technique and/or methodology employed in the study must be flawed and the conclusions cannot be relied upon.
Um, no, that’s a silly assertion. PCA does not attach labels to the outputs that say “temperature,” “sunlight,” etc., if the input sources combine non-linearly, or they change over time, you cannot separate them using linear extraction techniques. If your colleague is doing that with “similar methods,” such methods are either not so similar, or they have other information that relates the inputs to the outputs, e.g., he knows how the inputs relate to each other with time.
So I find that saying that because of the divergence problem, then the whole of dendochronology warrants no confidence is unjustified.
Who said that? It just means tree rings aren’t good thermometers.
Mark
that is the point i was making through contradiction. PCM cannot distinguish if tree growth declines because of excess heat, cold, wet, dry. as such, the hockey stick could be measuring any of these factors, at any time, depending which one was thaving the most effect. the post 60’s decline showed they were not measuring temperature, but the ignored it. worse, they hid it in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door
saying Beware of the Leopard.
that is the point i was making through contradiction. PCM cannot distinguish if tree growth declines because of excess heat, cold, wet, dry. as such, the hockey stick could be measuring any of these factors, at any time, depending which one was thaving the most effect. the post 60’s decline showed they were not measuring temperature, but they ignored it. worse, they hid it in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door
saying Beware of the Leopard.
Precipitation affects growth, but in the far past you do not usually have data on precip to factor it out and infer temp.
I’m confused by this argument. If you are claiming that the people in question intentionally misled us by the way they presented the data, isn’t the important issue what THEY thought about the quality of the data rather than what YOU think of it?
It’s a matter of opinion then?
The quality of data is based on the ability of said data to demonstrate warming in my opinion.
John n-g If you are claiming that the people in question intentionally misled us by the way they presented the data, isn’t the important issue what THEY thought about the quality of the data rather than what YOU think of it?
Yes. It turns out they were worried that it “diluted” their preordained message.
John N-G
“isn’t the important issue what THEY thought about the quality of the data rather than what YOU think of it?”
Only if they were the only ones who were going to see the graph. The graph, while a summary graph, was specifically designed to convince people of something. The change was made to make it more convincing, not because of some idea that scientifically one way was better.
As the communicators, they had a responsibility to show IN THE GRAPH the main features of the data sets so viewers could see for themselves. It’s also up to the communicators to make sure that what they present is the most likely presentation to try to make sure a clear and true picture will be received by the audience. I doubt you’ve read McIntyre’s documentation of this particular incident, but if you have I think you need to do a professional ethics check.
Harold- Thanks for the on-point response. I think one of the things that led everything astray was that in the original WMO figure, the authors were tasked to show global temperatures over the past 1000 years, not specifically tree ring data. So there was no point in showing the portion of the tree ring reconstruction that clearly DIDN’T represent global temperatures.
We can turn that around, though. What’s the point of showing both tree ring reconstructions and global temperature measurements during the calibration period where they overlap? During that segment of the reconstruction, the tree ring data is literally nothing more than an approximation to the global temperature measurements that are also shown. There’s absolutely no point in showing them both, and it leads to a false sense of confidence in the tree ring reconstructions for anyone not familiar with how they are made.
I really don’t think this was part of the conscious thought process of those who created the graphs, but it’s important to explore these issues so that (a) similar problems don’t arise in the future and (b) there are no excuses if they do. At least, I think that’s the stated purpose of this blog item.
Well I *do* think it was part of the conscious thought, and I *do* think this is all-too-obvious. Further, if your claim that these people weren’t doing bad things knowingly, then with all due respect, fire them immediately. You cannot have it both ways. Either they are intentionally disingenuous or they are incredibly incompetent. Remember that these people *still* give you this kind of graphic mish mash.
Not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but if there was a recent 40 year period of no correlation how does it hold that the rest of the series has any correlation at all with temperature? Seeing as they were forced into correlation during the calibration period, were incorrect for the recent period, why are they of any worth in the preceeding period?
Dr Curry,
“To my mind, this is sufficient justification to have no confidence in the entire time series before 1960 as well.”
Thank you for saying that. Why oh why has it taken so long for an “insider” of the climate science community to state this simple and obvious truth? Of course, I suspect your status as an insider is well and truly under review by the club. Let’s just hpe that a tipping point has been reached, and the members are of a mood to vote out the current board.
The divergent data post-1960 fits into the category of less-reliable data
This is pretty remarkable on itself. It shows why I have lost (some) confidence on climate science over the past few years. Mr John, “data” isn’t “less reliable” only when it shows you outputs that you don’t like. If a model, say, a paleo reconstruction, gives you a completely bad output in exactly the best years it had to show that it worked well against actual thermometers (despite the calibration years), it destroys the credibility of the whole reconstruction.
How this basic fact is simply handwaved as a “it’s only a post-1960s problem”, is astonishing to me.
And then this:
If Mann et al. thought that their original hockey stick analysis was a sufficiently accurate temperature reconstruction, they would not have spent the following decade trying to come up with better reconstructions.
I really have to self-snip what I really wanted to reply to this kind of sheer naive optimism. Hadn’t McIntyre et al fought like hell to show what MBH already knew were bad practices and faulty statistics, we wouldn’t have had Mann2008, etc.,etc.. The only “benefits” of the latest installments of the hockey stick is that now they can testify that their model is sufficiently hacked to the point that no longer can anyone say that the graph is entirely dependent on bristlecones. I guess 10 years is enough to find other “good” proxies for that kind of job.
The divergent data post-1960 fits into the category of less-reliable data
… and this is scary because that overlaps the time period of “maximum CO2 influence”
Also commonly claimed by AGW proponents: It can’t be the Sun because TSI doesn’t match the temperatures post 1970.
and yet tree ring declines post 1960 are hand waved away – amazing!
Regarding your first point, I agree with the problem but disagree with the solution. Lack of agreement with recent data does decrease confidence in the rest of the reconstruction, but I feel this should be expressed better as increased uncertainty ranges during the reconstruction period. Alas, uncertainty bars traditionally represent the known unknowns (because these are the only ones that are quantifiable), making them inherently misleading. This is a problem throughout science, not just climate science.
Regarding your second point, McIntyre et al deserve some credit, but it strains credulity to think that the entire paleoclimate community would have been satisfied with the very first attempt at global reconstruction and said “Nothing to improve here, may as well go flip some burgers”.
I think you misunderstand how PCA works. Divergence indicates a non-linear and/or non-stationary relationship between the output (ring width, density, etc.) and the inputs, the sources one is attempting to extract. Increased uncertainty is not what you get unless floor-to-ceiling is what you call increased.
Mark
This is shear madness.
The part of the paleo record that we can accurately calibrate against temperature shows that trees are not reliable thermometers, so your solution is to deem the most accurate calibration segment the data as “faulty”. But the prior data, going back centuries where there is no reliable cross calibration, can still tell us something? Particularly when it is used to show that temperatures in the past weren’t as high as today?
The only sensible solution is to conclude that paleo studies provide no accurate temperature history. There are no “error bars”, it’s just all error.
Lack of agreement with recent data does decrease confidence in the rest of the reconstruction, but I feel this should be expressed better as increased uncertainty ranges during the reconstruction period.
But that would require another statistical model that would calculate just how much decrease in confidence such reconstruction would have given pure mathematical arguments. IOW, we would have to invent *another* statistical model without any kind of actual empirical feedback to know if such a model has anything to do with actual reality.
Given the huge divergence displayed post 1960, I’d qualitatively guess that such uncertainty band would just turn the entire reconstruction completely useless, that is, statistically insignificant.
Oh, wait, MBH already was (Amman and Wahl / McIntyre).
Regarding your second point, McIntyre et al deserve some credit, but it strains credulity to think…
I’ll concede that point easily, it’s an unproductive line of thought to ponder and speculate exactly what would have happened if X and Y, specially regarding motives. My posts regarding this issue are pretty colored by my personal distaste for the characters in question, so take them with a lot of salt ;).
“… it destroys the credibility of the whole reconstruction.”
And of every other reconstruction based on that methodology.
And of any work on any topic performed by those that hid the divergence, and of those that wave hands even now to dismiss its importance and excuse the unscientific cover-up.
They cannot be trusted.
“The divergent data post-1960 fits into the category of less-reliable data,” Huh? This implies the data is *more* reliable elsewhere in the reconstruction (that in the period with presumably the BEST measurement data available). To this paleoclimate layperson this statement seems odd.
“continue to see nothing wrong with using a summary graph, intended for a broader audience, to show only that segment of data with which the scientists have confidence”
If it doesn’t mislead…
It is worth noting that the Muir-Russell review was very critical on this. Even though the reviews went to great lengths not to look to closely at any of the issues, even they felt they couldn’t ignore this elephant in the room:
Evidence of intent to paint a misleading picture – you bet. And so was the RealClimate summary of the trick. They paint a misleading picture by pretending it was the overlay of the instrumental record, rather than a splice. Compounding misleading graphs with misleading blog posts.
shhhh, don’t tell Gavin such obviosities.
“The question I am asking myself is what is my role as a scientist in challenging misuses of science (as per Beddington’s challenge)? Why or why not should I personally get involved in this? Is hiding the decline dishonest and/or bad science?”
Yes, it is dishonest and bad science!
You are doing the right thing.
McIntyre discussion of the Chris Folland and related climate emails does not pinpoint the fact that ‘hide the decline’ was not the point under discussion.
The decline was hidden, almost without discussion, when Tim Osborn, acting on behalf of Briffa did not include the last few decades when he sent data to Michael Mann
In any case, Mann as lead author, holds responsibility for how the chapter turned out.
Yes, responsibility for Mann, but also, I would have thought, for the 2 ‘co-ordinating lead authors’ of TAR Chapter 2: C.K.Folland and T.R.Karl, whose job it was to oversee the contributions of the various lead authors including the relatively inexperienced Mann. They failed however to give sufficiently close attention to Fig.2.20 (Mann et al’s suspect hockey stick), even though towards the end of the editing process they would almost certainly have been aware that Fig 2.20 was to be given enhanced – indeed iconic – prominence as Fig 1 on page 3 of the TAR Summary for Policymakers. Folland and Karl must share some responsibility for the promotion of this misleading diagram.
JC: “I’m more interested in the handle than the blade of the hockey stick.”
Indeed, this is the whole crux of the issue, the reason MBH98 – and all the other papers with dodgy PCAs – were undertaken in the first place, the reason they have become so central to the AGW debate and the reason they are still being defended, with increasing desperation, to this day.
If a paper can successfully “disappear” the MWP then the claim that modern warming is unusual becomes much more reasonable. To this extent, the “hide the decline” debacle is a bit of a sideshow, although it was incredibly significant in drawing political attention to the problems with peer review, especially in relation to the hockey team….. oh yeah, plus the fact that it was incredibly dishonest, unconscionable and has cost the economies of the western world untold billions already.
Thats because it has been re-classified “Medieval Climate Anomaly” (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/05/what-we-can-learn-from-studying-the-last-millennium-or-so/). Mike is not sure if it is warmer or colder (regional paleo-proxies may vary by user), but it is an “anomaly” that it always comes up in discussions. Obviously, the Medieval “Warming” Period does not exist, since written testimonies can not compete with “paleo-proxies” ;)
A wee reminder of a possibly related posting in the infamous SA article on Judith:
“Iconoclast” posts the following:
[slightly edited for typos and punctuation]
It seems that apparently deliberate overlooking of data problems is endemic within the IPCC process, not just the Hokey Team.
I see four separate issues involved in this problem, which if conflated, can result in misleading conclusions.
1. Did the IPCC and the authors involved transgress the boundaries of scientific probity?
2. Did their actions lead to false conclusions about Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past millennium?
3. If it did, would this fact significantly alter our conclusions about anthropogenic contributions to current climate change”
4. Are any transgressions evidence that climate science is disproportionately involved in improper conduct and is less trustworthy than other scientific fields?
Briefly, I would answer the questions as Yes, No, No, and No.
In slightly more detail:
1. It may be true that the divergence problem was discussed in the literature, but that does not justify concealing the data in presentations destined for a large scientific and lay audience. Even if it is reasonable to conclude that only 20th century data suffer from such a problem (and I’m not convinced we can conclude that), this is something that readers should have been permitted to judge for themselves.
2. There are now numerous studies demonstrating approximately the same conclusions as MBH – current NH warming probably exceeds NH warming any time during the past thousand years, even though this conclusion should be considered tentative. Interestingly, one more addition to the list is described in the March issue of Scientific American by Julian Sachs and Conor Myhrvold, who discuss (with references) evidence that the ITCZ has been moving northward during the millennium as the NH has warmed more than the SH, and is higher now than during the MWP, with a consequent threat of drought to many agriculturally fertile areas in lower to mid-NH latitudes.
3. The MBH reconstructions tell us little about response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Climate responds to many internal and external factors, and understanding how it varied 1000 years ago informs us about factors that might have operated then (and perhaps about climate sensitivity in general), but little about the current mix of factors. More important, a few tenths of a degree C one way or the other are trivial compared with temperature variations throughout the Earth’s history that have deviated more than 10 C in either direction from more moderate temperatures.
4. This gets to the heart of implications from the “hide the decline” controversy, because one of those implications is that climate science is disproportionately prone to inappropriate and misleading presentation of data in comparison with other sciences that have performed well over the course of centuries. Some of this has been discussed in other threads. As someone familiar with another discipline, biomedical science, which has been responsible for enormous advances in recent centuries leading to profound human benefit, I can say that transgressions in that field have been as serious and detrimental to public trust as anything in climate science. Examples from other areas of physics were also cited by others in a recent thread. This does not justify improper scientific conduct, or course, but neither does it justify a lower trust level in climatology than in other scientific disciplines that have performed well despite the lapses over the course of many decades. Judging any person or any group requires a balanced assessment of virtues and faults, with neither elevated to disproportionate status. The latter phenomenon tends to reflect the effect of political polarization, with its own contribution to the creation of false impressions.
Fred, my answers to your questions 1, 2, 3 are yes, yes, yes.
Could you elaborate, with evidence and relevant references?
Of course not. They are not needed in ‘blog science’ (see above).
Many refs in my previous posts; will address these points in more detail, possibly in a Part II to this post.
Gavin 1
Judy 0
Gavin -10
Judith 10
Sorry, you have it wrong. Using a little known “trick”, gavin has spliced the actual record—the evidence clearly leveled that shows (from SteveMc) gavin et al are disengenuous misinformation spreaders (normally called a liars)—with a proxy based on respondents at rc.
Original graph would have shown gavin down by 50 points, but the splice now shows him leading JudithC by a hundred.
Nice hide the decline gavin!!!
Judith Curry.
It appears to me that you obviously disagree with the recontruction, or you would not have started this thread.
Can you post data describing a trajectory that you believe represents the warming in the last one thousand years, as you accept it?
Aka “can you chase after my red herring?”
Mark
aka “You say that my Unicorn is a horse with a fake horn – please produce a better Unicorn. Otherwise, mine is a real Unicorn.”
This isn’t a reasonable question. It’s entirely possible to take issue with an approach without having a complete alternative, or indeed any alternative at all. The issue here isn’t that of preferring one paper over another, it’s of taking exception to a particular method.
Bernard, the point is that I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does with any significant confidence.
@JudithCurry,
I cannot believe you are resorting to the “we don’t know” position.
After all this time and all this good science, “we” know a good deal.
Plus, retreating to the “we don’t know” corner is way too generalised.
First, not all of us “don’t know”. Some of us know a great deal.
And secondly, there are some things that are very well known indeed, and we know what the unknowns are (in category terms) – we just don’t know how big all of them are (in quantity terms).
Your argument is not robust, from my point of view.
You could be accused of hiding the decline in uncertainty.
If you “know” what the global climate looked like 1000 years ago, please tell me about it, in a way that might convince me.
Nobody can know exactly, for sure, 100%, what the entire, global climate looked like 1,000 years ago. Being macro-scale multicellular life we cannot travel back in time to measure it.
There is considerably more data as time goes by, and this is whittling down doubts about some of the regional and global modelling. Ice cores clarify, but only part of the picture. Sediment cores add detail, but only some of the story.
But exactly what the global climate was like 1,000 years ago is not the “key statistic”. To lock into a view of the world that focuses on an absence of knowledge makes the situation feel uncertain. Anybody can claim whatever they like where there is a gap in the data. We weren’t there and no cameras (or thermometers) were recording.
However, and this is the big however, we can know a great deal about trends in climate over many timescales. I have recently tried to summarise some of the science about this. Since the beginning of the world, at all timescales, the surface of the Earth has been generally cooling down, apart from the last 150 years, when it has been warming up.
Whether or not some city in Europe, or even a small country, or even a large part of the north Northern Hemisphere, during one season or several 100 years, around 1,000 years ago, was warmer than today’s global average really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
What matters are the trends :-
http://www.joabbess.com/2011/01/25/revealing-the-global-warming-signal/
However, there is still plenty of evidence mounting that the Hockey Stick view of the last 1,000 years is correct. Mini Hockey Sticks keep turning up all over the place. In this month’s Scientific American magazine for example :-
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-shifting-band-of-rain
I think that you need to step back and review the evidence from the wide variety of sources that strongly suggest, even with missing data, that the trends of the last 150 years are genuinely anomalous for time periods several orders of magnitudes larger.
The uptick is there, and only an imbalance in the carbon cycle can explain it.
Jo, “Only an imbalance in the carbon cycle can explain it”. Oh really ! What an absolute poverty of the imagination. Have you considered that the conditions prior to your 150 year period were equally anamolous ? You are also absolutely sold on the idea that past variations were only regional, or northern hemispherical at best, what foolishness ! Try searching for records from the Southern Hemisphere, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, plenty of “merely regional” variation there, and oddly in synch with the northern hemisphere. Pity about the bias.
“The uptick is there, and only an imbalance in the carbon cycle can explain it.”
of course that has to be THE ONLY reason possible, isn’t it?
Isn’t the uptick of 0.8C in the only time we have a global record within natural bounds of variability? If not, how do we know that, given the lack of a reliable global record outside those times? And how on Earth do you ascribe it to a single forcing agent?
Watch our Judith, Jo might send you a harshly worded email, thus forcing you to amend a climate article on the BBC :0)
Regards
Mailman
jo,
I think you need to review what the scientific process is all about. Of course “we don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer when the data don’t support the hypothesis. Just because you don’t have an alternate hypothesis doesn’t mean you have to continue to accept an unproven one.
I am so tired of hearing this kind of reaction from the believers.
You could consider one of these two:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LL.htm
Loehle’s appear to be favoured by the ‘geomagnetic correlation’, but that is another story I am working on (pseudo-science ?).
Perhaps congressional investigations will turn up additional and current material. It boggles the mind that after climategate full and complete investigations on both sides of the pond were not launched.
If there were a similar whistleblower event involving the Nuclear, Oil, Banking, Pharmaceutical Industries, etc.. the leaked documents would not have been the limit of scope of submitted evidence. Why were the rest of the undisclosed emails and documents not investigated?
It is not just the decline that has been hidden.
“Perhaps congressional investigations will turn up additional and current material.”
Hammer will meet anvil and then we will see.
The way that the hearings were conducted were atrocious. It was the equivalent of the defence conducting the defence and the prosecution case in front of a judge and jury of the defendant’s closest friends with the defendant being allowed to decide what evidence is presented to the court and what evidence was withheld.
We have not yet seen an independent analysis of the standard of ‘climate science.’ We have seen lots of allegations and snippets of evidence of grotesquely misleading, cherry-picked, bullying tactics aimed at confirming a narrative in support of a political agenda, that flout the age old tenets of the scientific method.
If ‘climate science’ has nothing to hide, and the “hockey stick team” are clean, scientific and above board, then they have nothing to fear from a truly independent investigation.
I look forward to the day when such an investigation, without fear or favour, looks utterly independently at all the papers, on all sides, and investigates fully the science and only the science, convenes and concludes, whatever that conclusion may be. So long as they are investigating in a search for objective truth and adherence to ALL of the scientific method, then whatever such an investigation concludes, I will accept.
There has been far too much revealed so far that calls into question the impartiality of the Hockey stick team. Many other scientific disciplines have peer-reviewed and documented solid evidence of a warmer medieval warm period in many locations around the earth. Using “dodgy” graphs to dispute accepted and extensively documented historical, geological, anthropological, botanic records showing warmer historical events is dishonest. To use tree-rings (which cannot be used as a reliable temperature proxy AT ALL) to try to contradict such overwhelming prior evidence of a warmer past is utterly ridiculous and completely laughable. Or it would be laughable, except for the call for trillions of dollars worth of political policy to strangle human endeavour and requiring a global return to the stone age if the more alarmist end of the AGW crowd are to be believed.
There is ample evidence in other fields that we are NOT at the warmest point in 1000 years.
“2. There are now numerous studies demonstrating approximately the same conclusions as MBH – current NH warming probably exceeds NH warming any time during the past thousand years, even though this conclusion should be considered tentative. ”
Every one of these additional studies use some permutation of the same questionable proxies. (Plus window dressing) Frankly I can’t believe the warmers here aren’t aware of this fact. This makes me doubt their scientific honesty. If you really insist I give a link to one or more lists of the proxies used in the other multi-proxy temperature reconstructions, I can do it, but you’d be much better off to go directly to Climate Audit and click on one of the topics in the left margin near the top that refer to a particular reconstruction and read up on it.
I hope I’m not presumptuous, Judy, but I sense that your disapproval of the particular actions you discuss is distorting your objectivity. I believe lapses from the ideal should be put in perspective, both in terms of their seriousness and their implications for our interpretation of scientific evidence. I may not agree with Gavin that the lapses were inconsequential (certainly they had political consequences), but neither do I see them as overwhelming, nor do I believe they change our view of climate change in any appreciable way.
(For some reason, my login above failed to cite an active URL, but this has been corrected).
Fred, I will do a part ii on “why this matters”. it DOES matter.
You have our attention. Maybe it should be a guest post at WUWT.
Yes it should Theo. And on climate audit. And at the Heartland Institute. And then Fox News. And Finally, the pinnacle…Professor Glenn Beck!
Maybe go around and give the Koch Brothers a private briefing as well. they’d love it…
FWIW, very few of these institutions/people have any relevance/traction outside North America. No point on telling UK based or Oz based or EU based or NZ based about them, since they evoke nothing to us.
This is supposed to be *Global* warming.
WUWT has a massive UK following, FOX news is available in the UK but is thought of as a very very poor and unreliable media platform, Glenn Beck has a small following of right wingers.
Sure – WUWT has a worldwide following.
But Fox News isn’t available to me here in Surrey Freeview afaik and I still don’t know who Glenn Beck is. Is she like Oprah?
Whether one or two follow their work does not negate the point that they are unknown to all intents and purposes.
Sure – WUWT has a worldwide following.
Latimer,
I like to think of Fox News as the anti-BBC :)
Besides, those numbers dont lie, Fox News continues to be America’s most trusted media outlet…more trusted than all the alphabet mfm put together.
Regards
Mailman
If Anthony doesn’t post it there, I will.
Judith,
Based on your stark criticism of paleoclimatology, I can understand you answering yes to Fred’s questions 1 and 2, but to 3? How does attribution of recent climate change depend on temp reconstructions from the past 1000 years?
quick reply: too much reliance on interpreting all of the recent variability as forced, where multidecadal internal variability is probably much more important than ch 9 of AR4 says. this overreliance is justified in part by climate models being compared with a relatively flat time series for the last millennia. Note: this refers to the stick, not the blade; it is the stick that is important.
A climate that can by itself (ie without being forced) wonder off quite far in any direction would be a very sensitive and unstable climate.
Moreover, the temp cannot wonder off all that far in any one direction without being pushed back to its equilibrium value because of the ensuing energy imbalance (unless the temp shift is due to shifting of energy around between its subsystem).
(http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/is-the-increase-in-global-average-temperature-just-a-random-walk/ )
Your argument seems to rest on two factors:
– Attribution is based on knowing the amount of natural variability
– The baseline for the amount of natural variability is based on the climate over the past milennium
This would be an interesting topic for a technical thread (ie without the accusatory tone).
The first one makes sense, though I was under the impression that parts of the instrumental period without strong net forcing were also used as a baseline for the amount of expected natural variability?
Over the past milennium there were also natural forcings at work. Wouldn’t a greater response to those forcings imply a greater climate sensitivity?
Doesn’t attribution depend more on matching specific patterns of the observed with the expected warming, rather than on past climate variability/response (where the distinction between what is forced and what is variability is far from clear)?
Bart, re your last paragraph, this was discussed extensively on my previous detection and attribution threads. Given the large uncertainty particularly in solar and aerosol forcing, not to mention handling their indirect effects in the models, explanations of the parts of the record prior to 1970 that involve solar and or aerosol forcing are unconvincing. And if natural internal variability played an important role in the early part of the century, why would we assume that it didn’t play an important part in the later part of the century? the peak warmth near the end of the century got a significant boost from warm AMO plus warm PDO; I do not think that the CMIP3 runs did a convincing job of separating this kind of variability from forced variations. The CMIP5 decadal simulations, combined with the century scale simulations, could provide some insights here.
I believe Bart is correct. Not to belabor the point, but global temperature has moved up or down by 10C or more over the course of geologic history. A few tenths of a degree variation in NH temperature during the MWP is rather minor for concluding that major re-evaluation of current warming is warranted. That would be true even if we had precise knowledge of the internal and external climate drivers operating 1000 years ago. We don’t.
Current attribution requires an accurate assessment of the current mix of climate drivers- it’s a 20th-21st century problem, not a MWP problem. If the drivers operating a millennium ago produced slightly greater temperature changes than estimated by MBH, it implies that climate sensitivity is slightly higher than we have thought it to be. This would apply to both anthropogenic and natural factors, and so the balance would be unlikely to change much. I don’t suggest that better knowledge of the MWP would be worthless, but it would have very little effect on our understanding of the causes of the past century’s warming.
The above assumes that the MBH conclusions were inaccurate to the extent claimed by a number of critics who have assessed the paleoclimatologic data. However, in my earlier comment, I also cited one example (the ITCZ) of evidence that the conclusions were probably largely correct after all, despite statistical errors and despite the failure of the IPCC to cite evidence of the divergence problem. I believe Gavin Schmidt has cited others, and readers can find still more in the literature. To me, the issue is much less one of science than of public relations , and for the latter, some IPCC authors can certainly blame themselves, even if their fiercest critics have magnified the nature of the infractions.
A few tenths of a degree variation in NH temperature during the MWP is rather minor for concluding that major re-evaluation of current warming is warranted.
Fred –
What evidence do you have that the NH temps varied by tenths of a degree? Or that the temp variation was confined to the NH? These are assertions by those for whom any other interpretation would be inconvenient, but they’re not supported by archaeological evidence. Nor by a wide range of paleo evidence. Either read some archaeology or go to the Idso site – preferably both.
Well, a few tenths of a degree variation in modern temperatures is rather minor for concluding that major re-evaluation of current energy use is warranted.
Highly sensitive to what?
It has been remarkably boring these last ~150 years of steadily increasing CO2.
There seems to be a problem of what we might call ‘hermeticism’, ie a small group of scientist who are prepared to discuss among themselves their ‘secret’ knowledge of uncertainties but, when they exit the ‘cave of knowing’ they become purely political and ‘appear’ to abuse the scientific process. Ie a dichotomy that doesn’t completely condemn them as scientists but, rather, as conveyors of that science.
PS I couldn’t help wanting to quote a poem of mine after your reply to ‘fredmoolten’, which you can excise as you see fit:
It was a comic sight:
His earnest face forward
In the fury of impotence,
Awkward and shyly expressed,
And she agile in her agreements
Reassurance with a “Yes, yes, yes.”
“4. Are any transgressions evidence that climate science is disproportionately involved in improper conduct and is less trustworthy than other scientific fields?”
Irrelevant. Other fields are irrelevant. The issue is this field and its improper conduct!.
Edim – It’s not irrelevant for the reasons I mentioned. A scientific discipline deserves to be judged by its overall performance. If other fields have made major advances despite lapses equal or worse than those discussed here, it’s reasonable to conclude that climate science is capable of the same and deserves equal trust. I would argue that it probably has met that standared, but of course, that requires a discussion well beyond the limits of this thread concerning the positive contributions.
There are sceptics who are also sceptical of other fields (tip of the icberg), but this just muddies the waters for this discussion.
There is scientific method, no need to include other fields for comparison.
Trust? Trust in science is irrelevant except when policy issues come up. As for medical research, here too there are large mine fields – the risk of having everything look right and being wrong in reality is pretty high, so I take all these with a grain of salt. Over time, if enough work is done by enough researchers I can develop some confidence in them.
‘Trust in science is irrelevant’.
Stuff and nonsense!
Surely the whole basis for science’s relatively high status in society is that the general public trust scientists to be objective and to act with integrity.
And because, if carried out with those characteristics, it is an extraordinarily useful way of understanding the world.
Done otherwise, however, it is of no more utility than a Dan Brown book, and probably far less entertaining. Retaining trust is essential. Which is why betraying it is considered to be such a serious matter…as this thread amply demonstrates.
If you believe that acting in an untrustworthy manner is compatible with/irrelevant to work as a scientist, remind me never to bother with any conclusions you might draw.
Latimer-
Yes, when it comes to broad public interaction trust comes into play. I also view this as perception of integrity. In science, I expect the work to be well checked, so unintentional errors and intentional errors are corrected.
”
If you believe that acting in an untrustworthy manner is compatible with/irrelevant to work as a scientist, remind me never to bother with any conclusions you might draw.
”
No, I think that trust should be excluded from the scientific process as much as possible. I’m retired from the research side of the semiconductor industry, but I still consult in nanotechnology if something interests me. From the research side, a “package” of documentation results is produced. The usual requirements aren’t difficult to meet. The package I produce goes way beyond what is normal industry standards. All experimental samples are indexed and stored (where possible), so if someone wants to repeat the measurements they can, if they have a new measurement technique in the fiture they can compare to the techniques which was used. If they later think there may be something else important that wasn’t measured, it can be measured. Continuity from the research effort is maintained. All details of metrology is documented, so the results can be duplicated by purchasing the same equipment and following the measurement procedures (this is in theory; some metrology is just difficult). The details of how and why the experiments were designed and run is indexed and kept. All raw data, meta data, any data scrubbing (I include all data in the analysis except for any data points which can be conclusively shown to have a problem due to a specific reason. Even here, I may keep it in. It’s documented either way), the analysis (including code and meta data where applicable, and on and on. Everything is indexed for easy retrieval in the future. Any limitations specific to the work are explicitly noted up front. My preferred research report format (and hee I’m referring to individual experiments, not the overall research program) lists conclusions, then recommendations, then the details of the experiment and analysis. This makes it natural for others to read the report critically, making sure the recommendations follow from the conclusions, and the conclusions are tightly supported by the research. I’ve seen many conclusions by other which contain some elements of speculation, which I don’t do. Back when data consisted of a printout, a hard copy of the data would be attached, or the data indexed in a master file, and referenced in the report. You didn’t have to trust me, you could easily check what I said.
I’ve been in the position of checking other people’s work. For several years, all I did was find out where others went wrong, and then find a solution. This gained me an appreciation for organizing and documenting beyond what was required of me – I put out the information which would make it easy to find where I went wrong and why, or look for other things that weren’t anticipated. I also found that doing this made it easy for me to find my own mistakes before the research reports were public within the company.
These days, most of the details can be put on a shared network drive, and I keep as much as possible on a flash stick on my person. If any question arises, it can be answered in an level of detail needed any where a PC is available. Before this, I had to assemble copier paper boxes of all this and take them to meetings. I someone thought the data said something other than what I claimed it said, I could spread the printouts in question down the conference table, show them where my interpretation came form, and give them a chance to either challenge or capitulate. When you’re dealing with VP level scientists, it’s the only successful way I’ve found of keeping from being derailed.
There’s more, but in general I don’t think you’d be unhappy with any of my research output. Maximum transparency, maximum future utility of the research.
OOPS! forgive the typos
Wrong A scientific discipline needs to be judged in accordance to the extent to which its practitioners seek to overturn the world order. Those who study butterfly mating tendencies do not have to meet the same standards of rigor as those who seek to deprive billions of people of their lives, liberty and property.
On Fred’s #1. In hindsight the issue might well have been handled differently. But was that really obvious at the time? “Scientific probity means that may be only maintained, what is proven and can be proven. “
On Fred’s #1. In hindsight the issue might well have been handled differently. But was that really obvious at the time? “Scientific probity means that may be only maintained, what is proven and can be proven. “ Proven is too strong for the empirical sciences so let’s say “strong evidence for”. The authors felt they had this in their references. So, while better judgments could have been made (say by adding a note to the graph) it is not clear scientific probity was violated. How best to present evidence to a lay audience is a matter of judgment. You don’t want to get so detailed that their “eyes glaze over.”
Mike, you’ve inadvertently identified the key issue. There is no “strong evidence for” anything in the post-1960 climate that explains the divergence problem … at least, nothing that is unique to the modern era. The proxies diverge from temperatures post-1960. This could lead one to the conclusion that proxy data could have easily diverged from temp in the distant past, too. In order to avoid such a conclusion, the divergent data was removed from the IPCC graph; as you say, based on their “references.”
BUT … the evidence from these references was nothing more than speculative hypothesizing … which you can see for yourself in the original papers. That is, the “references” that you presume show “evidence” for removing divergent data do nothing of the kind … they simply state speculation. The only empirical basis for removing the divergence from the graph was the authors’ belief that it wasn’t supposed to diverge.
Briefly,
1. agreed
2. http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/#comment-45924
One of the papers own authors doesn’t believe in the veracity of the paper’s assertions. Yes, their have been numerous papers, all suffering from the same difficulties. I know of none that have survived the statistician’s scrutiny.
“with a consequent threat of drought to many agriculturally fertile areas in lower to mid-NH latitudes.”
Strange, I thought the alarmists just got through saying more precipitation would be expected in a warmer climate. (Personally, I don’t think they have a clue as to which climate disaster will happen nor where.)
3. You are confusing “your conclusions” with “our conclusions”. As illustrated by this discussion, many people respond better to graphics as opposed to data and discussion. Perhaps I’m missing the framing of the question, but for climatologists and people current on the issues, you’re correct, no it doesn’t significantly change anything regarding our current mix. Mainly because no one(current and interested) puts much validity to the graph. We know the blade is wrong. We know the handle doesn’t properly represent the past, too. Of course, there should be that bothersome explanation about the LIA and MWP and why we know these things aren’t occurring now. To the policy makers, this is an entirely different issue. They see a single line on graph in the shape of a hockey-stick. That’s the end of the story.
4. “This does not justify improper scientific conduct, or course, but neither does it justify a lower trust level in climatology than in other scientific disciplines that have performed well despite the lapses over the course of many decades.”
No, I put climatology just slightly lower than biomed and many other fields. “Performed well” is quite subjective. How about ‘Society has managed to advance in spite many short comings of various scientific fields. They could have easily and significantly performed better with an insistence of possessing of a modicum of compunction.’?
Sorry, I don’t buy into the “everybody does it” argument.
Sorry for the length, I tried to be brief, I hope I didn’t come off as short.
Fred Moolten ,
You argue that there have been similar errors/frauds in other fields, and
that therefore climatology should not be seen as particularly suspect.
But how many of these these other incidents been funded by a single party, that has outspent all others by a factor of perhaps 5000, and that has a vested interest in the flawed outcome being believed? And in any such examples, has there also been a complete lack of contrition?
And as to your lamenting political polarization, what we have in this case is politically funded science being distorted so as to support further politicisation of society. What other outcome can one reasonably expect?
Fred –
I will attempt to answer your questions and give brief reasoning for each of my answers.
1. Yes. Whether the intent was to mislead or just paint a nice tidy picture, the fact is the graphic did mislead many other scientists and lay people into a false degreee of certainty as to the unprecedented nature of recent warming.
2. Yes. Whether or not subsequent work appears to support (more or less) the earlier reconstructions, at the time, the action lead to false conclusions as to the degree of certainty that could be placed on the accuracy of the reconstructions. Some may argue that the divergence issue is well discussed in the specific literature, but the issue as I see it is the degree of certainty that other scientists, policy makers, and lay people would conclude from the graphics.
3. A qualified yes. Of course, the reconstructions tell us nothing about the role of CO2 emissions (or land use changes or other pollutant emissions and discharges) in affecting climate, but as I see it, it goes to the certainty issue again. With a higher than deserved degree of certainty in the reconstructions, it allowed climate scientist to potentially discount role of natural variability. This leads to a higher than deserved level of certainty in the conclusion that most of the warming in the last half of the 20th is due to anthropogenic GHG emissions.
4. an unqualified and emphatic NO. What many who rail against all of climate science forget is this was an action of just a very few individuals and the strident defense of it is made mostly by those involved or their close associates or blog denizens. I think the fact that most climate scientists haven’t actively spoken out against it is not atypical of any scientific discipline where such an issue occurs.
Agreed on all, particularly number 4.
Climate science isn’t like any other scienctific discipline. When science is used fraudulently or incompetently to deprive people of lives, liberty and property, what moral obligation lies with those who have the knowledge and authority to stop the fraud, yet choose to remain silent?
When the stakes are this high, moral duty increases commensurately.
The difficulties I have with “dendroclimatology” in the first place are:
a) The effects of climate change on local precipitation vary widely. For example, the MWP provided sufficient precipitation in Europe, Japan, and northern China for crops to take advantage of the longer growing season, but caused severe drought in the American southwest. Thus if I pretend growth is directly related to temperature, and average the poor growth of treese in the southwest with good growth in Europe, I get a flat line. There are too many confounding variables here.
b) Paleoclimatology inherently involves extensive statistical manipulation of proxies. But dendroclimatology adds to that a host of preliminary manipulations to relate ring width to temperature and discount other factors affecting growth, leading to a situation where the final product has been so thoroughly mashed that it resembles the actual data about as much as baby food resembles steak. The opportunity for tendentious hacking is enormous.
Thus I would put much more faith, even a priori, in a study like Loehle’s, which purposely and specifically excluded tree ring data.
Craig
We don’t even have to get into the specific problems with dendrochronology. The divergence between tree rings and observations after 1960 demonstrates that tree rings are not reliable air temperature proxies, and this should have stopped publication of the MBH results. The fact that it didn’t is where the scientific malfeasance came in.
The day hasn’t come yet, when I will be lectured about “honesty” by the guy who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into acknowledging McIntyre’s contributions in the identification of the BAS station data errors, just two years ago (see “Prometheus”, post 4936).
Anyway…Judith – your hopes about getting “a useful analysis and assessment of the paleodata for the last millennium” might rightly be very low. Remember what Lord Oxburgh said, during one of the hearings by the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee:
Gavin, If the IPCC had any integrity at all they would have thrown out the hockey stick and used other examples of a “cooleth” MWP. There must be tons of it in the published articles. If there was not much else to use then this tells me the IPCC was desperate to get there idealogy presented.
Deep Climate already demonstrated how McIntyre constructed his case from out of context quotes. It is disappointing to see that Judith Curry failed to do due diligence on her post.
Terrific. Does this mean that there is no divergence problem and that the data after 1960 were actually included in the plots under discussion? And that there was no splicing with instrumental data?
I thnk it means you are great at reading headlines but not reading the actual reports. Just like Muller.
This is non-responsive. If you didn’t think that McIntyre’s misrepresentations were relevant, why did you include them in your post?
Judith Curry.
It is quite apparent that you obviously disagree with the recontruction, or you would not have started this thread.
Can you post data describing a trajectory that you believe represents the warming in the last one thousand years, as you accept it?
I’m not sure if it follows that if you disagree with someone’s assertion of a specific trajectory, that you must have an alternative trajectory you believe is true.
You could simply believe that the answer is not known, or is unknowable.
What a convenient lack of curiosity..
Or a convenient understanding of the limitations of reality :)
Being curious doesn’t require one to have a specific dogma.
Did you even read your link? You must be joking.
“Terrific. Does this mean that there is no divergence problem and that the data after 1960 were actually included in the plots under discussion? And that there was no splicing with instrumental data?”
That is the title of the post, and seems to be something that Gavin and his minions try and not answer directly. Instead they put forth one red herring after another trying to obscure the fact that the diverging part of the data was deliberately deleted from the graph. They actually explained why they did it! They did it to “hide the decline”. Everyone knows why, even Gavin and Co. The fact that he continues to pretend he doesn’t says volumes about him and many others.
It is great that you have addressed this issue Judy. My opinion is much the same as this fellow from Oxford.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/2/23/the-beddington-challenge.html?lastPage=true#comment12009168
You make me proud to be a Ga Tech graduate, unlike Jen above! Keep their feet to the fire!
Tim? The “hide the decline” was bad science. How does McIntyre quoting “out of context” anything, have anything to do with this case of bad science? Would you like to do an in depth peer review of some of the more recent proxy reconstructions?
Balderdash! Scrupulously honest scientists would have published that they had collected forty years of data that undermined the reliability of tree ring data. They would have dropped all of the tree ring data from their evidence.
“Scrupulously honest…..”
Not only are these traits not required for climatologists, they are, apparently, discouraged. It muddles the message.
the case for hide the decline has little to do with quotes, these just provide context. The hiding of the divergence (and other manipulations like end-padding and thick red lines for instrumental) are all to be seen by dissecting the graphs. Real data wonks use the data, not just word processors.
The material under discussion was not limited to fellow scientists. It was presented by the IPCC to the World. It must satisfy the standards of truth employed by the ordinary tax payer.
Judith
Don’t be diverted by Tim’s obfuscation, misdirection and muddying the waters.
The issue is unprecedented global warming was presented as a hockey stick to the world. In closer examination, the hockey stick was found not to be made of one material. The handle is made of tree rings, the blade of thermometer.
Why the blade is not made of tree rings? To hide the decline.
That is deception.
This, from a person demonstrably non-proficient in basic statistics…
Top work. When you can’t refute a statement, attack the authour. Pray tell, what was statistically incorrect in that statement?
Tim Lambert:
“It is disappointing to see that Judith Curry failed to do due diligence on her post.”
Due diligence = reading a “Deep Climate” blog post?
LOL!
deep climate is dave clarke.
I think he plays music
Hope there’s not five more like him.
Lol. How old am I to get that cultural reference? Too old to know, that’s the problem.
There’s only “bits and pieces” that remain. ;-)
“Catch us if you can”
One of DC5’s hits was:
‘Catch Us If You Can’.
Looks like we’re closing in on DC’s tail and his other Teammates. Would ‘Run Rabbett Run’ be an appropriate number at this time?
Uhm… There would only be 4 as DC would count as one… You were trying to hide the decline! :-)
Tim,
You make me sad to be an Aussie.
Zorro
Zorro, I feel the same way about you. Back to the world of Andrew Bolt with you young fella!
That’s a good world to be in.
Tim,
The RC rationalization is not convincing to many informed people.
Why does your opinion that it is otherwise trump the conclusion of Dr. Curry and many other people who are at least as qualified as you to your opinion?
Tim Lambert :
I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned your other source of climate science information; Gareth the New Zealand truffle farmer that you frequently link to as an important source of science analysis.
I would like to add a bit of emphasis. The decline took place after 1960. During most of that time, the data was collected by scientists involved in the Climategate emails. The decline took place on their watch. The tree ring data that shows a decline in temperatures and a divergence from thermometer data is the most reliable data they have because they collected it. Surely, serious scientists or just scrupulously honest scientists would have concluded that the tree ring data is suspect as their own data collection showed. Hiding the divergence amounted to rejecting their own work. Scrupulously honest scientists would have published that they had collected forty years of data that undermined the reliability of tree ring data. They would have dropped all of the tree ring data from their evidence.
Theo – It would have been misleading to omit tree ring data when the latter are informative, and in fact, correlated well with measured temperature over many decades. The appropriate action is to disclose the areas of divergence, offer tentative explanations, acknowledge their limitations, and let readers judge. Simply pretending the data did not exist would have deprived readers of a source of information and would have implied that the readers were incompetent to evaluate it when given enough evidence to do so.
Aren’t you ignoring the importance of a scientist’s own work of data collection? I would think that after forty years of data collection, a scientist would have a highly refined critical appreciation of the older data that had been passed on to him. If it were me, I would be highly impressed by the fact that my data diverged drastically from what had been collected before me. If a young scientist has little confidence, he might criticize himself. For a scientist comfortable in his skin, the critical juices should flow and he should show no mercy as he criticized the earlier data. Criticism is no less part of science than data collection.
Fred,
There is no convincing data to support the assertion that tree rings make good thermometers to the precision levels claimed by Mann, Briffa and gang.
They hid their problem, and no amount of rationalization by you, Schmidt or from peanut gallery neverwuzzers like ianash will change that.
hunter, start reading some science and stop reading American Thinker. Then you’ll understand why your comments are nonsense.
Don’t read American Thinker.
So far you fail on breast exams, American Thinker and your ability to post links or citations to support yourself.
Do you in fact know how to post a link?
“Simply pretending the data did not exist would have deprived readers of a source of information…”
You mean, like using a “trick” to “hide” the data that did not show what you wanted it to?
Good thing they didn’t replace said inconvenient data with OTHER data that did show what they wanted shown. That would have been truly deceptive. Oh, wait…
“It would have been misleading to omit tree ring data when the latter are informative, and in fact, correlated well with measured temperature over many decades.”
Fred, correlation is not causation. When something correlates well for some decades, and then not at all for other dedcades, the default hypothesis must be that tree rings don’t reliably reflect temperature. No other honest interpretation is possible.
Isn’t it true that the model was calebrated to the recorded temperatures? And that the model fitted closely to the temperatures ecept for the post 1960 period? It seems to me that the model should fit closely to the calebration data, else you’d keep working on the model till it did. The fit over this period is not evidence of correct proceedure.
“I would like to add a bit of emphasis. The decline took place after 1960.”
How do you know this? The chart shows that but what of the data? You’ve seen the raw numbers?
Tim,
to my knowledge, Steve McIntyre constructed “his case” with a very careful and scholarly examination of the statistical methods applied, including very specific points about principal component analysis, the number of component to be retained, the kind of statistical test to use (and their virtues and shortcomings), the conflation of various types of data within the same chart (including some years averaged over 30-40 years and other years not averaged at all), an many other similar scientific points. I admire your capacity to be satisfied with a “demonstration” to the contrary given at Deep Climate, which I regrettably do not share. I am afraid I am not the only one, should I say. About how McIntyre “constructed his case” I cordially recommend reading The Hockey Stick Illusion. I am not recommending that you share the book’s conclusions, mind you: yous that you read it. Most of the references are to readily accessible sources such as published papers and online blogs, so you can “demonstrate” to yourself the presence or absence of “context” in any of the “cases” that were “constructed”. In fact, I remember several issues in which digging up the context made them incredibly worse.
Judith, thanks for the post, it was long overdue. I share your concerns outlined in your primer but I am curious as what motivated you to say “Can anyone defend “hide the decline”? I would much prefer to be wrong in my interpretation, but I fear that I am not”. What do you prefer to be wrong about –the reputation of climate scientists generally, the honesty of Mann, Jones, Schmidt et al., or that AGW might have been overestimated?
OK. Judith, if you’re going to delve into tree rings you have to do the same thing with the actual M&M analysis of the Mann paper that started this off,
Why did M&M sequester the data with the biggest positive response?
Why did M?&M graph their data with a Y-Axis 10 times smaller than Mann’s graph?
The “hide the decline” graph btw was a one-0ff small time production almost on the level of a PowerPoint presentation. It wasn’t part of a big journal article. It wasn’t part of any big proof or any big misdirection play,
If you want dishonesty, you might want to start with that characterization.
The issue at hand is what showed up in the IPCC reports, everything else is small potatoes. What showed up in the IPCC TAR and AR5 was misleading.
What’s in the IPCC AR4, so we can go over what is misleading:
That’s an interesting concept that these trees quit due to stress when it gets too warm, explaining what happened in the 60’s. The AGW case for damage could have been made stronger with this piece of information added to the MBH paper and showing the decline in its full glory.
If trees are sensitive to 0.x degrees of temp average change, I have yet to see any evidence at all to support it.
Only a lot of hand waving from those who desperately need for that to be the case.
That’s a great bit of hand waving. Scroll up to the top. You notice the topic? A graph. Did you include the graph? No? Well then your posting is almost relevant.
There’s a graph on the page. The piece I posted references the graph and describes the divergence problem. Here is a link to the page in the IPCC. And here is a link to the graph that appears on the same page.
And we know that this paragraph references this image because it cites the image:
I figure what the IPCC says about the graph is also part of “what showed up in the IPCC reports”. Interesting how the text that explains what’s in the graph is considered ‘hand-waving’ tho. Not sure I see logic there.
Because one bunch of crooks got away with a large sum of money, we should turn a blind eye to a second set with equally grandiose ambitions? Is that your point? A new take on ‘two wrongs do make a right’?
Might make sense to you, but not to me…….
Something up with the postings here. This was meant as a reply to a completely different post from me old mucker grypo.
Ty Grypo, much better. See, now people can go look at the pretty pictures. Which is what we were talking about. The explanations to the graphs are sufficient for people engaged in the science. The graph in question is totally insufficient for the purposes of accurately conveying a finding. The justification for the graph seems to be “if after viewing the graph you came away with the view that the treeometers perfectly correlated with observed temperatures, you should have read the fine print.”
Given that one of the purposes for the IPCC’s existence is to provide policy makers information, if find this approach disingenuous. Does anyone really believe our bureaucrats and politicians could read and understand what was written about the graph? Geez, they need a dictionary for 3 syllable words and still won’t understand the context.
How is it ‘disingenuous’? While you can argue the scientific validity of anything in the chart, attributing tags of ‘disingenuous’ and ‘dishonesty’ are merely subjective reactions, it’s especially odd to expect them to know how far to dumb it down for stupid policy makers . As has been argued many times, this is the way the scientists thought was the best way to represent the data. Post 1960 data on that particular proxy was faulty. I doubt lawmakers would appreciate faulty data being highlighted in a graph, just as they would not have appreciated not having the divergent data explained. Reasonable people can disagree on these points about science and communication, but the crux of this issue is that there is a large number of people who continue the premeditated dishonesty gambit. The logic behind these assertions is faulty. Just because something is uncertain, that does not mean it is disingenuous to show it, especially with large error bars and explanations and references to original works.
Well, attributing to motivations is always interpretive.
Post 1960 data on that particular proxy was faulty.
This is where I get a bit frustrated. The “proxy” data wasn’t faulty. The data disagreed with the narrative of the story they wished to tell with the graph. So, they removed it to convey a consistent message. I believe this to be an accurate characterization of the events.
No, it disagreed with the all the temperature data from all other sources. It was faulty, no questions there. Calibrating it and setting that curve to it would be faulty, as the IPCC says is the reason Briffa did not include it. It would bias the results, whether the error forced a lot more growth, or, as is the case, less growth. The data is useful in finding reasons, which is very important understanding how good tree rings are for thermometers, for example, whether or not this tree ring recon is useful beyond a certain temperature.
Perhaps a good question to ask ourselves is what would have been done, if say, the faulty data had shown that temperatures had gone way up. And this disagreed so much with all the other proxies, (boreholes thermometers, etc) that the graph showed an unusual spike that stood out, to a confusing degree and known to be faulty. Would policy makers want to see that? Would the scientists have put it below the thermometer lines? I am betting the answers to that one will be sifted through the confirmation bias also, but it’s a worth a try, if anything, to see if we can be more objective about motivation.
Yes, it disagreed with data from all other temp sources including observed temps. That doesn’t make the data faulty. It calls the conclusions from the data into question. Here’s a question. Why include the study at all? The last 50 years are in disagreement. Seeing that the 1st thermometer was invented in 1714, how much of the recorded temp record can really be correlated with a tree ring? Given that calibration and distribution of thermometers didn’t happen over night.
What was the compelling reason that made it so necessary that this be included in the IPCC? The inclusion being so important that we’d have to splice a graph together to tell the proper story, but, by God, we must have it in the report!
I just realized. The M&M paper is something of a Boojum, isn’t it?
It actually doesn’t say that Mann’s code forces a hockey stick on the data. M&M have just let us take its plaintive tone and go with it. The M&M paper only says that it “often” would create a hockey stick. Presumably, there were times when it didn’t. M&M just helpfully provided a graph that showed what it looked like the times that it did. And by gum, the times that it looked like a hockey stick, it looked like a hockey stick. Only smaller.
To me it looks like the wording of the paper was crafted with an eye toward governmental testimony where a defense against perjury is a true statement. But what do I know?
If we wanted to take M&M’s aggrieved tone and infer something, well, that’s not M&M’s fault. Aggrieved tone? they could ask. Well, we were just pointing out that sometimes Mann’s code produced a hockey stick shape with random data. Of course, there were times when it didn’t. We never said it did. And if the data had a hockey stick shape in it? Well, that’s beyond the scope of the paper.
Yes, Judith, M&M’s paper is small potatoes.The whole cottage industry based upon a hunting of the snark would be, wouldn’t it? I was a chump to think otherwise.
“It’s a Snark!” was the sound that first came to their ears,
And seemed almost too good to be true.
Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
Then the ominous words “It’s a Boo-“
You clearly haven’t read MM05 (GRL)
“The simulations nearly always yielded PC1s with a hockey stick shape, some of which bore a quite remarkable similarity to the actual MBH98 temperature reconstruction – as shown by the example in Figure 1.”
I mis-remembered the text (“nearly always” instead of my memory’s “often”) but the substance is unchanged. “Nearly always” actually means “Not always”. Which means (necessarily) that some didn’t.
The graph which displayed the “similarity” used a Y-axis 10 times smaller than Mann’s. As if the graph were a 1955 sci-fi movie gila monster.
Here are the two graphs:
http://deepclimate.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/wegman-fig-4-1.jpg
For the snark was a boojum you see.
I am all in favor of sorting out the merits of the different arguments on both sides. lets lay it all out.
Dr Curry
As a layman in climate science I’m intrigued to know how you propose to examine the merits of “both sides” while at the same time you (and the echo chamber here) fling words like “dishonest”, “pseudoscience” and “lazy” around.
Call me naive, but I’d have thought the first prerequisite for any honest appraisal of the facts would be the absence of mud-slinging.
SteveC2: 1
Judith: 0
Grow up.
OH SNAP. nice retort
Steve,
What if Dr. Curry is right? What if you looked into the issue and learned that Jones, Mann and the rest had violated the standards of science, hid the fact papers had failed verification statistics, truncated data and the rest? What should Dr. Curry do then?
Is it possible to examine both sides when one side is using tactics perfected in pseudoscience and not expose those tactics? Can one “lay it all out” and not discussed these violations of the standards of science?
Ron
If Dr Curry is right, what need of “dishonesty”, “Pseudoscience” etc.?
But let’s see what Dr Curry has to say…
Steve,
Answer the question. Is it possible to look at both sides without commenting on these kinds of violations of scientific standards? She is not name-calling because she disagrees. There are important scientific standards that have been violated. If you have not looked into these issues yet, you should.
SteveC2,
so was it OK for the RC gang to call nearly everyone in the world who disagrees with them ‘denialists’ or to seek to censor the skeptics work or to break FOIA to stonewall releasing data?
You may be a layman, but you are certainly a partisan.
“so was it OK for the RC gang to call nearly everyone in the world who disagrees with them ‘denialists’ ”
Yes, if they are ill-inofrmed and are denying the evidence presented.
ianash,
Your view of what is ill-informed and denying of evidence is breath taking in its reactionary ignorance.
Please do continue your self-immolation. But is it carbon neutral?
Lift hunter lift!
You can do better than that. The hive mind needs you. Protect the Queen!
You’re arguing with a 4 y/o. But, it is indicative of mentality. You asked if it was ok to break laws…….he said yes. You asked about censorship and he responds by saying “if they are denying evidence presented.”…………newsflash! Censorship denies the presenting of evidence. Maybe English isn’t the first language of ianash.
Way to make stuff up suyts! Do you even understand the issue?
I made nothing up.
Hunter: “..seek to censor the skeptics work or to break FOIA…”
ianash: “Yes, if they are ill-inofrmed and are denying the evidence presented.”
“lets [sic] lay it all out”
Yes, let’s.
Judith Curry.
You obviously disagree with the recontruction, or you would not have started this thread.
Can you post data describing a trajectory that you believe represents the warming in the last one thousand years, as you accept it?
That would involve doing science. Unlikely at the best of times with this one.
If you disagree with string theory, do you have to come up with an alternative in order for your criticism to be taken seriously? You’re essentially putting forward the argument that in the absence of an alternative, an incorrect methodology is useful. This is clearly nonsense.
Argumentum ad ignorantium.
Which reconstruction do you support – and why?
Nobody can do what you ask because we only have empirical evidence for the last century and a half (which has its own problems). All else is hypothesis and conjecture. We will never have undeniable proof of what the planet was like past that point.
Here? You’re kidding , right?
Be a scientist, Judy. Collect some data, find some collaborators with skills to aid you, and do an analysis. Or a meta-analysis of already-published work. Send it to a peer reviewed journal . ‘Sort it out’ in the literature, not on a *blog* teeming with ‘skeptical’ mad-as-hell howlers who seem even understand where to find the published claims they’re shaking their fists at. (It’s telling that the AR4 quotes that Grypo posted seem *new* to people here, well into this ‘discussion’. )
Attention howlers: See, the dendro proxies *aren’t* the only proxys used in reconstructions. See, the AR4 *does* discuss the divergence problem. See, the dendro proxies *do* track temperatures for most of the period that we have very reliable temperature records, i.e., post 1880. See, the divergence problem concerns a *subset* of tree ring data since ~1960, *not* all of it. Even wikipedia (“Divergence problem”) could’ve helped you there: “Samples from southern forests do not exhibit this divergence, though this could be due to paucity of samples, and not all trees in the northern hemisphere do. Divergence is most common in the far northern hemisphere.”
See, even howlers can go to the journals if they really want to (if one of the two links below doesn’t work you can likely get free online access at your local university library ).
D’Arrigo, Rosanne; Wilson, Rob; Liepert, Beate; Cherubini, Paolo (2008). “On the ‘Divergence Problem’ in Northern Forests: A review of the tree-ring evidence and possible causes”. Global and Planetary Change (Elsevier) 60: 289–305.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~liepert/pdf/DArrigo_etal.pdf.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.167.728&rep=rep1&type=pdf
(See, *14 papers between 1995-2006* about the divergence problem referenced in the paper’s introduction — that’s ‘hiding the decline?)
Fantastic post Judith!
It’s great to see Gavin engaging in an environment where he can’t hide behind moderation. I think he needs a little more practice at it though. Perhaps you could winkle him out of his shell a little further by offering a guest post, followed by a science/maths based Q and A, heavily moderated for relevance.
Or perhaps you could ask a series of searching questions concerning the pal(eo) papers and their claims of “robustness”.
….now I must get back to work!!!!!!
Boy I would love to see that
I doubt you even read RC. If you did you’d see RC moderators engage ‘skeptics’ time and time again in comments. Look up a recent exchanges with ‘TimTheToolMan’ re: Lindzen’s unsupported claims, for an example.
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=5257
RC mods’ patience with the willfully muleheaded is low, certainly (and that’s a not uncommon impatience among scientists I know). Once something’s been explained multiple different ways, and once they’ve been given the references to continue their own education, there’s not much point in continuing to engage someone who doesn’t want to understand.
Their patience for spewers of oft-debunked zombie memes is zero, and I applaud them for that. Wish more blogs would show the same impatience (hint).
Steve,
I think you need a reality check. Moderation at Real Climate is more like censorship. Anyone arguing points with them experiences it. Brain dead piling on by the RC disciples however is positively encouraged.
You know David, that’s very insightful -> I hadn’t thought of it that way. The Real Climate assertion that “we moderate away the repetitive arguments of people who just don’t want to learn” is in fact falsified when they *fail* to moderate warmist repetitive spam!
I wonder if someone could do a study on that -> parrot the warmist line in a trollish way on RC, and see how many comments actually get moderated out :)
My bet is that out of 100 trollish warmist comments, exactly zero will get moderated out. Any takers on more than zero? :)
Judith,
A few things that stand out to me and I would have highlighted:
From the IPCC TAR:
Mann wrote that “everyone in the room” agreed that the Briffa series was a “potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we’d like to show”.
and
Briffa recognized there was “pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more ’”, but expressed many caveats, in particular that the proxies were not responding the way that they were supposed to and that that the recent warmth was “probably matched” 1000 years ago.
I don’t read honest science in those statements, they were creating a story for consumption, clear and simple. That is not science.
You should note that your quote isn’t “From the IPCC Tar”.
It’s from Stephen McIntyre’s interpretation — “a story for consumption, clear and simple. That is not science.”
Hope that helps.
For me, the main problem with the “hide the decline” episode is not the issue itself, but rather what it represents, and the consequences of that. Let me explain:
The “hide the decline” and “Mike’s Nature trick” is an issue that is perfectly easy to follow. All I have to do is read the detailed accounts and contexts, and give fair reading to multiple viewpoints, and then I can easily make up my own mind. It’s all there and plain to see. From having done this, I KNOW that it’s not merely “a neat way of solving a problem.” It is gob-smackingly obvious that issues of PR have triumphed over accuracy in this instance, as with many other instances here and there. My point is, I don’t need anyone to explain it to me. And if someone tries to tell me it’s merely some sort of unfortunate colloquialism, and doesn’t mean what I already know it means, then I know one of two things about that person: either a) they haven’t bothered to look at the details themselves, and so they can’t be trusted; or b) they have all the facts at hand and are lying about it, and so they can’t be trusted.
Here’s the problem. The vast majority of science is built on trust. I’ve never actually measured the distance, say, from the Earth to the moon. I have to rely on the experts, and trust that they’ve done their job. Nearly everything I know – from news accounts in Tunisia to the atomic weight of hydrogen – represents something I don’t have either the ability, the time, or the inclination to investigate for myself. Even the peer-review system is built on trust. Reviewers generally give a careful reading and decide if the outcomes are novel, and the procedures sound, etc. But they also assume that the author is not being duplicitous – not fabricating results or deleting data or lying about methods. It all comes down to trust.
And so the great tragedy of this corruption of climate science (in the original sense of the word “corruption”) is this: there are some things I cannot investigate for myself. There are some thing I don’t have the ability, or perhaps the time, to devote myself to, in order to fully understand exactly what was done and decide for myself what it means.
Years ago it took me half a day of searching online to discover that the Vostok ice core has a resolution of something in the neighborhood of 900 years. This, still, is not easy data to find. Thanks to the William Connolleys of the world, even Wikipedia won’t give up this simple fact. Now I understand … such information “dilutes the message” and is a “potential distraction” from the clear, consensus view. But I finally figured it out. And I know – I don’t need someone to tell me – that 900-year smoothed data cannot and should not be sliced in with Mauna Loa yearly CO2 data. And yet it is, constantly, by people who should (or do) know better.
What this leads to is this: I just can’t investigate every issue for myself. I read about other paleo proxies and alternative methods for measuring CO2 levels – such as this account – and I simply don’t have the ability or the tools to figure it out for myself. What would be nice is if I could just assume that it’s been given a fair reading, by people who know about this stuff. It would be nice if I could just read the next IPCC report and get an unbiased summary, in the context of all the other relevant science on this issue and others.
But now I know I can’t get that. I know that climate science has been deeply corrupted by the politics of AGW, and even good scientists are sometimes afraid to challenge the orthodoxy. And so, for the stuff I can’t figure stuff out for myself, I’m just left to wonder how robust these results are, and how well investigated. Were CO2 levels really 350 ppm 12,000 years ago? Does CO2 persist in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, as with the current climatology meme; or were all the physicists, chemists, geologists, etc., right when they pegged it at 5-6 years?
Now, unfortunately, it’s very hard to know. And I have to assume these non-conforming results have NOT been given a fair hearing, because the bums who are supposed to do so keep telling me “hide the decline” wasn’t a big deal.
Right. I may be dumb, as they say, but I’m not stupid.
Ted – You’re clearly neither dumb nor stupid, but you are vulnerable to confusing the level of blogosphere attention to inappropriate behavior with the actual degree to which it reduces the reliability of climate science conclusions. In a polarized debate atmosphere, perspective is hard to achieve even for brilliant practitioners in a different discipline.
I’ve commented above on my perception that climate science in general performs admirably, and despite lapses that warrant correction, deserves as much trust as other fields that have also contributed important scientific advances – one needs to balance the positive against the negative, because no form of human endeavor is free of negatives.
Finally, apropos of atmospheres, you should feel free to ignore the article by Segelstad on the lifetime of excess atmospheric CO2; the article totally misunderstands how that is evaluated and mistakes the turnover time of CO2 molecules with the decay time of a concentration excess – the latter is characterized by multiple decay constants rather than a single half-life, and these vary from decades for a fraction of CO2 to hundreds of thousands of years for another significant fraction.
Fred, thank you for the nice comment. I’m afraid I don’t share your assessment that climate science in general performs admirably. My view has certainly been informed by information in the blogosphere, but it is by no means dependent on it. Mainly, it comes from repeatedly – repeatedly – diving deeper into an issue to get the real facts, and finding that the science doesn’t actually support the conclusions.
The popular press is the most egregious, of course, but the scientists themselves quite often fall into hyperbole or confirmation bias. I’ve looked up references and have found that they are mis-characterized. I’ve read research papers and found them to be weak or poorly designed, and wondered how they could ever have been published. (Here is <a href="http://climateaudit.org/2010/11/06/phil-jones-and-the-china-network-part-3/#comment-245106"one example, on the UHI effect – an old, poorly done paper that is still cited by the IPCC.) And I’ve come across so many examples of double standards, ad hominem attacks, and groupthink by climate scientists that its a wonder there’s any room for dissent at all.
Unlike the more, hmm, vocal skeptics, I don’t view all this as some grand conspiracy. The AGW proponents truly believe that the most important issues in climate science are thoroughly settled, and that the consequences are dire … and that’s where they are the most dangerous, when it comes to the scientific process. Gavin, or Michael Mann, or Phil Jones – heck, even “death train” Hansen – believe themselves to be right. So much so, that any skeptical argument is seen first as a PR issue, rather than an honest attempt to get the science right. The knee-jerk reaction seems to be: any skeptical paper or blog post is badly done, or meant to confuse the issues, or funded by Big Oil, or is otherwise useless.
Thankfully, we had Climategate, which prompted many true scientists – our gracious host among them – to take a second, more careful look. So I am hopeful that the science will get better, and the true scientists will more often point out when the emperor has no clothes.
Judy – apologies for the mistyped link above. -t
Fred, as you said, “one needs to balance the positive against the negative, because no form of human endeavour is free of negatives”. Based on that, I choose to call all the published papers, & the opinions of “The Team” who control climate science, as the negatives in the endeavour of climate science. Of course, you will not agree, but an impartial observer would say that Gavin Schmidt has shown by his above comments that he is aggressively defensive of a fellow” Team” member in the face of a very reasonable argument that he is defending the indefensible.
Fred “climate science in general performs admirably”
I’m interested in how you arrive at this assessment. Can you, for instance, name any solid, empirically confirmed discoveries achieved by climate “science” in the last, say, twenty years?
Fred, with respect, climate science performs as admirably as political science. Both rely heavily on statistical analysis and confidence intervals. Within both realms modeling is used to make best-effort representations of reality. While both have methods to explain the reality of the past, both are less successful at predicting a future reality. I am quite willing to accept the predictive uncertainty of future reality within the context of these sciences. In both fields practitioners are working on complex systems.
Where climate science has run into peril is its hijacking by the scientists who cross the line into advocacy and rhetoric. At this point seeking the truth is overtaken by persuasion. Plato pointed out in the Gorgias that rhetoric and persuasion is not a way of seeking the truth.
I am not a political scientist – I am an engineer who happens to have political science and philosophy of science as a hobby. I started following AGW before Climategate, but when the Climategate emails were published I became outraged at the corruption of the scientific enterprise by scientists who crossed the line into advocacy and rhetoric. There may be only a few bad apples in the barrel but these are the bad apples that informed the alarmist rhetoric flowing from the IPCC reports that governments relied upon to make policy decisions with billions of dollars of public funds.
For me this “hide the decline” incident put doubt into my mind about the integrity of climate science. It brings to mind the cold fusion claim that broke while I was an undergrad student. Physicists around the world tried to replicate the experiment but couldn’t and excitement turned to disappointment. The hypothesis of low temperature fusion was resoundingly falsified but its failure did not affect the integrity of the scientific enterprise in physics.
In the long wake of the Climategate emails my doubts about the integrity of climate science still linger. Its credibility now rests upon a choice. When its practitioners inevitably admit that there is corruption, will they embrace the words of Louis Brandeis: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants” (no pun intended)?
Great post Ted.
I agree that trust is the central issue here.
Had “the trick” been an honest mistake, or something that happened in the stress of the final hours of preparing the report, that would have been forgivable, if it was admitted as being a mistake and publicly corrected.
That way we could have hope of things being done better in the future. Trust would be rebuilt to some extent.
But as long as mistakes are not admitted but staunchly and aggressively defended, there is no hope. It is proof of a continuous intention to deceive, casting doubt on anything else that might come out of the IPCC and associated partners.
A sorry state.
Trust only comes into it in the public arena and only then for making decisions. If no action is to be taken, it’s irrelevant how good or bad the work is – it’ll all get worked out internally eventually. When I make an important decision, trust doesn’t come into play much. I either have some kind of validation of the information I’m using, or I don’t. I understand the implied risks of using unvalidated information can be rather large.
I basically agree, but a point that is often missed in discussion of this issue is that the problem is not decline.
The problem is hide. There is nothing imaginable that is more contrary to scientific tradition and method than that.
Nonsense. Complex data and models are simplified all the time for pedagogical purposes, e.g., textbooks. Exceptions to general rules are omitted or alluded to in passing. Science is OK with that as long as the complexity is actually represented in detail in the scientific literature…which in the case of the divergence problem, it certainly is.
The “divergence problem” is not a problem; for the conclusions which Mannean dendroclimatology tries to draw, it is a catastrophe, showing that the underlying assumptions are untenable.
As to “represented in detail”, this might have some validity if the point were unambiguously emphasized in such “authoritative sources” as AR4 and specifically underlined in the Summary for Policymakers, which is all that our idiot politicians and journalists ever read (if they ever get beyond the press release). But of course it was not; to the contrary, the “divergence” was buried as carefully as a diseased corpse in the verbose, opaque prose of the “scientific” sections.
There is another aspect to the Hide the Decline, and that is the use of end-point padding to create the smooth graphs so loved by the dendros. To present a nice message, annual data won’t do because it is too noisy. So some sort of smooth/filtering is done, like a 30 or 50 year centered gaussian or other filter. This is fine (more or less) until you reach the end of the data and then your smoothed curve might have to stop in 1980 and won’t leap into the sky. McIntyre found (and others) that Mann etc used various types of reflections and padding that would continue and amplify an upward trend right up to 1998 or 2000. But when temps stopped rising after 1998, this type of filter misbehaves and they conveniently changed the type of padding used in the GISS smoothed graphs and others (and IPCC). This type of end padding is unjustified and exaggerates warming trend certainty in the most recent years.
Another reason all this is important is that paleoreconstructions have been used to test climate models, including the original Mann recon that is so flat.
Finally, a multivariate test of the primary recons in IPCC 2007 showed that they do not agree with one another in terms of patterns of fluctuation at any time scale as a group, but only in pairs and 3s (at home now so no reference) and then not with any impressive level of agreement. This suggests that they are NOT capturing multidecadal to centennial patterns well and are not giving a basis for making statements about the world, either due to including bad proxies, funky math, untested assumptions, or other.
Craig,
I totally agree with how they handle the endpoints as mathematically corrupt. This is an important point that is difficult to explain easily, and falls on deaf ears.
If you have a whole bunch of very noisy data and you heavily average it, it will flatten it. But if you leave just the very last part of it un-averaged, of course it is going to look like the end of the graph is all of a sudden changing wildly. Hello HS (up or down).
Yes Craig, you had the same problem with your paper and desperately weaseled around to try to connect the end of your smoothed data (1935) with the present! Even going so far as to verbally ‘splice’ the instrument record onto the end of the proxy record.
“Can anyone defend “hide the decline”? I would much prefer to be wrong in my interpretation, but I fear that I am not.”
Judith, I agree with Bob, above, with regard to the precise thing that you want to be wrong about. As far as I can tell, you’re desiring that your eyes deceive you. They do not. The decline was hidden. You are right that it should not have been hidden. Hiding the decline will always be, as it always was, a dishonest act of misdirection in the reporting of scientific evidence.
I see Gavin is very much away on a blustery tangent, not in any way addressing the crux of the issue – the actual practice of splicing disparate series to create an illusion of tree-ring proxy veracity in the paleo record. This act is an affront to the ethos of dispassionate scientific endeavour.
Gavin,
If you attempted posts of such content at RC they would never be posted.
Chew on that for awhile.
In his original ClimateAudit post “IPCC and the trick” on “hide the decline, Steve McIntyre made the following accusation.
“After the Arusha meeting, Briffa hurriedly re-did his chronology and the new version was delivered to Mann on Oct 5, 1999 – it was this version that had the big decline. In the First Order Draft of Oct 27, 1999, IPCC author Mann deleted the post-1960 portion of the Briffa reconstruction plus other things that I don’t yet quite understand. “
The particular accusation against Mann is unequivocally false. It never happened. The version that was delivered on Oct 5 was not used in the First Order Draft, which in fact used an earlier “low frequency” version of Briffa (similar to the Briffa and Osborn in Science 1999). At Mann’s later request, Tim Osborn resent the newer data set in time for the Second Order Draft, where it first appeared. But that version of the data set only went up to 1960. So once again nothing was deleted by the IPCC.
See:
http://deepclimate.org/2010/05/14/how-to-be-a-climate-science-auditor-part-2-the-forgotten-climategate-emails/
Also, I demonstrated that the particular splicing of Briffa with instrumental data claimed by McIntyre was highly unlikely. And, in general, padding with the average of final values vs instrumental values would have made very little difference to Briffa’s series in any case. And the Jones series was clearly not padded with instrumental values.
See:
http://deepclimate.org/2010/06/29/revisiting-tar-figure-2-21-part-1-another-false-claim-from-steve-mcintyre/
So does this mean the graphs in the TAR and AR4 and the WMO Report aren’t misleading? What a relief.
Judith, at the end of your blog post you issued the following challenge: “If there is a problem, lets get to the bottom of it and fix it. ” I, and apparently DeepClimate, thought by this that you cared not just about whether they were misleading but how they came to be misleading. Otherwise, how do you intend to fix or prevent whatever errors were made?
You are falling for the ruse – it’s about stirring up the locals, not really debating the issues.
While I might not agree with Gavin on much I note that at least he has the courage to put his real name on his posts and let the comments fall from there. You on the other hand hide behind anonymity and make not only rude but vile statements. I am not a scientist and therefore I follow the tone people take. You strike me as someone who would have a hard time maintaining a middle school social life chasing every one who might disagree with you but still like you off because they disagree with you. It is this tone that has convinced me that the members of “the team” are hiding something. They remind me of my teenagers when caught hiding something from me. Lots of arm-waving and denials but the more shrill the denials the more certain I am that I am on the right track, and you and others like you are getting extremely shrill.
At least there is an admission of errors.
Judy,
Clarke states that it is not presently established whether Mann or Briffa deleted the post-1960 data in the spaghetti graph (Fig 2.25) in the IPCC First Order Draft (dated Oct 27, 1999). Clarke observes that it might have been Briffa, rather than Mann, who physically deleted the post-1960 data in that graphic.
The assignment of responsibility as between Mann and Briffa, while perhaps important to the institutions involved, is surely irrelevant to the practice of hide-the-decline itself. Regardless of which of them physically deleted the data, it doesn’t justify the practice. In any event, the evidence seems clear that, regardless of which of Mann or Briffa physically deleted the post-1960 data, the other party endorsed the practice and thus responsibility is joint and several.
I also note that Dave Clarke aka Deepclimate discussed my December 2009 post (written in the immediate wake of Climategate) rather than the later and more detailed exposition in May 2010 to which you linked. My December post attracted comments that clarified the chronology in my initial exposition – something that I noted in an update to that post. For example, Clarke observes that Briffa participated in a hide-the-decline incident prior to October 1999 (the deletion of post-1960 data in Osborn and Briffa (Science May 1999). Quite so. I reported this in the May 2010 article that you linked to.
And isn’t that the case, in a deeper sense, with the great lengths the whole Team went to refuse to face the fact that Hide the Decline was rotten science.
Sorry Deep, but the fact that the post-1960 data were deleted before being sent to Mann does not make it ok, and the splicing in of instrumental data has been clearly shown by a data audit, which I followed in detail.
The WMO graphic was one graph in a summary report that contains no footnotes or reference page. It is clearly intended for a general audience and as such, a certain degree of detail is lost, as it always is in this kind of document. Take this publication of the International Astronomical Union – it is similar in purpose — a summary of the work of the IAU for the year. No footnotes, not references. Just summary of the work and intended for a more general audience.
The WMO graphic could have been better labelled, as the inquiry into the CRU found, but it was one graphic in a public summary report that is over a decade old.
That this is still being trotted out by contrarians and put on display still suggests to me that it is done for political rather than scientific interest.
The decline was hidden for political reasons, by those on political paychecks. For shwonk to accuse those who point this out of being political, is disingenuous.
punksta, please provide proof that there was political motivation and political paycheques.
That the whole “hide the decline” meme / chum is now being promoted for political gain is not in question.
It is very difficult to proove such things, even if seems an obvious reason why the graph has been presented in this deceptive way.
Because the omission of the decline is deceptive: it hide a crucial parameter that allows the general audience to forge a personal opinion about the validity of tree ring as proxy thermometer.
Without the decline, as a non-specialist, I had no particular reason to doubt the usefulness of the proxy, it makes sense that the growth of trees is influenced by temperature, even if as a gardener, I also have strong suspicion it is not the only parameter so I expect quite large error bars
With the decline, as a non-specialist, I conclude that the curve is meaningless and that tree rings are not usefull as proxy thermometers. To convince me otherwise, you will have to expose much more than this curve, which is not possible in a summary.
Any book on data presentation….well, common sense too, tells u that the fact that hiding available info to add perceived robustness to a interpretation is dishonest, especially in a summary where there is no place to present the raw data and discussions…
With the decline, as a non-specialist, I conclude that the curve is meaningless and that tree rings are not usefull as proxy thermometers.
If the specialists disagree on the implications of the DP for the meaningfulness of the curve and for tree rings as a useful proxy shouldn’t I, as a non-specialist, be even more circumspect?
The detailed discussion I have read from specialists mouth on the DP cast doubts on the validity of tree rings as a useful proxy. Some of them say that although the DP is unexplained, they have reason to believe tree rings can be used before industrial period. Other says that they do not have those reason.
So you are right, specialist do not agree to unconditionally rules out tree ring as T proxies.
But I am also right: specialists agree that DP CAST DOUBTS on treemometers accuracy (those 2 propositions are not mutually exclusive, I hope you can see it). They better do, else I would have serious doubts about the logical capabilities of the specialists who don’t.
As DP cast doubt on the accuracy of the reconstruction, it is dishonest to remove it from a curve, especially from a summary where it is the only information available to the casual reader.
I try hard to be openminded on this (not easy, as a skeptic I come with my bagage, as you come with yours as a warmist), but really, I can turn it on any angle you wish, I can not see how removing the DP can be defended as the correct way to expose the data as objectively as possible. It can be defended as the most effective way to expose an evidence of AGW, but this is not the same thing. Far from it, and if you do not see the difference there is no hope for you to do Science (as in advancing human knowledge), only scientific advocacy (as in defending a theory with technical-like arguments)
AH its dave clarke.
DC. nice
funny how DC considers McIntyre so important, a discussion about hiding declines becomes an analysis of what if anything McI has ever been wrong about (and am not saying he has)
can’t help wondering if in the world of DC poor Mann and Briffa and Schmidt are but tools of evil climateauditers remotely controlling them sometimes even back in time
I admit that I am not an expert, but from what I have read of the literature, it seems to me that the divergence problem, far from suggesting that scientists should drop all the tree ring data, or that it undermined the reliability of the tree ring data, instead provides a new avenue for study and understanding both of trees and their response to environmental stimuli but also the consequences for the ability of northern forests to act as carbon sinks.
As I understand the literature, not all trees show divergence and not all trees that show divergence do it to the same degree. The fact that trees, even divergent ones seem to follow the instrumental record well prior to the 1960s suggests that there is something specific to the post-1960 era that is responsible for the divergence problem. Some possible sources examined by D’Arrigo et. al. include drought stress due to warming, global dimming due to aerosols, ozone depletion, pest infestation – all of which suggest anthropogenic and related influences. The fact that trees track the instrumental record well until the post-60s suggest that they can be useful prior to these anthropogenic influences.
Of course, as Feynman said, “Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.” I take the divergence issue as part of the unsure body of statements that make up scientific knowledge. Doesn’t mean scientists have to throw out tree rings. I would think that the divergence problem makes the issue even more interesting from a scientific point of view and if this whole matter hadn’t been so politicized, it would be one of those areas of research that would yield up much important knowledge about climate and dendroclimatology.
“As I understand the literature, not all trees show divergence and not all trees that show divergence do it to the same degree. The fact that trees, even divergent ones seem to follow the instrumental record well prior to the 1960s suggests that there is something specific to the post-1960 era that is responsible for the divergence problem”
– well, my understanding is that there is another entire subset of tress that don’t show any correlation with temps in the calibration periods. So, we have some that correlate during a specified period, some that don’t, and then some that do correlate in the calibration period but then ‘diverge’ (by differing degrees) later on. This only screams out to me to be a HUGE opportunity for spurious correlation. This stuff is just very unintuitive to me. I must be missing something as to why some insist on putting so much weight into the dendro-paleo studies.
Amazing. So, contriving a valid set of tree proxies is a tough thing to do?
Knock me down with a feather.
I know some people who can just squint at a stand and tell.
“The fact that trees track the instrumental record well until the post-60s suggest that they can be useful prior to these anthropogenic influences. ”
But ok, so for 100 years it tracks well, and for 50 it doesn’t. Did it track well 300 years ago? 500? 1000? 5000? Since there’s no instrumental data at those points, it’s impossible to say. You’re stipulating that the last 50 years are an abberation that can be discarded, but that’s not proven in any way. What the discrepancy shows us is that the tree rings don’t track temperature alone (or even, at all?). What DOES it track? Impossible to say at this time… but claiming that it’s temperature requires a leap of faith that all past extrapolations of tree ring temperature follow the same trends as the “good” tree rings. We don’t know that, and science shouldn’t be about faith.
I suppose it depends on why it doesn’t track well in those 50 years.
From what I understand, there is a physical basis for tree ring growth to track temperature and other climate variables. It’s not faith.
Again, just because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean we know nothing.
And I try not to mistake my own ignorance for that of scientists. Just because I personally don’t understand something doesn’t mean the scientists who study the field are equally ignorant…
Shewonk- you said, “The fact that trees, even divergent ones seem to follow the instrumental record well prior to the 1960s suggests that there is something specific to the post-1960 era that is responsible for the divergence problem.”
Part of the problem is, the calibration period for these studies is from 1881 – 1960. That leaves very little temperature data to perform validation on, particularly if the post-1960 data is excluded. So, I think it “follows the instrumental record well” simply because it was largely calibrated against the instrumental record.
‘So, I think it “follows the instrumental record well” simply because it was largely calibrated against the instrumental record.’
You know. I bet there might be some scientific literature on this very problem.
The main problem is that tree rings don’t respond to temperature in a linear way. The real response is an upside down U-curve with a temperature optimum (all other items like precipitation being equal). Part of the divergence problem may be that some species are over their optimum temperature. But there is no way to tell us which species has had a divergence in the far past, if the real temperature was higher than today (which is the case in the bristlecone area of the SW USA), even if these have no divergence problem today.
I did not know that- though in hindsight it seems obvious.
Dumb question, has anyone.. erm… calibrated the tree response? I.e. has anyone defined the U-curve for the individual species?
Yes, see my post below
Excellent- thanks.
Craig i can only seem to get the abstract- am i being dense?
Labmunky
Tree growth and plant growth are somewhat complex. They respond to temperature, total daily sunlight, moisture content of soil, etc. In the case of sunlight much of the spectrum is irrelevant – typically there are two bands in the visible spectrum which drive development. The details are all species dependent.
Yes i’m aware of this- it was kind of a rhetorical question.
“I suppose it depends on why it doesn’t track well in those 50 years.
From what I understand, there is a physical basis for tree ring growth to track temperature and other climate variables. It’s not faith. ”
You understand that because it’s what they want you to understand, but it isn’t known with any degree of certainty (if it was, they could tell you WHY the divergence.). You’re accep[ting their word for it that the tree rings are an excellent proxy for temperature, with limited information. That’s faith. With limited calibration, they can be an indicater at best, not a proxy for temperature because they don’t know all of the factors that will influence growth, clling into question the reasons for behavior in the past. Science doesn’t allow you to wave your hand and make data magically dissappear. You need facts to discount the 1960 decline… so far, they dont exist.You’ve speculated on reasons, but speculation isn’t a fact either (despite what Climate Science says.)
“And I try not to mistake my own ignorance for that of scientists. Just because I personally don’t understand something doesn’t mean the scientists who study the field are equally ignorant…”
Here we have the classic appeal to authority… “surely they must know if they make these statements!” Or they are being disengenuous and not giving the public and policymakers all of the facts and highlight problems with their current understanding since that would tend to undermine their bully pulpit.
Here we have the classic appeal to authority… “surely they must know if they make these statements!”
Which authority is a layperson to appeal to — the majority of scientists or the few dissenters? I only know that as a layperson who doesn’t have the scientific background to judge the value of any given paper or discipline in science, I am better served, in the long run, to stick with the consensus view.
I suspect that many laypersons use their political compass to arbitrate scientific debates, as in “which side doesn’t threaten my cherished political values?”
So you just suspend any rational judgment in the face of lots of people who assert themselves to be right? No thought of tryng to make your own assessment?
You must be an ad mans dream consumer. A blank canvas on which they can write their message. And an even better target for con artists.
Some people are capable of making a rationale assessment of their own strengths and capabilities and conclude that others know better.
‘Trust me, I’m a climate scientist’??
Works for some, I guess.
But it reminds me of the three great lies of humanity:
1. The cheque’s in the post.
2. Honest I’ll still love you in the morning.
3. I’m from Head Office I’m here to help you.
Maybe there’s a fourth around here somewhere……
1
4. My judgement of my own capacity is always accurate and never inflated by ego or ignorance.
I’m glad that you are so self-aware. But somewhere the humour is missing in that remark.
You meant ‘irony’ perhaps?
Yes Lat there is a fourth and a fifth, both from the gentler sex and posting either would probably get me banned.
Suffice to say, getting banned would be hard to swallow.
I’d love to do a PhD in dendrochronology / climatology but alas, I have to feed my family and don’t have the years of time to spend. But I still have to decide who to support when it comes to electing politicians. I have to decide which one is likely to listen to science and do the right thing when it comes to policy. My dilemma is that I don’t have the expertise and I know it to judge the value of the work of Briffa and Esper and D’Arrigo and other scientists.
That’s the crazy thing about this modern society with its specialization and division of expertise. Some of us just know more about things than others due to the 10 – 12 years of post-secondary education and years of research cred it takes to become a peer in a given science field.
I recognize that I don’t have the capacity to make a valid analysis of the years of literature and theory and so I trust the consensus of the practicing scientists in the field based on their assessment of the peer reviewed literature. To do otherwise when you are a layperson and have no expertise is dangerous.
For what it is worth here is an idea: Consider which group is using ad hom attacks, appeals to authority, and other logical fallacies very frequently. History, and personal experience, tells me this is the group least worthy of trust.
I think this is a fair question and approach, shewonk, in the normal case. But the claim made by Professor Muller in the video Professor Curry links to is that hiding the decline is the very antithesis of normal science. I think his argument in the few minutes on this should convince anyone, even someone without any science background.
But happily there’s no need to rely only on the video. Andrew Montford’s book The Hockey Stick Illusion lays out the detail in a way that many non-scientists have found very helpful. Even Judith admitted it helped her to see the wood for the trees in a sometimes confusing welter of competing blog posts.
To read this book with an open mind and form one’s own view doesn’t go against using your heuristic in other areas. We all have to take some things on authority. But the possible corruption of climate science seems to me to be too important not to dig down just a little.
errr no, most sceptics have a pretty good inbuilt bull$hit detector.
Unfortunately, the gullible lemming types don’t, so they have to defer to appeals to authority. Naturally enough, being gullible and a follower (lemming like) the authority they choose is the consensus one. (Safety in numbers for the unconfident if you prefer.)
Appeals to authority make sense if the authority is in possession of expert knowledge in a subject area and that subject area is the matter under consideration. Appeals to authority are fallacious when one claims that the person in authority can’t be wrong. I am not claiming that the scientific experts can’t be wrong, but that a layperson is better served to trust the consensus of climate scientists who publish in the peer reviewed literature over non-scientists who publish their non-peer reviewed musings on blogs.
I don’t try to judge the scientific evidence because I don’t have the expertise, but I am just as good as the next person on judging if people are acting based on the desire to have reality conform to their political values. In fact, maybe more than most as that was at least part of my own area of study.
[Ipcc-style Climate Science has no “authority”.]
shewonk, examples: in the realm of real science, peer review by a few has never been warranted to produce the “given truth”, and “hiding the science” in general has always meant that whomever is doing it is not practicing real science.
In other words, the most basic problem with the science you are accepting as authoritative is that ipcc Climate Science is not real, scientific method and principle, science. One simple example of this fact is that the Climate Scientists in question have mislead anyone susceptible, as to the use and meaning of peer review in real science. That is, contrary to the behavior of certain Climate Scientists and what they often seem to be saying, peer review at a journal by a few selected peers has never been warranted to imply that the study then published is the “given truth” or anything even close to it – until the advent of “Climate Science”!
At this point and even if you disagree, do you at least see why I’m arguing that CO2 = CAGW Climate Science has operated according to an unscientific definition of “peer review” and has, therefore, conveyed the wrong idea of what real science is to anyone who, especially through no fault of their own, is ignorant of what real science does?
Because this anti-scientific concept of peer-review is also conjoined very closely with another way in which ipcc Climate Science behaves unscientifically, namely, that certain ipcc Climate Scientists – such as Jones, Briffa, and Mann early on – and Journals such as “Science” and “Nature”, contrary to their own stated conditions for publication, have failed to make available the “materials and methods” of certain critical studies, which are their “science”; so that their science can be reviewed after publication essentially by ‘everyone and their mother’, at least where the stakes are this high.
In other words, real science necessarily includes the scepticism made possible by transparency of “materials and methods” as a component of the processing and confirmation of any alleged science.. Real scientists welcome the scepticism because they want their ideas to be able to stand up against all comers. Climate Science instead wants to thwart FOIA requests, made necessary themselves only because the Climate Science in question has not involved transparancy of its “materials and methods” to begin with.
In fact, by not operating transparently and thus “hiding the science”, Climate Science itself has even managed to help prove again why transparency of “materials and methods” is essential to the practice of real science; that is, given what has been revealed subsequent to the time when this information – in the case of some critical Climate Science – was finally obtained by people outside of the closed circle of the essentially self-annointed Climate Science peers.
There are many other ways in which ipcc-style Climate Science proves it is simply not doing real, scientific method and principle, science. Therefore, within the realm of real science, ipcc-style Climate Science has no “authority”.
Appealing to authority = suspension of critical thinking. If we’re going to stick to the science in the Popperian tradition then there is no authority to appeal to other than the truth which might be inferred through the say-so of a billion scientists but takes only one to conclusively falsify. But if we’re in the arena of politics and rhetoric, appealing to authority is a tried and true trick that is fair game.
Laah-daah-da-da-consensus-da-daa-da-daaa-da-daa.
My favorite version of the Sleeping Beauty Waltz. Nice rendition, but derivative in interpretation.
I only know that as a layperson who doesn’t have the scientific background to judge the value of any given paper or discipline in science, I am better served, in the long run, to stick with the consensus view.
You ‘know’ your appeal to authority/consensus is what you need?
Even though this consensus is all funded from a common source, that has huge vested interest in the conclusions?
And where the leading lights of this consensus have been caught trying to cook the books? And flatly refuse to change their ways or even apologise?
More unsubstantiated claims, Punk. Please provide some evidence.
My first thoughts were the tracking of the start of the use of Agent Orange, and the distribution of the diverging trees relative to the areas of initial testing and then heavy use. I would like to look at the persistence times and locations of airborne residuals relative to the sample trees in the study, if the data is still not being suppressed.
Judith, I honestly thought I had something to say…
…Until Ted Carmichael said it all, and better
It is nice to see that Gavin thinks it’s only a difference of opinion on how a graph should be displayed.
Sorta like getting your horoscope done, isn’t it Gavin………….
Thanks, Latitude!
The justification for hiding the decline was that somehow there was something different about that data in that time period that made it “bad” data, and so could be dropped. But nothing was ever shown to be the cause, and one can’t simply get rid of data you don’t like without a verified reason. And people can see this clearly.
There is another trick, when dropping the Briffa post-1960 data, they had to renormalize it, and picked a base period different from the others and one that was much too convenient to make it line up with the others better. IIRC.
I have done a detailed analysis of the divergence problem
Loehle, Craig. 2009. A mathematical analysis of the divergence problem in dendroclimatology. Climatic Change 94(3-4): 233-245.
available here:
http://www.ncasi.org//Publications/Detail.aspx?id=3273
One of the consequences of divergence is that past periods warmer than the calibration period can not be reliably estimated–they are suppressed. The the MWP will be underestimated. A second problem is that past responses of trees will be influenced by things like local forest conditions and precip, about which we have not data. This makes them unreliable.
Is that a peer reviewed journal? If not, why not?
If the divergence is due to anthropogenic influences such as ozone depletion, or aerosols, and there was no similar era of such influences, I would think that you cant really make that assumption.
You speak as though our knowledge of the “MWP” is certain enough to know if it would be underestimated. From what I have read, the MWP is thought to be a regional or hemispheric phenomenon.
Just because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean we know nothing. To suggest otherwise is to be rather unscientific. We know something and we need to know more.
“Climatic change” is a first-line peer-review journal. If there is something special about after 1960, why do only some groups of trees show a decline? How do we know which ones will do so –we don’t. I demonstrated that mathematically when you use the methods of dendo reconstruction you will underestimate past warmth–try reading my paper before accusing me of things.
My apologies – I was unaware that you had published another paper. I was thinking of the two in E&E. Congratulations.
How do we know which ones will do so? We don’t — but that doesn’t mean we just give up. It seems to suggest that we need to do more research so that we can know.
At any rate, as I said, in less politicized circumstances, the DP would signal a fruitful line of research and might provide important knowledge relevant to both dendro and climate science. Instead it seems to have become a means of skeptics to suggest that we have to throw out dendro. I don’t think that’s valid. Can it be improved? Sure. Most science can.
I went back and examined the original WMO graphic and related text. Could it have been better handled? Sure. Does it matter in the long run? No. IMO it’s a manufactured controversy conjured up for political hay-making.
Shewonk
NCASI Members:
“Any U.S. company that manufactures pulp, paper, or solid wood products is eligible to apply for membership in NCASI, as are companies that own or manage industrial timberlands. Currently, NCASI’s U.S. Membership numbers approximately 75 companies, which represent more than 90% of the paper and paperboard produced, nearly 70% of the wood panels produced, and more than half of industrial timberland acreage in the U.S.”
Independent…like a train is free to travel wherever it wants…on the tarck laid down…
No one tells me what to publish or reviews my work. Google scholar me.
Umm, let’s see if I understand… Corporations that grow trees to make paper are Evil and Greedy, while Corporations that grow trees to feed utterly useless “biomass” plants for the sake of government subsidies are Wise and Helping To Save The Planet.
I may be able to understand this eventually…
I agree the divergence is a distraction and it doesnt matter.
So, for AR4 chapter 6. We should probably agree that Briffa should have shown the divergence that doesnt matter rather than hiding a divergence that doesnt matter.
Ar4 has an errata. You’ll support putting the right graphic in that
right? it doesnt matter so why fight it?
I’ll leave it up to the scientists to determine what constitutes and error or a difference in opinion over methods and the way to display data and evidence.
What is interesting is to what use skeptics and contrarians put “errors”. Look at the “gates” that erupted when they found a few in AR4 – used them to squeeze out and amplify every ounce of doubt and smear as much as they could. Not in the interest of “sound science” as some proclaim but for political haymaking.
As far as I understand, none of the “errors” — real or manufactured — found in the AR4 undermine radiative physics or the GHE or reduce the warming shown in the instrumental record.
As far as I understand, none of the “errors” — real or manufactured — found in the AR4 undermine radiative physics or the GHE or reduce the warming shown in the instrumental record.
And who is claiming that they do? The issue is not the validity of the basic physics, but of the analyses being made and the credibility of those making them.
Yeah, their credibility is just *shattered* by a handful of ‘errors’ — all debatable either as actual errors, or as evidence of malfeasance — gleaned from a multi-authored document running to thousands of pages.
Making a mistake doesn’t undermine your credibility, defending it to the death does (“Voodoo Science”, anyone?). Is it a mistake to present “a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more'”?
Shewonk:
“Just because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean we know nothing. To suggest otherwise is to be rather unscientific.”
I agree with you but the point you are raising here is surely how to deal with the expression of uncertainty, especially with paleo reconstructions.
This is why the ‘shaft’ of the hockey stick is so important. There is plenty of statistical evidence to suggest that the uncertainties in MBH98 – and all subsequent paleo reconstructions of the MWP – are so large as to make them little better than background noise.
This really, really matters when the hockey stick graph has been used as the basis for so much government policy over the last several years.
That we need to know more is beyond question – that we know enough already to confidently take action is far less certain.
This really, really matters when the hockey stick graph has been used as the basis for so much government policy over the last several years.
What government policy in particular? Can you reference some that have specifically referred to the hockey stick or WMO graphic as supporting evidence?
I don’t work in the climate policy field but it seems to me that whatever climate policy exists, it isn’t likely based on either the hockey stick or WMO graphic. When science is used to inform policy, it is usually the preponderance of evidence that is convincing rather than a single work. The basic physics, calculations of climate sensitivity and potential impacts are probably what would be influential in the determination of policy. But I would defer to an actual climate policy analyst.
The Labor government here in Australia most definitely used the hockey stick as the cornerstone of their argument that “the science is in” and that we must do all sorts of things to combat climate change.
I’m trying to locate the actual document(s) which featured it. The website appears to have been taken down since the election last year.
Shewonk says:
What government policy in particular? Can you reference some that have specifically referred to the hockey stick or WMO graphic as supporting evidence?
When the 2001 IPCC report came out with the Hockey Stick of MBH98 as the poster child, the UK government presented it as the evidence that climate change was real. The IPCC Summary for Policymakers claimed it is likely “that the 1990’s has been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millenium”
The Hockey Stick picture was the centre piece of the UK Energy White Paper that was based on the IPCC report. And as a consequence in 2003 the following words were uttered:
“Climate change – largely caused by burning fossil fuels – threatens major consequences in the UK and worldwide….We need urgent global action to tackle climate change.” by the Rt Hon Tony Blair, then UK Primeminister.
It was the hockey stick in IPCC 2001 that set the UK government policy to this day. It was the Hockey Stick that allowed the claim that the 1990’s were the hottest decade of the last 1000 years. That claim is not true.
I can pretty much guarantee you that the government did not use that graphic as the reason for enacting legislation. Science is often used to inform policy, but usually it is not the only consideration. There are multiple conflicting interests to consider when developing policy. The decision to act is not premised on a single graphic or even on a single document.
Sadly people are as unaware of how policy works as they are science.
You may be right that it wasn’t the sole reason. But it was a very iconic and very powerful image. Which are things that politicians in general are very amenable to.
Tony Blair was especially moved by and persuaded by such things. And was good at conjuring them in his words as well. He had Brown to do the sums and the detail while he concentrated on the broad brush. I ‘m sure that he was much taken with the graph.
Thanks for telling us how policy is made btw. We’d never have known otherwise. I’ve always thought that the Queen told Mrs Obama what to instruct BO to do. Have I got it wrong?
Glad to help!
Ignorance is bliss, but it’s a pretty bad basis for policy.
shewonk,
You’re clearly both intelligent and well informed. Have a look at TAR and tell me that the NBH98 graph wasn’t presented as the ‘must use’ icon from the whole document. I would have been incredibly surprised if the various under secretaries – and journalists – hadn’t rushed to the photocopier…..OK, the PDF printer, to make this important information available, both as a news articlce and as an influential policy document.
If a scientific assessment report is presented in such an unequivocal and visually attractive way, you must surely understand that politicians would only weigh its value against the likelihood of it being either (a) popular with the electorate…..or (b) neutral with the electorate but cash positive for the government. It is only the new – and very cool in a rather anarchic way – medium of the web that has caused diverse views to percolate down to citizen level, in spite of political and journalistic enterprise.
Politicians deal with multiple lines of policy pressure from any number of sources. You imagine that the process is far more diligent than it actually is, than it actually can be, in reality. This is not because policy makers are lazy and don’t care – it’s because they are human beings and run out of time.
Clearly you have a real fire in you about this subject. You could do worse than write to your local MP or, better still, a government minister with your views. I think, if you express yourself as clearly as you have here, you may be surprised by the response.
Politicians deal with multiple lines of policy pressure from any number of sources. You imagine that the process is far more diligent than it actually is, than it actually can be, in reality. This is not because policy makers are lazy and don’t care – it’s because they are human beings and run out of time.
Saaad, there is reality, there is our understanding of that reality, there is communication of our understanding of that reality, and our decisions made based on that communication of our understanding of that reality. In each step, some of the reality is lost in translation. It’s inevitable. No science is completely certain and no policy is driven solely based on the science.
Policy is premised — or should be — on the best available science but as you say, there are conflicting interests to manage. Scientists who seek to communicate their understanding of the state of the science to the public or policy makers must consider their audience. That is a fundamental of communications. If you don’t, communication doesn’t occur. Confusion does.
Could the WMO graphic have been better referenced or explained or depicted? Perhaps, but I am not the one to determine what would have been the best depiction and besides, it’s a small point in the greater scheme of things and for those who claim to be concerned about AGW. That people make more of it suggests to me that it is due to their hopes they can use it for other purposes.
For some audiences, you give the full-meal-deal and include all the caveats and provisos. For others, not so much because they either can’t understand their significance or don’t want to understand (just the facts, ma’am) or will become utterly confused by the detail. Policy makers usually employ experts to winnow down all the evidence into something that is actionable. They want the facts and risks and options.
One graphic may have a lot of impact on a visceral sense, but I can guarantee you that those scientists (and non-scientists) advising policy makers take what the scientists write in their papers and in their public communications and craft it — edit it down — to pull out the key points, messages, in order to suit the goals, values and agendas of the political decision makers. And political decision makers decide whether to act — or not — on whatever basis they find most compelling. No matter how carefully scientists craft their communications, political decision makers and their advisors will take it and do with it as they will in order to decide how and if to act.
A single graphic alone will not be enough to sway policy makers into acting. If that was the case, we’d have long ago had a carbon tax / cap and trade system, global treaty, comprehensive alternative energy program, and have been well on the way to mitigating CO2.
I see that WMO graphic as the scientists trying to put together a simple graphic that expressed the best science that was available at the time. Scientists are aware of the caveats and complexity, but if you are asked to condense the current state of the science down into a simple graphic, you can’t by definition include all the complexity. How much complexity to include is a judgement call based on the best science understanding of the time in the expert opinions of the scientists. I refuse to think that I have the expertise to arbitrate this.
Take the model of the atom and how it has changed over the years. As knowledge progressed, we had different depictions of the atom. The simple model of the atom condenses down an awful lot of information, maths, and uncertainty and evidence into something simple and powerful. Does it fully and perfectly replicate reality? No — it’s meant to abstract from the complexity and give the take home. Just because the older models are imprecise or proven not complete or even incorrect does not mean that those who created the model were intentionally hiding information to deceive.
That’s what the WMO graphic is, at least in my opinion.
The U.S.’s EPA relied almost exclusively on the IPCC literature for their recent finding that CO2 is a pollutant.
Considering that IPCC literature is “the” authoritative literature on the subject, that makes sense.
Well, yes, of course, they’re the ones that gave us such wonderful contrivances as this little graph we’re discussing. I would mention the other glaring deficiencies that call into question the validity of assigning the word “authoritative” to it, but I think the discussion as devolved enough.
But, it should suffice that this little sidebar should underscore why it is incumbent upon climatologists to be clear and concise. The graph in question failed miserably in the “clear” department and “concise” isn’t a word I’d attach to it either.
Z
Then why do denialists insist that the MWP was as warm or warmer than today, given that you insist that all paleo reconstructions of the MWP are so uncertain as to be little better than background noise?
dhogaza,
Personally I would be happy if we could base any policy decisions on evidence that was much more certain than the paleo reconstructions.
> Then why do denialists insist that the MWP was as warm or
> warmer than today, given that you insist that all paleo reconstructions
> of the MWP are so uncertain as to be little better than background noise?
Written testimony of the time. We know for a fact there were vineyards as
far north as Leeds in England, things must have been considerably warmer
than now. This situation must have existed for a lengthy period of time
for anyone to think it worth their while planting vines.
This is one local example (of many geographically distributed examples)
but it’s unlikely to have lasted as long as it did if it wasn’t at least a whole
Northern Hemishpere condition, and as such it should be picked up
in the paleo reconstrustions.
Nial.
Nial | February 23, 2011 at 5:58 am | Reply
Written testimony of the time. We know for a fact there were vineyards as far north as Leeds in England, things must have been considerably warmer than now. This situation must have existed for a lengthy period of time for anyone to think it worth their while planting vines.
That particular ‘fact’ isn’t quite as firm as you make it sound, and most of the vineyards that there are good documentary evidence for (e.g. in the Domesday book) are much further south than Leeds. Why you would think that would mean that it must have been “considerably warmer than now”, since there are more vineyards in England now than then, one even in Leeds (Kirkstall, where the abbey would be likely to have been the site of any winemaking in Leeds)!
There are historical records and other evidence that doesn’t rely on tree rings.
And they do not show the hockey stick.
Yes they do
Examples please?
I’ll follow hunter’s approach on this one and just state my opinion as fact – if it’s OK for him then it’s OK for me.
I’ll give your opinion due weight.
dhogza,
By the way, each time you use ‘denialist’, you lose.
Dr Curry uses denialist.
i don’t use denialist, but i do use denier, but not in labeling an individual that does not want to be labeled in this way.
Right. Calling someone a denialist is far, far worse than comparing them to a eugenicist.
I mean, seriously… whining about namecalling? Are we in kindergarten? There’s no crying in baseball.
Well, on the one had, the eugenicists and the warmist hysterics have one overwhelmingly powerful characteristic in common: Both were calling for radical government action on the basis of scientific evidence and theory that was highly uncertain at best and complete junk at worst.
Drawing attention to this similarity may or may not constitute “name calling”, but it is at the very least an interesting parallel.
because people during the MWP with iron age technology lived and farmed areas of Greenland for several centuries, areas that are now ice covered and which even with modern technology would be nigh on uninhabitable now
Yeah, but did they grow strawberries?
And how do you know they farmed areas that are now under ice?
Making stuff up out of whole cloth.
I could point to links showing where the Vikings were and where the ice is now, but you should do your own research.
I’ve even heard it argued that it was called Greenland becuase it was such as green and pleasant land when the truth is that was a huge propaganda exercise to persuade vikings to move there. They did and tried to scratch out a living before almost all died off (only coastal settlements survived).
Please point out these links. It makes your argument so much more persuasive.
Because telling people to do their own research doesn’t build confidence that
a. such links exist and that you are tolerably familiar with them or
b. that you are genuinely seeking to persuade people of your argument.
Those not convinced of either a. or b. might be inclined to discount your postings entirely as posturing hot air without substance.
http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/
I did – long ago. The Greenland Norse settlements were a thriving enterprise for several hundred years with constant trade with the northern European countries. They even acquired their own Bishop, which is an indicator of the size of the communities.
The settlements died out because of increasing cold, which caused shorter growing seasons and, more importantly, cutoff access to the mainland and Iceland due to the icepack growth. Between 1350 and 1380 AD, the icepack grew such that Greenland Polar Bears were crossing the ice to Iceland, something that hadn’t happened in over 400 years.
Cut off from trade with the mainland for much of the year, they could not get some of the necessities of life and the settlements gradually died out as the people went back to the “home country”. One of the problems with the settlements was that they never adopted the fishing, hunting and survival techniques of the Inuit, but rather kept on using the European techniques.
Lots more in any good archaeology text on the subject. For an easy read, try Brian Fagan’s book – “The Little Ice Age”.
Try some education – it’s a wonderfu thing.
The farms of the vikings are not ice-covered today, and they have never been in the years between. And they are still green in the summer.
If you read the entire link, it certainly refers to cooling, shorter summers by in the 1300s:
‘Greenland’s climate began to change as well; the summers grew shorter and progressively cooler, limiting the time cattle could be kept outdoors and increasing the need for winter fodder. During the worst years, when rains would have been heaviest, the hay crop would barely have been adequate to see the penned animals through the coldest days. Over the decades the drop in temperature seems to have had an effect on the design of the Greenlanders’ houses. Originally conceived as single-roomed structures, like the great hall at Brattahlid, they were divided into smaller spaces for warmth, and then into warrens of interconnected chambers, with the cows kept close by so the owners might benefit from the animals’ body heat.’
This was added to soil erosion and sociological factors in this analysis of the failure of the Greenland Viking colonies. Must of the standard histories with which I am familiar prioritize the falling temperatures as the key factor which killed these settlements.
Which, if you read the sources of that text, may have been corresponding to other known times of a couple of hard winters in a row. Nothing that equals a climate change, but a local phenomena that could easily have been the straw that killed these very exposed settlements.
(That it actually was the cold temperature that killed of the settlements is the most common explanation, but not the only one, and not one that by any means is proven.)
Which, if you read the sources of that text, may have been corresponding to other known times of a couple of hard winters in a row. Nothing that equals a climate change, but a local phenomena that could easily have been the straw that killed these very exposed settlements.
Horse puckey.
The original sources were the written records kept by the priests. And the cold was NOT a couple years as you claim. Nor was it a localized phenomena – all of Europe also got cold. AND the evidence is that most of the rest of the planet did as well.
If you’re reading “other explanations” then you’re reading revisionist texts that are based on uninformed speculation, not original sources.
Maybe in the US you all believe that written European history started in about 1776 (to pick a date at random). And that before that people spoke only in grunts and writing was unknown.
There is a wealth of surviving written material that directly and indirectly supports the conventional view of a cooling period in the 1300s followed by a very welcome warmer time when crops returned to abundance and more. And the population expanded.
Not only did people write about the weather, you can see it all in their household accounts, their crop inventories, their laws, their rent rolls.
Medieval times are not a closed book. We know a great deal about that time and its climate from contemporary accounts.
LOL
So the real temperature increases arent there?
They most definitely are there, ianash. They just don’t look quite so scarily dramatic when removed from the MBH98 graph.
Why would they be ‘removed’? We have actual temperature data for all of the period of the ‘blade’.
If in fact there was a MWP model that matched or exceeded the heights reached by the blade…and btw, there isn’t; even with alternate reconstructions, there still a ~0.5 degree gap…that would indicate that climate sensitivity to natural forcings is likely on the HIGH side. And for the we’re adding significant anthropogenic forcings to the mix. Is that good news to you?
What government policy in particular? ….
Look at the bigger picture :
– CAGW theory is funded by the state
– CAGW justifies an expansion of the state
Add to this Climategate and the general rampant dishonesty of the state’s Team, and what do you get?
CAGW = State Expansion = conspiracy theory = don’t forget to put on your tinfoil hat
So you don’t think CAGW is a reality?
The acronym ‘CAGW’ is a red rag that skeptics wave at each other. It’s also their clumsy way of trying to control the terms of debate.
You won’t see it much in scientific literature.
Have massive power grabs by elites in the past ever been a legitimate cause for concern? Power over the emission of CO2, as Lindzen pointed out long ago, is the ultimate tool for the totalitarian. Pointing this out is not saying that everyone concerned is a totalitarian. Just that history tells us – and I know for past interactions you have these concerns about the rise of the Nazi state – to be extremely careful.
Wow, that seems to remind me of the opening statements that “Policy-Lass” used to get ignored by Steve M. many moons ago. Hope it is working better this time ;) Times may change, but policies remain…
“From what I have read, the MWP is thought to be a regional or hemispheric phenomenon. ”
Try a little more research! Plenty of papers supporting the MWP as worldwide.
Pete H, there are papers that dispute the existence of a global MWP and papers that claim it exists. Which plenty do I trust?
In instances like that, you can find sources other than climate papers.
For example, look up some history books. Find out what people were wearing. See if the period was a time of plenty (usually means warm) or a time of hunger, sickness and upheaval ( usually means cool)
There is a third way, which is to question the concept or practical usefulness of global temperature. As Dr Curry said above:
The sampling issues are hard enough even with modern thermometers. With proxies like tree rings, ice cores or coral they are ridiculously hard right now.
What we are left with, apart from proxies, is plenty of documentary evidence of a warm period in the middle ages across much of the world that was bothering to write such stuff down for posterity. Judith is saying the arguments beyond that may not be worth having – and I agree with her.
But this also serves to show that simply counting the number of citations on ‘two sides’ of an issue may be quite dumb. Science depends on real data, not the words people write about it. Critical assessment, as always, is required from the reader.
Don’t trust any of them. TRY to keep an open mind until there is sufficient unrefuted evidence supporting one side.
More importantly, do NOT make ANY policies which affect millions of people’s livelihoods and lifestyles until the evidence is unrefuted.
From 1047485263.txt, March 12, 2003
My em-ing
rats, did it again. em-ing doesn’t show in blockquote
Wow,
Watching Gavin sputter is a great early birthday present. Thank you Judith.
~ ctm
(this comment probably shouldn’t survive moderation, and I should know!)
classy. Great way to build bridges…
Denialist – level 1
Creationist Level 100
I’m surprised Gavin’s comment didn’t end up in the “Bore Hole.”
Oops. Sorry, wrong blog.
BTW, I think the “Bore Hole” is the best bit of that other site.
You would orkneygal.
How you going reading those papers. Worked out where you went wrong yet?
By the way, have you read them?
Have you?
After you, dear friend.
Yes, I have read those contradictory papers, carefully. Anyone that does, immediately realizes that the contractions apparent in the respective precipitation maps, generated per methods described, cannot possibly be described as anything other than non-concordant and contradictory.
Now that the most recent Nature paper has been shown to be fundamentally and fatally flawed, the contradictions of the two papers is less interesting. The Nature paper is technically wrong and wrong headed, so it really doesn’t contradict the view that increasing temperatures are bound to cause increased drought in the mid-latitudes of the NH, which is what the paper that Trenberth approved claims. NH flooding cannot be attributed to climate change, per the Trenberth approved paper. It must therefore be weather.
A close reading of postings in the Bore Hole gives great insight into the attitude, mentality and biases of the moderators, doesn’t it?
As steve mosher said a while back, RC does have some very worthy scientific threads, which have been completely undermined by their overbearing moderation. I gave up reading the comments there a long while ago.
…but the borehole – IMO, It’s by far the most interesting thing to have happened on RC in recent times (possibly ever), although I think it reveals more about the insecurities of the blog posters than those who are chosen to protect them via moderation.
Wow, Dr. Curry, I’m impressed and a bit disappointed at the same time. I’m impressed with your statement. I’m a bit disappointed with some of your readership. McShane and Wyner pretty much make this discussion …..academic, yet no mention, strange. So perhaps this is what academics do. I think it is good to discuss this. Gavin seems to be in a state of denial. (Sorry, I looked for a better word, but couldn’t find one.) Whether intentional or not, the graph was misleading. It misled a great many people. Gavin, it isn’t ok to mislead people regarding information to our policy makers. It isn’t acceptable. Policies have been changed, in part, based upon the interpretation of that insidious graph. Why? Because some wanted to “tell a story”. I think that’s just about the proper way to term it.
By this tree ring, I pronounce the average decadal temp 500-490 years ago to be precisely 0.6 C less than today…………….anyone that ever bought into that……..
Very impressive, Judith. It’s nice to see a climate scientist accept and even defend the straightforward interpretation of ‘hide the decline’.
WOW!!
I am a non-scientist who comes to sites such as this one for enlightenment on the issue. Tonight I get not only enlightenment but the Friday Night Fights as well!
This is a great discussion Dr. Curry and I am glad Gavin stopped by to participate. His comments were very illuminating in both tone and “content.”
By the way, Dr. Schmidt, while you are here: do my taxpayer dollars pay for any of your “Real Climate” activities and if not, is that documented somewhere?
Heartening to see your stance on this Dr. Curry, thank you for being so direct. I have been both a scientist (PhD CME) and a marketeer in my career. In neither of these extremes is what was done in that chart either ethical or acceptable.
Judith,
You write:
“Can anyone defend “hide the decline”? I would much prefer to be wrong in my interpretation, but I fear that I am not.”
Thank you for the bravery of the post, considering your pseudo-‘peers’ have no stomach for truth in this instance.
SteveM deserves credit for disseminating this issue, he also deserves credit for calling my attention to Mann 08. This exact issue was discussed at the Air Vent vociferously in this unique post well before it became mainstream knowledge through climategate. There are reasons that the few blogs which received climategate links were chosen.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/mxd-tree-removal-service-choppin-wood-off-a-hockey-stick/
The link is the same discussion that ‘hide the decline’ became famous for – note the date. Same issue, same problem, and if you don’ t snip it, the same kind of falsified methods. — by some of the same people.
Ducks are Ducks.
Fig 1 is the critical one.
Jeff Id: “There are reasons that the few blogs which received climategate links were chosen.” Would you care to elaborate? The Norfolk Constabulary is interested.
I had a nice email correspondence with the Norfolk Constabulary about it already, but if you think you can find any nefarious inference you just go right ahead believing it.
I am not “discussing the subject,” Charles, I am asking a simple question, which only Jeff Id can answer. Is he in a position to know the “reasons that the few blogs which received climategate links were chosen,” or is he speculating? He can reply, either way. Your opinion doesn’t interest me in the slightest.
Jeff Id claims to know “reasons.” Is he just speculating, or is he in a position to actually know the reasons why certain blogs were selected. If he is in a position to know the reasons, then yes, I think the Norfolk Constabulary would be interested.
Bravery. Hmmm.
Writing a chum laden post that is guaranteed to stir up the denialists that inhabit this little piece of paradise…really brave.
How about she do some real science?
A simple question, to which there should be a simple answer: is Jeff Id speculating, or is he in a position to know the “reasons that the few blogs which received climategate links were chosen”?
I see you don’t know very much about Climategate, where the files were distributed to and why. Or the fact that Jeff Id talked to the Norfolk Constab waayyyy back in 2009.
So I’ll try and make it short and simple for ya. WUWT got the files on Nov 17th but Charles the Moderator embargoed them to try and verify and to get Anthony’s permission to post, which you would know if you had read this post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/13/climategate%E2%80%94the-ctm-story/
You would also know he has talked to the Norfolk Constab if you read this post:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/25/ctm-is-contacted-by-the-norfolk-constabulary-and-responds/
On the same day WUWT got it it was uploaded to RC and a link was posted on CA. Gavin quickly tried to bury it.
That same night another website got a a link to the emails on Warren Meyers Climate Skeptic Blog. However he was away and didn’t realize until much later that he got a link to the Russian Proxy Server.
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2009/11/bummer-i-didnt-make-the-list.html#comment-5931
After that is when Jeff Id got the link on his server:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/open-letter/
Now why would they link to those sites? Could it be because they just might know something about the subject matter at hand? That they have been writing articles and in some cases written peer reviewed papers and testified before the US Congress on the issues tied to in those emails? Nah of course not. Some how Jeff Id while Deer hunting was able to hack through all the firewalls, trawl through every server and computer at CRU, only pull out ones dealing with Climate (did you notice there was no really “private” type emails such as hey Jim how is the Kids I’ll be in NY next week lets get together and have a few), then find the one email where a password to RC was in them, use it to upload the files, link it to CA with a title that said “A miracle occurred”, started lurking to see what would happen, saw RC pulled down, saw WUWT embargo the files and then uploaded the files to a Russian Proxy Server and then linked to someone else’s blog before linking to his own and for some reason a couple of days before that sent some of the emails to a BBC reporter to find out if they were really from him.
But if you had read this post at the following link you would have already known this instead of your transparent attempt to divert and smear:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/01/12/the-mosher-timeline/
Boballab,
Where did you get the idea about what my intent is (to divert and smear??). All I’ve asked is a simple question in response to Jeff Id’s claim that he “knows” the reasons that certain blogs were targeted to receive the link to the stolen e-mails: Is Jeff Id in a position to “know” what the reasons are that certain blogs were selected, or is he speculating? That’s all. If it’s speculation on his part, that’s fine with me, but it’s not the same as “knowing.” If Jeff has spoken to the constabulary, that’s fine too. Thank you for the time-lines and links to other posts on the subject. I am not at all ashamed to admit that I don’t frequent WUWT or climateaudit.
“I am not at all ashamed to admit that I don’t frequent WUWT or climateaudit.”
Then unlike Gavin, who does, you are not remotely qualified to discuss this subject.
This is a reposted reply to charles the moderator’s comment, which the blog software apparently placed out-of-sequence, above:
I am not “discussing the subject,” Charles, I am asking a simple question, which only Jeff Id can answer. Is he in a position to know the “reasons that the few blogs which received climategate links were chosen,” or is he speculating? He can reply, either way. Your opinion doesn’t interest me in the slightest.
The blogs were chosen because they understood the subject being discussed. Anthony, Steve, Charles, Lucia, Warren Meyer, Roman,Hu, McKitrick and several thousand regular readers ALL KNEW the proxies, the issues and the meaning.
Then there were the denialists, who still can’t believe what is right there written out in front of their faces.
You are not qualified to even ask that question. Seriously.
I see people here all the time opine on scientific matters they are not expert on — why is this any different?
If you haven’t then I encourage you to at least check the archives of the Air Vent (Jeff Id’s blog) where he has posts going back a couple of years concerning the problems in the “Hockey Stick” series of papers and Climate Audit which has posts going back to 2003 on dendroclimatology.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/hockey-stick-posts/
First in the series is dated Sept 2008
http://climateaudit.org/multiproxy-pdfs/
papers and presentations
http://climateaudit.org/?cat=1604100
MBH 98
http://climateaudit.org/?cat=1604102
All the other Multiproxy studies from Dr. Briffa through Dr. Mann’s latest papers.
My note here is that Richard Muller is an AGW supporter, who is concerned that current proposed CO2 policy is too weak on countries like Brazil, China and India. The important point is that even as a warmist, he is not deterred from going after the ‘hide the decline’ stuff. This shows that to most scientists lie him, this is all a side-show relative to the actual AGW case on the current and future warming that is more important to get across.
The outburst of fierce and deep emotions that the hockey stick controversy invokes strikes me a topic suited more for sociology than geoscience. The symbolism of the issue enormously outweighs its scientific implications as I interpret them from the vantage point of someone who knows something about the science. Needless to say, that claim on my part will itself engender some heat.
The credibility of conclusions that our carbon emissions are significantly warming the planet, with potentially hazardous consequences, rests in part on the validity of the supportive evidence. One can assess this by attempting to assess the conclusiveness of the evidence. In many fields, a skeptical position would be to search for inadequacies in the evidence itself, and of course, climate change skepticism does undertake that task, with results that shouldn’t be ignored. Here, however, we see an additional approach that entails attempts to discredit the scientists who produce the evidence, and it is this phenomenon that is exceptionally prominent in climate science debates.
Is this because climate scientists deserve less credibility than those in other fields? I have already argued that the answer is absolutely not, and that climate science credibility overall should be deemed excellent. Given that no human activity will ever be free of imperfections, an important question is whether the imperfections of the climate science endeavor are receiving an appropriate level of emphasis vis-a-vis the evidence for credible performance over many decades. I suspect not, both on the part of critics but also defenders who battle within the crucible of emotional intensity generated by the policy implications of climate science conclusions.
The credibility of adversaries is more the stuff of politics than science, and here, in my view, we see it applied to science – or often misapplied, I suspect. In politics, emphasis on the negative element disenchants voters who grudgingly opt in favor of the least bad candidates. I’m not sure who benefits most from that phenomenon, but in the case of climate science, it is likely to be those who most hope to see the public throw up its collective hands in disgust, and opt to do nothing. There is a clear winner and a clear loser when that happens.
I have suggested above, and elsewhere, that the scientific implications of the hockey stick are rather meager – they are a sideshow to the main arena where basic principles of climate change are emerging in growing detail. This raises a question of its own. If discrediting scientists is an important instrument in the battle of adversaries, why has not a phenomenon more central to climate change than the hockey stick been elevated to almost unsurpassed prominence by those looking for weapons? The answer to that question may have implications of its own.
Fred, the reason that the hockey stick engenders so much emotions is very simple, and really does cut to the heart of the matter. It keeps generating emotion because one side just won’t let it go, and it isn’t the skeptical side. The pro-climate-change advocacy side is absolutely incapable of admitting even the least little, small defect. You see it in this very thread, where Gavin is unable to say, “Hey, you know what? Snipping inconvenient data and splicing on the instrumental record was a bad idea. It was wrong.” Instead you see him throwing up insults and strawmen and trying to distract things. I’m not a scientist. However, I can read and do math, and it doesn’t matter how many gallons of whitewash panels use on things this simple.
And you’re right that in the pure science realm the hockey stick, “Mike’s Nature Trick”, using upside down proxies, don’t really affect the underlying science all that much, because bad science eventually gets replaced with better (frequently after the old guard dies off). But this is no longer a pure science question. It’s a political one. A certain class of politicians wants me to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in my tax money to advance a particular agenda, and these science-activists have decided to support that.
So let’s look at a pair of statements
1. Recent temperatures are the highest on record. Therefore Something Must Be Done.
2. As best we can determine temperatures today are about as warm as they were a thousand years ago, but we can’t say with any accuracy which was warmer due to large error bars.
Which statement will the climate-advocates choose? Will climate advocates ever mention that CO2 levels were apparently many times what they are today within the last couple of hundred million years ago with no apparent doomsday consequences? Those questions answer themselves.
So basically the whole hockey gang has been shown to be a group that will shade the truth for political advocacy. And you’re right, for purposes of the underlying science that’s meaningless – the science either works, or it doesn’t. But the point is that I’m not willing to spend a single penny in tax money on their say-so if I can avoid it. And sure, many, if not most, of the science they’ve done may be correct. But until someone who doesn’t have trust and prevarication issues comes through and double-checks it it’s worthless. And until the gang can start by admitting fault and mistakes in the cases where it’s so obvious that anyone who’s not a Democratic politician or a climate “scientist” can see it then all their work is similarly tainted.
Skip. It is the sceptic side that won’t let go on this. Gavin has given *his* justification for “hide the decline” and much of the information is out in the open. Some in “the gang” do admit to mistakes, but don’t accept that they are anything like as serious as supposed, or that they were made with malevolent intent. This is usually the point that you say – OK let’s agree to disagree and maybe reassess the science and the methods for doing things in the future.
This is why it is equally important that (unlike suggested by Bishophill above) the existence of more recent science papers by different authors are important – the scientists are moving on from the Hockeystick.
As I perhaps count as a (relatively ignorant) “climate advocate” your phrase 1 looks a bit misconstrued – the first part doesn’t imply the second. Your phrase 2 looks like a not unreasonable assessment.
BTW do you think that the world entered and left a number of ice age states *without* a doomsday scenario for a wide range of species? If so, what is your evidence?
Fred Moolten
…….”I have suggested above, and elsewhere, that the scientific implications of the hockey stick are rather meager – they are a sideshow to the main arena”…..
The British House of Commons has been brought to public contempt by relatively trivial fiddling of expenses.
The attitude of the new MPs will determine if public confidence can be restored.
Likewise self pride and honesty in scientific method will determine if public confidence in Climate Science returns.
Dear Fred, You appear to be literate: “they are a sideshow to the main arena where basic principles of climate change are emerging in growing detail. This raises a question of its own. If discrediting scientists is an important instrument in the battle of adversaries, why has not a phenomenon more central to climate change …”
But like many, you are incapable of asking Essential questions. Here are three..
1. Why do you insinuate that discrediting scientists is the motive?
2. What are the “basic principles of climate change that are emerging in growing detail?”
3. Where is your evidence???????
If you were in my 8th grade class on Information Literacy I would have to fail you.
Further complicating the task of us persistent denialists is the obvious fact that the actual evidence for CO2-driven CAGW is nonexistent, so finding inadequacies in it is impossible. Thus the inadequacies must be found in the tendentious nonsense that politicized bureaucrats keep peddling to ignorant journalists, which accounts for the hockey stick controversy.
You may be right. Define ‘CAGW’.
Judy,
I think your perception of this as a tar baby was correct and you should have stayed away from it.
But your falling into the same trap as IBD. Proxies do not help us with info about 20th C temperatures. We have far better measures. So a “decline” of proxy measure post 1960 is not useful info saying that temperatures did in fact decline then, and a graph which said that would be misleading.
What they do cast doubt on is the reliability of proxy fitting in previous centuries. This is the much-published divergence problem. And what is needed is a pointer to a proper discussion of that problem – not misleading post-1960 curves on a graph.
“But your falling into the same trap as IBD. Proxies do not help us with info about 20th C temperatures. We have far better measures. So a “decline” of proxy measure post 1960 is not useful info saying that temperatures did in fact decline then, and a graph which said that would be misleading.”
Problem Nick is that Briffa argues that he chopped off the proxies because if he didnt ,the estimate of the MWP would change. The issue is the uncertainty of reconstruction DUE TO assumptions about the uniformity of the behavior of proxies over time. The divergence simply means that the uniforminatarian principle doesnt necessarily obtain.
If you need the briffa cite I’ll gladly pull it from my book.
Steve,
Chopping off proxies in a graph wouldn’t change the estimate of the MWP. The uniformity issue is what I was referring to when I said:
“What they do cast doubt on is the reliability of proxy fitting in previous centuries. This is the much-published divergence problem. “
But your falling into the same trap as IBD. Proxies do not help us with info about 20th C temperatures. We have far better measures. So a “decline” of proxy measure post 1960 is not useful info saying that temperatures did in fact decline then, and a graph which said that would be misleading.
No, she’s not. That’s absurd. To say that the graph misleads by switching to the instrumented record after 1960 is not to say that simply replacing the post-1960 segment with temperatures from tree ring proxies would correct the problem.
Right Nick; better to leave it to the ‘experts’ like Gavin and gang to ‘explain’ and handle? Not a chance … when so much has been pinned on these results, the prevalence in the literature and publications reports e.g. IPCC pubs.
Right Nick.
Or leave it to Jim.
He’s seen a tree ring once so he is qualified to comment…
This must have been meant as irony… given the utter lack of substance in your posts.
Mark
So what is your view on the reliability of tree rings as a proxy for temperature over the last 1000 years?
Dr. Curry,
Nice post. It is good to see you discussing this important issue. You are spot on, just like Jon Stewart.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-december-1-2009/scientists-hide-global-warming-data
pluueese Nick, (I think that is how Eric and Gavin handle that),
Enlighten us to the nuances of this “We have far better measures.”. We do wish to put paleo-reconstructions into their proper “reference material” category. In the engineering world we have “standards” and “reference material”. So far, we have neither a reference of a standard (and the “Le Grand Kilo” seems to be losing mass). What are you trying to say?
What I said. Proxies give uncertain information where no other is available. Make of them what you will. Thermometers are much better. If proxies say temps went down 1960-1990 and thermometers say they went up, then the proxies are wrong. The question is what that means for what they say about 1400, etc. That’s the divergence problem.
Not necessarily so Nick. Esper 2010
“Estimates of past climate and future forest biomass dynamics are constrained by uncertainties in the relationships between growth and climatic variability and uncertainties in the instrumental data themselves. Of particular interest in this regard is the boreal-forest zone, where radial growth has historically been closely connected with temperature variability, but various lines of evidence have indicated a decoupling since about the 1960s. We here address this growth-vs.-temperature divergence by analyzing tree-ring width and density data from across Siberia, and comparing 20th century proxy trends with those derived from instrumental stations. We test the influence of approaches considered in the recent literature on the divergence phenomenon (DP), including effects of tree-ring standardization and calibration period, and explore instrumental uncertainties by employing both adjusted and nonadjusted temperature data to assess growth-climate agreement. Results indicate that common methodological and data usage decisions alter 20th century growth and temperature trends in a way that can easily explain the post-1960 DP. We show that (i) Siberian station temperature adjustments were up to 1.3 °C for decadal means before 1940, (ii) tree-ring detrending effects in the order of 0.6-0.8 °C, and (iii) calibration uncertainties up to about 0.4 °C over the past 110 years. Despite these large uncertainties, instrumental and tree growth estimates for the entire 20th century warming interval match each other, to a degree previously not recognized, when care is taken to preserve long-term trends in the tree-ring data. We further show that careful examination of early temperature data and calibration of proxy timeseries over the full period of overlap with instrumental data are both necessary to properly estimate 20th century long-term changes and to avoid erroneous detection of post-1960 divergence.
We already know that – for well over 12 months now
Not to disagree, but just to note for completeness: thermometers are proxies too and they too have their problems including over recent years.
In fact the so-called “instrumental record” is not a record. It is the output of a complex and questionable kind of statistical model. The satellite record is closer to the proxies than to these surface model outputs.
Whoa.. one bit of pseudo-science at a time.. we’re hacking to bits the pseudo-scientific practice of concealing inconvenient evidence that goes against a “nice tidy message” at the moment.
The manufactured illusion of a “global temperature” is sure to be high on the to-do list of “Things To Hack Apart Next”. :)
Judith Curry … you’ve used this “my eyes glaze over”, and “it’s outside the arena of my personal expertise” argument before.
Yet … whenever you do, you come down on the side of the denialists.
Your personal philosophy seems to be…
“If I don’t understand it, the anti-science people are probably right”.
Ponder what this means to your personal reputation (whatever is left of it).
Dr Curry’s personal reputation will not be affected by RC groupies who dare to leave their moderated heaven to post on a open blog.
I am enjoying the spectacle of watching your house of cards crumble and begin to circle the drain. Am buying more popcorn.
Honest people have no need for PR propaganda and non-reproducible results. Your PR machine has sucked in millions, but the end is coming. And most likely the coming decades of colder weather will provide the coffin nails.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of trolls.
Here is Dhogaza again, finding some shred of credibility for Judith, only to completely lose it again.
Dhogaza, why do you keep looking for something you don’t really want to have anyway?
We won’t know until you and your Berkeley friends “prove” that we’re actually seeing a decline in global temperatures.
Proven here.
And here.
dhogaza,
I think the whole Berkeley thing is looking less and less credible when you have so called ‘experts’ like Curry and Muller making dopey comments time and time again.
so, re: the Berkeley thing, can we start ” enjoying the spectacle of watching [their] house of cards crumble and begin to circle the drain. ” ? (Not sure what the cards were doing in a sink, but anyway.)
I mean, if hysterical ‘skeptics’ can post week after week how the whole edifice of climate science is ‘crumbling’ ANY DAY NOW, can’t we reality-based life-forms indulge in wish-fulfillment once in awhile too?
Judith:
If Mosher’s roomate is actually a moderator of your blog …
What’s left of your scientific reputation is toast. Well, as if it weren’t anyway, maybe it’s just butter on the toast.
Pot.Kettle.Black.
Mark
Pot. Kettle. Toast. Butter. Sounds like morning in America.
dhogza,
The amazing thing is you true believers could never have this sort of conversation at RC- and you do not even pause to ponder why.
Between the convergence between you and ianash, and the palpable meltdown of Gavin, this might be the bestest blog post ever.
Add to that the bizarre-o world Gavin faux pas irt E&E, and I think you on the true believer/troll side of this are going to have a very rough bit of sledding ahead.
hunter c’mon, you can do better than this. Wheres your usual right wing passion!
ianash, you are consistently the most entertaining troll I have seen in a long, long time of reading blogs.
You know, it’s not like RC has never done articles on paleo reconstruction and the hockey stick ….
2005 (!):
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/what-if-the-hockey-stick-were-wrong/
2009:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/
If you mean, RC won’t waste bandwidth jousting repeatedly with every ‘skeptic’ that comes trolling by wielding a zombie meme, yeah, you’re right, they won’t be having that ‘conversation’.
oh, and
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-muir-russell-report/
where the RC mods discuss the WMO graph.
Read the comments, Steve. How many are people who had honest questions and were turned off by the RC attitude?
I’ve spent years on hiking forums, teaching newbies how to survive in the backcountry. It DOES get boring after a while, But that’s no excuse for copping an attitude with them – they’re there to learn. If you can’t handle it then you go away and don’t deal with it.
But RC didn’t get “bored” or “tired” – RC STARTED with the attitude – and just got worse. How do I know? Because I was there on their second day of operation. It sucked then and it sucks now.
They never learned what the Internet is, or how it operates, or how to survive in it. They just ASSUMED that they were the “Gods” and everyone should kneel at their feet and worship them. Not a formula for long term survival on the Internet.
If you like it there, then maybe that’s where you should be posting.
thats his name you moron, not his role.
bwwhahahahahhahahaha!!!! really? you wrote that? Are alarmists incapable of introspection?
Anyway, while I don’t know that ctm isn’t moderating here. (I don’t see much moderation at all.) I’m familiar with ctm from Charles moderating WUWT.
you forgot my full name.. steven “piltdown mann” mosher
get it right. I’m pumping my piltdown mann numbers on google
Judith
I am full of admiration for you. What more can I say?
If you checked back on the few comments I have made in the past, you would be able to see that I had thought your objective was to “educate” those who disagreed with the “consensus”. No longer.
Those Climategate emails should have been a game breaker, and the fact that warmists have been able to carry on regardless is a condemnation of politics. But the tide is turning with no small thanks to you. And Congress.
The decline was not all that was hidden. All the data, the R2 score, everything. Only somebody with the skills of Steve McIntyre would have been able to reconstruct what was done, only to be criticised for not knowing the data and methods – the bits that were concealed. I have been manipulated in my lifetime, and know the signs.
Fred Moolton, whom I crossed swords with in a previous posting, is trying to say the science is fine apart from the manipulation. So why the manipulation?
Climate sensitivity is heavily influenced by the change in temperature over the study period which appears to be 1,000 years. If the Medieval Warm Period was as warm, or even warmer, than now, what does this say for climate sensitivity to CO2?
It is very interesting that you have lured Gavin out of his safe haven at RC, where he now has to debate rather than moderate. He would have been better to have gone to Lisbon!
Alan
If the MWP was warmer, it implies that sensitivity to CO2 is higher. However, since the disagreement involves only a few tenths of a degree C, and since we can’t precisely quantify the forces at work at that time, it would be unwise to revise CO2 sensitivity upward on the basis of such incomplete data.
Alternatively, Fred, it could be that the same natural forces that were at work during the MWP are at work presently.
You’ll have to remind me of the logic that says ‘if the MWP was warmer, it implies that the sensitivity to CO2 is higher’. Somewhere you lost me.
Please explain – in simple baby steps. Starting with
‘If the MWP was warmer without additional CO2 it suggests that there was a warming mechanism then that wasn’t CO2.’
and following on from there.
this argument assumes all climate change is forced. if the MWP was associated with internal century scale ocean oscillations, then this says nothing about CO2 sensitivity.
That’s not strictly correct, Judy. For CO2, we have a good idea of the no-feedback sensitivity parameter, and so the ultimate value of sensitivity depends on the magnitude and sign of feedbacks. However, feedbacks are a response to temperature change rather than to the cause of temperature change. Therefore, if the climate responds more strongly to one cause (e.g., natural variations, either external or internal), we can conclude, tentatively, that it will respond more strongly to another. Although this is not a certainty, there is no plausible basis for thinking that a stronger response to a natural climate driver should imply a weaker response to an anthropogenic one. At worst, it would leave CO2 sensitivity unchanged, and more likely imply an increase.
Fred your statement assumes radiative equilibrium and that the concept of no-feedback sensitivity parameter makes any sense, particularly in the context of climate change that isn’t associated with radiative forcing. See the no feedback sensitivity thread.
http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/14/co2-no-feedback-sensitivity-part-ii/
http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/11/co2-no-feedback-sensitivity/
Climate sensitivity is defined as an equilibrium response. The no-feedback parameter applies to CO2 and combined with feedback, defines CO2 sensitivity. It is the response to CO2 forcing that is well constrained by the data, and the response to temperature (i.e., the feedback response) that is less well understood. As long as the climate system’s equilibrium response to other temperature perturbations is similar in direction to that of CO2-mediated warming, it need not be similar in magnitude. That is why CO2 sensitivity estimates might remain unchanged based on greater responses to natural perturbations, or they might increase, but it’s hard to invoke a mechanism whereby CO2 equilibrium sensitivity could be assigned to lower value, given that uncertainty resides mainly in how the climate responds to a temperature change rather than to the forcing itself.
Fred, go through the derivation of no feedback climate sensitivity. the idea of climate being driven by a surface temperature change comes from a 1-d radiative convective model view of the atmosphere/climate system. this framework simply isn’t useful for considering aspects of the climate system that arise from the spatiotemporal chaos of the coupled ocean atmosphere system.
That’s not how no-feedback sensitivity is derived. It is driven by a TOA flux imbalance, with the surface responding on the basis of a lapse rate, which in the no-feedback case is unchanged by definition. This is all pretty straightforward, and invoking spatiotemporal chaos strikes me as a bit of a diversion. I don’t think it’s possible to take seriously the notion that an enhanced temperature response to any climate factor, including internal ones, implies anything other than an elevated or unchanged CO2 sensitivity. I would entertain the notion of a reduced sensitivity if someone can specify the mechanism and the quantitation, but I strongly doubt that’s possible. I believe this should be considered a non-issue, in the same sense that Claes Johnson’s denial of back radiation was a non-issue.
go back and read the papers where this was derived. the fact that much of the climate community regards the natural internal oscillations of the climate system to be a diversion is not a good thing. go back are reread the no feedback threads here. can’t do anything further on this subject on this thread, more on this on a future thread.
Fred, I think that what Dr. Curry is saying is that the no-feedback “TOA-down by definition” case is the diversion. That is certainly my opinion. The physicists seem to want to start with this simple model, and then build outward to reality, all else beyond the simple model being an add-on. It does not work that way in the case of the climate system. There is no bench model of the climate system.
This is perhaps the skeptics primary point. One cannot start with simple bench physics and then build out to the actual global system, dragging the world’s economies and peoples with you. Speculation has crossed the line of reason, and is being shouted back.
Let’s assume that, on long timescales (above pseudo-periods of ocean oscillations), the climate is not chaotic. There is another element that can break Fred analysis: if the change is not related to an “external” forcing, but to a characteristic of the system itself, then the analysis in term of forcing and sensitivities also break. The no-feedback system is so simple that such a change is not probable.
But if you include all the feedbacks, what if the cause of T change is a change in the feedbacks themselves?
Fred analysis assume that the forcing are different, but that the feedbacks will be the same and derive a delta T accordingly. If the forcings are the same, but you change the feedbacks (change the system), you can have a T change that tells u nothing about the CO2 sensitivity (or sensitivity to any change of forcing with the feedbacks assumed constant).
Many alternate sun theories have those characteristics, they are not only unknown forcing, but change the climate system in term of feedbacks/sensitivities: shift in sunlight spectrum at constant incoming intensity (absorbed more or less by the ozone layer), change in cloud formation due to other effects than average T and relative humidity).
So no chance of a ‘baby steps’ explanation then?
Long time ago –> temperatures went up without CO2 as a driver.
Now –> temperatures go up.
Fred M –> ‘ ‘ which proves that CO2 sensitivity is bigger than we thought.
Please fill in the blanks so that I can explain to an intelligent teenager.
I will play the devil advocate (I do not agree with Fred, but I see how he can reach this conclusion):
(1) assume that we have an idea of past forcings order of magnitude (orbital, sun, volcanic,….)
(2)assume that the sensibilities to forcing (delta T=S*delta W, W the forcing in Watts/m^2 whatever the cause) has not changed since MWP and is constant whatever the cause of delta W).
Fred say that we do not know S, but we know deltaW_CO2 (I agree). Assume also that we say that MWP was cause by unknown forcing of amplitude deltaW_MWP.
Proxy gives a deltaT_MWP. So S (during MWP) can be computed as deltaT_MWP/deltaW_MWP, and today, deltaT_today=(deltaT_MWP/deltaW_MWP)*deltaW_CO2.(1) and(2) have been used, namely sensitivity have not changed since MWP (1), and sensitivity is only dependent on forcing amplitude, not on forcing nature (2)
If a new proxy reconstruction show that deltaT_MWP is larger than previously thought (for the same unknown forcing), it means that S is also higher. So with the same forcing from CO2, this new study would imply that we can expect larger deltaT (it’s worse than we though ;-) ).
I agree with Fred that it follows from (1) and (2), and I suspect (1) is true. I also suspect (see previous post) that (2) is completely false, at least for some king of effects (that are not really interpretable as forcing)
‘but we know deltaW_CO2’
Do we? We might have some lab level rough guesses, but do we actually know it? From measurements? And have we showed that ‘unknown factor from the MWP’ doesn’t hold sway today?
As I said, I played the devil’s advocate, I do not think that Fred is right…but I think that we indeed know deltaW_CO2, because it comes from radiative transfer in gases that is a well know theory, validated in lab, and without much fidling no unknown factors, at least at the accuracy that is needed for the greenhouse effect derivation. I do not see real problems in the math behind the radiative part of AGW (the no-feedback sensitivity derived from 1D model, with geometric correction).
However, this 1D model (perfectly conductive sphere eclosed in perfectly laterally conductive gas without convection) is so far removed from reality as to make it useless. I think we can extend it to non-conductive (with day/night transient) without changing the result too much and with good confidence too.
So yes, the “forcing” related to CO2 is imho well known – from a purely radiative theory at TOA level.
But adding water phase change and atmosphere/ocean circulation makes the model completely different, and we have more or less unknown effects (solar wavelength distribution, magnetic effects, biosphere feedback, cosmic rays,…). This makes the characterisation of the earth system as a linear system reponding to energy forcing at TOA with a fixed temperature sensitivity hopeless imho, and the GCM are quite pathetic attempts at more complex modeling given their lack of validation at huge approximations at every levels…
“However, feedbacks are a response to temperature change rather than to the cause of temperature change. ”
Yes.
“Therefore, if the climate responds more strongly to one cause (e.g., natural variations, either external or internal), we can conclude, tentatively, that it will respond more strongly to another.”
Here is where you run into problems. The potential cause of a MWP is unknown, as is it’s magnitude. What IS known, however, is that runaway warming did not occur. In fact, at some point the warming stopped and eventually reversed itself. So why would this not lead you to (tentatively, by all means) conclude that feedbacks to temperature increases are NEGATIVE?
It is almost universally accepted in climate science that feedbacks are net negative, once the Planck Response (the tendency of a warming object to shed more heat) is factored in. The concept of positive feedbacks applies exclusively to the notion that a reponse to a forcing such as CO2 is magnified by feedback responses, but not that it becomes a “runaway”. Given the Planck Response as a constraint on all other feedbacks, that is extremely unlikely for any reasonably foreseeable future climate.
“It is almost universally accepted in climate science that feedbacks are net negative”
Great.
“The concept of positive feedbacks applies exclusively to the notion that a reponse to a forcing such as CO2 is magnified by feedback responses”
?? This is in contradiction to the first sentence. Is CO2 a special case?
“but not that [temperature increase in response to positive feedbacks] becomes a “runaway””
OK. As I understand what you are saying, you believe that there are positive feedbacks, but as temperatures increase they become more and more swamped by other, negative, feedbacks until an equilibrium is reached (or at least some reasonable facsimile of, given the chaotic nature of climate).
However, this is STILL in direct contradiction to the ‘consensus’ (if I may borrow a term from the Team) that you first described of feedbacks being a net negative.
Jim – CO2 is not a special case. The confusion, however, lies in the semantics. There is evidence that the effect of CO2 is magnified beyond what would occur if the climate did not respond to the temperature change induced by CO2. To the extent this is true, the magnification is defined by the climate science literature as a positive feedback. We also know that both the initial response to CO2 alone as well as the response to CO2-induced temperature changes are constrained by the Planck Response, so that the overall net feedback is negative. Therefore, in this scenario, CO2 effects are magnified, but the climate ultimately reaches a new equilibrium because the Planck Response places a limit on both the original effect and the feedback responses to it.
In essence, “positive” or “negative” feedback” are terms used to denote all feedbacks except the Planck Response, and the Planck Response, although technically a feedback, is typically excluded from the discussion of feedbacks even though it is included in the calculations.
An example: it is fairly well established that a CO2 doubling would increase temperature by about 1.2 C in the absence of feedbacks. Feedbacks have been estimated (with some disagreement) to raise that effect to somewhere between 2 and 4.5 C, implying a positive feedback. However, the Planck Response is what would limit the rise to that range rather than permitting a runaway climate.
Some of this is relevant to comments above involving Judith Curry, Kai, and David Wojick – the 1.2 C figure is not in significant dispute, and so it is the feedbacks that are argued about. These are responses not to a particular climate driver, but to temperature itself. It therefore can be argued that it should not matter what causes the temperature change as long as whatever it is results in feedback responses to temperature – if some unknown past climate factor caused it and the change is larger than previously thought, the response to CO2-induced temperature change might also be larger.
It also might not be – the conclusion is tentative – but there is no plausible mechanism to make it smaller.
I don’t believe that quibbling about this as a concept is useful, because the basic principles are well established even if the exact value of climate sensitivity is not. There are items in the climate inventory that are less well established, and therefore deserve more attention.
I’m pretty sure I understand everything you are saying. However, you are still contradicting yourself, and until you can resolve this inherent conflict then I don’t see any point in continuing.
Let’s say that current temperature T0 is in ‘equilibrium’ at the current CO2 level. Let’s say that the CO2 doubles causing a rise in this temperature. Let’s further stipulate that with respect to ALL (including the Planck response) feedbacks:
Neutral —- T1=T0+1.2C
Positive — T1>T0+1.2C
Negative — T1<T0+1.2C
You are saying that feedbacks in respect to CO2 doubling are net negative AND you are saying that they are net positive. You simply cannot have this both ways. They are either one or the other.
Here is your direct quote saying that the net feedback is negative:
"We also know that both the initial response to CO2 alone as well as the response to CO2-induced temperature changes are constrained by the Planck Response, so that the overall net feedback is negative."
If the net feedback is negative, then T1T0+1.9C!
No conflict, Jim. In your example, the evidence suggests what you calculate as a positive feedback – T1>To + 1.2C. The actual value may be about 3C.
Why does it stop at 3C? If the net climate system feedback were positive, a sustained increase in CO2 of that magnitude would not let the warming stop there, but would cause the Earth to burn up. Instead, the Planck Response limits the magnitude by which the CO2 effect is magnified to 3C. This is the essence of negative feedback – a response that forces a change to come to a halt.
As I stated before, the only confusion relates to how the terms are used. “Positive feedback” is used to denote only a magnification of CO2 effects (or the effects of other forcings), and is not used to imply that change is not ultimately halted. It is purely a semantic issue, not a scientific one.
Fred, I’d to come back to this particular point:
Some of this is relevant to comments above involving Judith Curry, Kai, and David Wojick – the 1.2 C figure is not in significant dispute, and so it is the feedbacks that are argued about. These are responses not to a particular climate driver, but to temperature itself. It therefore can be argued that it should not matter what causes the temperature change as long as whatever it is results in feedback responses to temperature – if some unknown past climate factor caused it and the change is larger than previously thought, the response to CO2-induced temperature change might also be larger.
This is true, but only if you assume that the unknown past climate did not change anything that is currently collapsed into “feedbacks”, only something that is (or could) be collapsed into “forcing”.
The problem is that you assume a linear response dT=S dW with S fixed (the same during MWP and now). This is true as a linearisation limit for a non-linear system T-T0=f(W-W0). If the T-T0 (average ground temp around a base value) depend on other (unknown) factors that W-W0 (average downstream radiation at TOA around a base value), you can not derive any sensitivity estimations from MWP.
Imagine that the relation is something like:
T-T0=f(W-W0, HF-HF0,GCR-GCR0) with HF a measure of the spectral content of downstream radiation, and GCR the amount of cosmic ray.
You will get a linearisation of dT=S1 dW+S2 dHF + S3 dGCR.
Not only your are not sure anymore that dT is due to a change in W, but you are not sure anymore that S1 is constant, even for small dT : S1 is a function S1(T,HF,GCR) so even if S2 and S3 are relatively small, they can change S1 significatively if HF change significatively, or GCR change significatively. They can change ozone absorption and cloud formationrespectively, so they are possible physical mechanisms which could explain such dependecies.
That’s why I though that even without chaos argument, considering a purely deterministic system, your analysis is incomplete: for it to be true, you need to assume that all effects that surface T can change only from a change of total downstream EM intensity at TOA (called W above), and no other “external” factor independent from W.
I do not think this hypothesis is justified…
Fred, what will it take for you to realize that We Just Don’t Know. We don’t know why the MWP happened, we don’t know why it stopped. We don’t know why warming took place in the early 20th C, why it reversed in the mid-years, and why it warmed again towards the end of the century.
All this stuff about forcings and equilibrium. It’s theory. And theory’s fine if it fits and explains the data, and allows us to make useful, correct predictions. Current climate science does not do this, or at least, cannot demonstrate it.
The significance of the handle of the hockey stick is that it made the ‘unprecedented’ claim possible, and made us (well, you, apparently) think we knew stuff when we just didn’t. And don’t.
Obviously, you believe, apparently with high confidence that you ‘know’ that ACW is occurring. Like any human, you’ve been wrong about stuff before, and right up to the point that it became obvious you were wrong, you ‘knew’ you were right.
Let go. We Just Don’t Know.
Fred,
I think you have a blind spot for non-CO2 factors influencing climate changes and amazing confidence in CO2 sensitivity (feedback or not).
How will it influence your opinion if for example this decade global temperature drops significantly?
Pardon, your paradigm is showing. Is the hydrological cycle a “forcing” or a “feedback”? Are ocean currents a “forcing” or a “feedback”? If ocean currents are a strong forcing, for example, and feedback is strongly negative, your CO2 sensitivity argument falls apart — not that it actually made any sense in the first place.
Fred,
No it does not! MWP could have been 5 °C warmer and sensitivity to CO2 could be negligible or even negative.
It is not all about CO2. It might be even irrelevant for climate change!
Curry:
The Michael Behe of vaguely climate-science related specialists.
’nuff said.
LOL
But the tide is turning with no small thanks to you. And Congress.
Yes, that will be quite the legacy.
shewonk,
What legacy are “you” looking for? Saving the world from the depths of ignorance? If not…
Yeah, I will leave it at that.
Did you say ‘depths of ignornace’? With a straight face?
Check the tapwater sunshine.
And you need to check the Kool aid.
Seems to me that the kindest thing one might say regarding Gavin’s continued indefatigable defense of the indefensible is that he seems to have caught on to the (heretofore unknown but recently articulated … thanks to John N-G) doctrine of “justified disingenuousness”.
As I understand it (and I hope that John N-G will correct me if I’m mistaken), this doctrine is drawn from the mores of those involved in the “culture” of peer review (esp. in “climate science”): it hides (that which those outside the culture would consider) a multitude sins – kinda like an oversized but attractive sweater one might choose to wear when having a “bad weight day” ;-)
On a somewhat related note, Gavin was evidently a presenter at one of the recent AAAS workshops on the challenges of “communication” of climate science to the public. If his performances in this thread can be taken as an indication of his communication skillset, one can only assume that his role at the workshop was that of demonstrating how communication with the public should not be conducted.
should be :
“a multitude of sins”
A preview, a preview, my kingdom for a preview! [Memo to self: before composing comment, switch to Firefox with greasemonkey enabled]
lol, yeh, what’s a little deception when lying is the norm? Oh, wait, they don’t like that word……sorry, “justified disingenuousness”. Waaay better.
Uh, no. See ClimateAudit for a more complete discussion.
Fascinating read. I especially like some of Dr. Curry’s combacks and then watching nobody actually debate the comeback.
The only thing that spoils this thread is this “dhogaza” person. You should probably delete those childish rantings. The signal to noise ratio is low with that one.
No, dhogaza is wonderful. He is the deniers best friend. Even we sceptics love him and quote him frequently.
Taylor B – “The Norfolk Constabulary are interested”
No, they are not the slightest bit interested. I didn’t bother to respond to their RFI from over a year ago and haven’t heard from them since. They probably worked out early on that no one external was involved in the “hack”.
I agree with Charles Bourbaki that it is great to see dhogaza here in full glory. Its so much more refreshing than at FauxClimate where sceptical views are censored and you are just left with dhogaza and the other cheerleaders shouting in the empty room while Gavin and his cronies pretend they are the Oracle on all matters climate-related. At least on the blogs like here, climateaudit, WUWT and bishophill everyone gets to talk and debate these matters without censorship like at FauxClimate
Ted Carmichael @9.38 has expressed my view, I hope this adds a little.
The issue on “hide the decline” is: are Mann, Jones et al concerned to obtain the most accurate data and understand what is going on? Or are they concerned to tell a particular story which accords with their agenda, even if this means concealing or ignoring “an inconvenient truth?” That is, are they acting as scientists, seekers after truth, are they acting politically, promoting an agenda?
From Mann’s comment that “’everyone in the room’ agreed that the Briffa series was a ‘potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we’d like to show,’” it is clear that the latter is the case. There is other evidence that supports this.
It may that the group genuinely believe (1) that the earth is undergoing unusual warming, (2) that this will have catastrophic consequences for humanity/the earth, (3) that the warming is man-made, (4) that drastic action must be taken to slow warming, and can do so, and (5) it will be very hard to persuade policy-makers/the public to take such action.
However, that does not justify them acting dishonestly so as to help their case prevail. As it happens, I am not at all convinced by points (1) to (4), and am concerned that (5) might have been easier than they thought.
Yes
It was the intention of those in the room that is the important matter we should be concerned with. And it is their intention that seems to be indefensible. Was it fraudulent? Probably not in a legal sense, but it was disengenuous, it was certainly intended to mislead and it couldn’t in any sense be deemed scientific.
It’s simple really and no amount of outrage by the likely lads will change it.
The Narrative.
Dear old Gaia was chugging along nicely for millenia. No real bad weather events, no significant divergence from tepid temperatures. And then along came evil industrialization and stuffed it all.
Bend the data, distort the charts and hide explanations in detailed technical jargon to permeate the narrative, and voila’, you have yourself a climate catastrophe in the making as demanded by the UNEP and WMO.
Just distribute your wealth via the UN and all will be fixed.
Would have been an easy sell for intelligent and creative folk, but alas…..
Judith Curry–the Sarah Palin of climate science, with her “bridge to nowhere.”
Hunter, I can see why you would say that, and I admit my comparison is intended to be disparaging, but I think the comparison with Sarah Palin is quite appropriate. As Dr. Curry should know, the so-called issue of “hide the decline” is a dead horse and really trivial as far as any real scientific debate is concerned, as well as being red meat for the “skeptical” audience. Dr. Curry clearly didn’t raise it out of any curiosity about the science. She is obviously “chumming,” and not interested in a scientific debate. The entire tenor of her comments and those of her fans on this thread has been no different than a typical blog post at WUWT, where science has no place. She hasn’t responded substantively to any of Gavin’s arguments, except to say “My detailed justification of this statement will be forthcoming at another time” (punt) and “Great, thanks for the references, glad to hear that divergence is no longer a problem,” which does, in fact, betray a willful ignorance on her part regarding the scientific literature. As far as the scientific content of this post, none has been provided by Dr. Curry. So much for her bridge-building. So, I stand by my comparison as being scientifically valid.
If it is such a “trivial” dead horse, why is it that Gavin chooses to expend so much (of his rapidly declining) “scientific” credibility on flogging it as though it were still alive and defensible?!
Perhaps because Dr. Curry *claims* to be interested in bridge-building and promoting dialog? But I guess Gavin was mistaken in taking her seriously.
Dr. Curry has clearly demonstrated that not only does she “talk the talk” but also that she is willing to “walk the walk” when it comes to bridge-buliding and promoting dialogue. Gavin’s first mistake (in this particular thread) was in not taking her seriously.
Were he to have taken her seriously, instead of exhibiting his customary knee-jerk response of taking arrogant umbrage and jumping on his high-horse, he could have crossed the bridge. Instead he chose to continue flogging the (according to you) “trivial” dead horse.
Next time you’re talking to Gavin, though, you might pass on to him a Helpful Hint from Hilary: a little humility goes a long way.
You have misunderstood the meaning of ‘building bridges’.
Instead of bridges between camps, Dr Curry seems to have built herself a gangplank over open ocean that she’s chosen to walk off all on her own accord.
I can do nothing but laugh every time I see Gavin’s fans, like you, attempt to raise the “sceptics building bridges” meme. If Gavin were interested in going ANYWHERE NEAR a bridge of reconciliation, he would not have responded so disparagingly to his invite to the Lisbon conference.
You’re cut-and-thrusting with the “building bridges” knife while holding the blade, mate.
Gavin is not the self-proclaimed bridge builder. And, FWIW, I found Gavin’s response to be not at all disparaging, his honest criticism was spot on.
Yes, and why has his army of AGW supporters flocked here in force to try and defend the indefensible. Oh I forgot, it’s only a minor matter.
Right, your opines are about as scientifically valid as the discussions at RC.
You criticize her for not properly responding to Gavin? After seeing the several posts by alarmists here, I am quite certain alarmists must have either a genetic disposition or an ailment of some sort that precludes the ability to do any introspection. Gavin jumps here and insults.(along with many minions from the intellectual void known as RC) What the hell? Gavin doesn’t respond to anything! He deletes. He doesn’t even allow any of the minions to respond. He deletes. And you have the loutish audacity to presume that Dr. Curry should respond Gavin and his minions and their trollish behavior? Get real. While you come to her website to insult. What’s wrong with you people?
If you had even an inkling of what people like Gavin have to put up with, you would apologise and beg forgiveness.
Apart from the usual disruptive tactics of the denialists and their political allies, there are the threats of physical abuse, death threats to friends and family, you name it. Check out who your friends are in this debate – they are not very nice people.
Add to that the fact that all these issues are old, so so old. They have been answered a million times but the political, pseudoscientific machine keeps pushing them up to the top of blogs like this, to the cloud the issue. Every new blogger, every wannabe scientist, every libertarian fruitcake that wants to rewrite history raises the same old guff over and over and over. I’m surprised he is so restrained in his responses. I’m surprised he even bothers to even talk to someone like Curry.
The saddest thing of all is the scientists working in this area know the problems related to AGW are getting worse every day. And yet rather than being allowed to do their work looking at the science and for solutions they have to deal with this garbage. Your garbage.
There’s are more documentated and ‘official’ examples of serious threats to the skeptical side than the warmist, i suggest you remember that (either being indefensible obviously).
As for the ‘questions have been answered again and again’, well no they haven’t. Not well.
You can continue to try to derail the discussion but there is NO justification for the treatment of this data set. It is fraudulent- and madness if what gavin maintains is true (that it is irrelevant sue to the other data).
Yes, teh answers have been answered – you repeating thelie doesnt make it real.
Read the science. Just some of it. Try.
I have, at length.
If you’re SO sure explain to me now- why it is acceptable to cut and splice two data sets to give the impression of one continuous set.
I repeat, had i done this at work i’d be facing legal charges.
How about you help me out a bit, and succinctly state your falsifiable hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming? What possible observations, either past, present or future, would falsify your current beliefs?
It seems that the warmanistas are either spewing bile at anyone who disagrees with them, or playing the “heads I win, tails you lose” game. Seriously weak.
Is this post even English?
What it seems from here and elsewhere reading your comments, it seems you have never have anything to say about the real subjects. Which makes me wonder if you have any understanding at all on these subjects, but just being a cheerleader of Gavin etc.
So unless you have anything else to say, than trolling away and being snarky, I suggest you head back to Romm’s.
No seriously. Is this even English? Sure there are English words in the post but they dont make sense…
Maybe this guy is your High Lord Monkton in disguise!
This is EXCACTLY what I meant.
You meant that it is not English or that it is Lord Monkton or both?
Yes, as far as i can tell.
Yup, but it seems that perhaps you don’t understand it.
Is there a different language you would like me to pose the question in?
Yes, but unfortunately you have to be able to read English to tell. Sorry.
So, because some people are mean to Gavin, it is perfectly acceptable for you to dispense with societal norms? Perfect logic.
“Check out who your friends are in this debate – they are not very nice people.”
I expect they do things like threaten to write nefarious letters to somebody’s employer or mock an indivdiual who has lost his wife in a car accident. Have you looked in the mirror recently nash? Oh, probably not, there won’t be a reflection.
“hide the decline” is a dead horse “. “hide the decline” is a symptom of corrupt scientists who have not gone away.
That this particular thread topic has generated so much interest in such a short time manifestly demonstrates that it hasn’t gone away.
The horse is not only alive, it is kicking. And landing some blows in tender parts that the owners would rather keep concealed.
I note that the warmist attack brigade have made their totally ineffectual flypast and skedaddled for home pdq. Leaving only one or two irrelevant minions who are not worth rescuing.
Meanwhile at Bishop Hill there is speculation about Josh’s next cartoon. Schmidt as Gavdaffi, defiantly facing his last stand against overwhelming force and total credibility meltdown is a favourite.
While Judith prising open the doors of the big black castle to let Real Science escape from the clutches of the climatologists is another.
Perhaps he’ll treat us to a midweek double header.
Latimer,
That is the funniest post I’ve read in ages. I’m just visualising that damned horse and spitting red wine all over my keyboard! Perhaps Josh should turn it into a comic strip. :-)
Taylor B,
I think I will let Dr. Curry speak for what she knows and does not know.
You demonstrate no ability at telepathy, so your assignment of motives are pure hand waving- and rather tacky.
Additionally, your dismissive about WUWT is really only a demonstration of ignorance on your part. That you are so far off factually and carry such an arrogant condescending tone only marks you as a true believer who cannot understand why your world view on CO2 obsession is falling apart.
Catch this thought, if you can:
The AGW catastrophic movement is going down in flames because it is as full of hype and devoid of truth as every other world catastrophe ever declared.
You are no different than a eugenics believer of 100 years ago.
FYI to the blog author/moderator: the post by hunter (February 23, 2011 at 1:26 am) to which I responded (Feb. 23 @ 2:10 am) has disappeared from the thread. Not that it’s important, but there appears to be a problem with the software, and thought you should know. Other than that, I have nothing more to say to the pure nonsense that has been posted here by Dr. Curry and her fans, who are truly on a bridge to nowhere. Enjoy the ride!
i have someone checking on this
In one of his lectures Richard Feynman explains one of the prerequisites of being a scientist is to examine and present any contrary evidence to the theory being put forward. (I can’t find that video just now.) It is interesting to imagine how he might have expressed his opinion about this treemometer issue.
Not being able to find the video mentioned above, here are two that convey how clearly and directly he spoke:
You don’t like it? Go somewhere else!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMDTcMD6pOw
The Key to Science
Feynman…Emeritus warning!
(Please also post some Linus Pauling and mega doses of Vitamn C)
What is your contribution to the discussion on this blog – you appear to have nothing
He is here for comic relief. Fortunately he is being paid nothing.
Do not be too quick with that assertion.
Well, Ms Curry. I went through exactly the same analysis. Prior to the same, I was a bit curious about the importance given to tree rings as a proxy for temperature as opposed to precipitation. Naturally I assumed I that Briffa knew better. Then when I read that thermometer readings varied from tree ring measure, I was astounded. Thermometer readings from 1960 onward are as common as a trip to a library.
The real story was that tree rings were not a proxy of temperature at all. They were likely a proxy of precipitation as every school child learned since 3000 BC. Instead of reporting the same, Briffa went to ground, and CRU went into a strange ‘hide the info’ mode. As did NOAA/NASA. NIWA, and Met.
Sure there was a warming from 1979 through 1998. Unprecedented? Not likely.
The hockey stick, disappearing Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon turning into desert, polar bears dying…none of these are at the core of climate science. Gavin Schmidt himself has said on other blogs that the paleo reconstructions are not all that central to the debate. Why then the full court press in defending them (or more to the point, why defend the graph that is the subject of this thread in particular)?
First, because they are central to the political debate being presented to the voters by the CAGW advocates. Ask your average man on the street if he has ever even heard of radiative physics, let alone knows what it means, and listen to the silence. But ask that same man about the poor polar bears, the hockey stick, etc., and you will get a significantly different response. They were great PR.
Second, because the average voter’s eyes glaze over (to borrow a term) at the mere mention of forcings and feedbacks. But mention dishonesty in a public policy debate where someone wants to raise their taxes and change their entire economy, and they pay real attention. “Hide the decline” is to the skeptical argument what the polar bears are to CAGW proponents. A great way to catch the public’s attention and make a larger point.
Finally, and most importantly, “hide the decline”is a stake to the heart of the credibility of the CAGW movement. Whether it should be or not is irrelevant. In a policy debate of this magnitude, it is hard to say, “yes, we shouldn’t have done that,” and then expect the public to ignore your dishonesty/bias/mistake.
Dr. Curry,
Excellent deconstruction.
The reaction of the believers, from Dr. Schmidt to your own little troll groupies is amazing.
Keep up the good work.
Not sure if this is addressed up thread or not, but the “paper” by Dr. Richard Muller linked to by JC in the original post is hardly a credible piece of scientific research (though it was cited 3 times in…oh wait, E&E!…oh wait, by Steve McIntryin’).
This is another example of a classic chum post by Dr. Curry.
Joe, I don’t think Dr. Curry was presenting Muller’s paper as peer-reviewed but as historically significant. Muller was the first big global warming proponent to have his faith shaken by evidence the math of the Hockey Stick was fudged. While other proponents of the theory were shaken, Muller was IIRC the only one willing to write and circulate his criticism of the Hockey Stick. The paper is important from that perspective and the story was picked up by newspapers. I don’t think the Hockey Stick fiasco caused Muller to become a skeptic completely, but I think Climategate may have done that.
McIntryin’
Clever Joe, exceptionally clever. Thanks for dropping by and adding your little pearl of wisdom to the debate. Collect a gold star on your way out.
The editor herself said it was a vehicle for her to promote her own political agenda. “I’m following my political agenda — a bit, anyway…But isn’t that the right of the editor?”
That might be one reason.
The quality of the papers published in it might be another.
Are we now pretending the alarmist camp is apolitical?
The subject was the journal.
joe,
Do you have any evidence to show why E&E is not a credible journal?
Didn’t think so.
Yes,
The contents.
It’s a while since I’ve seen the mad Dhog ‘gracing’ a blog post. Classy.
Judith,
After a long time arguing the figure in ch06 of AR4 I settled on this way of viewing things because it crystalized for me the CHOICE that Briffa had.
Briffa had a choice. He could show the decline AND explain it in the text
OR he could not show the decline and explain it in the text.
The graphic would take the same space. The 264 words used to explain the divergence would not have to change. The only difference is this. One graphic would show the divergence the other graphic would not.
He had that choice. He choose to not show the divergence and explain what he hadnt shown in the text. Why? If he showed the divergence then people could actually see how severe it was or they could see how slight it was. As it stands by not showing the decline, one can only guess ( or check old papers) to see how bad it was. A picture is worth 1000 words. There’s no compelling reason not to show the decline and explain it in the text. That conveys more information in the same space as hiding the decline and trying to describe in words what you havent shown.
I dont know why Briffa didnt choose the better solution. I’ve speculated about this, but at this point I dont think such speculation is called for.
the IPCC have errata. Publish the chart with the decline.
Sometimes it is not about what you show, but what you don’t. I believe this is the case with this study.
This I think gets to the heart of the issue. The graph displayed (and some subsequent ones) is a classic example of how to mislead. It uses techniques that may be justified in marketing (or political campaigning) where it should be understood that there is no requirement for objectivity in a context where they are inappropriate. The IPCC Summary was presented as an unbiased objective statement of the science and in such a case it is not correct to disguise the fact that a particular proxy series no longer appears to match the temperature.
Furthermore I find it ironic and worrying that some people appear to justify the graph by noting that the surrounding text does mention the divergence problem because the surrounding text only mentions that because Steve McIntyre insisted that it should. If Briffa, Jones, Mann & co had of their own volition put in a statement about the divergence problem then one might be able to ascribe the misleadingness of the graph to scientists not thinking through the likely ‘marketing’ effects, but they didn’t. Contrariwise the evidence clearly shows they did everything they could to minimize, if not eliminate, discussion of the divergence issue and were forced to put it back in by Steve M and others insisting that it had to be mentioned.
What I found is that when dealing with the obsfucations of gavin, Deep Climate and others it is best to return to the simple decision that Briffa made.
He presented a graph. That graph(line) differed from the one he had Published in the technical literature. Part of the line was elided.
McIntyre as reviewer made a request to show the divergence.
briffa said no and gave no explainaton
In the end Briffa did explain the divergence in 250+ words. His graphic didnt show the divergence. His text tried to explain what wasnt shown.
Thats an odd way to explain things.
Comes the question: why not show the divergence and use the same words to explain it?
In the official IPCC review briffa gave no reason. No inquiry has asked him this question.
What we now know is that overpeck had asked him to do something more compelling than the hockey stick. Thats a quote
Until Briffa can give a rational reason why the graphic showing the divergence and the text explaining it was not included we are left wondering.
Did he refuse to show the divergence because it would be less compelling than the Hockey Stick.
So for the average reader who cannot plow through all the papers and details, this simple choice briffa made is the key.
Do you have a link to the two graphs that you describe? A link with them side by side would be even better. Seeing the visual impact of the difference would help me.
Thanks
J
Steve,
It’s not just the “average reader” who “cannot plough through all the papers and details” – worse still it was the policymakers at whom TAR was specifically aimed. It was surely with the knowledge that politicians, who are used to relying on summaries, would skim over the dry stuff and focus on the easily digestible material, that the IPCC editors made such extensive use of the hockey stick graph, with its big red alarming curve at the end.
This is why I believe the best solution is for AR5 to publish the hockey stick again, minus the instrumental record, with a suitable explanation.
At least then the policymakers can see where they may have ‘mis-interpreted’ the MBH98 graph. I’m being very kind.
McIntyre as reviewer made a request to show the divergence.
briffa said no and gave no explainaton
In the end Briffa did explain the divergence in 250+ words. His graphic didnt show the divergence. His text tried to explain what wasnt shown.
Thats an odd way to explain things.
So he explained the divergence in the text and left the graphic the way it was.
You’ve got your panties all twisted because he explained the divergence but didn’t change the graph?
That’s what this dozen of years of complaints is all about?
It sounds to me that it’s just, well, I have to say it — chum.
shewonk, the reason this tired issue keeps coming up is because of the visceral defense of the graph by the alarmists. Personally, I’m tired of the topic, also. But it is a bit of a highwater mark for becoming a skeptic. While I can say I’ve always been skeptical of the climate alarmism, I’ve witnessed many who’ve come to view climate science skeptically from being firmly an alarmist. This graph is usually considered when changing views. It isn’t so much that the graph was intentionally deceptive. Skeptics are used to such behavior by alarmists. The difficulty is the continued defense of such a tactic. As long as this issue continues to receive the response it has like today(yesterday) then it will continue to be raised. A little contrition and it would cease, but, alarmists are incapable, or so it seems.
Chicken and egg, I’m afraid. Why do “skeptics” — and I hesitate to use that venerable term for most people who label themselves with it — continue to bring up old dead horses to flog? For political traction. If scientists dispute the way their work is being [mis]characterized, they can hardly be blamed.
I think it has been well established that the graph was ‘misleading’ is an apt characterization. It isn’t an “old dead horse” when alarmists continue to vigorously defend its use.
If one vigorously defends its use, it is seen, and rightly so, as an attempt to defend the act of misleading people. Whether the original use was or not, the defense of its use is intentional. At this point, the person realizing this becomes very skeptical of climate science for very obvious reasons.
Possibly for the same reason warmist hysterics continue to mention Arrhenius, although his views on climate have been discredited for more than a century.
errr, A picture was worth billions of dollars (so far).
So much for motive.
Never admit you are wrong and they can’t say that you admitted it.
One can only hope for another “hack” where someone with a conscience lets the (black) cat out of the bag. That will be a great day for (real)climate science.
Interestingly the ‘decline’ appears to be a Northern Hemisphere only phenomenon which surely complicates the search for an explanation. Have a look at:
http://www.climatedata.info/Proxy/Proxy/treerings_introduction.html
The simplest conclusion based on all kinds of divergence problems is that treemometers are bad proxies for temperature. An honest scientist would’ve come to this conclusion by now instead of going down, guns blazing, into the annals of bad researchers.
One thing has amazed me about this hockey stick graph from the beginning: there is so much other evidence (remains of habitat, warmer region tree remains in cold regions etc ) which speaks for long periods of warmer climate, even quite recently in geological scale, why try to prove it otherwise? Basically the whole endeavour seems like statistics vs. hard evidence, and in my mind the winner is clear . And when such questionable graphics excercices, faulty maths etc are brough into light this conclusion is even stronger.
Btw, was Ljunqvist 2010 already covered here, too? Afaik it is the most recent study on this same topic.
Judith, the other bit people miss is this.
The trees might not have diverged as widely as briffa thought.
Simply, the temperatures they are compared against have gone through
adjustments. There was a recent paper on this as I recall..
Also, dont forget the DIRECTIVE that briffa was operating under.
He was encouraged by overpeck to come up with something MORE COMPELLING than the hockey stick (thats a quote) towards the end of the writing Briffa complained to overpeck about caving in to solomon and Mann WRT over stating the certainty.
Yes, Briffa was uncomfortable with the whole business. Was that a bit of conscience?
The day that I will take any notice of the IPCC will be the day when:
1. The IPCC provides empirical evidence that CO2 emissions from human activity causes catastrophic global warming.
2. The IPCC explains how the 3% of CO2 contributed by human activity each year is so very very dangerous for planet earth, while the overwhelming 97% of CO2 produced by nature each year is not dangerous at all.
The day that I will take any notice of the IPCC will be the day when:
…
2. The IPCC explains how the 3% of CO2 contributed by human activity each year is so very very dangerous for planet earth, while the overwhelming 97% of CO2 produced by nature each year is not dangerous at all.
The 97% doesn’t count; it’s part of the carbon cycle that existed before fossil fuels were used. I’m not saying that the 3% is “very very dangerous.”
Ok, Judith here is the cite for esper
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=22265247
The divergence problem is a lot messier than Briffa made it out to be. For exmaple, he never questioned the temperature record. hey it was Jones work.
But other dendro ( Wilson I believe) and Esper have had a look at the reliability of the temperature records themselves. In Wilsons case he did his own temperature for the canadian grids he was working on.
And in the paper linked above Esper looks at the reliability of the temperature record.
Recall that Briffa’s motivating argument for chopping off the rings at 1960, was this: if he didnt the estimate of the MWP would be inconsistent with other recons. That assumes, of course, that the temperature measurements are accurate.
Wow! A full mobilization! First time we’ve seen that! We’ve got the ant-farm, the hen-house, a few bunny-muffins (though it appears the main-force of that contingent has yet to deploy) and, as always, Sir ianash of Sri Lanka (you still planning that ego-trip to Sri Lanka, ianash?). And all that vitriolic language (I fear we’ve learned nothing!) arching overhead from the lines of the newly de-funded. I think we’re witnessing a piece of history–the last banzai charge of the Gore-grokkers.
Not that we don’t trust you guys (though, in fact, we don’t (we=everyone except ianash (discoverer of the mysterious aquanaut-people of Sri Lanka), the bunny muffins, the antoids, and shewonk’s old-biddies), but could you guys take a break from your heroic efforts to get your gravy-train back on track and provide links to the data, methods, and all internal correspondence, to include e-mails, of the references you cite. And while you diligent little dead-enders are at it, could you provide the same for the references’ references?
Otherwise, you don’t think anyone’s going to take you seriously, do you?
Though your whipped-up, desperate frenzy is very, very entertaining.
mike a little late to the party. Have difficulty getting out of your lazyboy?
Gee your pinup girl has shown her true colors finally. All the crowd at American Thinker will be happy.
I think your new name must be Archie Bunker!
Well, ianash, I may be late to the party, but you’ve run out of steam. I mean, guy, this last retort is unworthy of your former troll greatness. I guess loosing all that boondoggle dough has had a depressive effect.
Reading through this post’s comments gives me the same pleasure I experienced when watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on TV and in the comfort of my lazyboy (how’d you know I have a lazyboy, ianash?). And you’re part of the show, ianash. Love every minute of it.
Incidentally, ianash, up the page I have a comment that explains how your planned volunteer work on behalf of humanity can be realized in a manner that is both a more “green” and more efficacious. Doesn’t get any better than that, does it, ianash?
Lazyboy bound and proud, ianash. And we’re winning, too. That’s the best part.
Archie you old charmer. Proud of being a baby boomer (necrotic limb) and now lazyboy (fat arse and fat mind). Shucks it’ll be the flag and apple pie next (watch those calories).
Come to Sri Lanka with me Archie. Do something useful in your sad, bland existence. There’s always room for one more – but – one rule when we travel.
You cant bring your lazyboy with you.
I’ll let you have the last word, ianash (sort of, that is).
Mission accomplished, once again.
What is driving the AGW enlightened mad is that a bunch of unworthy troglodyte denialist scum have derailed their nice little scenario.
For ianash, it was a very short drive.
Surely the correct term is ‘AGW-delusional’?
It is a shame so many trolls turned up after Gavin left the thread, even Deltoid only turned up for a short while!
Sorry Judith, I just can see no way forward in your efforts to get the two sides together!
There are not ‘two sides’ to this debate.
There are credible scientists and there are…you guys.
At some point Curry will tire of playing these strange games with you. Prepare to be disappointed.
My prfound disappointment in you, ianash, caused by your sad decline from your former troll greatness has inured me against the pains of any future disappointment, you can be sure. Incidentally, it might help if you put on a little pan-cake make-up, rouge your cheeks, and read some of your much earlier comments, posted in your troll-prime. Your know, from those days when you were a somebody.
Archie, Archie, Archie,
What can I say.
You spend enough time around dunderheads like those here and it starts to bring you down to their level. This blog would sap the IQ out of Einstein himself!
Mike,
You mean that ianash wrote something worth reading at some point in the past? Where?
Sorry, Jim, ianash doesn’t really have any worthwhile comments. I just made that up to cheer up my ol’ pal who seems to be having something of a madcap meltdown. I was feeling a little guilty enjoying the spectacle, and all.
He had something about denialist-porn. At some point I even expected to see him in the “reader stories” column of the next Playboy…
mike you forgot to paste the link. here, I did it for you…
What is the current state of research more widely speaking concerning proxy reconstructions, have the problems been sorted out by individual studies? I recall one the key persons involved in this email leak admitting in an interview that MWP was probably close in terms of temperature (Jones was it?) also globally. I might have misinterpreted that of course.
To move discussion forward, it might be fruitful to see what is the “best” knowledge on the subject. Perhaps from authors that still have their credibility intact?
The latest science is that Mann et al still use upside down Tiljander sediments and bristlecones, and those who have created more reliable recons still say there are problems and their recons still don’t agree that well in the past and their work is ignored by the Team. Not such great progress.
Judith,
I’m greatly cheered by your open-mindedness. Please continue your search for the truth, wherever it may lie.
What is of course important, is what showed up in the Summary for policymakers, etc.. not what was buried away in the reports.
It is clear from the emails that a simple message was required for politicians, leaving stuff out, meant they were being policy advocates, not scientists.
Without, the ‘unprecedented’ temperatures, why would the politicians listen.
Also, why 2000 years, any evidence in the last 2,4,10 100, thousand years (or longer) that the earth was warmer. also falsifies it ‘must’ be us meme.
With all the obfuscation being peddled here it is easy to forget that two data sets were spliced, with data being omitted at the same time to show a trend that the individual sets did not show. This is not only dishonest, but in my book, fraud- i’d certainly be in very hot water (or jail) if i did this at work.
But it is easily solved- drop both sets of data and continue on with the other data. The blind and vehement defence of the undefensable here really shows a severe lack of judgement and proffesionalism. Further, if this is deemed as accepted practice by Gavin it makes you fear for the rest of his work.
@ Judith- i understand the frustration at play here- but, with respect, your tone is not really helping you much. Don’t descend to the same level.
Labmunkey,
I agree with you, but then I work in an FDA regulated environment. We have a canned phrase for data like Briffa’s: “invalid due to inability to meet suitability requirements.”
I can understand that academia is not as strict, but I struggle with the idea that what was done with this graph is OK. Would people be OK with a new drug approval that used the same “trick”?
This should be very relevant here:
http://slsingh.posterous.com/41313406
Paul Dennis (UEA) on this issue.
“Before I add anything further to the debate I should say that I’m an Isotope Geochemist and Head of the Stable Isotope and Noble Gas Laboratories in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia.
I’ve also contributed to and published a large number of peer reviewed scientific papers in the general field of palaoclimate studies. I don’t say this because I think my views should carry any more weight.
They shouldn’t. But they show there is a range and diversity of opinion amongst professionals working in this area.
What concerns me about the hide the decline debate is that the divergence between tree ring width and temperature in the latter half of the 20th century points to possibly both a strong non-linear response and threshold type behaviour.
There is nothing particularly different about conditions in the latter half of the 20th century and earlier periods. The temperatures, certainly in the 1960’s, are similar, nutrient inputs may have changed a little and water stress may have been different in some regions but not of a level that has not ben recorded in the past. Given this and the observed divergence one can’t have any confidence that such a response has not occurred in the past and before the modern instrumental record starting in about 1880.”
AND:
“How can you be so certain that the tree ring data tracks temperature outside of the calibration period, say before 1880? As you have pointed out we have no explanation for the modern divergence. Thus we have no certainty that such divergence would not occur in the past. I’ve no doubt the biophysical response of trees to environmental factors is complex and almost certainly is non-linear with respect to temperature.
I reiterate my point of view that the divergence is highly significant and given it’s occurrence it seriously limits our ability to use tree rings as a proxy for temperature. Moreover, hiding the divergence also hides the evidence that tree rings might not be such faithful recorders of temperature.
There is a widespread global temperature data base, contra your assertion that ‘early weather experiments’ (I assume you mean records) were scattershot. Why not use the instrumental temperature record from 1880 instead of 1960?”
AND:
“The point about the ‘Hide the Decline’ debate is germane to much of what we know about past climate of the last several millenia. There is a discrepancy between the modern tree ring data and the instrumental record. Assuming for the time being the instrumental record is robust then the conclusion one draws is that it is not possible to reconstruct past temperatures on the basis of tree ring data.
The ‘hide the decline’ graph splices together the modern temperature record and a proxy temperature curve based very largely on tree ring data. But we have direct observation that tree rings don’t always respond as we might think to temperature thus shouldn’t be splicing the two together without a very large sign writ large which says ‘Caveat Emptor’.
This is especially so when preparing material for NGO’s, policymakers etc.
This is what Bishop Hill argues is indefensible and I agree with him.
How poorlazlo can claim that the graph is not inaccurate is difficult to understand. Are the proxy temperatures based on tree rings accurate? If so how do we know they are when we have direct evidence they don’t respond to temperature in ways we might expect? This seems to me to be a leap of faith.”
Gavin:
“Problems with modern divergence – which only applies to the Briffa et al curve in any case – are issues to be dealt with in the technical literature, as they still are.”
Tallbloke paraphrase alert:
Don’t do the dirty linen in public Judy!
Anyway, didn’t Briffa fix this problem with the bewitched larch of Yamal?
why Gavin?
so the politicians don’t get to hear about it?
It sounds like Gavin can point us to lots of series with available data and ful methodological descriptions about sampling choices which don’t exhibit the divergence problem. Can’t wait to find out where the true treemometers reside.
Has anyone told Mike? Or is he out of signal checking mosquito vectors still?
Thank you for this post, Prof Curry. sadly but predictably, there has been a firestorm of ad homs and misdirections. however for me a couple of gems too, including this by Gavin:
“…One can have a difference of opinion in how to present a graph, and that depends entirely on what point you want to make.”
My point would be that, when acting in the role of a scientist, the ‘point you want to make’ must be (and must only be) to represent the data as clearly and accurately as possible. ‘Hiding the decline’ is a manifest decision not to do so, and a manifest departure from Science.
Second gem is from yourself “we need to understand the magnitude and characteristics and causes of natural climate variability over the current interglacial, particularly the last 2000 years.”
The obvious point being that since we do not understand cause and effect in past climate changes, we are in no position to predict future climate changes, and vice versa, if we want to be able to predict future climate changes in order to determine what (if any) constraints on the people are necessary to preserve their well-being, we had better focus our efforts on working out that cause-and-effect in the past record. None of the stuff about tree-rings or PCA or who said what when is really germane to that key issue, except to underline the need to be sure whatever is published is watertight from ‘the ground up’ primary data, adjustments, statistics, logic of conclusions, public presentation etc.
Judith,
I very much appreciate you calling it like you see it. I suspect that this is neither easy nor fun for you but defending the integrity of science, as you are courageously doing, is vitally important work.
The panicked knee jerk reactions of Gavin and his loyal chorus have, in some ways, been even more enlightening than your post. Their blatant attempts at misdirection, obfuscation and ad hom innuendo seem straight out of the scientology PR playbook (and just as ineffective). I’m pleased to see you continually redirecting them right back to the central point of “hiding and splicing” that they seem so desperate to avoid and obscure with such tremendous bluster and fury.
The panicked knee jerk reactions of Gavin and his loyal chorus have, in some ways, been even more enlightening than your post. Their blatant attempts at misdirection, obfuscation and ad hom innuendo seem straight out of the scientology PR playbook (and just as ineffective).
Gavin Schmidt has an understandable motive. He’s a principal, and he’s trying to hold the fort any way he can. What I don’t understand is the loyal chorus. What’s at stake for them?
Whenever people risk damage to their personal and professional reputations by supporting the unsupportable, the answer is usually money. The reason the minions continue to support Gavin and the Hockey Team is that they hope to continue getting their share of the money. If the US Congress actually takes away the money, the only sound will be the splashes as the squealers swim to another source of sustenance.
That would be true of people who actually have something to lose, but lots of the “loyal chorus” here are anonymous – they could be nobodies (as I am). See, personally, I don’t care whether harmful AGW is true or not. I’d care once I had a strong reason to go one way or the other, but I don’t, and I certainly don’t believe that the anonymous loyal chorus have or that they’ve looked at the question as much as I have.
Actually, I mean that I have more reason to believe it’s false, but I’d need something stronger than that to really care.
Gosh! What a lot of shooting at one’s own feet around here today!
Isn’t it odd how one seeks explanation, but finds instead excuses, prevarication and insult? “Eyes glaze over…” indeed. Keep stirring the pot Judith. It’s very entertaining and hopefully some might realise that if they want people to come onside, it’s better to explain things, rather than insult the questioner.
To paraphrase Baa Humbug: intelligent and creative folk already know this.
Maybe one should ask Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist (http://enhistorikersbetraktelser.wordpress.com/) for a guest post on this? As I understand it, there are two new paper by him (and otheres) in press.
I have no trust in climate “scientists “who “hide the decline” and do not show all the data. Cherry-picking and hiding data are not science. A full apology from those involved is required. I’m not holding my breath.
An interesting thread. I think Gavin has made a start at explaining his position (although I struggle to parse much of what he writes). Maybe the follow up needs to identify why it is important when things have moved on, and why this is not (yet again) about creating a better reconstruction, as well as some specific citations. Are the differences in the two versions of the graph (see my site) a good representation of the problem, or is this discussion about something different?
Let’s see if I have this right.
These guys thought that tree rings were a good ‘proxy’ for temperatures. But don;t really have any very good reason to think so.
So they did some work and came up with a pretty graph until 1960 ish. And bits of it sort of matched the actual thermometer record up until then. But it also gave conclusions about past temperatures that were very different from the historical, cultural and archaeological records that other fields were already very familiar with.
But after 1960 the tree rings and the thermometers got way out of line. And the tree rings were not good proxies any more. The reasons for these changes in tree rings as proxies are not understood.
Question: Why does this ‘divergence not just invalidate the whole idea of tree rings as good proxies at any time? If the correlation suddenly stops working, doesn’t that show no causation..maybe just coincidence..or careful ‘input data selection’? Sloppy science, unworthy of an A level student.
They then, knowing that this ‘divergence problem’ existed and was unsolved, deliberately set out to create a summary graph that actively misled the reader into ‘hiding the decline’. To cover up the fact that the divergence was there.
And it nearly worked. The peer reviewers were misled (or complicit). IPCC colleagues swallowed it largely without comment. Politicians latched on to it. Many reputable scientist believed it – because they couldn’t imagine ‘professional’ colleagues misbehaving in such a way.
But Steve McIntyre wasn’t immediately overwhelmed, and the threads began to unravel.
And now we have something approaching the full story – from both sides – it is clear that the Team knew all about what they were doing and that it was all done deliberately.
I see no reason to describe this behaviour as anything less than actively dishonest on their part. ‘Defences’ about which forum or where such matters should be discussed or summary charts or any other attempts to divert attention from that central issue are irrelevant.
They got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. And the world is beginning to notice their lack of integrity and ethics. Good!
It was this very diagram that got me investigating CAGW. I am a historian with a specialty in 800-1400 Europe. I found the “Hockey Stick” to be so divergent from my and my colleagues understanding of the climate during this period that I took considerable time and effort to understand the area of paleo and dendro climate reconstructions.
Once I understand the maths behind it all, the splicing of data to give an untruthful diagram and the cherry picking of reconstructions (or of even 11 tree rings) to support the CAGW theory I lost all faith in “Global Warming”. Mainly because of the crucial role these areas fill in showing “unprecedented” warming. The more I read of the underlying data and the statistic torture required to get to the preferred solution the less respect I had for the whole discipline. I believe many others from history backgrounds have similar views.
As for the whole “Northern Hemisphere” argument that is just chutzpah to try to defend the indefensible.
Andreas, That was one of the first things that got me worried too. It was against everything I knew about history. Add to that the amazing lack of historians and archaeologists involved with the paleoclimate sections.
The effects of warming and cooling on various ancient cultures was well known yet apparently a statistical model derived from some trees was suddenly able to negate the work of hundreds of scientists. The large changes in climate simply disappeared. Some thing smelled very badly.
This is just too good to pass up. I have re-posted the entire article at my site. Eventually enough people will agree to discredit the use of tree-ring proxies for the paleoclimate reconstructions and we can move forward with the valid and useful methods that are accurate enough to be useful.
Perhaps this is the “tipping point” for the end of the tree- ring proxies. One can hope. :-)
The language of hide the decline and Mike’s Nature trick was certainly unfortunate. Is it deliberately misleading or aberrant psychology? Much of which is going around on both sides.
I was rereading Trenberth et al – Earth’s Global (warning tautology?) Energy Budget 2008 – http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/10.1175_2008BAMS2634.1.pdf
I noted this statement in looking back over the paper.
‘There are spurious trends in the ISCCP data (e.g., Dai et al. 2006) and evidence of discontinuities at times of satellite transitions. For instance Zhang et al. (2007) report earlier excellent agreement of ISCCP-FD with the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) series of measurements in the tropics, including the decadal variability. But the ERBS data have been reprocessed (Wong et al. 2006) and no significant trend now exists in the OLR, suggesting that the previous agreement was fortuitous (Trenberth et al. 2007b).’
Dai et al talk about North American cloud trends based on a limited network of surface station observations – not at all relevant, definitive or even useful. Later studies in the Pacific Clement et al 2009 and Burgman et al 2008 – tell a different story. Something I have gone into in the decadal variability of clouds post.
More importantly – Zhang et al (2007) talk about surface radiation whereas Wong (2006) is concerned with correcting ERBS TOA radiative flux and, apart from the odd discrepancy in the Trenberth timeline, makes no such finding. ‘The effect of the altitude correction is to reduce the magnitude of the tropical LW flux change from the 1980s to 1990s from the original 3.1 to 1.6 W m2. The correction increases the magnitude of the SW flux decadal change from –2.4 to –3.0 W m2.’ 1.6 W/m-2 increase in LW out is well within the limit of Wong’s stability uncertainty – and very significant. There was warming in the SW and cooling in the LW as a result of less low level cloud cover.
I keep saying to people to imagine the political implications of a planet that does not warm for 10 to 30 years more. No mere scenario – but something that emerges repeatedly from peer reviewed literature – see for instance http://www.pnas.org/content/107/5/1833.full
Everyone knows about this – but every time it pops up it just keeps getting swept under the ideological carpet. It is madness I say rather than fraud – they find it impossible to face a reality that is different to the scenarios imagined. But again that goes for both sides.
Many years ago, I was involved in MBFR – Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions – in Europe. I was involved with preparing the NATO position, but not with the actual talks in Vienna. For many years, the 15 nations met, and every month there were formal/formal meetings. Each nation read a prepared statement, together with an offical translation in the 3 other official languages. One Canadian I knew said, with some justification, that in the 2 years he spent on MBFR, he succeeded in changing two words in the official Canadian position .
This is what this is all about. When I saw Gavin’s name, I could almost have written what I read. It is a well rehearsed statement. And the same is true for just about all the 300 plus comments, which I readily agree, I skimmed rather than reading.
Sorry, Judith. This is not science. This is “all sound and fury, signifying nothing ” William Shakespeare.
Let’s use logic and a little supposition.
Suppose that the 15-year flat global temperature trend continues for another 15 years to give that magical 30 year term that some say separates weather from climate. We are in year 2025, 30 years of temperatures with so small a signal that it can’t be extracted from the noise.
A ?bright scientist decides to do a calibration of instrumental temperature with tree ring properties for the last 30 years. Um, but the temperature has not changed, so the tree ring properties should be invariant if past mechanistic assumptions are correct.
Our bright researcher next looks at the shaft of the hockey stick and says ‘But these reconstructed temperatues were essentially constant for hundreds of years. It follows that tree ring properties were invariant for hundreds of years also.’
Some questions to our readers here: Were tree ring properties essentially invariant from 1000AD to 1900 AD?
Second question: If you answered ‘Yes’ to Q1, what is the scientific purpose in correlating flat straight lines with other flat, straight lines.
Third question: How are any proxy studies, beyond tree rings as well, going to be conducted over the past 15 years of flat temperatures? Will it not be interesting to read in proxy papers that ‘We confirm that there has been no change in the values of proxy X, which is consistent with there being no temperature change.’ Logically, this is silly, because a possible temperature proxy can be identified and used ONLY when there is a variation in temperature affecting it.
Note: You should not respond that proxy temperatures relate to local, not global study areas. I stress this for the reason that local proxies (like the bristlecone pines) tend to get elevated to represent the global picture.
The deletion of data simply to present a pre-agreed position on what the results should be, is fabrication. That is, it is serious research misconduct.
To bury the results of a test which demonstrates that without one key proxy, the entire shape of the reconstruction disappears, is serious research misconduct.
To write that the resultant reconstruction is robust to the removal of some or all dendroclimatic proxies when you know fine well that it isn’t, is serious research misconduct.
Why does the Mann Hockey Stick matter? Because it changed the entire climatic history of the last 1000 years and established (amongst other things) that the 20th Century warming was “unprecedented” and followed an apparent rise in carbon dioxide.
It told a story that industrialization using fossil fuels was to blame, that the future trajectory of climate was catastrophic. It was, in point of fact, a climate science Creation Myth: a benign temperature with very little variation, then a fall when Man ate from the Tree of Knowledge (the Industrial Revolution) followed by sudden climatic upheaval whose trajectory was towards disaster. The only way to avoid the coming apocalypse was by repentance through sackcloth and ashes (sustainable living through a low-carbon lifestyle).
The HS became a benchmark against which all subsequent studies were evaluated, because violent disagreement with the HS meant that there had to be something wrong with those studies and life was made torrid for those researchers, while studies that “agreed” with the HS were waved through by a peer review system that had become severely compromised.
And anyone who disagrees with the HS worldview is “denying the coming Apocalypse”. Denial, therefore, is the Unpardonable Sin.
thank you for this very succinct summation.
“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” – Thomas Jefferson.
Judith, your principles make you a very admirable person to follow in matters regarding climate science.
Gavin, your style is likened to that of a certain emperor and his clothes as written by Hans Christian Andersen. We can see through it all.
Judith is having fun and playing games with Gavin and invites more to join:
curryja says:
February 22, 2011 at 4:55 pm
For more fun and games with Gavin, see my latest post at Climate Etc “Hiding the Decline” http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/
Gotta love those bridges.
And you are certain that it is actually Dr. Curry who wrote the piece you quoted – from where exactly?
This thread calls for moderation.
yep, hit the delete when it all gets a bit difficult…
You mean like deleting emails…??
I know of no alarmist site that doesn’t embrace that thought. In fact, they’ve perfected the practice.
Into the borehole with you!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/22/speaking-of-gavin/
Your point being?
The “gotta love those bridges” was my addition; forgot to mention that comment is from WUWT.
Well that self-promotional advertisement on WUWT makes it pretty apparent that she actually has zero interest in forging connections. I tried for the longest time to support this effort of hers here but this latest post and the inevitable free-for-all it inspired certainly don’t back up that goal, and has erased any credibility she had in my mind. Bad move.
(she)..”has erased any credibility she had in my mind. Bad move.”
And why should she care what you think of her credibility?
She probably doesn’t care much. But I am a research scientist in atmospheric science, and I was following this effort in hopes of seeing progress made. I have seen mistakes made by climate scientists, and had hopes that a civil dialogue could 1) root out the causes of those mistakes 2) restore some confidence and 3) clarify the impact on climate science from these mistakes for much of the crowd here (very little impact). But the flavor of her presentation was provoking and naive. There was no pretense of civility, and the minute I read the post, knew that childishness would prevail from all quarters. Her post seems meant to inflame, not inform.
But yes, Orknegal, I’d guess that my opinion is not of much concern to her or most of the posters here.
H’mm
You call them ‘mistakes’. Others would use other language.
‘Noble cause corruption’ would be charitable. I’d leave off the ‘noble cause’ bit.
And much thought you might like to see a sort of ‘all pals together’ cover up and a bit of sweeping under the carpet in the interest of unity among ‘climate scientists’, that ain’t going to happen.
The hockey stick was such an iconic image, and its implications believed in by so many, that discovering that its antecedents are ‘dubious’ (hem hem) is a betrayal so deep that you can;t just wish it away.
Even less effective is suggesting that anyone who tries to discuss the obvious problems with it is a bad person and launching attakcs on their character. The characters at issue here are those of the Team who produced the pig in a poke. And they have been shown to be shallow grubby little individuals lacking in any integrity.
Close your eyes if you wish. But it’s not going away anytime soon.
Interesting reply.
Interesting and spot on. 2 for 1 you might say.
Thanks. I hope it explains a little of why this generates so much passion. I didn’t use the word ‘betrayal’ lightly.
Many feel that the Team betrayed science in their work. As well as trying to play them for fools.
And you can read in the ‘denizens’ thread here that many here are passionate about science and its applications, With thousands of man-years of collective experience.
They do not like seeing the perpetrators get away scot-free.
And like even less the lack of condemnation of their ‘mistakes’ by the wider climatology community. Failure to raise even a finger in admonishment has damaged your collective credibility greatly…beyond repair in many people’s eyes.
When your reputation and credibility is based on trust and that trust is shown to be misplaced, you have nowhere to go.
Well, if what you’re saying is that your emotional response to the errors of others is at issue, rather than the errors themselves, I’d have to agree.
So it’s all really all about “you” and what you consider are personal affronts?
OK then.
Bizarre readings, Michael and shewonk. You must have had to tie yourselves into the shape of a pretzel to see Latimer Alder’s post the way you did.
Jen, to add to what Latimer said. A number of posters have commented that if they had done the same thing in their field it would be a criminal offence. This is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact.
What would happen to a drug company that chopped off the data it didn’t like from its test studies? What would happen if you pulled the same sort of stunt on your financial report for the Tax Office? Could an aero engineer pull the same thing without facing major repercussions?
Do you really think that “It was a mistake” would cut it in court? If I jigged my Company Report in such a way, jail time would be involved.
So I go to jail for doing it but climate scientists should get a free pass? My moral compass isn’t that flexible.
This is where a lot of the anger is coming from. This shrugging off as a “mistake” things that are criminal acts in other areas.
You have not proven that what was done was illegal or fraudulent. Those are just allegations and opinions. There are many claims made by so-called skeptics but several inquiries now have not found any credible evidence of fraud or mishandling of evidence. You can dispute the inquiries but that just shows that the only thing that will satisfy you is if the inquiries confirm what you already believe. So much for skepticism…
shewonk, I’m realising that you are either cripplingly uninformed on this subject or you are in vacuous denial. I had argued that nobody interested enough to express an opinion on the “hide the decline” trick was ignorant of the details or their implications. Clearly you’re evidence that I was wrong. I’m left wondering, how it is you came to have such a deep interest in a thread on a subject you’re so blindly ignorant of?
Jen,
It is finally not about the ‘impact on climate science’: it’s very much about the impact on policymakers, who were fooled into believing that the MBH98 graph spread all over TAR was one contigious thing. Had there been one un-truncated graph showing the paleo reconstructions and another separate graph showing the instrumental record, with descriptions of both, the policymakers would have understood what they were looking at and this particular dispute would not be taking place.
I venture to say that, had MBH98 been expressed in this fashion it would have been a far more honest interpretation of the study and would have led to a far more sober response from policymakers around the globe.
So I love your passion for your chosen field and long may it continue – but I think you need to take on board the political implications of ‘hide the decline’. This is where JC was headed with this post, IMO.
I also share your desire for more civility in this discussion but I would like to suggest two things. Firstly Judith is by far the most polite science blogger I’ve encountered thus far. Secondly might I suggest that perhaps you should try and maintain your own civility a little better. I don’t mean this as some kind of admonishment at all…….it’s just a suggestion.
By the way I, for one, am very interested in your expert views on atmospheric science: I’m aways keen to learn from people who know far more than me on this fascinating subject.
“Secondly might I suggest that perhaps you should try and maintain your own civility a little better. I don’t mean this as some kind of admonishment at all…….it’s just a suggestion.”
Thank you very much for the suggestion!!!
Jen, I wholeheartedly concur.
I initially applauded Curry’s efforts (even though I wasn’t in full agreement):
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/judith-curry-on-climate-science-introspection-or-circling-the-wagons/
But have since concluded that the way she goes about it is counterproductive to her stated goals:
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/judith-curry-building-bridges-burning-bridges/
My view is that Judith has not been able to change her spots, despite her self-proclaimed change of views.
She first came to public notice for her ill-considered, inflammatory and very public comments about a fellow scientist (Bill Gray) .
6 years later she is still doing it. The only thing that has changed is that before her target was someone who doubted AGW, now it’s those who accept AGW.
Bart, i’m trying to catch up on responding to comments, you’ve mentioned the “building bridges” issues several times. You seem to think it is primary importance for bridges to be build to scientists involved in the CRU emails. As a climate scientist concerned about the integrity of the climate science, I find it of primary importance to build bridges with the broader community of scientists (including skeptics), the public, and policy makers. I stopped bothering with the RC crowd in summer 2007, when i received an unpleasant email from Mike Mann chastising me over congratulating Steve McIntyre on winning the 2008 Science Webblog Award. It was at that point that I stopped having anything to do with RC (other than my driveby comments about Montford’s book last summer). So I have built a bridge in the form of a platform for dialogue, they can meet me half way or not (pretty much not, the prefer the circling wagons strategy). But that is not the bridge that I am particularly interested in.
Judith,
For it to be a bridge to some outside world, the bridge should remain grounded at the original place as well.
Your strong and broadbrush accusations towards your professional peers, and the lack of criticism towards empty talking points and conspiratorial thinking
make you lose that grounding imho. You’re pushing herself away it seems. It’s your choice of course, but I can’t square it with your stated objective.
I think the core of your argument as I see it (the need for scientists to be less defensive, less circling of the wagons, more introspection, more communication and collaboration with “outsiders”, taking criticism seriously, etc) is important and valid. But the way you go about airing it, with broadbrush accusations towards mainstream science/ists (RC en the IPCC process are squarely in the mainstream), give the impression of a one way bridge, where as you walk along you burn the bridge behind you.
See as an example how different (e.g. constructive rather than destructive) John N-G voices his criticism. Granted, your criticisms may be stronger, but the way they come across, I tend to think that an increasing number of climate related scientists will be put off by it, at the same time as an increasing number of true skeptics, pseudo-skeptics and conspiracy theorists will cheer you on.
In effect, your accusatory framing comes across as very tribalist.
Bart, if this stuff hadn’t already been going on for 15 months, with absolutely no efforts by the people who wrote the emails to correct the record and work towards addressing the underlying problems, I would be more sympathetic to your approach. In the meantime, the public credibility of climate science remains in tatters. To infer that my failing to be kind to Gavin et al. and give them the benefit of every doubt is associated with my joining the tribe of Sky Dragons or whatever they should be called, is way off the mark.
Judith, you writing in response to my comment “If…, I would be more sympathetic to your approach.” sounds like you’ve given up on building bridges?
Bart – so Judith is not building bridges because she is not building the exact bridge you desire?
I find the appeals for civility and chastisement for the lack thereof to be especially amusing coming from the AGW crowd – the same group that has done nothing but belittle and denigrate their critics rather than engage in honest debate.
Take, for example, the multiple potshots taken at Steve McIntyre in this thread. You may agree or disagree with his conclusions – but he shows his datasets (and makes them available for independent verification – the novelty!), explains his methods and why he chose them, and then robustly defends his conclusions – all while allowing anyone to critique those results in open commentary. Don’t like his choice of analytic tool or conclusions drawn from his result – then prove him wrong. This is how science should be done – openly, transparently, and allowing for a robust defence of equally robust criticisms.
Jen, what you perceive as a loss of credibility could be enlightenment if you opened your mind. Elitist manipulation of the “truth” to avoid pesky facts that counter your logic is what?
Didn’t someone on realclimate recently say that the climate science can’t be discussed with the masses because they cannot understand? So are the masses ignorant or do the elitists just have difficultly explaining why divergence and uncertainty are unimportant?
When proper scientific and statistical methods have to be bent a bit to prove your point, how confident can you really be in your point?
Address the issue not the one pointing out that the issue exists!
Dallas, I appreciate your post.
Where we differ is the intensity of our distaste of the subject at hand (“hide the decline”) and our perception of its impact on climate science as a whole. We also differ in our perceptions of climate scientists in general, I would guess.
I don’t think it was a good idea to pose the graph as was done. But I also do not believe that implies a serious problem with climate science in general. To be honest, paleo climatology is not a crucial branch of the field in my mind.
Jen,
I agree with you that paleo climatology is not a crucial branch of the field: I’m far more interested to see the development of the science in terms of understanding ENSO, cloud, cosmic radiation, magnetic fields, UHI, albedo etc.
Politically however, and for the benefit of the credibility of climate science in the wider world, I’d love to see the hockey stick graph separated – as I mentioned earlier – and re-presented in AR5, so that our policymakers can understand what they are seeing without any ‘hidden declines’.
Jen, I suspect you will reconsider the relative importance of paleoreconstructions and hidden declines when Congress uses this issue as a pretext to slash climate science funding.
I also suspect that Judith fears some political persecution of the entire climate science field over this.
And for the trolls accusing Dr. Curry of ad hominems and mud-slinging and name-calling, nothing of the sort appeared in this blog post. Saying to a person, named or not, “What you did was dishonest” is strong language indeed. But it is well short of saying “You are a dishonest person.”
Oops, in using “Congress” I presumed you American, Jen. I don’t mean to be Amero-centric.
I have to agree with you Jen. There’s a whole schoolgirlish tittle-tattle pals emailing each other in the background thing going around the climate-blogosphere that is really a little bit nauseating.
I’m starting to question Judith’s position in this. Her criticisms are overwhelmingly oriented in one direction and with posts like the above she is undermining any claim to civility that she may have made elsewhere. She might just be overcompensating, but it’s a pretty big over compensation.
So do you think Gavin’s comments on this thread are civil?
Never said that. I said childishness was prevailing from all quarters.
I know that, Jen.
My question was directed to Mark.
Not particularly. I’m entirely with Jen on this one.
So you think both Dr Curry and Gavin are showing childishness?
Not being confrontational, just trying to understand what you and Jen seem to be agreeing on.
“And you are certain that it is actually Dr. Curry who wrote the piece you quoted – from where exactly?”
Well, it could have been Ann Coulter.
Dr Mann wrote in 2004 (from here):
But Dr Jones wrote in 1999 (from here):
That’s pretty damning. And they’re complaining that Judith is using the word “dishonest”?
Thank you Dr Curry.
As apparent by some postings on this blog many on the side of the AGW camp will see you as a traitor to the cause.
Thinking people will see you as a scientist who should by nature be skeptical, even of their own findings.
Two people posting one ianash and a Gavin seem to be so full of their own superior knowledge and brilliance, indicate by their reasoning both you and all others here are idiots.
I will posit a question, if the treemometers work perhaps the thermometers have been fiddled and the world is actually cooling.
Summer in Moscow was a tad hot and the warmists rejoiced, big news in all the papers. The last two weeks has seen Moscow enjoying -30C some 10 to 13 below normal with worse to come, Europe is having a bad run also, this also should be big news and nothing is said. People are dying from the cold.
Real scientists are trying to come to terms with our weather and the slumbering suns effect on it, and ,people such as this Gavin person are trying to perpetuate a myth.
The time is now for real people with integrity to come forward with commonsense and decency to give the world the real picture and not some fanciful nonsense of a carbon free nirvana.
One more thing that should be noted. Tree rings are “proxies” for spring/summer temperature (correct me if I’m wrong). Scientists should audit/improve instrumental records evaluation as soon as possible. There are quality surface stations! Even as few as 20 – 30 quality stations from all continents would be very valuable, to estimate some kind of global temperature index. By quality I mean as rural as possible (deltaUHI can be huge), min changes and moves, no adjustments, …
This should give us a reasonable estimate of some average variation, of not only air, but also sea, soil and other temperatures.
I think tree rings as proxies shouldn’t be completely discarded yet. They are still valuable information.
You know what makes me mad is that Gavin is actually getting paid on my tax dollars to run this ridiculous show. I want him fired for misuse of my tax dollars. That money he is getting paid could be put to better use. He is not a scientist. Anybody who has taken basic science can see the fallacy he is trying to perpetrate. He does not adhere to the scientific method. Nor do the rest of the authors(bullies) at RC.
This is the result of your bridge building, Dr Curry.
can’t take any credit for this one
A share of the responsibility then perhaps?
Perhaps ‘no longer complicit’ would be a better description, although ‘responsible’ is a good word for it as well.
There comes a point where you have to take a stand against dishonesty and propaganda aimed at keeping the science ‘on message’ – as either have no place in science. I totally support what Dr. Curry and Dr. Muller are saying.
You apologists are an embarassment.
Some responsibility is in order as you willingly installed yourself as ‘the’ mediator/interface between the ‘skeptics’ and science. I don’t doubt your initial good intentions, but your D&K-scenting inability to see the obvious incompatibilities speaks volumes.
Out of sheer civility toward your former peers you should really keep your hyenas on a shorter leash. You know they go nuts from the spiced up steaks you sneak them. But maybe that would defeat your goal?
I hope you at least enjoy the limelight while you feed them. You seem to have learned not to show signs of weakness or your throat….
Peace?
SRN
Out of sheer civility toward your former peers you should really keep your hyenas on a shorter leash. You know they go nuts from the spiced up steaks you sneak them.
JC is not the problem.
The following cover up is.
SRN, you are asking JC to be part of the coverup.
SRN, the “spiced up steaks” are the following (Never forget that SCIENCE = TRUTH)
Sometimes, when building a new bridge, one must clear away the dead wood first.
Just sayin’.
… and a wonderful result it is, too.
But I would attribute it rather to the gross dishonesty of the whole MBH98/RC undertaking than to any specific efforts by Dr. C; she is simply (and laudably) offering a venue where the matter can be discussed.
If those are the rules, I have a long list of soon-to-be-vacant positions at the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Commerce. I’d venture that I might be one of the minority commenting here who actually earns enough to pay Federal income tax, so I should be able to carry out a fairly significant Reduction in Force.
Remember, Taxation Without Representation Is Tyranny! Clean out your desk, Gary Locke!
really? I’d be fascinated to hear how you deduced that.
Judith,
Did you expect to get so much reaction to this post.?It’s incredible.
no i did not expect this much reaction. Gavin showing up here sort of insured the reaction.
So, you going over to WUWT and advertising that Gavin had commented had nothing to do with it???
Sheesh Judith.
My posts have been linked to in the past over at WUWT and have not received anything close to this level of hits. actually of the 6000 hits today, 2000 come from WUWT. so it is a factor, but apparently not the dominant one.
Your feigned surprise was a bit much when you went to WUWT to advertise Gavin’s comment here.
You advertised the comment yourself and this is reflected in the fact that there is now a full post at WUWT in relation your comment there and Gavin’s comments here.
To then claim Gavin is responsible for the attention when you yourself advertised it on sites known to be hostile to his position is astounding.
Try this, here is the chronology:
1) i do a post called hiding the decline
2) Gavin shows up to defend the team
3) i spot a thread at wuwt that mentions gavin http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/22/realclimates-over-the-top-response/
4) I post a comment that gavin is commenting on my thread
5) WUWT posts a new thread based on my comment at WUWT, plus Gavin’s comment on my thread
6) 2000 people from WUWT link to my post
my conclusion: if gavin had not posted the comment on my thread, i wouldn’t have made the comment at WUWT, and my hiding the decline probably wouldn’t have been mentioned at WUWT. feel free to draw your own conclusion from this.
I find it kind of interesting that you characterise my comments as ‘defending the team’. What I am ‘defending’ are the norms of scientific dialogue. The point is that scientific dialogue has evolved a number of standards to ensure that scientific disputes can get resolved as objectively as possible. One of those norms is that you assume good faith when discussing technical details. Another is that you stick to the science and avoid personalising issues. And yet another is that you stay away from attributing motive and malice to people who disagree with you.
While those norms certainly don’t exist in politics or more generally in the blogosphere, neither of those spheres are charged with actually finding out what is happening on the planet. For that, somewhat more self-discipline is required.
Your guns-a-blazing, caution-to-the-winds accusations of malfeasance and misconduct, like Steve McIntyre’s before you, are simply poison to grown-up discussions of real issues. You appear to be well aware of that, and yet continue to indulge in it – even to the point of touting for partisan comments. One can therefore safely conclude that you are not actually interested in grown-up discussions of real issues. So be it.
Steel eyed gunfighter
Whips it out and hits the mark.
Shoots himself in foot.
==============
Mirror, meet Gavin. Gavin, meet mirror.
Gavin, the norms you mention are predicated on the assumption that you are dealing with colleagues who may be honestly mistaken, but who are not deliberately seeking to mislead.
The day you engage in tricks to hide declines is the day you lose the right to have that assumption made about you.
It’s eight years since MM03 and fifteen months since Climategate revealed all that had preceded and followed it, Gavin. You’ve made no effort it seems to apologise for or face up to the bad science. At some point the norms of scientific dialogue have to be considered broken. And you are the ones that have done so.
You want apologies?
Is this what all of this is about?
In many cultures sincere apologies are often accepted and serve to prevent severer sanctions being taken.
Like other have posted, many practitioners in other fields would earn jail time if they presented the hockey stick graph as part of their professional responsibilities.
Apologies might be a good starting point.
Especially when so much is at stake.
And even if you could prove that it was an honest mistake, you’d be very lucky to keep your job.
But that’s back down here in the real world, where most of us live.
Not at all. Traditional Japanese culture has much more effective rituals, which Gavin seems at the moment to be performing.
Your guns-a-blazing, caution-to-the-winds accusations of malfeasance and misconduct, like Steve McIntyre’s before you, are simply poison to grown-up discussions of real issues.
You, Gavin, talking about grown-up discussion? Surely you jest?
Mark
Gavin defends and explicates the ‘norms of scientific dialogue’ daily on his well-lubricated blog, and does it on my dime, too. Who could ask for anything more?
=================
Kim, as always, you’re a breath of fresh air :-)
There is no mention of malfeasance or misconduct in Judith’s post. She mentions dishonesty, but that seems to be a reasonable analysis given significant prima facie evidence of deliberately shaping the appearance of the science to support a pre-defined conclusion in support of a “message”, in support of an “agenda”.
This is what one would call pseudo-scientific practice. If, in your circles, this is what passes as normal scientific practice then your circle certainly practices pseudo-science. Pseudo-science is universally recognised to be dishonest and to be rejected.
Let’s be clear here, “hiding the decline” – cutting/splicing/smoothing with other data series, or carefully truncating data, at a point where the data diverges from the “tidy message” and becomes inconvenient – is not considered by many (should perhaps be any) of us to be a legitimate scientific practice.
This is an ideal opportunity to acknowledge that this is unacceptable and illegitimate. All the bluster aside, the question is whether you are determined to reject or embrace pseudo-scientific practices, including but not limited to the act of “hiding the decline”.
Further, I did not mention any individual as being dishonest, although Gavin seems prepared to throw Briffa under the bus.
Really? I’m the one casting aspersions? Ha.
“Not only is this misleading, but it is dishonest”
You may not have called an individual dishonest, but you did call the committed act dishonest. Not sure if that’s a relevant difference.
Regarding the norms of scientific dialogue, as Gavin brings up, this gem from John N-G seems very relevant here:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/3344965660/scientist-a-may-be-having-lunch-with-scientist-b
The graph was dishonest. If you like, you can infer backwards from that what actions led to the graph and who did them. I did not speculate on that, nor will I, other than to wonder about the role of the whole IPCC process in this.
Judith,
It struck me from reading the climategate emails that a few of the team wanted to throw Briffa under that bus.
There is a great sense that he was far from comfortable with the conclusions the team wanted to draw from his dendrochronologies.
Perhaps you should offer him a guest post!
Ok, so all scientists who are implicated in (does that mean whose name appears in?) the CRU emails, the whole RC team, those who agree with the RC scientists, and the IPCC process (all who contributed? Or just those who contributed to this graph? and/or to other -gates, whether real or imaginary?) are all to be excluded from the bridge building effort?
Definitely makes it easier, as the bridge doesn’t need to carry much so much weight anymore.
I will happily cast aspersions, Gavin. The Hoockey Team chose to act a) either in the interests of forwarding the IPCC’s political agenda, rather than science, or b) in the interrests of furthering their own agendas and careers rather than science, or c) some combination of the two.
What they did not do was act as scientists are expected to act by the greater community in which they sit. They violated the norms of scientific behaviour and have tarnished by proxy the reputations of thousands of scientists working to increase our understanding of the climate and humanity’s effects upon it.
Shame on them. You should not be defending them.
Judith, you need to start a new thread to continue this discussion. Your database is getting tired… I imagine Gavin is as well.
Tom I’ll get a new thread up by this eve.
But, Bart, the committed act IS dishonest. Judith called a turd a turd. Gavin and Michael could also call the same turd a turd.
They really should. It’s a turd, Bart, for goodness sake.
Gavin,
Perhaps this has been a Mark Twain moment for you:
“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
Gavin, sorry to disappoint, but i have never made a public accusation of malfeasance or misconduct with regards to this entire affair, and have publicly stated this in a number of places. This is bad science, with misleading information, and when combined with background from the emails, has lead many to conclude that the hide the decline issue is characterized also by dishonesty. Your defense of this serves to reinforce Richard Mullers conclusion, which i concur with.
I don’t care what you say to your friends or colleagues. I care about what shows up in the IPCC assessment reports. Overconfident conclusions and misleading graphics concern me greatly, and this concern is shared by the public and policy makers.
I’m discussing really big issues on this blog, with grownups (well, most of them are grownups). These may not be issues that you want to discuss, and the discussions may not be going in the direction that you would like to see them go. You can pretend that these discussions aren’t occurring, or you condemn them, or you can participate in them. Your choice.
I hereby nominate Gavin’s above post as the most humorous post in the thread.
Is there a second?
Sorry, to be clear, I meant the post of:
Gavin | February 23, 2011 at 10:11 am
I find it kind of interesting that you characterise my comments as ‘defending the team’. What I am ‘defending’ are the norms of scientific dialogue.
…
“my conclusion: if gavin had not posted the comment on my thread, i wouldn’t have made the comment at WUWT, and my hiding the decline probably wouldn’t have been mentioned at WUWT. feel free to draw your own conclusion from this.”
Ah! Gavin is responsible for the attention because if he hadn’t posted you wouldn’t drawn that attention yourself by advertising it somewhere you knew would draw negative and hostile reaction.
I certainly will draw conclusions from that as will others.
go for it.
Don’t be so cynical.
I’m sure Judith expected a wave of good faith inquisitive questioning, and nothing like a pile-on of insinuation, accusation and bad faith.
Nope. She’s met the RC team and their hangers-on and acolytes so knew exactly what to expect.
Boom TISH!
Exactly right, though. And did ianash or dhogaza disappoint? Not one iota.
Seems to me that your focus on this minor issue – if it is indeed an issue of any relevance at all , which is moot – merely highlights your lack of anything substantial to say about the main topic of this thread.
I was half expecting that you would have a great explanation of why all us sceptics were mistaken, that the hockey stick is great , that mcintyre’s analysis is wrong ….or any really good on-topic argument.
Instead you worry about who said what to whom on a blog. Like a schoolgirl worrying about who she’s best friends with.
As if ClimateEtc readers don’t read WUWT or Bishop Hill. And as if us sceptics only read what our blogistas tell us. Without their guidance we would be like lost lambs bleating in the wilderness.
Yeah right. That almost exactly characterises the nature of the sceptic…conformers par excellence, followers not leaders, authority-figure driven, shy, meek and retiring. Afraid to raise our voices without being asked. /sarc
Just compare the number of postings on this thread to the one at WUWT. They ought to be coming here to advertise.
Gavin did himself absolutely no favours by storming in here, all guns blazing, and starting to hurl around all manner of specious allegations.
I reckon his response was waaaay over the top for what is purportedly a non-issue.
“Storming in”
How dare he. This is a ‘true believers’ blog!!
LOL!!
…followed by the posse
Michael, I’m unsure what you think the problem is, with lots of people reading Gavin’s defence of the “tricks” to “hide the decline”. We know Gavin likes to speak to as large an audience as possible, so where’s the beef? Is it the subject matter that’s uncomfortable to you, or is it something else?
..sorry?
You write: “It is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data in figures shown IPCC AR3 and AR4, and the 1999 WMO document. Not only is this misleading, but it is dishonest (I agree with Muller on this one). The authors defend themselves by stating that there has been no attempt to hide the divergence problem in the literature, and that the relevant paper was referenced. I infer then that there is something in the IPCC process or the authors’ interpretation of the IPCC process (i.e. don’t dilute the message) that corrupted the scientists into deleting the adverse data in these diagrams.”
..just to follow up with this: “no i did not expect this much reaction”.
Makes no sense. No logic. I see two possiblitites: you are either too naive. Or you are not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
No, i REALLY did not expect this much reaction. So far since midnight eastern time, this post has almost 6,000 hits. This is huge by the standards of my blog.
Universal Law of Blogs #1;
It’s oh-so-easy to start a flame war.
Well said, Michael. You’ll always get more hits by saying something controversial and inflammatory than you will by saying something intelligent.
Fox News is the most popular cable news network. Controversy sells.
Why would you expect such a reaction Judith? The subject has been done over and over on many blogs with nowhere near the same reaction.
The difference here is that THIS TIME IT’S BEEN DONE BY SOMEBODY WITH UNIVERSAL CREDIBILITY.
And that scared the $hit out of the team, so their number one spokesman came over to discredit you.
But as usual, the tactic backfired.
Sheesh, even a monkey gets whipped but once.
Oh maybe, people can finally get sick of the some old bullsh!t being trotted out.
Taking a broad step back, Michael, I’d say that this almost certainly depends on you and Gavin, and what you do next.
Beddington set down a challenge, to reject pseudo-science universally. All Judith’s done is acquiesce in his request. If you have an issue with climate scientists standing up and challenging the pseudo-legitimacy of pseudo-science, take it up with Sir John.
” UNIVERSAL CREDIBILITY.”
[inigomontoya.jpg]
You keep using that word.
Snorted coffee up my nose at that one…
nose enema. nice
JC: how do you find out the number of hits of a post?
I did not expect this much reaction because I thought the facts were already known. To anyone who has been paying attention, this is old news. Perhaps it was Gavin coming in and blowing his lid that got people interested. It was an amusing spectacle.
As one who did come over from WUWT, I am always interested to see what a conversation with Gavin is like when he isn’t moderating. It is so much more informative when you can actually see both sides of the argument.
I try to be open-minded enough to be interested in what he has to say, but I can’t stomach too much exposure to the tactics at RC.
I think you underestimate your own influence Judith. Gavin’s response certainly mad me prick up my ears but I’ve been waiting for you to address this most important aspect of the debate, in anticipation of the shockwaves it would engender.
Also, I’m hoping that perhaps a few of your colleagues, who thus far have perhaps been a little intimidated to say anything, might feel a little more inclined to make their position public.
As an anonymous poster myself, I’m looking forward to the day when I can risk making members of my own profession aware of my less than enthusiastic embrace of the hockey stick.
Saad,
I had not read your post when I wrote mine above. I agree with you completely. Gavin seems to be of the mindset of the Climate Rapid Response Team. A rapid response is a good idea when the facts are on your side, but the facts are against you they only hurt themselves by making a weak defense of the indefensible.
I have a scientific background, but only started to learn about the anthropogenic global warming issue in 2006. Until then I had no opinions on the issue one way or the other. I was a blank sheet. One of my first sources was the IPCC 2001 WG1 report, for which I paid about 30 pounds for a used copy via Amazon. I was impressed by the very first diagram in the book, Figure 1. It shows (or rather claims to show) ‘Variations of the Earth’s surface temperature for (a) the past 140 years and (b) the past 1000 years.’ Figure 1(b) is of course the famous ‘Hockey Stick’ diagram. I later learnt that this diagram is partly the result of, to be polite, ‘cherrypicking’ (and partly also of a regrettable, but perhaps forgivable, misuse of statistical techniques on the part of the original authors). Some may call it ‘dishonesty’ or ‘fraud’. Those terms implies a conscious intention to deceive. Whichever term one prefers, the net result is that the prominently displayed diagram was not what it claimed to be. It was misleading. I was misled. I hadn’t expected to be fed pseudo-science by the ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’. The aftertaste is not good.
Until the IPCC comes up with a withdrawal or an apology, I have no alternative but to conclude that any other material given prominence by that organisation is possibly, like Figure 1(b) of the 2001 WGI report, pseudo-scientific nonsense and should therefore be disregarded unless and until independently confirmed by non-IPCC scientists.
If you came into the game 10 years earlier and bought yourself a copy of the SAR 1995, you would have learned how the team arrived at the claim of “A Discernable Human Influence on Climate”
Maybe if Judith is into mashochism, she could do a post on that and poke a raging bull with hot iron
Perhaps it’s time for another listen to The Hockey Stick Blues…
Oops, linky didn’t work, here’s The Hockey Stick Blues
http://www.gather.com/viewVideo.action?id=11821949021918437
“I’m more interested in the handle than the blade of the hockey stick.”
There is no handle.
The longest single-site actual thermometer records do not show only blade, carrying back 350 years.
I plotted the ones with name recognition here, in quick glance postcard format: http://i49.tinypic.com/rc93fa.jpg
I hope Dr. Curry considers the profound implication of these records on this debate.
thanks for sending this.
It’s interesting the things that you remember.
One of the things that I most strongly remember from my A-level Physics classes is my entertaining teacher banging on, and on [and on] about the importance of error bars.
Now one of the nice things about the famous “hockey stick” graph were the error bars, which are, understandably, incredibly wide for the pre-thermometer period. All of the variability on decadal and other timescales is hidden within those error bars. The graph doesn’t say that the variability doesn’t exist, just that the proxy data isn’t of sufficient accuracy to determine what it is.
It’s something of a false accusation that is being made that a “handle” of no variability is being presented. You’re ignoring the huge error bars.
You almost get used to what gets ignored around here.
Too busy patting each other on the back.
NikFromNYC,
The “global” warming is in the Arctic http://justdata.wordpress.com/arctic-trends/ The temperature increases there are then smeared onto nearby (1200km) regions with no climate recording stations.
The manipulation of graphs to suit a particular political position is clearly considered perfectly normal by some climate scientists. In the recent BBC “Horizon” tv programme, Jones explained quite matter-of-factly to Sir Paul Nurse how he changed the graph for the WMO99 report to suit the advocacy needs of the WMO.
From the transcript:
Jones:
The fact that this he considered this to be OK is deeply worrying. And it’s no defence to say that the divergence problem is covered in the technical literature.
We have come to expect endemic, unrepentant dishonesty from the IPCC, the Team and their various acolytes. They have their agenda.
Far more disturbing though, is the deafeningly silent majority of climate scientists. If only more would just come out and say that
– hiding the decline
– asking people to delete emails, deleting data
– working to manipulate the peer-review process
– withholding data from people suspected of not agreeing with you
– etc etc etc
are just plain wrong, and that steps will be taken to prevent them from happening again, the rehabilitation of climatology can commence. The longer the silence persists, the deeper the grave they dig for themselves.
Even realclimate has criticised suggestions of deleting emails and data. Many scientists have openly agreed that data and methods should be more acceptable. Noone agrees that manipulation of peer review is good – the climategate emails were as much about preventing manipulation of the peer review process; a sceptic journal editor has been criticised for saying that sometimes they publish papers that agree with the editor’s political views.
So I suspect that you havent been listening to the “majority” of climate scientists.
The reason for “hide the decline” has been given, so people can make up their minds; there remains a disagreement about motives which, it appears, will never be resolved.
How would one define “steps” to prevent such a thing happening again. I expect many uninvolved climate scientists have heard loud and clear that some people do not like “hide the decline”, which will result in an extra level of care in presenting results.
Presenting results is not a problem. They can present ’em any which way they like, wrapped in roses if they wish.
The key is to make ALL data and ALL algorythms plainly and simply available.
If the ‘team’ thought they had to make all their workings available, they would not have been tempted to “please’ their IPCC/WMO/UNEP masters.
Most crooks do what they do coz they think they’ll get away with it.
the climategate emails were as much about preventing manipulation of the peer review process..
Oh come on! It was about getting it to stick to the party line.
So I suspect that you havent been listening to the “majority” of climate scientists.
Tricky when they keep silent.
And How would one define “steps” to prevent such a thing happening again ?
How about sacking or otherwise disciplining those responsible ?
That’s not a step for preventing things happening. It’s a sanction. First you have to define what you conclude to be dodgy behaviour. Is it fair to, say, splice the ARGO data to the XBT data, or to splice records from multiple satellites together? If one does that, how transparent must one be? Different colours in graphs? Different graphs? Bold capitals in the captions?
As a rational environmentalist I have to say that this single issue has damaged the environmental agenda more than anything. It will set back the cause of looking after the environment more than any other event in the history of the environmental movement.
I was not really interested in climate as an issue before this broke as I was too busy earning a living. I like to look at both sides of a debate before comint to a decision. I read ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’ by AW Montford. I was concerned by its content, particularly by the manipulation of publication dates of scientific papers in order to marshall an argument for the IPCC reports ( I refer those interested to montford’s site and read the link to ‘Casper and the Jesus paper’.)
I then went to the Real climate website and asked in a perfectly civil manner if anybody had done a crique of the arguments put forward in Montfords book. Remember, this is the site created by Mann et al.
I was met with abuse and condescention.
All I asked was if somebody could point me to a critique of the book ! They said why should we read this book it has not been authored by anybody in the climate science arena. (It cost £6.50 at the time)
I tried to convince them that this book was going to ‘bite them in the ass’ if they didn’t read it.
I remember saying the Real Climate site felt like a junior common room.
They said I should read about atmospheric physics and don’t let the door hit my ass on the way out.
This last, was alarming. I thought if they can do this to a ‘friend’ , one who was looking for guidance to support their position, I’d hate to be on the other side.
I would encourage more scientists to actually take the time to read Montfords book. It not only points out flaws in the Real Climate version of the science, but also shows the depth to which this science has been manipulated towards a particular agenda.
This alone would cause people to take a second look at ‘RealClimate Science’ and see it for what it is.
When climategate came along…well…
The only looser here can be bad science, but I fear for the loss of funding for real environmental issues, and the loss of the general publics support.
If AGW is proved to be merely a political movement, it may well have killed millions. The production of biofuels alone, has forced millions into poverty.
The destruction of rainforests for palm oil. The diversion of resources both financial and scientific to a mirage. I could go on..
Well done Judith. for taking a stand.
Great story, soreron, very well told. You’re not the only one since Climategate. But the really fateful decision was after McIntyre and McKitrick first published in 2003. At that point climate science should have repudiated hide the decline and all that went with it. Instead, without so much as a thought for the implications for the environmental movement and for the integrity science they decided to use their positions over the levers of power, from the IPCC down, to tough it out. They never dreamed that one of their own would rebel – Professor Muller has to be right that it was an inside job – in such a devastating way in the leak of 17th November 2009.
There are many things here for historians to ponder. But your testimony has been a great help in this very messy thread. Thanks!
How’s that Wegman GMU inquiry coming along? Has he been allowed to start supervising again? Historians will certainly be scratching their chins at the interminable length of time it’s taken.
I’ve spent the last two hours cleaning up the thread, I’ve trashed 58 comments. Most of them were in threads initiated by Ianash. I will be vigilant today in keeping the thread free of posts that violate blog rules. At this point I am reluctant to ban anyone from Climate Etc., and in particular I’m sure Ianash would regard being banned here as a badge of honor. But my patience is wearing thin, and I don’t have time to routinely do the level of moderating I have had to do this morning. Please keep your comments within the bounds of blog rules.
Judith,
Any discussion of the hockey stick always seems to provoke the most visceral responses. I can only imagine the amount of time it takes to run blog like this but can I just say that the massive number of responses – even those that were inappropriate – is indicative of the weight your views now carry in this debate.
IMO you are in a unique position, having had the courage and integrity to publicly admit a change of viewpoint, even in the face of powerful opposition from the new ‘self-appointed ‘gatekeepers’. It’s no wonder that the “team” are keen to vilify you as quickly as possible – you are an “insider” and they have an enormous amount to lose.
All I can say is please keep going with this. You are having an enormous impact and, frankly, the relative lack of trolls here given the low levels of moderation is ample testament to your positive effect on the quality of this vital debate.
Please keep going!
Judith Curry, have you considered getting help with moderation? I would think having even just one other person to look for the more egregious posts might help you manage your blog and time better.
well the dynamic is sufficiently complicated that it is a judgment call. if traffic were to stay this high, i would definitely need help.
Yes ma’am. For my part I apologize.
I just finished doing a PC analysis on your web site traffic. Unfortunately the data suggests that this is an unprecedented increase in traffic and my models show that this will very likely result in CSMD (catastrophic server melt down).
After using a series of different computer models the cause has been identified as the GSE (Gavin Schmidt Effect). Further my models show that is the GSE continues unabated the entire Internet will become extinct.
Sorry.
Josh has a new cartoon at Tallblokes, on the Roman Warm Period
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/lisbon-reflections-a-tale-of-tribes/
“This last, was alarming. I thought if they can do this to a ‘friend’ , one who was looking for guidance to support their position, I’d hate to be on the other side.”
– Are you reading this Gavin?… This is RC’s biggest problem, when people want to engage with you, your reaction is one of viciousness and open hostility – way to go genius! I’ve read the way Mann addresses people – it’s definitely an ego issue with him, but why have the rest of the gang ended up copying his bad behaviour?
He has turned thousands of us off from posting anything at RC, or even reading anything there.
It’s the crushing weight of being the smartest guy in the room.
You are a brave woman Judith, keep up the good work its the science that matters and the methods you described by Mann & co are not science, I say that as someone who believes that man has been warming the planet up a tad, how much who knows
btw any idea as to when the temperature data will be out at your new Berkeley group, Im impressed that you have included statisticians to help with what is mainly a statistical exercise – thats an improvement on whats gone before at least!
“but why have the rest of the gang ended up copying his bad behaviour?”
Simple – because this is how religious fanatics act when a heretic (in their eyes) challenges the Orthodoxy that just happens to give them a steady paycheck.
They would have been right at home in the 16th century.
Dr. Curry,
It is striking to me that it is a woman who is driving the terms of this situation so well and with so few words to a likely resolution.
I am reminded of Lysistrata.
Joan of Arc? Lysistrata? One led a war while the other tried to stop one. Make your minds up.
Late to the party, but as a non-climate scientist, I argue that the hockey stick is not just bad science (answered in detail by the various statisticians who have analysed this), but scientific misconduct.
Leaving aside all questions of proxies and thermometers, it boils down to this:
I am taking measurements of one entity to show that something has happened during a set timespan which hasn’t happened before.
The results are unclear, no matter what stats I employ, e.g. I have no evidence that what I postulated has actually happened.
So I take measurements of another entity, which has nothing to do with the first one, and add them on/splice them in.
Lo and behold – result!!!
I.a.w., if I count the number of snails in one square metre of grassland to show they have increased over time due to X, but the counts show no increase, it is ok for me to add the numbers of ants to the count, because they’re both invertebrates.
That would be ok, according to the hockey stick defenders, right?
I think I’d have been thrown out in the first year if I had come up with such a proposal.
Which hockey stick?
as a non-climate scientist, I argue that the hockey stick is not just bad science
The eleventy-millionth recitation of the pseudoskeptic credo: “I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I’ve already made my mind up about it…”
…as a non-climate scientist, I argue that the hockey stick is not just bad science (answered in detail by the various statisticians who have analysed this), but scientific misconduct.
PDA The eleventy-millionth recitation of the pseudoskeptic credo: “I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I’ve already made my mind up about it…”
The eleventy-millionth recitation of the pseudoscientist credo : you need to be a climate scientist to identify scientific misconduct.
‘Hide the Decline’ has always been a political issue…
Who were they ‘hiding the decline’ from?
That is the question that should be asked and why do they feel the need to hide the decline..
The answer is of course the policy makers…
Even policy makers can understand if the proxies for temperature don’t match thermometers, for some unkonwn reason…. HOW THE HELL can they be used to reconstruct past temperature reliably.
Thus, ‘unprecedented’ global warming, the claim that reconstruction show this, and it must (argument from ignorance) be due to humans.. GOes completely out of the window..
Politicians, CAN understand this…
Hence the defence and distraction to the bitter end
You put into words exactly what I was thinking about saying.
The biggest problem with the “hide the decline” is that it proves that there was bias in the study towards proving anthropogenic global warming. Just that fact should be enough to discredit the study.
Judith,
Thank you for this post and the comments of many who feel that this is a topic worthy of debate.
For my involvement in the process I am not a scientist or climate scientist so will not be surprised by any response by some here, more used to a single sided argument, to shut up and but out. My involvement is by being a parent and grand parent of children who are being presented this information without caveat. Those who have been and are directly involved in the presentation of this data “the scientists” not only have a duty to express their own opinion of the relevance and accuracy of the end presentation but have to realise that history will link them directly long after the political will has moved on.
My children and grand children have no knowledge of your uncertainties, the graphical representation is your legacy, if it is not all that it is supposed to be then it is your responsibility to correct that, not the policy makers. Those of more mature years will understand this all too well which I would hope will spur some comment from the scientists that were around before the divergence occurred.
Apart from the fact the whole divergence problem was actually out in the open and the fact that there are multiple lines of evidence to support AGW, this `hide the decline´ meme offers the best excuse to dismiss climate science and thus avoid taking action. It is classic delaying tactics.
It goes like this- hiding the decline was dishonest, it was intended to decieve policy makers and the public into thinking that temperatures are rising. If climate scientists are dishonest, then climate science is dishonest. Therefore temperatures are not rising and no action is required.
No action of course meaning; allowing GHG emissions to rise.
The word ‘unprecedented’ in unprecedented warming would not exist if not for the infamous hockey stick and hide the decline.
Anthropogenic would not exist if not for the other infamous ‘a discernable human influence on climate’
These are not excuses to dismiss climate science, these are the VERY REASONS to dismiss climate science.
p.s You have multiple lines of empirical evidence to support AGW? You’re the first.
And you, of course, are the only person around here who is capable of intelligent judgement.
Yes, this pretty much sums up the damage that the climategate emails and hide the decline has done, to those of us who are concerned about AGW
Whatever the truth and scale of the A in AGW, this statement alone should be reason enough to moderate the tone of those objecting to Dr Curry’s original post. There could be real tragedy for humanity here – corrupt science driving out what should be genuine concern. Because driving it out it is. I’d love to see ‘the convinced’ follow this through properly. But the example set from the centre is very bad.
Dr Curry’s original post is part of the problem, not the solution.
and the solution would be . . . ?
Certainly nothing you are doing.
How about a post discussing all the other reconstructions in order to give the best current understanding of how the Medieval Warm Period’s temperatures relate to current temperatures.
We could start with Craig Loehle’s paper published in E&E.
Yes, silencing the opposition is the first instinct of a particular political orientation. You must therefore attack the legitimacy of the topic, the quality of comments, the usefulness of the exercise, the characters and qualifications of all who annoy you, etc. Standard fare on most college campuses. Weak gruel here where evidence-based arguments are grist for the mill.
If you keep tearing the scab off a wound you can’t expect it to heal and to claim that is your goal is either self-deceived or disingenuous. If you care about AGW, it would seem that one would try to move the science forward rather than dwell on old controversies, bringing them up and inviting more of the same ol same ol.
Without dwelling on “old controversies” there would be no way to guarantee such things do not continue unabated. This is not a one-time issue, it is part and parcel to methods employed by the likes of Mann and, apparently, Schmidt. THEY are the problem with climate science. Anybody that cares about AGW should shun them for defending such ridiculous actions.
Mark
It is not going to heal until the issue is confronted, understood, and there are assurances that this is not going to happen again, and the field of paleoclimatology is set on a more scientifically defensible path.
It’s been confronted endlessly on many blogs and in organizations and at the political level. There have been enquiries into the allegations, which have cleared those accused of wrongdoing. That people keep bringing it up suggests that they do so for reasons other than science.
shewonk,
Clearly, despite the endless ‘confrontation’, the issue has not been resolved, as this thread amply demonstrates. IMO, this is primarily because the debate has thus far only really happened in the blogosphere and, even then, only here and now, without totalitarian moderation.
It’s entirely right and proper that the most crucial graph presented to guide policy makers in TAR, the document that has already cost us all so much money, should be debated thoroughly. The shame is that so little of this has taken place in the public arena.
I love your passion on this subject but, surely, you would agree with me that a truly mainstream public forum would be the best place for us to see our various positions played out. That’s how democracy is supposed to work.
I know that my own frustrations on this subject are largely concerned with the lack of genuine debate in the full glare of the public arena.
To me, if Judith’s re-awakening of the hockey stick issue causes it to become a truly mainstream public debate, where both you and I can have our say without anyone telling us that “the debate is over’ or “the science is in”, this can only be a good thing.
Ignorance, ultimately, is everyones enemy and I guarantee you most people out there don’t even know, to this day, that the hockey stick is controversial!
TAR, the document that has already cost us all so much money
Jesus wept. Really, Saaad? Really? I’m continually stunned that people still haul out the tired old “OMG TEH MUNNIE$” line. It’s like a form of Tourette’s: you’ve got to know how ridiculous you sound, but it’s an irresistible compulsion.
You and I both know how well and truly cornholed the average Western taxpayer was by the financial shenanigans of the past decade, at a cost several orders of magnitude largerthan every penny spent by every government on every study that was referenced in the Third Assessment Report. This is beyond motes and beams. We’re well into quarks-and-redwoods territory here.
completely agreed.
So, could we disband IPCC and put an UN-derived panel addressing speculation and bank practices, just redirecting funding? I’d like something which would garantee that parasites will not use my money to get richer while at the same time risking it dissapear in a bubble that will have to be absorbed by taxes and below-inflation interest rates just to avoid total monetary crash.
In the meantime, I will enjoy the break about some additional taxes that, while not as bad (although they are happily used by the aforementioned parasites), reminds me that in addition to live in a casino world, I may soon live in a green theocracy where just saying “internal combustion engine” is a mortal sin, surrounded by new-age bio-consumer sheeps.
PDA,
I would love to discuss in detail the reasoning behind my comment but this thread is probably not the place to do it.
Clearly you feel very strongly about my assertion regarding the political and economic consequences of the hockey stick graph. I would relish the opportunity to debate the issue with you in more depth.
Let’s hope we get the opportunity to expand this exchange on a more suitable thread.
And O.J. was found not guilty
How many “trials” for the climate scientists so far? Six?
Anything sunk in yet?
Well, all I can say is that if I ever stand accused of wrongdoing, that’s exactly the kind of trial I’d want.
None. A trial requires a procecutor, defense attorney, and witnesses – from both sides. None of those ever showed up.
Sorry gents, it escaped your notice that the trial metaphor was set up by your buddy in the comment above mine.
You were the one who asked “How many?”
Oh look, another clearing of wrongdoing. What timing.
Office of Inspector General: Response to Sen. James Inhofe’s Request to OIG to Examine Issues Related to Internet Posting of Email Exchanges Taken from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, UK
http://www.oig.doc.gov/oig/reports/2011/001688.html
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110224_climate.html
IIRC, they’re not finished yet.
And the attempt to block Cuccinelli failed.
It ain’t over till the faat lady sings. And the orchestra is still tuning up.
And the only way that this will happen is if the silent majority of climate scientists rise up and publicly insist on it. A revolution. I believe that we are only talking about a small number of people that are perverting the science, albeit some very influential ones. It’s time they were discarded so that fresh minds can take over.
”
If you keep tearing the scab off a wound you can’t expect it to heal and to claim that is your goal is either self-deceived or disingenuous.
”
Impossible to be redeemed if you don’t admit your sins. Why do you think the first step to recovery is admitting you’re an alcoholic, addict,…?
Personally, I liked it when someone found I was wrong – I had a chance to learn something and improve. I’d thank the person for finding it. Acknowledge the problem, thank the persons who brought it to your attention, learn, move on.
IMHO, these guys would get fired a lot of places in industry – not for the graph, but for their subsequent responses.
The so-called “sins” have been investigated and those accused have been found not guilty. That is apparently not good enough for the kangaroo court of the blogosphere and those with a political or economic stake against the findings of climate science.
To compare science to industry is to compare apples to oranges.
‘To compare science to industry is to compare apples to oranges’
Looks like you’re right. In industry, from my experience, people are expected to uphold high standards of integrity and honesty in their work. Both because of their own personal self-regard and because there are strong sanctions for not doing so.
In climatology, none of the above seem to apply. Which makes me wonder why you have so much faith in the practitioners there.
In industry, from my experience, people are expected to uphold high standards of integrity and honesty in their work. Both because of their own personal self-regard and because there are strong sanctions for not doing so.
In climatology, none of the above seem to apply. Which makes me wonder why you have so much faith in the practitioners there.
Oh, please — I keep snorting coffee up my nose at the comedy, especially because I’ve just read over the testimony of Madoff and the Enron folks…
Goodness. Subtlety in analysis is not a strong suit, eh?
You’ll observe that I noted that there were strong sanctions for those who crossed the line.
Your comments about Enron and Madoff exactly make my point. The chief perps went to jail.
Now do you get it?
First, as I said, it’s wrong to compare apples and oranges. Talk to me about science, not business.
Second, your personal experience of ethics in business is just one data point. Show me the bigger picture and then your opinion is put into a meaningful context. Then, it might have some weight beyond mere opinion.
I can support Latimers position on this.
Had i ‘hid the decline’ in my submission data, i too would be in prison now.
Industry standards are exceptionally high- climate science could learn from industry.
Thanks
I think I’d prefer not to talk to you at all don’tcher know. I try to make it a rule only to engage with executive level trolls, not their junior members of staff.
No offence meant, I’m sure.
Let me draw a parallel for you.
Engineering is the use of science to build works. If I were to exaggerate or ‘hide’ some inconvenient fact, and if it had a detrimental effect on the work that I was to design and build, I would be subject to legal sanction.
In this case replace Engineer with Researcher and work with policy. Both have an impact on society in terms of costs and both should be held to a certain level of professional honesty or see legal consequences.
To suggest that scientists should be held to a lesser degree of honesty, given their position (and compensation) in society is absurd.
No, Shewonk, ethics is ethics. Cost/benefit analysis matters in both business and public policy. Risk assessment works the same way in both the public and private sector. Once again, it is not my job or the job of anyone else who posts here to alleviate your ignorance. That is something you must do yourself. Stop demanding information and get off your lazy backside and look for it.
Yup, Shewonk, there are occasional fraudsters in the private sector and there are rules and regulations galore to keep them at bay. Inferring that the private sector is corrupt throughout because of a couple of scandals betrays an amazing lack of knowledge of the real world. How sophomoric can you get?
This is, perhaps, the most ignorant assertion that will made in this thread. If you are to be a competent troll, you can’t simply lie. Chanting slogans while waving a sign simply will not do. You must instead obfuscate. You must somehow blend black and white to create a confusing continuum of shades of gray.
No,
By your analogy the wound AGW calamatism has caused is festering and is rapidly approaching septiciemia. The only hope is a debridement and flushing out the infected would with strong antiseptic floowed by antibiotics.
Think of it as draining an infection leaving the scab in place will do nothing but allow the infection to get worse and eventually kill the body. What Dr. Curry is doing is helping clean the wound and that while painful is the only way to save the body.
Ms. Wonk, if a limb has uncontrollable gangerene, the best option is to cut it off cleanly. You keep addling Dr. Curry with this bridge building meme. Have you not ever thought that the bridge is rotten, so Dr. Curry first has to destroy it completely so as the new bridge will not crumble on the old rotten footings?
Yes, Shewonk, best to ignore the embarrassing bits that annoy honest people. Let’s all forget that bit of Hockey Team nastiness. Let’s somehow in some magical and undefined way “move the science forward”. Deep, really deep thoughts there.
Dr Curry,
Wouldn’t it suggest that if the “hockey stick”-type of view over the temperatures for the 2000 years is shown to be invalid, and we go back to the knowledge that used to be textbook stuff, that the current development might be resulting from mostly natural phenomena and the mankind only plays a very minor role? For me, and many others it surely does.
As already written in this thread by a historian, a large base of historical evidence suggests that it has been very warm quite recently, potentially even warmer than today, with no catastrophic consequences but rather the opposite. Although we might discuss whether e.g during the MWP it was 0.5K warmer or colder than today, or even a couple of degress warmer which has been suggested at least for Europe, the essence of hockey stick is this: it tries to disprove a large number of evidence with a purely statistical exercise.
Curiously, nobody seems to be interest in ice-ages anymore despite they constitute a much more serious threat than minor warming – that, even if we get more of it, is not ‘unprecedented’ and perhaps with largely positive outcomes.
Sarah Jones:
“No action of course meaning; allowing GHG emissions to rise.”
I think the real issue is that GHG emissions are going to rise no matter what the US, the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Vanuatu (!) try to do about it. I think prof Richard Muller was absolutely right about this. Our current societal abilities to control global GHG levels is currently no more evolved than our abilities to control human population growth. We’re just not that smart, at the end of the day.
I do, however, have great faith in the future of clean baseload power. Thorium fission reactors look very useful to me and, in the longer term, I’m still very hopeful that fission reactors will be with us within a century or so.
Being a “lukewarmer” and a natural optimist, I don’t see these timescales as a problem. Thus, for me, the “hide the decline” issue is that the TAR hockey stick artifice has triggered a massive waste of money on knee-jerk “low emission” schemes which, IMO, are both ludicrously expensive and completely superfluous in attempting to tackle the perceived problem.
oops!…I meant “fusion” not “fission” reactors…..sorry!
I don’t think we should get too far away from “Hide the decline” in this comment thread but I think there are a bunch of assumptions in your comment which have yet to be proven as much of the evidence to support them has mostly been produced by scientists who are tarnished by “Hide the decline and related Team work.
The (C)AGW position is that
1) there has been recent global warming
2) the rate and scale of this is unprecedented
3) the only possible cause is human CO2 emissions
4) the only way to fix it is to cut CO2 emissions
Many (hopefully most) people accept 1)
Hide the decline causes one to doubt 2)
If 2) is in fact false then there is no need for 3) and 4). One would after all be pretty silly to go directly to 4) if it turns out that 2) and/or 3) are in fact false.
I would note that even if 1,2, and 3 are correct there is no logical implication that 4) is also true but that seems to excape many people and caused the vilification of Bjorn Lomborg amongst others.
The (C)AGW position is that
1) there has been recent global warming
2) the rate and scale of this is unprecedented
Well, you were doing good until you got to 2).
The understanding of climate science does not depend on the idea that “the rate and scale is unprecedented.” This is a common misconception among people who get their scientific information from blogs rather than reading primary material.
What scientists have found is that natural forcings that have been associated with prior periods of warming are not present in the current period. The rate and scale of the anomalous warming we’ve seen since the middle of the last century do, however, agree well with estimates of the effect of GHG forcing.
Again, in shorter words: just because there was warming in the past without human influence doesn’t mean present warming can’t be due to human influence. It’s a non sequitur.
PDA,
What “natural forcings that have been associated with prior periods of warming” are not present in the current period?
Your non sequitor is a straw man. No one says that. It might be due to human influence, but it’s likely not. More transparent and honest science is needed.
I don’t see how there can be delaying tactics if the political actions haven’t been agreed upon. I assume you’re thinking that limiting CO2 emissions is the political action. The problem with getting some kind of global political agreement is that weather and climate are local. Each region has its own experience of it, so some regions will be better served with a warmer climate, and some with a cooler climate. It’s a difficult proposition to get countries to go counter to their self interest. Then there is the question of what will be promised for regional climate – will it stay the same, improve, degrade? How do you know? What is the compensation to the countries if you’re wrong? From a climate change viewpoint, this political exercise is farcical. If the climate change politics aren’t about climate, then they must be about something else.
Sarah Jones,
“it was intended to decieve policy makers and the public into thinking that temperatures are rising.”
Who exactly made such a claim?
Dr Curry,
There seems to be a problem with the threading. When I ‘reply’ it seems to place my reply in the wrong place?
pls let me know if this is a consistent problem i may need to start a new thread to accommodate all the comments (but we’ve had several threads previously with more comments), will see.
Getting a bit like Mao Tse Tung in his “Hundred flowers campaign”
…”Let a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand thoughts contend”…
…only a hundred or so left to go!
Great article but a key point is missed. The Hockey Stick in particular and AGW in general asks us to throw away what we know is true and believe what some highly speculative models and data tells us, primarily because the folkes wishing us to suspend belief in the real for some fairy tale tell us so. We know the Romans grew grapes on Hadrians wall. We know Leif Erickson farmed in Greenland. We know that the Themes used to freeze. All without AGW. Climates change all the time. The fact that the whole Hockey Gate issue lasted more than the lenght of a hearty laugh the first time it was presented shows the depth of the decay that AGW has driven into the heart of the modern scienctific method.
Where is the outrage at the corrupters of the scientific method? They are the real deniers, deniers of one of the greatest inventions of Western Civilization.
Grapes were grown in Britain because it was expensive to ship wine in Roman times and impossible in Norman times (as the technology was lost). The British wine industry disappeared when it became possible to import superior wine from France. Climate has nothing to with it.
what an Orwellian statement.
lol, yeh sure, because Burgundy was famous before it was Burgundy. Ever wonder why the simple process of wine making was lost to some people and they had to settle for mead like drinks? And maybe the farms in Greenland was because the shipping lanes got faster and they no longer needed by grow their own food? Yeh, probably didn’t have a thing to do with the change in climate. The just got tired of picking grapes in England and tired of eating in Greenland.
The technology of transporting large quantities of wine was lost. The Romans knew how to do it across the Mediterranean. The Normans did not know how to do it across the Channel, and bitterly complained about the quality of English wine until they sorted out how to make a watertight container that could be shipped.
Have you tasted red wine made during an exceptionally cool year? (my dad used to make his own in Turkey) You’d bitterly complain too.
Making drinkable wine is a very simple procedure. Making drinkable wine from barely ripened grapes is nigh on impossible.
I suspect climate had plenty to do with it.
That’s the point exactly. It’s always been possible to make bad wine in England. They stopped doing so as soon as they could import wine from France — rather than because England got colder.
This paper,
http://www.bacchusandcomus.com/downloads/climate.pdf
by a man with apparently impeccable Team credentials, seems to contradict you, and includes the following.
“A recent study, summarised in Figure 1,
showed how the northern limit of British
viticulture has migrated to and fro correlative
with temperature over the last two millennia.”
Richard what are you saying? That the RWP didn’t exist, and that therefore grape growing took place in similar temperatures to today?
I have a friend who tried growing wine in Kent a couple of decades ago, and while he had a couple of OK years, his experience, even with frost-resistant white varieties, did not encourage the view that today’s climate could support a wine industry, if only Britons chose to go back to growing grapes.
No, I’m saying that the decisions to start and stop wine-growing in England were made irrespective of climate change.
“10. The geography and inhabitants of Britain, already described by many writers, I will speak of, not that my research and ability may be compared with theirs, but because the country was then for the first time thoroughly subdued. And so matters, which as being still not accurately known my predecessors embellished with their eloquence, shall now be related on the evidence of facts.
[…]
With the exception of the olive and vine, and plants which usually grow in warmer climates, the soil will yield, and even abundantly, all ordinary produce.“
Tacitus: Agricola Book 1 [10]
Gavin made the falling statement in one of his comments
“Problems with modern divergence – which only applies to the Briffa et al curve in any case – are issues to be dealt with in the technical literature, as they still are.”
I am not an expert in the proxy data, however, I am aware of studies which indicate this is a more systemic issue that what Gavin presents. My discussion of this include:
Comment On Tree Ring Proxy Data and Thermometer Type Surface Temperature Anomalies And Trends. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/comment-on-tree-ring-proxy-data-and-the-surface-temperature-trends/
Comments On The Tree Ring Proxy and Thermometer Surface Temperature Trend Data http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/comments-on-the-tree-ring-proxy-and-thermometer-surface-temperature-trend-data/
December 2007 Session ‘The “Divergence Problem’ In Northern Forests http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2007/08/21/december-2007-session-the-divergence-problem-in-northern-forests/
A New Paper On The Differences Between Recent Proxy Temperature And In-Situ Near-Surface Air Temperatures http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2007/05/04/a-new-paper-on-the-differences-between-recent-proxy-temperature-and-in-situ-near-surface-air-temperatures/
When I first saw the hockey stick figure at an IGBP meeting in Shonan Village in Japan, I was immediately skeptical of kludging together tree ring proxy data with the more recent thermometer data. My view on the inappropriateness of this approach has become even stronger based over time as we learn more on the proxy methodology and, also, as my colleagues and I publish on the biases and uncertainties in the “blade” part of the hockey stick.
Roger, thank you for your analysis and for providing the links.
I am interested in the consequences: If we now throw out the tree-ring proxy data, as it is unreliable as shown by comparison to temperature measurements in recent decades, what trends do the global temperature then show? Which proxies do we then use, and what do they show?
IMO, we do not have to decide anything (which proxies…). Science just has to be libaretad from politics and dogma and it with take care of itself.
But it is exactly the science I am interested in: -If the tree-ring proxies are unusable, which consequence does this have for our knowledge of past climates?
IIRC a number of different proxies give not dissimilar results to the tree-ring proxies – specifically, that current temperatures appear to be high compared with the past few hundred, and possibly 1000+ years.
Of course reasons are found to dispute the validity of many of these other proxies which is either fair sceptical investigation or unconstructive contrarianism depending on your perspective.
So in the case that we accept the other proxies, then this is a storm in a teacup. Or rather: it is an interesting discussion about scientific conduct in publishing and reiewing, but it does not have any larger implications on the state of the knowledge of the climate, ie. it does not affect the science. (Which may be why they did the curve the way they did – the “trick” does not alter anything at all.)
Then on the other hand, if we do not accept any proxy data at all, what happens then? As I can understand, we then only have our understanding of the laws of physics, and the models built upon those theories. The question then is what this tells us about AGW?
I think your question, ‘Reason’ are understandable but misplaced. There is such a thing as Terra Incognito (we don’t even know those initial conditions that were conducive to the beginning of life – why? Because in the end we can only speculate, retrospectively). Ie it is o.k. to say we don’t know but can make educated guesses. Don’t be fixated by the term ‘proxies’ – what we need is evidence, of which ‘proxies’ are or are not a cogent form of. That is to say, no one is necessarily abandoning this possibly fruitful avenue of research. The question here is, were the presentations in question ‘honestly’ presented?
But I am more interested to set the “honesty” in perspective, i.e. what consequences does it have if it was dishonest? If the consequence is nil, i.e. we have (more or less) the same temperature history from other proxies, then it is a tempest in a teacup. If the consequence is that we then do not know anything of the prior climate of the earth, the result is that we do not now if todays temperatures are historically high or not. I do not know which one it is, but I am sincerely interested in learning what the answer is to this question.
C’mon, Reason. The consequence of dishonest science is public distrust of science. That terrifies me, and should terrify you too.
Yes, that is a consequence for the public relations. But if the “dishonesty” have not implication whatsoever on the scientific conclusions drawn in the field (which seems to be the case), then I do not see the catastrophy. (And me personally I am much more interested in the science than in the public relations.)
“Which proxies do we then use, and what do they show?”
isotope concentrations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_isotope_ratio_cycle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryllium-10
http://www.landscheidt.info/images/solanki_sharp.png
But Beryllium-10 is a sun-activity proxy, is that the only thing that influences the temperature on earth? And O-18 does not have the resolution in time that makes it possible to use for the variations during the last 2000 years. So I do not see that we based on these proxies know anything about the climate in near history?
Having compared the graphs with and without the Briffa data, I conclude that the graph as published by the IPCC is indeed misleading.
Having read the unauthorisedly-released emails, I find that the misleading information did not arise by accident.
Not having been in the room when these decisions were made, it is difficult to say whether dishonesty was involved. The prima facie evidence, however, suggests there was.
Typically, people own up to honest mistakes. The vigorous defense of the IPCC graph, through smear and diversionary tactics, further corroborates the suspicion that something is not quite right.
Richard, thank you for your analysis.
“Typically, people own up to honest mistakes. “
Yet your analysis says:
“Having compared the graphs with and without the Briffa data, I conclude that the graph as published by the IPCC is indeed misleading.”
Thus the people involved are “dishonest” because they haven’t “owned up” to being misleading which is itself a synonym for dishonest.
Not so. One can mislead by accident or by design.
As explained by the individuals involved and Gavin in this very thread it’s impossible to present data outside of a technical context without simplifying which be definition removes some detail.
If we follow your definition of “misleading” it means “Doesn’t present a technical detail of note” which in the context of this discussion means you disagree with the choice of which details to simplify.
The point made by Gavin here is that it’s impossible to have a real conversation about which details are important enough to be included at various levels of simplicity when simple disagreement on the issue is presented as evidence of nefariousness and conspiracy.
Your position in this case is that you think the divergence problem is important enough to be included in a graph for a presentation to the WMO and that unless the people involved “own up” to the “mistake” of not agreeing with you then they are therefore “dishonest”.
This is not a rational position and it’s only acceptable to those who have already reached the conclusion the people involved are dishonest.
Just look at the graph with and without the Briffa post 1960 data. Do the two graphs convey the same message? If yes, the message was simplified but not changed. If no, the message was changed.
“Do the two graphs convey the same message?”
They’re not meant to convey the same message, that’s the entire point of a simplification. Graphing with the Briffa data conveys the message that temperatures have cooled, this is contrary to known reality. Explaining the divergence problem then becomes a necessity which the individuals involved have to weigh the importance of.
You could apply the same reasoning to anything (and again this is in Gavin’s comment above) – once you remove (i.e. simplify) a detail then you’re changing the message. In this instance you’re buying into a narrative that says climate scientists conspired generally to push something and that this is an instance of it rather than the more likely and rational one that someone wanted a fairly simple graph to show a non-technical audience without a lot of fuss.
In actuality there are many who prefer the less accurate message – that temperatures have declined and/or that tree proxies are worthless. Fred Singer pushes the “temperatures have declined” idea constantly against all reason and available data. Tree proxies became a target once they started supporting a conclusion that made people uncomfortable – that it’s hotter now than anytime in recent history. We see this pattern repeat endlessly – once the answer is disliked the source is attacked and suddenly we can’t measure C02 accurately enough, we can’t measure temperature accurately enough, tree proxies are useless and so on and so forth.
Once you start stretching the bounds of rationality in a particular instance because it supports a larger narrative you feel makes sense then it’s time to revisit and reconsider that narrative or at least re-examine whether than instance is really as it appears.
With the Briffa data, the graph suggests to me that paleoclimatology is a very imprecise business. Without the Briffa data, the graph suggests to me that paleoclimatology has a firm understanding.
“With the Briffa data, the graph suggests to me that paleoclimatology is a very imprecise business. “
This as distinct from your other suggestion says nothing about which of them is more accurate. You’re simply saying you’re able to form one impression from one over the other therefore one of them must be mistaken/dishonest.
It’s particularly impossible to both simplify and represent uncertainty.
If you graph annual or decadal means of temperature instead of monthly averages you’re giving the impression that temperature is a smooth moving line instead of a highly variable one. If you a graph a trend you’re giving the impression temperatures go up every single year.
Remember what’s being claimed here: That the individuals involved didn’t make a decision about what details were best to include in a simplified graph but that they actually used it to lie and deliberately mislead despite the fact that the information they were supposedly repressing was all published openly.
I look at the graph. It gives the impression of a flat period for a few hundred years, then a sharp rise. And it is prominently displayed in the supposed ‘bible’ for climate change.
No use arguing about the hows and whys and wherefores of the exact construction process. Or that ‘if you look carefully in the small print at this that or the other’. Those are the excuses of the dodgy insurance salesman and the second hand car dealer and all the conmen in the world.
The graph was misleading. Failing a better explanation from its creators – and they’ve had long enough to come up with one – it was made so deliberately.
Case closed.
In UK, an advertiser who knowingly misled people in such a way would face severe sanctions.
Can anybody tell me why the same should not apply to Phil Jones and cronies? And if similar sanctions exist in US to Schmidt and Mann?
“In UK, an advertiser who knowingly misled people in such a way would face severe sanctions.”
The pizza box showed 12 pieces of pepperoni evenly spaced but the pizza I got had only 10 and most were on the left side.
The box gave me the impression I’d get 12 evenly spaced pieces of pepperoni and I didn’t.
Case closed.
Obviously the individuals involved in creating that illustration should face severe sanctions.
Severe sanctions … The pizza box showed 12 pieces of pepperoni evenly spaced but the pizza I got had only 10 and most were on the left side.
As reagrds severity, there is of course the difference in scale:
Pizza ~$30.
CAGW adjustments to global economies…$X trillion ?
“CAGW adjustments to global economies…$X trillion ?”
You know everyone is already aware your real objection isn’t to the science but to your perception of the policy debate. You don’t have to keep repeating it and you should really learn the distinction.
“CAGW adjustments to global economies…$X trillion ?”
You know everyone is already aware your real objection isn’t to the science but to your perception of the policy debate. You don’t have to keep repeating it and you should really learn the distinction.
An inane comment, even by your standards.
You cite two separate comments of mine, and then complain that they aren’t linked.
But then everyone already knows this about you. Suggest you change your handle to blunteroo soonest.
@ shaperoo
In the pizza example, you will probably find that there is a warning along the lines of ‘illustration only’ on the box with the picture.
Otherwise a clever lawyer will try exactly what you describe. I do not condone this – it is a stupid import since the dumbass American woman win the hot coffee case. But that is the way it is.
There was no such warming on the Hockey Stick. It was exhibited despite all its faults being known to the perps.
If the state of knowledge is “we don’t really know” then the policy message should be “we don’t really know”. While I accept the need for simplification, this should not distort the message.
In any case, the IPCC did not simplify the graph. It removed part of a series and add part of another series. That makes the graph more complicated.
“If the state of knowledge is “we don’t really know””
It isn’t. As with any aspect of science it’s “The answer is likely this but…”
The “likely” and “but” parts of the answer are typically removed outside technical discussions on the topics for obvious reasons. It’d be nice if we could all be experts on dendrochronology and make expert appraisals of the divergence problem and its importance but we’re not and the same applies across countless fields.
“In any case, the IPCC did not simplify the graph. It removed part of a series and add part of another series. That makes the graph more complicated.”
Sorry but you’re simply trying to make it sound complicated to try and argue there was no simplification.
Both series were measurements of temperature. One mechanism of measuring temperature was replaced by another mechanism of measuring temperature at the point where the first mechanism was known and published as being inaccurate. This was done because explaining why the first mechanism becomes uncertain after 1960 is complicated.
If Briffa post 1960 was inaccurate than Briffa pre 1960 was inaccurate too, and should have been removed. As Briffa used similar methods with similar inaccuracies, the other records should have been removed too.
With climate science we could often say that we do not know, what we know. By that I mean that there are clear indications, even strong ones, but great difficulties in assessing their precise significance. More openness would help, but not resolve the problem, because the scientists themselves have difficulties in estimating the accuracy and reliability of their results.
Concerning the graph. If it is taken as presentation of the best estimate of temperature development, what was done was a simplification. If it taken as a presentation of paleoclimatological reconstructions, the significance of the operation changes. It has been used in both ways, but it is not completely clear to me, what was the original goal.
“If Briffa post 1960 was inaccurate than Briffa pre 1960 was inaccurate too”
That isn’t a logical conclusion.
For a long time the orbit of Mercury was inexplicable by physics because it didn’t fit with the predictions of Newtonian mechanics. The planets didn’t suddenly fly out of their orbits and people didn’t float up into the sky.
You are arguing, almost literally, that because we don’t know something we don’t know anything. This is again not rational nor reasonable.
Concerning the graph…. it is not completely clear to me, what was the original goal.
To mislead.
@Sharper00
Note that Briffa pre and post 1960 refers to the year of observation rather than to the year of publication.
“Note that Briffa pre and post 1960 refers to the year of observation rather than to the year of publication.”
Yes, I understand the issue and what you meant.
I don’t think you understood my response however: Newtonian mechanics failing to explain the orbit of Mercury did not prevent it being able to explain the other planets. Once a flaw was found it wasn’t simply labelled garbage and thrown out, it’s still taught and used today because it’s quite accurate just not completely accurate.
You’re saying that tree proxies being unable to explain post 1960 temperature makes them entirely useless and they shouldn’t be used at all, ever. That’s not reasonable and it’s not how science has ever proceeded, the divergence problem is proceeding as other issues have, are and will do: It’s a known published problem which is being actively researched. Eventually it’ll be solved and the appropriate caveats and limitations appropriate for that solution will be applied just as Newton works well so long as you’re not too close to a gravity well or going too fast.
@Sharper00
You now postulate that the “laws of climate reconstruction” were different pre and post 1960. That is not true. If it were, then all paleoclimatology is nonsense.
“You now postulate that the “laws of climate reconstruction” were different pre and post 1960. “
No – you’re still not understanding the argument.
We’re talking about a real phenomenon here which is a real measurable relationship between tree growth and temperature. You are now arguing that a change in that relationship post 1960 invalidates the relationship before 1960. That’s simply wrong and if applied would involve us invalidating everything we know because once you get down to enough detail, there’s always something that doesn’t make sense or isn’t known.
All those scientists that are employed? All that money spent on research? They’re working out the flaws and unknowns.
“In any case, the IPCC did not simplify the graph. It removed part of a series and add part of another series. That makes the graph more complicated.”
Aside from the fact that “the IPCC” did not do anything in this case (which suggests you lack an understanding of the topic) you are now simply repeating your argument without dealing with the response I’ve already given to it.
@Sharper00
You argue that the relationship between tree ring growth and temperature changed in 1960. There is no reason to assume that. In fact, it is central postulate of paleoclimatology that such relationships are constant over time. If they can change in 1960, they can change in 1530.
“You argue that the relationship between tree ring growth and temperature changed in 1960.”
Clearly something changed in the relationship or there wouldn’t be a divergence problem to discuss.
“There is no reason to assume that.”
Sorry but no. Calling it an assumption may suit your argument better but it’s not true.
Tree rings as a proxy for temperature is supported both by observation and physical theory. The relationship is obviously not perfect but it’s there.
“There is no reason to assume that. In fact, it is central postulate of paleoclimatology that such relationships are constant over time. “
I don’t think you’re qualified to make claims concerning central postulates of paleoclimatology.
The relationship doesn’t need to be constant it simply needs to be predictable given knowledge of other factors.
Do you know how carbon dating works? Did you know the rate of carbon decay varies depending on numerous factors? Getting a carbon date from something isn’t just a matter of measuring it and applying a constant to convert it to a date, many known factors have to be accounted for before an accurate date can be extracted.
“If they can change in 1960, they can change in 1530.”
This is certainly possible but then that’s why we don’t rely exclusively on tree rings as proxies. Different mechanisms are used and if they all give an answer it’s unlikely they all decided to be “wrong” in the same way at the same time.
That’s why multiple converging lines of evidence is an important concept and it’s something mainstream science has in spades.
Richard, go to this link and jump to 21.15:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00y4yql/Horizon_20102011_Science_Under_Attack/
Or 04.00 at this Youtube link:
Classic strawman attack by Sarah. There are no delaying tactics here. There’s long overdue public revelation of the dishonest activities of a specific bunch of climate scientists who are part of promoting the AGW scam.
It is very well known that the temperatures are rising a bit over the past hundred and fifty years or so. Nobody is disputing that.
It is also very well known that CO2 is a GHG. Nobody is disputing that.
We are in the midst of an interglacial. What is not known accurately is how much have temperatures risen as data is at the best, sparse and unreliable. it has been made even worse by the GISS crowd adjusting data to lower past temperatures and increase current values. They did it and have been doing it by different methods, one of which is the hockey stick.
What is even more unknown is that to what extent current temperatures are ” unprecedented “. If such temperatures have been there in the past, as history shows, there’s nothing ” unprecedented ” in what we are seeing today.
And even more unknown is how human released anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for ” unprecedented ” and ” possibly catastrophic ” temperature increase, a theory which is being promoted by this crowd and which has not been proven by empirical evidence.
And to find the truth, the first thing to be done is to purge the purveyors of untruth and get them exposed. There is no place for such people who distort, mangle and hide data dishonestly in any scientific endeavour.
The purging process is what is starting to happen now. The chickens are coming home to roost for the people who have indulged in dishonest and junk ” science “.
First, I will sound like Gavin. And ianash. And Bart V. And Judith Curry. And Kim. And hunter. And possibly, dear reader, you.
If I am very fortunate in my clarity.
Each demonstrate deep and long familiarity with the topic, passionate interest, some attempt at empathy with others who have different views, and utter failure to, *ahem* hide the decline in agreement.
Long before Climategate (what an idiotic name, both misleading and trite — Climateleak would have had more punch, currency, credibility and roar — I read paleo reports, and understood by the very clear words “proxy” and “reconstruction” that the authors were warning me, were keeping in mind themselves, were alerting all readers that the correct interpretation (if any could be correct) of the reports would take into account their origin and methods.
The authors of the reports, the commentators, the critics, the dissenters — McIntyre included — were all by every evidence of what they said keenly aware of the origin and methods and that at best the meaning of the graphs must be discounted or held in a different, lower category of reliability or certainty than what they sought to approximate. All before Climateleak.
If you doubt it, go back and look at the diverse publications about this topic prior to 2009.
So I feel compellingly insulted by anyone asking me to think the contents of Climateleak reveal anything new, revelatory, or that had not been considered prior on this specific point.
I’d already discounted the paleo as is appropriate, and discounted the claims of history buffs about MWP and LIA before paleo was available before that, because their intrinsically flawed qualities easily allow one to establish uncertainty from the outset.
That is to say, I practiced skepticism before it was cool.
However.
What Climateleak did clearly establish was broad and pervasive attitude NOT in the best traditions of science, but in some of its worse.
Data hiding and hoarding and mismanagement, in place of sharing and revealing and management as if, to paraphrase one Latimer Alder who said it better than I could, one did not regard it as the most important data in the world, remain practices in science’s dark side.
It is appropriate that there were no fewer than five official reviews with findings of fault.
It is appropriate that UEA announced a “reduction in duties” of the head of the CRU over these faults.
It would be really helpful, one thinks, if the actual meat and matter of the faults brought forward by Climateleak, not the rehashed quibbles of semantics of things already known widely beforehand, were looked at.
1. Sloppy data management practices pretty much from craddle to grave.
2. Hoarding and selective release to punish dissent and reward cooperants.
3. An attitude of disrespect* for people with policy disagreement.
*I disrespect people who broadly agree with my policies, where we differ on mathematics and reasoning. That is the far better approach. ;)
Why “Climateleak”? The emails didn’t leak, they were deliberately liberated.
Steeptown
I’d accept equally Climatewikied, Climateliberated, Climatehacked, Climatetheft, Climaterevealed, Climatestolen, Climateburgled, Climatewhistleblown, Climatemutinied..
All of which would be at least not as trite as the -gate appelative long since which has lost its vigour and impact as a terminus.
See, I don’t care which side of the liberated-hacked debate one is on, or whether the stuff was (farfetchedly) stolen by some profiteering Russian political agitator or (likely) outed by a concerned insider, from an aesthetic point of view with regard to the word itself.
Indeed, the word itself, unimportant.
There are important lessons to be covered in this topic.
Dr. Judith Curry has been kind enough to open those topics to prior productive and insightful discussion here.
However, as evidenced by some EIGHT HUNDRED posts in under 12 hours on this topic, it’s _this_ topic that has the blogosphere gripped by the most intimate excitement of its inner hopes and fears and concerns.
It’s nothing that was new 15 months ago.
There’s far more than 15 months worth of amending the CRU has to do on those issues I numbered 1-3 about data management and data politicking and just plain disrespect, so in this regard I disagree with Dr. Curry’s assertion that 15 months ought be enough for the disputatious elements on both sides to approach and resolve this little fiasco, in my opinion.. however, it continues to fuel the fervour and stir the imagination.
Why ought ‘hide the decline’ do this now, starting with those events of 15 months ago, when the term ‘hide the decline’, and the facts of the use of the technique, where known from the start, and relatively obscure nothings compared to the wider issues at question?
The skeptic in me has no answer.
The cynic in me has plenty of opinion on that matter, however.
Dr. Judith Curry has been kind enough to open those topics to prior productive and insightful discussion here.
Please show evidence that there has been any productive and insightful discussion here, and make sure you define “productive and insightful”. What I see is just more of the same entrenched positions being restated once more. What is the use of that other than to continue to inflame passions and further entrench positions?
That is not a rhetorical question.
I haven’t seen you around on previous threads here, shewonk: this month I’d particularly recommend Chief Hydrologist on decadal variability of clouds and the brilliant follow-up by Tomas Milanovic on spatio-temporal chaos. Those two guys hold quite different views on the possible seriousness of man-made warming, from what I can tell. But the discussion has been both productive and insightful.
This thread, on the other hand, among many other things, is proving enormous fun!
shewok
You ask a decent question, rhetorical or not.
One commends the entirety of the Ethics category of Climate, Etc. and the majority of the Lisbon Conference threads (eleven so far) to address the ‘any discussion’ portion of the question you ask.
As to ‘productive and insightful’ — the phrase depends on how you measure production and insight.
Clearly, if I’ve commented on a thread, it’s had either product or insight spread all over it, in the most fertile sense.
Yes, entrenchment is obvious, and it is getting markedly easier to observe in many quarters.
Yes, propaganda and mob mentality are winning, as they always do.
One day, however, this generation will pass away, and in the distant future some automated web-search engine will pluck the gems of this blog out, wash away the scam and muck, and in that far distant era, whatever valuable statements have been illicited will shine out.
Or, people can do that for themselves, if they’re careful and diligent and willing to work hard at research and logic, right now.
If people face and question the alarmists who declare that cutting back on carbon emission will somehow bankrupt a world that already is past the optimum rate of exploitation of carbon resources, and so pays too much by far for the energy it uses too much of too immoderately for too few people benefiting.
More fossil fuel use is not the solution to poverty, it is the path to poverty, they may then decide.
If people face and question their views on the significance of tertiary information like global temperature anomaly and increase their attention to primary data like CO2 levels, and focus on what it means to perturb a chaotic system.
The climate is not the right hornet’s nest to poke, and CO2 is a particularly risky stick to pick up, they might then decide for themselves.
Or, I may just be an entrenched opinioneer restating unproductive and close-minded talking points, like everyone else.
The forum provides an opportunity for people like you to defend the indefensible. Few are willing to rise to that occasion. That’s life. Get used to it. Changing the subject will not work for you. Find another trolling tactic.
The issue Bart..
Is what did the policy makers know and the general public.
The Hockey Stick was a dodgy sales/PR tool for the media and public and politicians
How many UK Politicians do you imagine have even read the Summary for policy makers, to pretend that just because the issue is buried and discussed in the blogs misses the point entriely..
Even the dimmiest politicians can work out, from ‘hide the decline’ that ‘unprecedented temperature’ in a thousand years, it must be due to humans (and argument from ignorance as well) is shall we say a little uncertain..
Call me a climate cynic..
Futerra a green pr/media company got that label first, along with focus grouping ‘carbon footprint’ years ago.
It has even got windturbines and polar bears on the cover (cartoon ones) – Sell The Sizzle – The New Climate Message
http://www.futerra.co.uk/downloads/Sellthesizzle.pdf
http://www.futerra.co.uk/revolution/leading_thinking
One of the founders is a board member of the 10:10 ‘No Pressure’ campaign.
Barry Woods
What did the policy makers know?
Policy makers are surrounded by coteries and hierarchies of attendants and bureaucrats paid to do their reading for them.
Some policy makers, further, _do_ read, deeply and widely and well.
It is easy for my cynical impulse to lump all into the basket with those who do not.
However, if we have policy makers we cannot count on to be prepared in their reading at whatever level, then this is not an issue as much of authors who were arguably honest in their admissions of the limits of their methods, as of voters for electing form over substance.
We must conclude that, to hoodwink the populace most, the most inept must have the most disproportionate hoodwinking machinery. We know who have been inept by their results.
Actually, there is an interesting irony here – 71,000 emails were ‘liberated’ (which I applaud, by the way), by definition ‘illegally’, from HBGary Federal and its parent company and sites like ‘Think Progress’ etc are trawling over their contents with glea – the very same sites who disdain these ‘dirtily, pilfered emails’! Isn’t life interesting?
Lewis Deane
The same week as Climateleak (just to rhyme) there was a far larger liberation in the USA from the government of the text messages in New York on 9/11.
It barely made the news, although in volume, audacity, and import it is arguably orders of magnitude more significant.
Just shows you what has people irrationally ready to pounce on more. Exactly what a tar baby is for.
1. Sloppy data management practices pretty much from craddle to grave.
2. Hoarding and selective release to punish dissent and reward cooperants.
3. An attitude of disrespect* for people with policy disagreement.
Nice points but context is everything in understanding a problem and finding adequate solutions.
Can you provide some for these points?
Some.. context?
Some.. understanding?
Some adequate solutions?
Well, I’d say the first adequate solution is less ambiguity in phrasing of questions. ;)
For additional context, understanding, and solutions, please see my skreedy rant below in reply to steven mosher, who deserves better on days when my cynicism doesn’t feed into my attitude of disrespect.
Any fool can find examples galore. Why should I or anyone else work hard to inform those who are willfully ignorant? Trolls get beaten about the head and shoulders here. Get used to it.
Seems to me the regulars here have beaten themselves about the head so much they’ve knocked the sense out.
“So I feel compellingly insulted by anyone asking me to think the contents of Climateleak reveal anything new, revelatory, or that had not been considered prior on this specific point.”
1. That Overpeck had told Briffa he wanted something more compelling than the hockey stick for Chapter 6.
2. That Ring had advised Briffa to deal with uncertainties forthrightly and not hide them away
3. That Overpeck advised briffa to take Ring with a grain of salt
4. That Briffa had asked Overpeck not to give into pressure from Solomon and Mann WRT overstating the certainty in this Chapter
5. That Briffa sought and received Wahl’s advice in handling McIntyre’s claims in ch06
6. That Jones requested that people delete mails related to these matters in order to thwart the FIOA or its expected appeal.
Of course you can “refine” “that specific point” to say that these issues dont address it.
steven mosher
I believe I had from the first amply and clearly already refined that specific point with my points 2 and 3 about hoarding and respect as distinct from hiding the decline.
The details of who said what and when, not significantly revelatory, nor really new in major ways as regards to hiding-the-decline as the specific point as clearly refined in my comment.
You’re telling me that my comment is internally logical, coherent and correct?
I already knew that.
Go back and read the many communications in the six years BC (Before Copenhagen, to use another obscure way of alluding to Climateliberation) and see if your perspective about this is supported in light of all that was publicly available about “Hiding the Decline.”
Most specifically, how is your point 6 about Hiding the Decline, more than it is about my point 2 about hoarding data?
So, sure, if you stuff the straw man full up to broaden the term “Hiding-the-decline” to the widest possible sense, you’re absolutely right, and I’m clearly off in the world of your mind where everything means anything, and nothing need mean something in particular at all.
I refer to hiding the decline as it was used in its original context, “adding in the real temps to each series” to use RealClimate’s phrase, because that’s clearly where it came from, and what it meant prior to its staggering level of inflation to refer to “all-that-has-ever-happened-in-climate-studies-everywhere-or-might-have-or-we’re-sure- didn’t-but-wouldn’t-it-be-awful-if-it-had-and-I-wouldn’t-put-it-past-them.”
This shrieking hysteria about hiding-the-decline is paramount to and far worse than what even the least lucid skeptic has alleged of those alarmists who see a rise in temperatures coincide loosely with a rise in CO2 and suddenly set off to alarm the world in the worst possible way.
You see this phrase, and make these links, and though there really is some substance somewhere in the issue worth discussing, you so bury it in tar-baby irrelevancies and overblown reactions as to muddy the whole.
That’s what I’m saying.
Science has much to learn from the appalling data management of CRU and the righteous public dismay; I’ve seen the same problem in multiple disciplines in academic institution and research group one after another for the past quarter century across North America. It is nothing new, but it is something well worth challenging and changing.
If the same principles as are recommended as solutions by some data handling professionals (or even Latimer Alder) were applied to automobile and drug testing, it would widen the eyes of the consumers of those products.
Likewise for data hoarding — which happened one is certain long before computer data storage and is part of the notorious history of astrology and physics since the days of Kepler and Newton — we know scientists face adverse rewards in publish-or-perish circles (almost the entirety of the scientific world) for sharing their data before they have milked it for every last ounce of original research credit they can.
This issue is so pervasive as to make not just Paleo-, but all of Climatology, and Earth Sciences indeed, seem a puny topic by comparison.
It holds us back in all things and it is morally repugnant.
So, yes, I refine the specific point to big and important issues and say these knee-jerk reactions don’t address the real, important subject.
A debate about whether a graph is clear enough?
Red herrings, anyone?
Wild goose?
Just watched the Muller video, if the “hide the decline” part of his presentation is factual and I have not seen anybody dispute the facts only the interpretation, then what was done was plain wrong.
I think Muller went on to demonstrate the potential further implications of such wrong doing by stating that in what was his view the best global temperature record had been compiled by the same people who carried out the “hide the decline” trick and leaving the audience to draw their own inference.
Another implication of this situation is the potential breakdown of trust, not just in science (bad enough) but, especially in the UK, what is lovingly known as the “Establishment”. This has the potential to be around for a long time.
Eight days before Climategate, on 9 November 2009, I emailed Michael Gove, now UK education secretary, pointing out, among other things, that Philip Stott had just, on BBC Radio 4, compared the fallout from the collapse of AGW catastrophism with that of another disastrous three letter acronym, WMD. The Tories were going to have deal with the deep malaise this was bound to cause, like it or not. So I agree with your point about the Establishment – and I know I don’t know the answer. Except that it’s going have to be radical. Gove is one of the few who I think may have the brains and the integrity to see the right response. His reforms to education are massively pertinent. But deep change will be required.
Richard – “But deep change will be required.” And Gove is in the right place, the UK education system certainly needs a radical overhaul and not just re the indoctrination of climate issues.
I have been asking myself for decades why a nation would dumb down their education system when musing on such a poster told me to look up “bread and circuses”.
On the UK climate science issue I have never understood why the people at CRU did not cry foul about the 2 “independent” reviews. It was obvious to all concerned that the structure and depth was not sufficient to clear their names. Why did they not demand the opportunity to face down their decriers? Why did they not insist that the actual papers in question be brought into the review? If falsely accused of malfeasance why not demand that the investigations be such that there can be no doubt about the outcome? I cannot see this problem going away until something like this happens. The “Establishment” wishes to sail serenely along but this is part of the problem not part of the solution.
Yes I can wax lyrical about it but I like you do not know the answer.
I am generally not interested in these issues but I must say that the thread was a very pedagogic read.
Especially since the appearance of the 2 thugs, Laurel and Hardy of the climate blogs – Itrash and Dégazé.
My first reaction was to wonder why they haven’t been moderated back to the black hole they have crept from.
Indeed reading jewels like Gee your pinup girl has shown her true colors finally. All the crowd at American Thinker will be happy. is so beyond the limit of a mental handicap that it is funny once but on repetition it becomes as funny as a clown in a S.King novel.
But then I found out that it is much better to leave their pixelised excrements as they are – clueless, stupid, heinous, irrelevant.
It is an excellent lesson by example.
As these things (not sure if they are human, perhaps they are just poorly programmed bots that react in a repetitive way on some key words) are what fills up RC and Tamino blogs, it gives a very good idea about what’s going on there.
I am sure that Judith didn’t miss this opportunity to do some pedagogy by example.
So for you all, be sure that you don’t miss Itrash and Dégazé appearing in exclusivity on this thread – they are the (un)living proof of the Murphy’s law that when you think that it can’t get worse, it does :)
And yes, in the case you ask, this is the kind of pals (or bots) that are all that’s left for Schmidt&Co.
Splendid comment Milanovic.
Finally! A climate scientist states clearly that trick to hide the decline was not acceptable scientific practice, no matter how the words “trick”, “hide”, and “decline” are defined. As a biomedical scientist for 30 years, I was absolutely amazed at those emails when they were released, but even more so by number and vigor of defenders in the climate science community. Until then, I had accepted AGW, because I have a lot of respect for expert knowledge and objective research. As soon as I read the comments of defenders of the trick, I knew this was not normal science as the vast majority of scientists practice it. This is not some little issue in a grey area. It’s blatantly wrong and defending it indicates a lack of scientific standards, or at least making them subservient to forwarding an agenda (which, of course, is not an appropriate role for scientists, because it eliminates objectivity).
You don’t know any laboratory tricks that we laymen aren’t aware of?
I have a related question.
The IPCC AR4 WGI has a figure “Figure 6.10. Records of NH temperature variation during the last 1.3 kyr”
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-6-10.html
This contains a 500 year temperature reconstruction (1500-onwards) based on borehole data.
I believe that this data is ultimately derived from the archived reconstructions held by the University of Michigan:
http://www.geo.lsa.umich.edu/climate/index.html
Now if this be the case, there is nothing wrong with producing a figure representing the borehole reconstructions, but should it be included in a figure with other reconstructions.
Now this all turns on an assumption that seems to be made in the Michigan reconstructions, it is contained in the following quotation:
“The magnitude of the departure of ground temperature from its undisturbed steady state is related to the amplitude of the surface temperature variation, and the depth to which disturbances to the steady state temperature can be measured is related to the timing of the original temperature change at the surface.”
It is in the phrase “undisturbed steady state”
and can be found here:
http://www.geo.lsa.umich.edu/climate/approach.html
Now this “undisturbed steady state” is I truly believe equivalent to the assumption that prior to 1500 the temperature record was flat. So the recovered record is an estimation of how the temperature must have varied in order for the record prior to 1500 to be flat.
Adding such a reconstruction to a figure illustrating that the record prior to 1500 was not flat without warning that the pre 1500 data undermines a basic assumption used to produce the borehole reconstruction might be misleading.
I believe that this is what has happened.
This can be easily refuted by any of the following:
A warning is given but I have missed it.
The Pollack and Smerdon, 2004 reconstruction PS2004 in the figure was not derived from the Michigan reconstructions.
The Michigan representation of the approach based on an “undisturbed steady state” is not part of the methodology.
That an “undisturbed steady state” does not require constant temperatures prior to 1500.
I am not questioning the reconstruction, I am questioning whether including it in the IPCC figure without warning that the other data undermines an assumption used in the reconstruction is misleading.
Alex
Reading this thread one cannot deny that Dr.Schmidt personally hit the final nail in the AGW coffin, firmly assisted by the usual answer bots. I agree with Tomas Milanovic (always enjoying your comments btw) that this thread is a true pedagogic experience showing the continuous demasquee of the AGW incrowd.
Dr.Curry, much respect for your courage facing the AGW bloodhounds like a true Joan of Arc as you have a lot to lose.
Joan of Arc was beset by visual/auditory hallucinations. Not the best comparator…
Thanks for making my point…
Just trying to point out the implications of your comparison, in case it was lost on you.
Nice, now I’ve my own stalker…
Don’t flatter yourself…
You can a bot tell by the answers? I usually have to ask.
To me “hide the decline” is also representative of the general behavior of climate scientists and specifically for their propensity for exaggeration. Exaggeration ought not be part of the scientific process but it appears to have been systemic (and probably still is) within the climate science community. Confirmation bias and mental hysteresis also joined in years ago. Political activism also. And those within that community that are trying to defend such behaviors are showing just how unscientific their actions were and continue to be. When confronted with criticism, scientists are supposed to pause, consider the critique and then open up and broaden their debate. However, the exact opposite of this occurs over and over. And Gavin’s comments here prove the point once again.
Exaggeration gets press, press gets money. It’s happening all over. Just look at what is claimed to be “nanotechnology” when it isn’t. Use the right words, and you get funded. Use thew rong terms and you languish.
There’s truth in what you say. But for every reaction there’s a counter-reaction. Climate science overplayed its hand and since Climategate has been on the back foot. We are still to see the full effect of Tea Party influence on the Republicans over funding. If climatology takes a significant hit it will act as a salutary warning for other areas. All to play for.
“If climatology takes a significant hit it will act as a salutary warning for other areas. ”
Well, that’s certainly illuminating.” Salutary hit”?
“Salutary” is what you mean? That wasn’t just a reach for another word and “salutary” popped up? IOW, we’ve got too much science funding now and we’d be better off without it? Fascinating.
And you’re here on which side of this debate?
Obviously the anti-science side…
My point was so simple it eluded you: climate science has prospered at least partly through dishonesty. If it now takes a major hit because of this others who have gained funding through dishonesty, in other areas, will be served a salutary warning. Harold’s pessimism was for me missing the sweep of history. Nothing purportedly based on science has been bigger than the climate scare in our recent culture. Once it falls victim to its own disregard for integrity much else will come out of the woodwork. And much that should have been funded in the past will be, because the wide boys will have been sidelined.
Richard Drake,
Your point didn’t elude me. That you find the prospect “salutary” is grim beyond your capacity to explain it.
I asked repeatedly in the post to be disabused of the notion that such a reaction would be “salutary” and you declined. I didn’t expect to be.
As the saying goes, “Big World.”
You fail to confront what I write. ‘The prospect’ I am talking about is that less funding will go to the dishonest, more to the honest. Are you really telling that in your world that would be a disaster? Because that strikes me as a very sad world indeed.
There’s a cacaphony here of bots and voices proclaiming the dishonesty of Jones, Mann, Briffa, etc from the CRU mail theft, but they ignore the many investigations into the issue that have cleared them of everything except getting angry and sitting on the deluge of FOI requests that hit them one weekend. So, your characterization of the “dishonesty” of the scientist ignores all the evidence available.
That’s called “cherry picking”. So, the idea that Congress would cut the funding based on a PR campaign that mis-characterizes their activities is far from salutary. That you find AGW a “scare” means nothing to me. To come up with that interpretation from all of the available evidence (and I address this to all here who share your view) reminds me of the wonderful line from Rilke, “The world sees you too.” The issues have been examined enough for an educated person like yourself to have enough data to understand what’s what’s possible, what’s likely, and what would sink us all. Since I post here under guidelines of courtesy, I’m constrained from saying exactly what I think like Dorothy Gale’s aunt eager to tick off Elvira Gulch.
“So, the idea that Congress would cut the funding based on a PR campaign that mis-characterizes their activities is far from salutary”
No, his point is that they will potentially usher in a new era based, not on the PR campaign, but what was actually done.
Eisenhower warned in his farewell address about the military industrial complex. But his larger point was the threat of government entanglement with science – in fact one easily can read in his words the conclusion that the military industrial complex threat at least in part grows out of the involvement of government in science.
A very interesting post Judith. I’ve been informally following the climate change debate for a number of years. As far as the science is concerned I can probably be described as a layman, my PhD is in Biochemistry rather than climate science. One issue that has constantly annoyed me is the conclusions drawn from very little data. Everytime I have reviewed papers for publication I have been very critical of the gaps between claims made and the strength of the experimental data. Every scientist is set on securing the next grant and it’s not unusual to read some amazing claims on the significance or impact of a given set of data. From the climate science papers I have read it seems that claims no longer need solid robust data to back them up, most of them seem to have data which suggests, or hints at a particular conclusion but only if the data are looked at with a tool-box of preconceived notions. The charge of broken or weak science within climatology is gaining traction, I can only speak to the attitudes I have met within my own field, but climate science is increasingly being seen as a bit of a joke by an awful lot of professional scientists outside the field.
Having conclusions that aren’t well supported by the data and analysis is fairly common, even in industry. One of the problems is to understand how well the conclusions are supported, you have to read the conclusions first, then read the rest. That isn’t particularly natural given the way papers are laid out. I inverted this for my team – conclusions followed by recommendations followed by the rest – it made critical review a natural for the readers. I’d rather have something torn apart and thrown away than spend lots of time and money in the wrong direction – every little bit to turn up issues helps.
When we discuss the hockey stick, it is good to remember that the picture has been used to illustrate two different things.
One use is to give an overall view on the temperature development over the period covered. For that purpose the natural choice is to use for every year only the most accurate estimate available, preferably with a band describing its accuracy. When the data consists of two distinctly different parts, where one of the differences is in the accuracy, it makes sense to draw an overlapping period. The hockey stick picture is not far from this description.
What we have learned about the history of the presentation, both from the emails and from some meeting briefs, tells that the issue was largely presenting specifically the paleo reconstructions. For that purpose the role of the instrumental data is as the reference for scaling the reconstructions and weighing each proxy record. When the purpose is to describe, how the reconstructions succeed, leaving the last decades out is grossly misleading. The problem is really that the whole instrumental period is too short and contains too few independent data points when the fluctuations and autocorrelations are taken into account. We do indeed have a data set with a weak signal and lots of noise. Much of the noise may be systematic in a variety of ways. Assuming that it is all random with some autocorrelation, is perhaps only wishful thinking. We do not know, whether it is really possible to get the signal out of the data. Therefore it is particularly difficult to exclude the possibility that the real variations are stronger than what we are capable of extracting as signal. It is unlikely that any statistical test can answer that question.
M&M created artificial data and demonstrated, how it can be used to get a rather similar agreement with the instrumental temperature record without any other content than random noise with suitable autocorrelation (red noise). They presented also some questionable other critiques, but the basic point is valid: The selected methodology may fail in revealing the signal even if there is one and the agreement with the instrumental record may be largely an artifact. In later publications the authors of paleoclimatic reconstructions have also stated that their methods may lose some real signal.
There have been several papers criticizing the reconstructions. I have not found them particularly convincing either, but their basic worries are valid. Furthermore even the critics have not gone much to the possible systematic errors in the data. What I have read has convinced me that the state of understanding the reliability of the reconstructions is still badly lacking, and that it is in particular possible that the temperatures have varied much more, but the methods are incapable in finding the signal from the noisy proxy records. Some of the most recent publications have not convinced me that their methods are even now sensitive enough and that whether they are or are not cannot be answered by the analysis done. This is a meta question that the methods cannot answer.
Judith-
“The question I am asking myself is what is my role as a scientist in challenging misuses of science (as per Beddington’s challenge)?”
The implied question is how involved / how activist is appropriate. As you may remember, I have strict standards, and many would challenge them as too strict. I think your standards would be viewed by many as reasonable academic standards (although some would still disagree). I don’t see that you or any other individual can dictate or enforce any specific standards, but you can evaluate research against your personal standards and you can certainly encourage others to improve theirs, or at least be more aware of the issues.
As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s professional danger in speaking out. I won’t relate a personal experience with this, other than to say I have been in the position of speaking out (about some research) with nothing to gain for myself (only doing my job in protecting the company), and waiting for months knowing my job was on the line and some very powerful people were angry. Fortunately, I was right. I could have ignored it, not said anything and nobody would have been the wiser – it would not have reflected on me at all in a professional sense. I don’t actually recommend this, but I can appreciate the searching involved with your question.
“Why or why not should I personally get involved in this?”
You already are. Again , this seems to be a question of extent. You’ve been a proponent of transparency for quite some time. This is really a way of saying to researchers to be open and honest about theirs and others’ results. Clearly some researchers will resist, no matter how much encouragement. In the end, it’s a value judgment on your part – what interests satisfy you the most.
“Is hiding the decline dishonest and/or bad science?”
I don’t view this as science, so I guess it would be bad “science”. AR4 is really a position paper written by scientists in a political climate with a fundamentally political charge. The problem is when it’s claimed that the result represents scientific knowledge accurately. AR4 is actually what convinced me that the “science” that was being presented was a useless scientific document – until reading it I had little interest in the area. I expect dishonesty in politics – not that I like it. More and more we see politics presented as science. Frequently, it’s honest, good work that has been hijacked for a particular purpose. The fact that “scientists” hid the decline is cover for it being a political action – to convince the masses. My argument is they were acting as politicians, not scientists, when they did this.
Tree rings don’t just respond to temperature:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2426456
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/016896229190033S
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/dating/dat_dendro.html
http://tinyurl.com/63c84cn
Apparently the MWP devotees got their temps from actual thermometers.
Trees don’t respond except when they do.
..and more c02 makes the temperature go up…except when it doesn’t.
Andrew
Increases in CO2 always adds energy to the equation.
Let’s see if you can figure out why sometimes the temperature doesn’t rise?
Why don’t you just tell me?
Andrew
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
Because you’re bad.
Hint: how many inputs to the equation are there?
I just received a very interesting email from Dr. Paul Matthews, Professor of Mathematics at University of Nottingham. He provided me with a link to his submission to one of the CRU enquiries
http://www.cce-review.org/evidence/Matthews.pdf
that addresses “hide the decline”
At last! The more of your colleagues who are willing to express their views on the “hide the decline” issue, the more likely it is that the situation will be corrected in the public arena and the more likely that climate science can retain at least some of its credibility.
I’m still hopeful that, if this can be done, there is still a chance for an open, realistic debate between science and policymakers to determine a sensible long term approach to climate change. Surely this is what we all want in the end.
Judith, Well done for this posting. You have really revealed the depth of revulsion by the general scientific community (and laypeople with an interest) to the dishonest practices that have been going on within climate science. This is going exponential, and still Gavin tries to defend the dishonest practices of the Team and he still doesn’t realise he is compounding their problems.
Thanks for putting up this link to Professor Matthews’ submission – most interesting. The reference in this pdf to Kelly’s remark (about considering cutting off the end of a temperature curve before giving a talk, because it was trending downwards due to recent coolish years) isn’t one I had come across before.
From my Concise Oxford Dictionary: hide v. tr.
1 put or keep out of sight
2 conceal (oneself)
3 keep (a fact) secret
4 conceal (a thing) from sight intentionally or not
Can a scientist ever “hide” (anything) honourably?
Welcome to the current ‘team’ strategy: when peer-review and pal-review gaming, bullying, data hiding, flawed statistics, and so on, fail, then convert the discussion into a squabble. (see e.g. Wegman, McIntyre, Steig, etc.) Not as good as being honest or correct, but better than seeing storied careers going down in flames.
The more Schmidt and the Team, and their true-believer-minions pursue Admit-nothing-deny-everything-make-counteraccusation attacks against those who are interested in the truth, the more they are reminiscent of Ponzi schemers.
The scam requires those who got in on the ground floor to help the scammer to perpetuate the fraud. They can only profit if they can continue to recruit new suckers. It’s both financial and psychological–their self-worth becomes intertwined with their belief in the scam.
For an excellent overview of a recent multi-million dollar Ponzi scam, see the People In Profit (PIP) scam. As a financial analyst said about PIP (which promised 2% returns, per day):
“Like all scams – including the Forex trading scam mentioned earlier – many who are deeply involved in the PIP scam seem to have what I can only call a “religious conversion” to the scam. There are many “believers” who simply cannot be told the truth. A prudent and reasonable person will look at the “business model” of a scam to see if the model is sustainable. This scam clearly does not meet the sustainability test.”
And Nebraska fraud investigators could have been talking about AGW scammers when they said:
“As the scheme begins to collapse, victims are given a constant stream of flimsy excuses, double-talk or no response at all, while the operators of the schemes are pulling out and disappearing with others’ hard-earned money, or reinventing themselves under a new name—as Marsden did several times before his arrest.” McFarland warned, “Either way, these scammers leave in their wake thousands of people whose confidence and cash were misplaced.”
http://www.fraudguides.com/pips_investment_scam.asp
http://www.swnebr.net/newspaper/cgi-bin/articles/articlearchiver.pl?159103
I assume your point isn’t so much that the people involved aren’t actual scammers, they just behave like scammers. This would be an interesting classification criteria for a research group.
I do not think that speculating on others’ motivation is useful, or has much chance of success. This applies to both sides. Back to the facts, I think that everyone agrees on the facts, more or less, in this case, not the motivation.
For me, the idea that you only use data which supports your argument, makes me think that even you don’t believe your argument. If the evidence is so overwhelming, why do you need to “filter” the data?
I expect a used car salesman to tell me all the great features of the ’79 car, and its up to me to find the faults. I don’t expect this of scientists, especially when they claim the data is clear. If the goal is to convince skeptics of your argument, is this the best approach?
Del Boy Trotter, of Only Fools and Horses come to mind, as he’s peddling goods in the market.
I do not think that speculating on others’ motivation is useful,
It is when one side of the debate has 99.99′ % of the funding
We need more funding to prove that the sun is made from iron.
Oliver has already proven that the Sun is mostly made of iron. Unfortunately, you can’t find an astrophysicist, solar physicist or cosmologist who takes Oliver seriously. What needs to be funded is a massive, world-wide PR campaign aimed at ensuring that every BLOG and online forum contains posts advocating Oliver’s Iron Sun theory. In spite of his best efforts, it is clear that he can’t do this alone.
It’s not apparent to me that the sun’s core isn’t iron, or possibly may be. Oliver’s interventions may be irrelevant and irritating, but don’t laugh at him because he’s so obviously wrong unless you’re sure that he is.
At least he holds it as a theory. He’s not the only research scientist in the world to passionately cling to an outlier view. It should be noted that the times that outliers are proven right are the times we see the biggest breakthroughs.
The only issue I have with him is that he does bring up the subject at inappropriate times. Much like a parasitologist, there are times to be careful about talking about work. Like dinner. Or in this case any subject not related to the sun.
Oliver has spent most of his academic life teaching chemistry at a public university in Missouri. More than 40+ years ago he was briefly associated with one of the NASA Apollo experiments. Ergo “Former Apollo Principal Investigator”. There were a large number of scientists given that title during the Apollo missions. Google it up. In terms of professional achievement, this is his sole claim to fame. His only professional award is a “well done” citation by his university alumni association. Nevertheless, Oliver is a competent nuclear chemist and has published good work in peer reviewed journals.
When looking at the claims of outliers I always have the ghost of Alfred Wegener looking over my shoulder. I’ve looked into Oliver’s theory and I can’t find anything unphysical about it. It suffers from the problem of being more complex than the standard model accepted by every other scientist with an interest in the matter. While his theory is sufficient, it is not necessary and Occam’s Razor favors the standard model.
I would find Oliver less annoying if he dropped the “Former Apollo Principal Investigator” nonsense and fessed up to being a retired chairman of a chemistry department at one of the University of Missouri’s campuses. He, of course, rails at the scientific establishment that marginalized his career and has never taken him seriously. I can live with that. But, for God’s sake, stop the Iron Sun stuff. It doesn’t belong here or in any other blog devoted to climate science.
“Unfortunately, you can’t find an astrophysicist, solar physicist or cosmologist who takes Oliver seriously.” Maybe, but I haven’t seen one refute him, either.
Judith:
I thank you for your commentary and strongly support your work on this topic.
I note that, based on my personal experience in Physics and Computer Science (including simulations and providing peer review), until the data and mechanisms of:
1. The Minoan Warm period,
2. The Roman Warm period,
3. The Medieval Warm period,
are adequately explained, then anything conjectured about more recent fluctuations, especially as cannot be extended to the earlier fluctuations, cannot be accepted as having *any* serious validity and can only be used as a testing/conjecture hypothesis.
When the proponents ask for big chucks of money, use bullying tactics, position power, communication channel power, political machinations, and obfuscation/withholding of experimental data, then, based on my experience as a senior manager, I either fire them or avoid all dealings with them.
Keep your words soft and sweet, you never know when you might have to eat them!
LOL in Oregon
Judith, more power to your elbow!
Hey kids
Stop squabbling !
PhD is for ‘ Philosophiae Doctor ‘.
A simple question. Why is it always Gavin that is sent out to defend the indefensibly dishonest science? Why do the rest of the Team (there are quite a few of them) keep their heads down?
Wasn’t it Stalin who coined the phrase about ‘useful idiots’?
This phrase is generally attributed to Vladimir Lenin.
Another good quote is, “Trust is good, control is better”.
And perhaps at this point Gavin is dreaming of the road not taken. There was that fork where he could have decided not to embrace stupidity, and walk away a free man.
I think it is our obligation to remind him that he still has a brain and his legs still work.
Andrew
Surely Gavin is not an idiot?
Far from an idiot, I think. Armed with a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from a British university entirely undistinguished in that field of study he managed to land a sinecure with the U.S. government that he later parlayed into alarmist rock star celebrity. In this regard his meteoric rise resembles that of Michael Mann who parlayed a newly minted doctorate into a position of major influence with the IPCC. There is much to be said for chumming it up with a powerful good-old-boys club that sees you as a team player.
Is Gavin a fool? I suspect not. Clever opportunist? Perhaps. Time will tell. If he skillfully finds ways to climb down off the alarmist bandwagon over the years to come he will show himself to be a scoundrel. For now he is to climate alarmism what Baghdad Bob was to Saddam Hussein.
He’s certainly not proving very useful…
Latimer,
Useful idiots was a term that was used by communists in referring to Americans who assisted the communists in their efforts to destroy America. I prefer, Willing Accomplices. Because that better captures their willingness, and the fact that they are accomplices in an effort designed to bring down an economy. They are not idiots, by any stretch of the imagination. These are smart guys.
The Soviets attempted to destroy American society, in order to make way for their Dictatorship of the Proletariat. When they realized they could not do so militarily, or spontaneously, they embarked on a covert influence operation.
The covert operators, led by Willi Muezenberg, actually created anti-progress Political Correctness that we see in action with the AGW scam. Their entire Marxist-Leninist philosophy was a scam clothed in “science.” They claimed that Marxism was a science, and it was taught as a science for the decades the communists ruled Russia. From kindergarten to graduate school, students studied “Scientific Marxism.”
The covert influence ops against America focused building a mindset among academics, the media, and Hollywood. The core of the mindset was that America was bad, and you were among the select coterie of insiders who knew it.
The mindset created a superiority complex among those who adopted it. They were smarter, better, more feeling, more caring, more humane, more human, overall better people than the unwashed masses.
You can see this PC mindset in spontaneous communications from the Hockey Team, and their minions. They are smarter, better, more caring, more humane, shoot, just better human beings, than all of us hoi polloi.
And make no mistake, AGW is simply the latest manifestation of the PC efforts to take out America and capitalism.
My book on this is due to hit the press, and the Kindle, next month.
http://www.kentclizbe.com
“Why is it always Gavin that is sent out to defend”
If you want to vigorously protect your position, you need a hatchet man. IMHO, he’s Hansen’s hatchet man. Hansen can do quite a bit himself, being a govt employee and on the right side of the politics.
@Judy
I think you are getting too nuanced about the issues concerning global warming. I also find it confusing that it took you until 2009’s climategate to realize that the scientists supporting global warming are politically motivated. Please comment on Al Gore firing Dr. William Happer. That should have been your first clue that global warming was dubious. Secondly, I do not think that I know more about climate science than actual scientists but I find it dismaying that an average 25yr old like myself was able to figure out that global warming was bogus before some of the actual scientists. Also, can you please comment on why historical climate data is ignored. Specifically, please explain why we should worry about GAT and atmospheric co2 being lower than their average historic values. It does not make any sense.
Here’s the best that the human mind is capable of. Far better than any computer will ever be.
The hopeless short-sighted pre-arranged state of the computer models at the base of this expensive fiasco would be amusing if it were not so tragic.
One way you can identify an activist is they never, ever give an inch. When the only tool left in the toolbox is spin, then spin-spin-spin they do. Relentlessly.
I also wish they would argue their case in a more polite manner (both sides)
This immediate almost organised attempt to demonise anyone who challenges the ‘concensus’ view not only goes against how science should be discussed but can be very unpleasant for those targeted and demeans those instigating it
Ken,
‘One way you can identify an activist is they never, ever give an inch.’
Given your behavior with reference to the Slaying the Greenhouse Dragon work of Dr. Johnson and the lack of any rebuttal to the serious physical and mathematical deficiencies in that work brought to your attention at this blog by myself and many others, I would like to present to you today’s most ironic comment award.
Let’s see who gets it tomorrow!
This thread is incredibly fascinating and enlightening. The opportunity to see scientists of stature show their humanity in such a naked way is priceless. G.S. clearly does himself no good, but he’s so blindly invested at this point he just can’t see that. The arrogance and anger in his posts are astonishing to me..
Dr. Curry, if you happen to catch this one tiny comment among the nearly 800 already posted, would you consider highlighting in some way the comments of greatest interest. Maybe you don’t have the time, but in long threads like this, it would be helpful if we could quickly pick out the comments of the featured players, and maybe those comments that strike you as particularly pertinent or well-expressed…
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this blog. When the history of this whole sorry mess is one day written, you’ll be remembered as a woman of great courage and integrity…
The opportunity to see scientists of stature show their humanity in such a naked way is priceless. G.S. clearly does himself no good, but he’s so blindly invested at this point he just can’t see that. The arrogance and anger in his posts are astonishing to me..
It’s interesting to me how two people can read the same posts and come to the opposite conclusion. The arrogance and anger and blind investment you ascribe to Dr. Schmidt, I do to Dr. Curry.
Amazing, isn’t it?
Yes, you would, but you’re a shewonk and prefer dishonest science and hiding the decline.
No, sadly, it’s not. Your ignorance of the “other side” shows that you have not allowed yourself the satisfaction of asking healthy questions. All you can do is name-call.
Pathetic.
Gavin Schmidt is not a climate scientist of stature. He is an applied mathematician dabbling in climate science. True, he does himself little or no good in this venue but we need not attribute that to blindness. Being combative and confrontational need not be attributed to arrogance and anger. Gavin’s stature, at least within the alarmist community, is the product of his role as heroic defender of the faith. He knows what made him a success in powerful circles and it should be no surprise to see him ply his trade here. Gavin is simply doing what he does for a living.
Dr. Curry is quite right, in my opinion, to challenge Schmidt’s defense of the Hockey Stick. She is also right in raising the issue of sampling problems in paleoclimatology. We know that there can be enormous, long-term changes in regional climates and microclimates. Speliothems in a cavern in New Mexico might provide an interesting piece of the picture but we don’t have enough pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to visualize the big picture. Paleoclimatology is nowhere near assembling proxy data that can be used to characterize the climate as a whole during the Holocene.
In short, Judith is spot on and you not only missed the ball but couldn’t find the ballpark.
Pokerguy: I think your request for flagging (highlighting) of interesting comments is unrealistic. Dr Curry is already overloaded with the task of moderating. Where she feels a comment warrants a response by herself she already makes it just below. You should be able to use the search facility on your computer to quickly locate comments by ‘curryja’, or indeed by any other contributor that interests you.
Well done, Dr. Curry!
Yes indeed! I think it is important not to forget these deliberate deceptions, because they surely cast a doubt on the other work that these people have done. Jan Hendrik Schön, and others have suffered a much more dramatic fate for doing something similar.
In another context, Phil Jones refused to share “his” data out of concern someone might find something wrong with it.
In this case, data was not disclosed out of concern that the nice, tidy story might be sullied.
This behaviour deserves all the criticism it receives.
And in yet another email, he moaned about the problems he was having in dismissing a paper because the maths was correct, but the conclusion was not what he wanted!
The divergence is clear evidence that the tree rings are unreliable as a proxy for temperature. Their use is, at best, misleading. It is bad science and made even worse by concealing the divergence.
It is odd, though, that Judith Curry has something to say about this now, as opposed to when it was news.
Andrew
It doesn’t seem particularly odd to me. I am a frequent visitor here (and also at Climate Audit, which can hardly be accused of ignoring historical reconstruction issues). It seems to me that Judith Curry has felt strongly for years that there’s something seriously wrong with the CAGW controversy at large, not merely on the critics’ side. She’s poked around in various ways trying to understand it, trying to find things that might help, and trying to do things that might help. But she has a rather broad view of what might be wrong, which tends to consume time (e.g., doing things like reading philosophy of science). And some of the things she does (answering questions, moderating comments, and thinking about policies for doing those things better) must chew up a lot of time too. Oh, and I also hear she has a job.:-)
There’s a semi-ironic figure of speech which I associate with macho adversarial occupations (like flying fighter aircraft) that “[it’s not being outnumbered,] it’s a target-rich environment.” Stripping out the adversarial macho, “target-rich environment” is a term of art applicable to lots of screwed-up situations. In my experience it fits nicely for helping with large revisions of large legacy computer programs. I suspect that from Curry’s point of view it fits nicely for trying to help diagnose and fix the CAGW trainwreck. (Another useful term of art is “up to my ass in alligators.”)
I do think since Curry has been explicitly looking at the attribution subproblem, it has become technically very natural for her to relax her “tree ring free zone” position, because the flat handle of the hockey stick is an important logical input into attribution-related questions. And I do think since she’s particularly vexed at the main establishment reaction to the Climategate emails, it has become sociologically natural too, because there are so many connections between theemails and the reconstructions. But probably from her point of view at any given time there have been at least half a dozen other reasonable candidates to focus on, so the delay seems unsurprising. And it’s not like she’s trying to sweep reconstruction issues under the rug — it seems to me that anyone who reads articles here and who cares about reconstructions will quickly find suitable links to Climate Audit and RealClimate.
(And the apparent reason for the end of the delay seems slightly odd only in wondering why Beddington would lead with his chin in this particular way. Given that Curry has already been critical about establishment reaction to Climategate-related stuff, her picking up on Bishop Hill’s criticism seems unsurprising.)
wow, i couldn’t have explained this better myself!
Excellent summary William. Only Judith can say how well it corresponds with her own ‘inner journey’ but it’s what I’ve been thinking as what seemed to me silly criticisms came down the pipe about Dr Curry’s delay in tackling the subject. I’m not always Dr Pangloss in these areas but the timing in fact seems to me superb. The level of hits and comments has been something to behold – something I totally trust Judith that she didn’t foresee, let alone engineer. The engagement of Gavin Schmidt is extremely welcome. All in all, a great day at the races!
I think she just did :)
“In United States politics, a Sister Souljah moment is a politician’s public repudiation of an extremist person or group, statement, or position perceived to have some association with the politician or the politician’s party. Such an act of repudiation is designed to signal to centrist voters that the politician is not beholden to traditional, and sometimes unpopular, interest groups associated with the party, although such a repudiation runs the risk of alienating some of the politician’s allies and the party’s base voters. The term is named for the political activist Sister Souljah.”
Substitute “Scientist” for “Politican” and “blog commenter” for “centrist/base voter”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment
Andrew
Part of Eric Steig’s review of ODonnell highlights the issue of hide the decline:
While the written text does acknowledge that the rate of warming in West Antarctica is probably greater than shown, it is the figures that provide the main visual ‘take home message’ that most readers will come away with.
Well picked up mike.
Before they got caught, RC claimed that they had never spliced the temperature record onto a proxy reconstruction. Responding to this question nn Decmeber 4th, 2004:
“Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record – as I believe was done in the case of the ‘hockey stick’ – is dubious to say the least. ”
Michael Mann wrote:
“[Response: No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.”
Now that tyhey have been caught doing it, Gavin argues that is perfectly acceptable.
Is it any wonder why people question their honesty?
The wonder is why no one encourages you to form more thoughtful and informed opinions that can stand up to obvious criticism for its cherrypicking and exaggeration.
Now that ‘they have been caught’? You refer to a well-circulated article on a site with links to peer reviewed literature from 7 years ago, as evidence that they have (only) now been ‘caught’.
You’re funny. What’s even more funny (but in a different sense of funny) is that you have so transparently selectively quote from: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/myths-vs-fact-regarding-the-hockey-stick/
As you know since you have read it, the rest of the comment explains “the instrumental record (which extends to present) is shown along with the reconstructions, and clearly distinguished from them”
Repeat: proxy and the actual temp records are distinguished, for comparison.
Repeat: the two are distinguished – not continuous based on proxy or instrumental date alone.
What’s more, the existence of the decline, and the reason not to use the post-1960 data as a result, is so well known and published in the literature for so many years now that it is hard to believe it still confuses anyone.
You are responsible for your opinions — not Judith Curry’s. You think you are more rational than the majority of climate scientists over many years of discussion in the literature. Why? What is the basis of your special insight?
p.s. Thank you for the link to the RC article. It includes some examination of why McIntyre was, even then, a very poor scientist.
Wow, so many errors in such a short comment. You must be new to the subject — or a member of the spin Team.
“Now that ‘they have been caught’? You refer to a well-circulated article on a site with links to peer reviewed literature from 7 years ago, as evidence that they have (only) now been ‘caught’.”
No, I refer to the climategate emails which clearly show an effort to conceal the divergence problem. This was the point at which they (you) got caught.
“As you know since you have read it, the rest of the comment explains “the instrumental record (which extends to present) is shown along with the reconstructions, and clearly distinguished from them”
Wrong. The IPCC graph in question, used to influence policy makers, does not distinguish between the proxy record and the temperature record. In fact, ever effort was made to obscure the difference.
“What’s more, the existence of the decline, and the reason not to use the post-1960 data as a result, is so well known and published in the literature for so many years now that it is hard to believe it still confuses anyone. ”
Really? What, pray tell, is the reason for not using the data — aside from the hand waiving argument that the newest, most accurately measured data is somehow “wrong”? Please tell me exactly what the mechanism is that caused the divergence. You don’t know and that’s the problem. You can only speculate. Without a convincing explanation as to the cause of the divergence, its presence disqualifies tree rings as temperature proxies.
“What is the basis of your special insight?”
It’s a gift really.
The temperature in the hide the decline graph was not placed along side the proxy records. It was appended to the proxy records, with no separate label. In other word, the proxy value was used from x until 1980, then from 1980 to 1999, the temperature values were used at the end, as if it was part of the proxy graph.
All I asked was if somebody could point me to a critique of the book ! They said why should we read this book it has not been authored by anybody in the climate science arena. (It cost £6.50 at the time)
There is a detailed critique of Montford at RC:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delusion/
And you might try, after reading that, Bishop Hill’s reply:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/22/tamino-on-the-hockey-stick-illusion.html#comment9093541
Sorry wrong url:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/22/tamino-on-the-hockey-stick-illusion.html
Various aspects of Tamino’s article, including the rather outrageous quoting out of context, are discussed here at CA.
Bishop, maybe it’s just my chrome browser, but your reference doesn’t seem to work? I think I know the post but can’t remember the specific url, though I’m sure I can find it? Though these two will do:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/25/the-team-defends-paleo-phrenology/
http://climateaudit.org/2010/08/01/the-no-dendro-illusion/
Try again
http://climateaudit.org/2010/07/27/taminos-trick-mann-bites-bulldog/
Thanks.
Wow! What a thread!
Bring on round 2.
I’m not a climatologist.
‘Hide the decline’ means truncating a tree ring data set that if shown in it’s full entirety would demonstrate that the tree rings were not in agreement with modern temperature records.
A proxy that fails to trend with known quantities isn’t a proxy for anything.
“A proxy that fails to trend with known quantities isn’t a proxy for anything.”
You could call it a poxy proxy.
And a proxy that agrees with almost anything if you pay it enough is a “doxy proxy”.
A proxy that knows enough to leave is a moxie proxy.
A proxy that likes Boston in baseball is a soxy proxy.
A proxy for the dying oceans is an apoxic proxy.
A proxy that your stuck with is an epoxy proxy.
A proxy in a bustier and big hair is a roxie proxy.
A proxy for taser use is a shoxy proxy
A proxy that steals from the rich and gives to the poor is a Robin of Locksley Proxy
A proxy for drug use among the gasbags is an oxy proxy
A proxy that has forced laugh lines is a botoxy proxy. (c.f. this post)
:-)
Nice.
Actually, that last line should be “a proxy for NO laugh lines is a botoxy proxy.” (The real world correlative remains the same.)
excellent.
Do you mind if we add to it? We can take this thread to a thousand comments at which time I’m sure Dr Curry will give a virtual prize to the thousanth commentor.
A proxy OUT of it’s bustier is a foxy proxy
By all means. Goofing on proxies wasn’t my ingenuity. I just followed the family tradition of running any good joke into the ground.
A makeshift substitute for a maritime measure is an ad hoc sea proxy.
OK Baa Humbug,
A proxy that no one would ever believe is an ignoroxy proxy.
A proxy that no one knows is an ignoranoxy proxy.
“Tree-ring temperature records” is a proxymoron.
Come to think of it, Michael Mann is a….. no that would be naughty, sorry M’aam.
Is it really that hard to get in these people’s heads when this happened?
I mean both sides of this issue are so well versed on the subject that we could easily write each other’s posts, can’t we?
The “team” are neither shiny examples of Feynman objectivity or dark instruments of scientific terror. Here is my mind reading experiment:
The team is pressured by political forces for a more “public friendly” presentation for the IPCC. Being convinced themselves that the decline was irrelevant, they left it out so as NOT to mislead the public on the quality of the data (now this point is of course is highly debatable). Not knowing the eventual over-sized effect of this graph, they considered it a minor point in a large ocean of other things they had to deal with as IPCC authors. I don’t get the sense that the team considered this as some kind of never look back moment where they had a made a career altering decision.
OK, fine, I can probably accept that. Clean it up, move on.
I’m guessing there are many a team member who secretly wishes they had just fixed it and moved on. The real damage was done when the team went “all in” in the defense of this hard to SCIENTIFICALLY justify graph presentation, and to then defend it even against other critical scientists.
Being and engineer for 30+ years now, I see this is a classic case of ego getting in the way of ethics, and things got totally out of hand. These guys now carry around a big red button on their backs that anyone can push that says “Torture Me”. All you have to do is say the words “hide the decline”.
For the record, I consider tree rings mostly irrelevant. We only care about where the climate is going in the future, and a very noisy bad set of tree ring data isn’t much help.
Hi Tom,
You’ve missed the main point.
“We only care about where the climate is going in the future,”
No. The whole raison d’etre for the hockey stick is that it makes the recent warming look “unprecedented”, and significantly correlative with the C20th rise in co2.
No SUV’s in the medieval warm period, so someone said to someone else at an important meeting:
“We’ve got to get rid of the medieval warm period”
George Orwell said:
“He who controls the past controls the present. He who controls the present controls the future.”
Which is why the Team are medieval warm period deniers, despite evidence from around the world that it was far more widespread than parts of Greenland and Europe. (They can’t deny the medieval warming there because of copious written records and historical data). It wasn’t so big in the southern hemisphere but neither is the modern warming. This is because the unimpeded circulation of the southern ocean works more efficiently to store and dissipate heat and maintain a balance despite changing levels of insolation into its surface.
And it turns out the Chinese had a MWP too. The evidence has grown stronger and stronger, and the Team’s silence on the MWP issue has grown louder and louder. Now they will try to excommunicate Judith because she has the temerity to call them for their scientific dishonesty. Considering the names they have been calling people with valid evidence for years and years, this ploy looks a bit short on credibility to me.
Technical literature Gavin?
“December 8, 2009 — Drinking coffee regularly may help lower the risk of advanced prostate cancer, a study shows.
The study, presented this week at a conference of the American Association for Cancer Research in Houston, shows men who drank the most coffee were nearly 60% less likely to develop advanced prostate cancer than non-coffee drinkers.
Researchers say it’s too early to start recommending that men start drinking coffee to help prevent prostate cancer, but the results are encouraging.
“Very few lifestyle factors have been consistently associated with prostate cancer risk, especially with risk of aggressive disease, so it would be very exciting if this association is confirmed in other studies,” says researcher Kathryn M. Wilson, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the Channing Laboratory, Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, in a news release. “Our results do suggest there is no reason to stop drinking coffee out of any concern about prostate cancer.”
Researchers say it’s the first study of its kind to look prospectively at both the overall risk of prostate cancer and the risk of localized vs. advanced prostate cancer that has spread beyond the prostate.
In the study, researchers analyzed information from the Health Professionals’ Follow-Up Study, which included data on the coffee-drinking habits of nearly 50,000 men from 1986 to 2006. During that time period, 4,975 of the men developed prostate cancer.
The results showed men who drank the most coffee (six or more cups per day) had a 59% lower risk of aggressive prostate cancer (fatal or advanced disease) compared to non-coffee drinkers.”
Now you do not have to be a medical epidemiologist focusing on prostate cancer to know that this study is rubbish since it is apparent to any individual with i sound intellect. The same goes for reconstructing past temperatures using various proxies, it is basically going to be rubbish with rubbish resolution and rubbish accuracy and you do not need to be a climate scientist to grasp this (or biologist since most proxies are actually based on biological stuff).
As for performing the famous grafting, that is not bad science, that is just fraud.
Of course it is…..
….then knowing what you did and trying to hide it
Thank you Dr Curry. Reading this thread is akin to watching a food fight in a high school cafeteria.
My lack of scientific background does not impede my ability to observe the flaws, inconsistencies, contradictions, and illogical comments. It is noteworthy that comments that come from liberals, whether scientists, pundits, politicians, or bureaucrats, have a common trait. Whenever, the facts become unfriendly or the argument cannot be won, liberals invariably change the subject, slime the messenger or adversary, or start lying.
Who was it that said: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds?”
The word about this thread has spread to other sites that are linking to it which I am sure has boosted the traffic. I will bet a case of a good IPA that if you plot the uptake and the rate at which comments are occurring, the plot will look like a hockey stick, even if you do not use PCA with short centering. 900+ comments heading for 1K in around 24 hours! Of course, should I lose, the winner will have to come to the SF Bay Area to collect. Off to read Part II.
JC, please promise that you will not adopt the NFL practice of using Roman numerals as you get to Part XXXVIII. ;->
I think that blogging has become to climate science what twitter and satalite tv is to Middle Eastern rebellion. What comes after will be different no doubt!
Unless your comment is a direct reply to something on this thread, please post your comments on the new Part II thread
McKitrick (and McIntyre) ran 10,000 sets of random numbers through Michael Mann’s al-gore-ithm. 90% of the results generated were a graph in the shape of a hockey stick .
That’s some ‘Real Science’ right there.
JC,
Thanks for finally addressing ‘Hide the Decline”.
Others will follow you . . . contributing to the expanding renaissance in climate science.
Take care.
John
Fascinating and very lively discussion!
The bottom line for me is that one decline which the AGW gang cannot hide is the decline in their credibility.
Gavin and his defenders are starting to remind me of ‘Bagdad Bob,’ except not so jovial.
As almost always, the bottom line that own prejudices are strengthened, whatever they are.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/20/believing-science/
I linked a wrong thread. I should have linked this
http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/18/epistemology-of-disagreement/
I think it would be legitimate to suggest that the value of a discussion lies in its ability to weaken prejudices. Some of Dr. Curry’s posts have done that to the extent that participants emerged with a changed or enlarged understanding of basic climate principles, even if their overall opinions did not radically change.
This thread does not appear to rise to that level. At close to 1000 comments, it seems to have changed none of the participants, and probably none of the bystanders, given the intense emotional, ideological, and political underpinnings of this issue.
I believe it has been a wasted opportunity.
>I believe it has been a wasted opportunity.<
And never once have you directly addresses the issue.
Why "hide the decline", Freddie, why ?
Please try to answer in under 765 paragraphs
OK. I agree that many of the discussions are helpful for quite a few participants. I have certainly learned quite a lot from the discussions both about the subject matter and about the thinking of others.
The speed of growth of this thread tells unfortunately that what interest many the most is personifiable accusations and declaring the opposing side guilty of wrong doing.
I find the subject case a bad mistake, which has caused much damage to those ideas that were being promoted. At first it may have had some minor effect in the intended direction, but by now it is just a proof that openness is important for science even when it makes the message more complex. Still it seems that too many do not see the point.
It is difficult to handle complex issues in political decision making, but for long term goals going for rapid wins through clever tactics is not the way. It is both counterproductive and error prone.
I do get your point. But. If this was simply an isolated case, and not yet another convenient ‘error’ or whatever one might call it, your point would have more merit. Thus my ‘prejudice’ is not based on some irrational politicized impression but rather on the weight of evidence.
And, given the circumstances, I thought my comment about Bagdad Bob was rather kind. It addressed the decline in credibility, not the details that caused that, and Bob was just a parrot.
Hopefully someday the AGW promoters will indeed engage in a genuine scientific discussion, but it certainly has not happened yet.
It’s just a recapitulation of the same discussion. same diversions, same weak attacks, same weak defenses, same lack of command of the facts.
Some new players however.
people need to ask different questions. not is it honest/dishonest. That’s a beat to death question and nobody will move on that.
For now I would settle for people actually understanding some of the things that led up to the production of the chart. the choices Briffa had, and the outcome of his choice.
Briffa knew that McIntyre was reviewing. Mcintyre asked for the decline to be shown. Briffa said no, but agreed to discuss it in the text.
If you are Briffa and you know that Mc will raise a stink about this in public, WTF? seriously, what was he thinking? was he thinking that Mc would not make an issue of this? Practically speaking he made the wrong choice. From the standpoint of conveying the most information he made the wrong choice. I havent seen any argument that indicates that his decision was the best decision on any basis.
Dishonest? hmm, I cant judge
Misleading? depends on the prior experience of the reader
As I see it Briffa was trying to compromise between the requests of his superiors ( give us compelling!) and the requests of his reviewers (give us candid)
tough place for him to be. Now I think that people who believe in AGW can accept my analysis. But as long as we try to figure out if briffas actions have the “marks” of dishonesty we will get nowhere.
So, I’d suggest changing the question. which pisses off the skeptics. But, I dont really care if I change their minds.
“I havent seen any argument that indicates that his decision was the best decision on any basis.”
Given that background it seems the only logical basis for that decision being the “best” one was if the objective was simply to maintain the groupthink and assume that, as had worked so well before, they could simply roll over any and all questions.
And given the example of the shift from ‘Global Warming’ to ‘Climate Change’ to ‘Climate Disruption’ etc., I am wary of your suggestion “that people need to ask different questions. not is it honest/dishonest.” Not because that wouldn’t be a good idea, but because they may come up with some mushy term that conveniently blurs what that means too. You know, perhaps ‘science disruption’ can explain everything? Or perhaps any apparent dishonesty (or honesty) was not statistically significant? Or does too much honesty actually cause dishonesty in the warmcold world?
Agreed. What about rephrasing the question as:
1)Was hiding the decline the best way to transmit as much objective information as possible about tree ring data to the casual reader?
2)Was hiding the decline the best way to use tree ring data to support AGW hypothesis?
my answer: 1) no, 2) yes.
I think that we should have quite a broad consensus on this, that my view is not limited to skeptic. Lukewarmers will also agree I think. And most warmers too.
Now one can argue if doing 2) instead of 1) is science, or advocacy? My stand on this is “it depends, but usually it is advocacy”.
The only place where 2) is somewhat acceptable as science is for teaching, as educative material, provided that the science is solid and under no real dispute.
I guess that warmers would have the same idea, and they will think that because AGW science is solid, it is ok.
I do not agree: first, I think that climatology is far, very far from solid enough to go to the elementary teaching level.
And next, I think that IPCC reports should not be build with teaching in mind. It is a summary for intelligent, scientifically minded people (or, in the case of policy makers, people who can ask advice from scientifically minded assistants) that must be informed, not teached. Elementary teaching can be dogmatic sometimes, for the sake of efficency, and indoctrination is a real danger.
With regard to new theories, or policy making, there is no place for teaching, only informing. And informing needs data to be exposed in the most informative way, not the most convincing way.
I Like question #1.
A long while back AMac and I tried to reframe the discussion as one of BEST PRACTICES.
I try to read Briffa’s actions as charitably as I can. In the context of the mails I do see him struggling with what to present. So I’m very hestitant, now upon reflection, to characterize what he did as intentionally dishonest or manipulative. NEITHER will I give it a pass. But see if you can find any other AGW folks who think as I do. shrugs, they are too busy fighting claims of fraud to step back and see clearly.
As a skeptic, I also have a lot of sympathy for Briffa, that seems to be a good guy and a good scientist that had the bad luck to fall in a bad place (a place with much more funding and spotlights, but much more pressure and political powerplays too). He did not manage as good as he could have…but it seems that at one point, his position was at stakes…In the leaked e-mails and IPCC review he expressed a lot of worries and the dilemna between inform and convince hit him hard.
Mann and Jones are very different animals…
Fred, you don’t do quite as well as Gavin. Gavin, at least, tries to defend the indefensible. Your best effort is to try to change the subject. Some remedial work in leftist trolling might help you a bit.
An outstanding thread – summarizing much of the recent climate debate disruptions !
An analogy for Gavin and his fellows : They are Titanic commanders ; two icebergs in a raw : M&M review of flawed maths ; fatal climategate e-mails, of which the ‘hide the decline’ is top tier. Is there still some room available on rescue boats ? in any case they decide to remain at the wheel, directing the sinking boat to next iceberg.
Passengers who left the boat no longer discuss the ability of boat commanders. They no longer even mention this fatal trip towards paleoreconstructions ; they discuss further their previous business, it was climate change ; they rename it climate disruptions ; they (see Royal Society, French Academy of Sciences) no longer mention paleoclimate in their updated line of argument when supporting policies aiming at mitigating climate change.
What about IPCC next report : there is still a chapter on paleo on the agenda. One CLA comes from my country, France.
She apparently supports IPCC’ conclusions since years ; she seems to be part of a kind of “French rapid response team”, organised early 2010 a petition of French scientists against the two major sceptics (Allegre, Courtillot), is one of the authors of a book recently published re-summarising IPCC arguments (under the title : Climat, la Terre et les hommes).
The ‘casting ‘ of this book is very interesting : introduction by a novel writer and a former member of IPCC’s Bureau ; 15 authors of which half selected as CLA, LA or reviewer of IPCC’s AR5 ; of which 4 or 5 as reviewers.
Will they be in a position to follow IPCC new guidelines for reviewers as recommanded by the IAC review ? Are they qualified to act as reviewers, or is the conflict of interest such that they should resign ?
Thank you Judith. Eye opening discussion to say the least!
I am somewhat new to the topic so don’t really have a “side”, but am very entertained by the very nature of the comments (though confess not understanding a lot of it!) Usually within 5 – 6 words into the comment you already know whether it will be thoughtful and worth reading or just silly. The difference in tone is so wide.
I am assuming that “trolls” are one of the camps in the debate… they seem to be the sillier side. They remind me a bit of the people in the background of a live TV newscast, jumping up and down desperately to be noticed and/or shout down the announcer.
A observation to the “trolls” (and with appologies if that is a pejorative term) – as a person with no “dog in the hunt” (and still trying to even understand the hunt) your approach may not be accomplishing what you intend. I confess that my starting point in understand is inclined towards believing AGW, but your comments are so very off-putting. Why? It is almost as if you are trying to push me to a side I am not sure I would otherwise take. Just a thought.
The “Team” had to defend the hockey stick. If the previous version of the past 1000 yr temperatures as shown in IPPC 1990 report was allowed to stand, the current warming could be explained almost entirely by natural processes. Also, that 1990 temperature plot did not fit well with the models at all. The team really had no choice but to defend the stick it or else the whole AGW thing collapses.
Judith:
A thousand plaudits for addressing this “tar baby” issue that really was the tar baby you thought it was. The divergence problem is big issue, but the _timing_ of the revelation of the divergence problem and the “hide the decline” event is unclear to me – the pdf sent by Dr. Matthews you posted the link to above mentioned that, and it’s something I haven’t paid much attention to amongst my lurking in all the primary climate oriented blogs over the last few years.
To my eyes, the divergence problem decimates the confidence in using the tree ring data sets showing divergence as a temperature proxy. Okay (some might reply), remove that offending data sets and look at all the remaining evidence! But the issue is using the tainted proxy evidence in the first place, and the scientific review process that didn’t (or refused to) catch this glaring error in the first place. This speaks volumes about the peer review process and several other issues already discussed.
I do practice science for my daily bread, but am a layman when it comes to statistics and climate. As such, I’ll go back to lurk mode.
This has been a fascinating thread.
And by my calculation you have been the one thousanth commentor on this thread. Congrats.
Judy Curry asks in her lead in, “Is hiding the decline dishonest or bad science?”
Listen to the FTC, and the question she poses is answered:
“Certain elements undergird all deception cases. First, there must be a representation, omission or practice that is likely to mislead the consumer.”
—FTC Policy Statement on Deception
It seems we protect the consumers of goods better than we do the “consumers” of science.
Do I get comment # 2^10?
Thanks, Professor Curry.
The Climategate dam is now disintegrating before our very eyes!
Judith,
It would appear that in your first interaction with Gavin here, you got taken in by his misdirection. I don’t know if you will see this comment, but it seems worth trying.
The “hide the decline” graph shows data significantly post-1960, but some post-1960 data removed from the presentation.
Gavin’s analogy was a presentation that was uniformly cut off at 1970.
You responded seriously to his analogy. The analogy was completely inappropriate.
In attempts to derive a believable paleo reconstruction for the past 1000 yrs… why not assume that the MWP was not just a local event nor was the freezing of the Thames just a local event. Then determine what the temperature had to be in order for Greenland to be farmable for the Vikings (that forms you upper temperature bound) and what temperature it had to be to freeze the Thames (lower temperature bound). No person with reasonable intelligence believes the hockey stick paleo can be right as is. I personally believe the 1990 IPPC reconstruction is the more accurate. It fits with the written human record at least.
Whilst Steve McIntyre now proceeds to screw down the lid on the coffin of Phil Jones’ and his notorious request that Mann, Briffa, Wahl and Ammann “delete any emails”. I consider that this little piece puts a lid on the ahole nonsense of AGW:-
“To their surprise, the scientists also discovered cycles in which drastic climate changes were found to occur much more rapidly than anybody had imagined – over decades, rather than hundreds or thousands of years. About 15,000 years ago, for example, Greenland abruptly warmed by 16 degrees over a period of 50 years. Later studies identified at least 24 of these rapid shifts, now known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events, between 100,000 and 11,500 years ago.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/science-obituaries/8326663/Willi-Dansgaard.html
Thanks Malcolm. Now I know what they are called. I have kept this little blurb, from Nature in an earlier era, which sums up the same points:
“The Greenland (Arctic) and Vostok (Antarctic) ice cores are particularly informative, offering fine temporal resolution and continuity. This has revealed surprising oscillations of climate on a millennial scale within the main 100-kyr cycle. The Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) identifies some 24 interstadials through the last ice age with average temperature rising rapidly by ~7 C over just decades. Further ice and sediment cores from around the world are demonstrating the global scale of these major climatic events.”
From: Hewitt, G. 2000. The genetic legacy of the Quarternary ice ages. NATURE, Vol. 405, 22 June 2000 (www.nature.com)
So much for the ‘unprecedented’ AGW story.
Malcolm – You might enjoy “Climate Crash” by John Cox. An easy read with a good summary of the ice core story – at least until the last two chapters. Then he goes off the rails and draws conlusions that are contrary to everything he’s presented.
Meanwhile, some of us are out here working hard on case-specific climate change risk assessments in order to steer USG strategy. From my perspective, this is schoolyard crap. Get on with it.
From my perspective, what you’re doing is pure guesswork that’s costing taxpayer money based on incomplete, uncertain and/or bad science. But don’t take it personally – I sometimes did the same kind of thing for da gubmint – in other areas. I know the drill better than you/
Wow. With that comment about uncertainty, you’re clearly demonstrating superior knowledge of risk assessment.
These threads are distractions. Drop the ego and get to work with some serious analytics, or go grow a garden.
If the thread is a distraction to you, then stop reading it.
As for ego, you’re the one claiming you have enough knowledge of CC to do risk assessment. I doubt that.
They’re distractions that prevent real public momentum on risk abatement.
And just what makes you think public momentum on risk abatement wrt climate change is necessary?
More – why is it that you don’t want public discussion of the basic issues? It is, after all, the public that will be paying the butchers bill.
You’re right. No need to consider risk.
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Astronomical Society
American Chemical Society
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Physics
American Meteorological Society
American Physical Society
Australian Coral Reef Society
Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO
British Antarctic Survey
Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Environmental Protection Agency
European Federation of Geologists
European Geosciences Union
European Physical Society
Federation of American Scientists
Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies
Geological Society of America
Geological Society of Australia
International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA)
International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics
National Center for Atmospheric Research
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Royal Meteorological Society
Royal Society of the UK
Academia Brasiliera de Ciencias (Brazil)
Royal Society of Canada
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Academie des Sciences (France)
Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)
Indian National Science Academy
Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)
Science Council of Japan
Russian Academy of Sciences
Royal Society (United Kingdom)
National Academy of Sciences (USA)
African Academy of Sciences
Cameroon Academy of Sciences
Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences
Kenya National Academy of Sciences
Madagascar’s National Academy of Arts, Letters and Sciences
Nigerian Academy of Sciences
l’Académie des Sciences et Techniques du Sénégal
Uganda National Academy of Sciences
Academy of Science of South Africa
Tanzania Academy of Sciences
Zimbabwe Academy of Sciences
Zambia Academy of Sciences
Sudan Academy of Sciences
The “basic issues,” which I interpret to be the basic physics, have been “discussed” for a loooooooong time.
While we’re at it, how about you give me a figure for that butcher’s bill of yours.
You didn’t answer the questions.
So I’ll ask another one – for how many of those organizations is the membership in disagreement with the leadership? The answer is non-zero.
That’s 3 you owe me.
Leaving data off a summary graph — proxy data that we know is not correct because we have an instrumental record that shows said proxy data to be incorrect — is hardly dishonest.
Is there a word for insisiting that dishonesty exists when there’s no substance to that claim and indeed that claim has been thoroughly debunked?
Leaving data off a summary graph — proxy data that we know is not correct because we have an instrumental record that shows said proxy data to be incorrect — is hardly dishonest
It is when you leave 1000 years of that same proxy data that has now become untrustworthy and/or incorrect on the same graph. If it’s not correct for the last 50 years then there’s no logical reason to assume that it’s correct for the previous 1000 years.
As an environmentalist and consumer of science (with just a lowly BS in biochem…) I saw the whole fiasco damage many of my friends on a personal level. The “hockey stick” graph was our holy grail. Before, all we could say is “well, CO2 will raise atmospheric temps, but we’re not sure how much and how fast.” With the hockey stick graph we had a clear indicator of the magnitude and rapidity (allegedly).
My friends went to bat with that. When “hide the decline” really hit public awareness (not some buried report discussed on the fringes of the web) they put their reputations on the line to defend the hockey stick! That’s how much their faith in what they were doing blinded them. And they have paid dearly for it. It’s horrible.
Environmentalist fight for the sanctity of the environment because they love it for what it is in itself, not because it has to do anything for them. To get non-environmentalist to contribute to the cause, though, you really need to convince others that if they don’t take action they are only hurting themselves. And that’s what AGW gives them – a big sword in their arsenal for convincing others to help them save something they love. The “hide the decline” fiasco has seriously damaged that cause, not the mention personally hurting those who defended the hockey stick to the bitter end.
Poor dears. It must be awful for them to realise that they’ve been betrayed by their own allies. And taken for suckers along the way. I will shed no tears for them.
Very very interesting that you use the analogy of ‘convincing others’ using a ‘big sword’, and an ‘arsenal of weapons’. Sounds more like an armed conflict to me.
But I’m sure that they’ll soon find some new armaments to use in their war against the rest of humanity.
So you replied to my comment simply to say you don’t care? How ignorant is that?
I linked the review of Montford because someone claimed that they stopped reading real climate on the grounds that RC was arrogant and would not respond to Montford.
So, since that person is incorrect, will that person return to reading RC?
Too often in these discussions, one person makes a claim and if that claim is met, another claim is made. This shifting the goal posts tactic makes any agreement hard to reach.
I’d like to know what reasons Judith Curry has for distrusting non tree ring reconstructions (http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hockey-stick-without-tree-rings.html) or distrusting the claim, overt in the literature, that the divergence is anomalous, not the entire tree ring record?
I linked the review of Montford because someone claimed that they stopped reading real climate on the grounds that RC was arrogant and would not respond to Montford.
So, since that person is incorrect, will that person return to reading RC?
I wouldn’t because I’ve found RC to be arrogant, and closed to open debate or even to honest questions. I experienced that personally during their first days of operation. I’ve seen no change in attitude or policy since. And I recently saw it wrt the Steig/O’Donnell affair.
I’d like to know what reasons Judith Curry has for distrusting non tree ring reconstructions (http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hockey-stick-without-tree-rings.html) or distrusting the claim, overt in the literature, that the divergence is anomalous, not the entire tree ring record?
1) AFAIK all recent reconstructions use tree rings – or currupted Tiljander. If you have others trot them out .
2) skepticalscience may satisfy you, but I find too many “holes”, omissions, misrepresentations, and outdated information there.
3) if the tree ring record is anomalous for recent years, then there is no reason to trust it for any period when it cannot be calibrated – like the previous 2000 years.
Holy crap!
Never thoght I’d see the day. Good job Judith!!!!!
pokerguy | February 23, 2011 at 12:23 pm | Reply This thread is incredibly fascinating and enlightening. The opportunity to see scientists of stature show their humanity in such a naked way is priceless. G.S. clearly does himself no good, but he’s so blindly invested at this point he just can’t see that. The arrogance and anger in his posts are astonishing to me..
pokerguy –
Does the phrase “cornered rat” mean anything to you?
Gavin at RC has certainly sensored my views and inputs. I gave up on the site about 18 months go.
What a hypocrit, IMO.
Can’t read a thousand comments, so maybe this has been noted. If so, tough. If not, good. The following concepts have been repeated many times at CA, but they are worth repeating here for those who haven’t seen them:
“Paleodendroclimatologists” (I think this is the term for the specialty that relates climate to tree rings) would be expected to have a basic understanding of the factors that influence tree growth (and hence, ring width and latewood density). I mean, that is their SPECIALTY, for crying out loud. If they DID posses this basic knowledge, they would certainly know that the relationship between growth rate and temperature for plants (when moisture and other key variables are at optimum levels) is an upside-down “U”-shaped quadratic, with the maximum growth rate usually somewhere around 20 C (growth rates are lower below this optimum and loweer above this optimum).
However, it is fairly clear from the hokey-stick papers that these famous PhDs assumed the wrong growth model–they simply assumed that growth rate increases with temperature. Well, that is roughly true below the optimum temperature, but the reverse is true above the optimum temperature. In fact, it is even possible that this COULD explain the “decline,” and ironically maybe the “decline” is actually more proof of higher temperatures??
AFAIK, this extremely important growth-temperature relationship was ever discussed in the hokey-stick papers. Amazing, no?
Whatever, these guys seem to have been in over their heads in their own specialty, IMHO.
What this may show is a serious lack of knowldege about their specialty. A travesty? a Thus, there acutally might be a “decline” after a certain tempera
Being Briffa’s SPECIALTY, I really doubt he would fail to mention the “optimum temperature” effect in an attempt to explain the decline. Surely this is not known exclusively by “Paleodendroclimatologists”.
Are you sure this is not mentioned in Briffa’s paper or are you just referring to Mann’s “hockey stick”?
I’m just wading through Effective Writing: improving scientific, technical, and business communication by Turk & Kirkman.
Chapter 10 was instantly enlightening – it makes the case very plainly that the use of summary graphs to clearly communicate the salient points amongst complex data even in technical reports is both recommended and good practice.
It might be fair to criticise the WMO graph for not making proper reference to the scientific literature, but there’s a a gulf of difference between criticism and the base and ugly efforts to smear legitimate research and scientific endeavor in the public eye.
That the Climatic Research Unit has been key in documenting the divergence problem in some tree ring data sets really should nullify charges of deceit in all but the most unreasonable.
‘That the Climatic Research Unit has been key in documenting the divergence problem in some tree ring data sets really should nullify charges of deceit in all but the most unreasonable’
H’mmm
Seems to me that it makes their deceit even worse. If they didn’t realise there was a problem at all and still published the graph, they might just have got away with being thought incompetent, but not deceitful.
That they knew fine well there was such a problem and constructed the graph despite their knowledge gives them no wiggle room whatsoever.
I see no evidence that this particular episode had anything to do with
‘legitimate research and scientific endeavor’. But a lot that its intention was to mislead the general reader and by ‘hiding the decline’.
Persuade me otherwise.
At last, some commonsense among the self-regarding and self-justifying nonsense on this thread. Those who think that three word “hiding the decline” have “damaged” climate science should get a grip.
When I first ventured into the Blogosphere looking to research as much as possible on Climate Change one of the first ports I actually stopped at was Real Climate. After reading posts and the responses – and in particular the moderation responses – I found myself wondering who the ^%$ these people were (I had never heard of any individual in Climate Science at that point) and I distinctly remember thinking that if this site wanted to convey facts on Climate Change and assist new people they should really change moderators as these people were atrocious.
Needless to say, when I realised that the people moderating were actually the scientists who were supposed to be the “go to people” for climate science – and that together they had a hand in most articles directly relating to recent warmth being anomolous – the attitude and absoloutely disgusting responses to some people was enough to singlehandedly put me firmly in sceptic land – and I hadn’t even looked into that side of the argument yet.
In fact, the experience left me which such an aversion to the people involved that when I see a paper with their name on it I am already turned off reading it. These people have done a marvelous job shooting their cause in the foot.
As someone with no background at this stage in climate science (I have actually just started an undergraduate in Climate Science so I will eventually) I, like all other “laymen” require trust in the scientists who are making these papers/reports etc. Trust is a necessity because much of the science is unreadable without a background in it. Because of that, I need to trust that the person who wrote it is doing their best to be faithful to the scientific process and as accurate and honest as possible.
Unfortunately after reading sites like Real Climate then looking into the opposite views of some of the papers such as at Climate Audit I just cannot bring myself to view the scientists involved as trustworthy. This is not because I am some right wing nut – I was very much into conservation and had believed up until last year we had caused warming of the planet – the shiftin views was simply a result of me trying to investigate the science behind Climate Change. In ths respect I always laugh at people on the pro CAGW side when they say “do the research and you will see the evidence”. I did, and woops I am not sure if that was the result you were looking for.
The sad thing is, if there s truth in this issue and somehow reducing CO2 would assist in averting catastrophie (of any kind) the people at RC have done some of the biggest harm in conveying the science and ensuring we take appropriate action and I have seen many other people who were also not sure on the science reacting the same way to posts on RC. Most laymen are sceptical by nature. Going to RC as someone who is not entirely sure about something, posting a valid question from a newb (so to speak) and being spoken to like you were 5 years old – or worse your comment just vanishing – is enough to turn anyone off.
You want some tips on how better to communicate the science of “glabal warming”? First step, delete Real Climate. Then we might make a little headway.
The great thing about the internet and blogs is that in the free world you are free to not visit sites. By avoiding Real Climate you are in essence assisting its passing into history. There’s no need to call for deleting RC – they’re going to do it to themselves.
The true believers must deny that the reason that sites like WUWT are popular is that they enable… dialogue! The true believers by necessity turn to condescension, invective and ad hominem attacks on the frequenters of open and transparent sites. While it may make them feel better their tactics don’t win over any converts.
Michael R
Likewise! It was the supercilious, derogatory ad hominem attacks coming from many of those who worried about global warming which motivated me to look into the matter in much more detail.
As soon as I see that kind of behaviour in the course of a dispute, any dispute, my suspicions are aroused as to the integrity and competence of those who engage in such behaviour.
And top of the list……Real Climate!
Adding to what I said above in a thread, it is interesting that the 60’s decline may be attributable to moisture stress. Warming and increased CO2 can be expected to lead to more water demand by the trees, so that trees that were in equilibrium with their local water supply (rainfall), may no longer be. I wonder if that is an important effect to consider as it would cause the dominant forest species to change with global warming and as CO2 increases, and tree rings would become thinner as a species becomes less favored. In this sense, the decline would be an ominous sign of a species eventually dying out at that location.
yes….but nope: increased CO2 reduce the water need of most plants, or do not change it. It never increase it , afaik.
Warming can increase water demand, if there is more transpiration. But I think transpiration is mainly due to relative humidity. As AGW assume constant relative humidity (it is the main positive feedback, without it the CO2 sensibility is too low to matter, at least most climatologist (even the alarmists) think so. Of course, it could be a local effect….but then treemomethers would not say much about global T, don’t you think?
Photosynthesis requires both CO2 and H2O to work. The H2O comes from the rainfall via the soil and roots. I would expect increased CO2 use, and plant growth, since it is considered a fertilizer, would also imply increased water use.
Unfortunately, no. With added CO2, the leaves can get enough with smaller stomata, which cuts the water evaporation and loss. Hence, the plant becomes more efficient, and water use drops with added CO2. So sad! Too bad!
;p
P.S. — doesn’t change the chemistry of photosynthesis; most water goes straight through, in the roots and out the leaves as a transport medium.
So if CO2 doesn’t increase the growth rate, what is all this about it being good for plants? If it does increase growth rate, that also requires water for the carbohydrates production. Increased growth rate = increased water use. But the process is self-limiting due to water supply.
But we’re all going to have a lot more water because of global warming!
The models tell us so. Apart from the ones which tell us the exact opposite. Funny old game this prediction stuff……
CO2 increase growth rate (if no other limitation in nutrient limit it), and also thus also H2O used to make sugars (and, after transformation, plant tissues). But H2O used to make sugar is very small compared to H2O lost by plants through evapotranspiration. CO2 increase means that the plant can close their stomata more while getting enough CO2 to build sugar at the rate photosynthesis allows. With more closed stomata, the H2O lost by evapotranspiration also decrease, wich more than offset the increased in H2O fixed in sugars.
The remark by Brian and me thus hold. More CO2 usually reduce the amount of H20 needed by plants, because it allows them to close more their stomata and reduce lost by transpiration. For some plants, they have other water saving mechanisms (like opening their stomata in the night, store CO2 and use the stored CO2 in the day with stomata closed), or can not reduce the evapotranspiration for thermal reasons. There increased CO2 do not help so much, but it certainly do not increase plant water needs.
I ma not a botanist, but if you understand that most of plants water needs are not for building carbohydrates, it is not really difficult to get.
OK, so the decline of those forests was only because they were warmer than they had been in their centuries of history, even if CO2 did not contribute to it. That is more comforting, I suppose.
I was surprised to find Phil Jones still on the list of ‘scientists’ in the link you gave. Do these organisations not understand that the majority of people lost their faith (literally) in AGW directly because of this man, and yet they still wheel him out as a credible ‘witness’.
No, he was officially re-habbed, doncha know, and appearances must be kept up. Besides, excluding him might make him all sad and suicidal again, and they wouldn’t want that on their “consciences”.
I would be particularly interested in hearing from any defenders of these global paleotemperature analyses by Mann et al, as such a defense is beyond anything I can understand.
Science must first and foremost support political correctness.
The simple fact is that those who will defend the “trick” to “hide the decline” must be seen as willing to do it themselves, or in the case of those involved, to do it again. I was always taught that correction can only begin once there is recognition of error. Since there seems to be no recognition of this obvious deception one is entitled to presume that such malfeasance is ongoing and perhaps pervasive in what the team calls its science. I don’t really see any graceful way out for them now. Who in their right mind would want to build a bridge to that nowhere?
You people are all so misguided. The real “hide the decline” is wrapped up in the oil depletion crisis. Our leaders are hiding this decline using every trick in the book. It is all technically detailed in The Oil ConunDrum.
Knock yourselves out, and ignore the real problem.
Dr. Curry,
thank you for this blog – it has become an important item on my reading list.
You write:
“There is no question that the diagrams and accompanying text in the IPCC TAR, AR4 and WMO 1999 are misleading. I was misled. Upon considering the material presented in these reports, it did not occur to me that recent paleo data was not consistent with the historical record.”
While trying to reflect on this statement I ended up thinking in terms familiar to me as an engineer.
(1) R&D/Engineering – develops the technology, designs the product, solves technical issues, advances state of the art
(2) Sales/Marketing – delivers the product to the market, positions it for survival and success against competition
They obviously differ in their goals, methods and cultures. Their messages reflect these differences, for example:
(1) Engineering report deals with technical issues, ways to resolve them, different design options and risks.
(2) Sales brochure sends a smooth and simple to understand message focusing on the product strengths.
The recipient of the message usually makes an assumption whether the sender is (1) or (2) – it enables better filtering, adjustments and proper interpretation of the message
.
The recipient can be misled when:
(a) the assumption about the message type is wrong, and adjustments are off
and/or
(b) the message misrepresents the product
Can the IPCC be viewed as the sales department pushing climate science products to its primary customers – the governments?
Would it be productive to interpret certain aspects of the IPCC communications as sales literature?
Hiding the decline can be done in many ways.
Heres how IPCC made a graphic supposed to show that new temperature graphs matches old (pre agw) very nice. The old ones where mostly based on NH data. However, the only used the pre-agw data sets ending the latest 1960 and thus happened to hide what happened to the mostly NH datasets after 1960:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/PERPLEX/fig2.jpg
taken from:
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/the-perplexing-temperature-data-published-1974-84-and-recent-temperature-data-180.php
K.R. Frank Lansner / http://www.hidethedecline.eu
The first wheel off the wagon is that of tree rings as proxies for temperature.
The second wheel is the manipulation of the temperature record.
The third wheel is that the climate is not following the models.
The last remaining wheel is a belief in something which is patently absurd.The Cherokees are after me and I’m still rolling along.
Ps to Our Gav. You shouldn’t get so upset considering the hatchet job Real Climate did on Freeman Dyson, a giant amongst pygmies.
See I told our Gav don’t do it our Gav, don’t go there huffing an puffing like a sore loser to Judy.
People will only call you a hypocrite because Judy won’t censor your posts just as you do at UN/Real Climate
Does he listen?
For anyone interested, here follows the full email exchange…
… note that the discussion revolves around inclusion of a tree-ring reconstruction (Briffa et al. 1998) which expressed high frequency variations and suppressed lower frequencies
Briffa, K. R., P. D. Jones, F. H. Schweingruber, and T. J. Osborn (1998), Influence of volcanic eruptions on Northern Hemisphere summer temperature over the past 600 years, Nature, 393(6684), 450-455, doi:10.1038/30943.
… note that the suppression of lower frequencies is a scientific ground for exclusion
… note that Mann and others were happy to include the series to show a larger range of estimates
… note that Briffa himself agreed that the high frequency reconstruction was inappropriate, and provided an at the time unpublished version (Briffa et al. 2001) which retained lower frequencies
Briffa, K. R., T. J. Osborn, F. H. Schweingruber, I. C. Harris, P. D. Jones, S. G. Shiyatov, and E. A. Vaganov (2001), Low-frequency temperature variations from a northern tree ring density network, J. Geophys. Res., 106(D3), 2929-2941, doi:200110.1029/2000JD900617.
… note that none of the above info appears in Judith’s selective quotations, which give a strong impression that the discussion was about ‘hiding the decline’, and that the scientists involved were concerned more with PR than scientific truth
… for more info, including more misleading selective quotation by Steve McIntyre, see here…
http://deepclimate.org/2009/12/11/mcintyre-provides-fodder-for-skeptics/
and here…
http://deepclimate.org/2010/05/14/how-to-be-a-climate-science-auditor-part-2-the-forgotten-climategate-emails/
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=136&filename=.txt
From: “Michael E. Mann”
To: Keith Briffa , “Folland, Chris” , ‘Phil Jones’
Subject: RE: IPCC revisions
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 12:35:24 -0400
Cc: tkarl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Thanks for your response Keith,
For all:
Walked into this hornet’s nest this morning! Keith and Phil have both
raised some very good points. And I should point out that Chris, through no
fault of his own, but probably through ME not conveying my thoughts very
clearly to the
others, definitely overstates any singular confidence I have in my own
(Mann et al) series. I believe strongly that the strength in our discussion
will be the fact that certain key features of past climate estimates are
robust among a number of quasi-independent and truly independent estimates,
each
of which is not without its own limitations and potential biases. And I
certainly don’t want to abuse my lead authorship by advocating my own work.
I am perfectly amenable to keeping Keith’s series in the plot, and can ask
Ian Macadam (Chris?) to add it to the plot he has been preparing (nobody
liked my own color/plotting conventions so I’ve given up doing this myself).
The key thing is making sure the series are vertically aligned in a reasonable
way. I had been using the entire 20th century, but in the case of Keith’s,
we need to align the first half of the 20th century w/ the corresponding mean
values of the other series, due to the late 20th century decline.
So if Chris and Tom (?) are ok with this, I would be happy to add Keith’s
series. That having been said, it does raise a conundrum: We demonstrate
(through comparining an exatropical averaging of our nothern hemisphere
patterns with Phil’s more extratropical series) that the major
discrepancies between Phil’s and our series can be explained in terms of
spatial sampling/latitudinal emphasis (seasonality seems to be secondary
here, but probably explains much of the residual differences). But that
explanation certainly can’t rectify why Keith’s series, which has similar
seasonality
*and* latitudinal emphasis to Phil’s series, differs in large part in
exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s does from ours. This is the
problem we
all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this
was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably
concensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al
series.
So, if we show Keith’s series in this plot, we have to comment that
“something else” is responsible for the discrepancies in this case. Perhaps
Keith can
help us out a bit by explaining the processing that went into the series
and the potential factors that might lead to it being “warmer” than the Jones
et al and Mann et al series?? We would need to put in a few words in this
regard. Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting
doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates
and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates. I don’t think that
doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have
to give it fodder!
The recent Crowley and Lowery multiproxy estimate is an important
additional piece of information which I have indeed incorporated into the
revised draft.
Tom actually estimates the same mean warming since the 17th century in his
reconstruction, that we estimate in ours, so it is an added piece of
information that Phil and I are probably in the ballpark (Tom has used
a somewhat independent set of high and low-resolution proxy data and a very
basic compositing methodology, similar to Bradley and Jones, so there is
some independent new information in this estimate.
One other key result with respect to our own work is from a paper in the
press in “Earth Interactions”. An unofficial version is available here:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ei/ei_cover.html
THe key point we emphasize in this paper is that the low-frequency
variability in our hemispheric temperature reconstruction is basically the
same if we don’t use any dendroclimatic indicators at all (though we
certainly resolve less variance, can’t get a skillful reconstruction as far
back, and there are notable discrepancies at the decadal and interannual
timescales). A believe I need to add a sentence to the current discussion
on this point,
since there is an unsubstantiated knee-jerk belief that our low-frequency
variability is suppressed by the use of tree ring data.
We have shown that this is not the case: (see here:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ei/ei_datarev.html
and specifically, the plot and discussion here:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ei/ei_nodendro.html
Ironically, you’ll note that there is more low-frequency variability when
the tree ring data *are* used, then when only other proxy and
historical/instrumental data are used!
SO I think we’re in the position to say/resolve somewhat more than, frankly,
than Keith does, about the temperature history of the past millennium.
And the issues I’ve spelled out all have to be dealt with in the chapter.
One last point: We will (like it or not) have SUBSTANTIAL
opportunity/requirement to revise much of this discussion after review, so
we don’t have to resolve everything now. Just the big picture and the
important details…
I’m sure we can can up with an arrangement that is amenable to all, and I’m
looking forward to hearing back from Keith, Phil, and Chris in particular
about the above, so we can quickly move towards finalizing a first draft.
Looking forward to hearing back w/ comments,
mike
At 04:19 PM 9/22/99 +0100, Keith Briffa wrote:
>
>Hi everyone
> Let me say that I don’t mind what you put in the policy makers
>summary if there is a general concensus. However some general discussion
>would be valuable . First , like Phil , I think that the supposed
>separation of the tree-ring reconstruction from the others on the grounds
>that it is not a true “multi-proxy” series is hard to justify. What is true
>is that these particular tree-ring data best represent SUMMER temperatures
>mostly at the northern boreal forest regions. By virtue of this , they also
>definately share significant variance with Northern Hemisphere land and
>land and marine ANNUAL temperatures – but at decadal and multidecadal
>timescales – simply by virtue of the fact that these series correlated with
>the former at these timescales. The multi proxy series (Mann et al . Jones
>et al) supposedly represent annual and summer seasons respectively, and
>both contain large proportions of tree-ring input. The latest tree-ring
>density curve ( i.e. our data that have been processed to retain low
>frequency information) shows more similarity to the other two series- as do
>a number of other lower resolution data ( Bradley et al, Peck et al ., and
>new Crowley series – see our recent Science piece) whether this represents
>’TRUTH’ however is a difficult problem. I know Mike thinks his series is
>the ‘best’ and he might be right – but he may also be too dismissive of
>other data and possibly over confident in his (or should I say his use of
>other’s). After all, the early ( pre-instrumental) data are much less
>reliable as indicators of global temperature than is apparent in modern
>calibrations that include them and when we don’t know the precise role of
>particular proxies in the earlier portions of reconstruction it remains
>problematic to assign genuine confidence limits at multidecadal and longer
>timescales. I still contend that multiple regression against the recent
>very trendy global mean series is potentially dangerous. You could
>calibrate the proxies to any number of seasons , regardless of their true
>optimum response . Not for a moment am I saying that the tree-ring , or any
>other proxy data, are better than Mike’s series – indeed I am saying that
>the various reconstructions are not independent but that they likely
>contribute more information about reality together than they do alone. I do
>believe , that it should not be taken as read that Mike’s series (or
>Jone’s et al. for that matter) is THE CORRECT ONE. I prefer a Figure that
>shows a multitude of reconstructions (e.g similar to that in my Science
>piece). Incidently, arguing that any particular series is probably better
>on the basis of what we now about glaciers or solar output is flaky indeed.
>Glacier mass balance is driven by the difference mainly in winter
>accumulation and summer ablation , filtered in a complex non-linear way to
>give variously lagged tongue advance/retreat .Simple inference on the
>precidence of modern day snout positions does not translate easily into
>absolute (or relative) temperature levels now or in the past. Similarly, I
>don’t see that we are able to substantiate the veracity of different
>temperature reconstructions through reference to Solar forcing theories
>without making assumptions on the effectiveness of (seasonally specific )
>long-term insolation changes in different parts of the globe and the
>contribution of solar forcing to the observed 20th century warming .
> There is still a potential problem with non-linear responses in the
>very recent period of some biological proxies ( or perhaps a fertilisation
>through high CO2 or nitrate input) . I know there is pressure to present a
>nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand
>years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite
>so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and
>those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some
>unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do
>not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter.
> For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually
>warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming
>is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth
>was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global
>mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of
>years as Mike appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence
>for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) that
>require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future
>background variability of our climate. I think the Venice meeting will be
>a good place to air these isssues.
> Finally I appologise for this rather self-indulgent ramble, but I
>thought I may as well voice these points to you . I too would be happy to
>go through the recent draft of the chapter when it becomes available.
>
> cheers to all
> Keith
>
>At 01:07 PM 9/22/99 +0100, Folland, Chris wrote:
>>Dear All
>>
>>A proxy diagram of temperature change is a clear favourite for the Policy
>>Makers summary. But the current diagram with the tree ring only data
>>somewhat contradicts the multiproxy curve and dilutes the message rather
>>significantly. We want the truth. Mike thinks it lies nearer his result
>>(which seems in accord with what we know about worldwide mountain glaciers
>>and, less clearly, suspect about solar variations). The tree ring results
>>may still suffer from lack of multicentury time scale variance. This is
>>probably the most important issue to resolve in Chapter 2 at present.
>>
>>Chris
Lazar,
Surely you’re not saying that Judith deleted some of the ‘data’ in these emails.
Some might consider that ‘bad science and/or dishonest’.
Michael,
Judith did delete some of the data.
I will not speculate as to whether that was dishonest, as I don’t have access to Judith’s mind, Judith.
We might ask, as Steven Mosher asks, what scientific best practise would be, specifically would that include modifying the body post to include or link to alternative interpretations and the full email texts? We may guess that Judith would not want to underplay the role of uncertainty.
Richard Muller, in his “controversial paper”, makes a questionable leap.of judgment…
The leap in logic is from “tends to emphasize” to concluding “turns out to be an artifact”, from effect to effect size.
It is dubious to describe the results of any PCA as an “artifact”. PCA on decentered/short-centered random data will only generate hockey-stick shaped PCs when series with hockey-stick shapes exist in the data. It may be better to ask, which may lack a definitive answer, whether such patterns in observational data are significant. Richard Muller might ask why hockey-stick series in the NAITRDB dataset point upward. He may ask what is an appropriate noise model for non-climatic variation’noise’ in tree-reing series known or suspected to have climatic influences.
The impression I get is of a rush to judgment by Muller. And that Judith likes his “controversial paper” because it supports her opinion. The only analysis in the paper echoes Wegman’s trivial conclusion, reported by many, that decentered PCA tends to inflate the variance of hockey-stick shaped series. I don’t understand why Judith thinks this paper is “important”.
I think you just missed the point bigtime. You are emphasising the wrong piece of the discussion. Look at:
‘When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!’
and so his correct conclusion
‘Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics’
If you are still confused, Andrew Montford’s excellent book ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’ will explain it all to you in educated layman’s terms. Despite the dry material its a cracking read. Highly recommended.
No, you’re reiterating the jump from effect to effect size. Feeding random series into short-centeed PCA *tends* to produce hockey-stick shaped PCs with higher explained variance than would be the case with standard centered PCA. That does not imply that any single such experiment will result in a hockey-stick shaped PC, nor that such a PC if it exists will explain at least as much variance as the MBH PC1 on *real* observed data, nor that the hockey stick shape of MBH PC1 is an artifact or lacks significance.
Take random data – no trends. Put it into Mikey’s Magical Mathematical Mincing Machine. Out pops a hokey stick..maybe not every time, but many times.
My man Joe Sixpack says that if the hockey stick wasn’t in the data to begin with and nobody has tampered with the M5, then it was the M5 that created the hockey stick.
All the rest just seems to be nitpicking about semantics. And your dislike for the conclusion and/or the author.
If there were no series with hockey-stick shapes in the data to begin with, then there would be no hockey-stick shaped PC regardless of which centering method was used.
Wrong.
And you can’t read my mind.
‘If there were no series with hockey-stick shapes in the data to begin with, then there would be no hockey-stick shaped PC regardless of which centering method was used’
That may be the case. But it doesn’t overcome the point that even a random data series might just randomly have a hockey stick shape in it.
And that the method used emphasises that shape and gives it extra special significance in the overall results. That such a result occurs does not prove that the hockey stick is a true representation of the actual signals (if any) contained within the proxy data.
I refer you once again to Montofrd’s book, where this is all explained in great detail. Chapter 2 covers the basic statisitcal theory, chapters 5 and beyond discuss Mann et als flawed application of their ‘alternative’ theory. and how their method vastly overemphasises ‘hockey stick’ shapes.
My perception is that the rest is just ‘nitpicking and semantics’ Care to expand on why you think I am wrong? Or is it just an assertion on your part?
And indeed I can’t read your mind. But I can read the words that you have written. And look at the context and the words you used. They led me to my observations. If I’m wrong. please explain why.
It certainly is the case.
Indeed it doesn’t overcome that point. And random data series can generate hockey-stick shape PCs using standard centered PCA, which leads into a tricky question of statistical significance which depends crucially on how the ‘random data’ are being modelled.
But this is a diversion. That point isn’t the point, which was Richard Muller’s assertion that…
therefore…
The ‘therefore’ is wrong. The conclusion does not follow.
The assertion is on your part. I’m not going searching for that pony.
Because I know what my motivations are, and I know that you don’t :-)
The video claims (31:00) that the data for Briffa’s reconstruction in various multi-reconstruction plots by the IPCC and WMO was hidden by FOIA, and that the “divergence problem” in these plots only became apparent after the UEA hack. This strikes me as entirely wrong. Anyone? (Mosher?)
The divergence was known about before the mails were liberated
Mosher, thanks. What about the claim that data for ‘the decline’ was closed source, subject to FOIA requests that were declined, and then released with the hacked emails? (31:00 to 32:20)
I’m sorry, but I fail to see how including both proxy and instrumental data on the same graph, while explaining exactly how and why it was done, as is the case in the IPCC report, is the least bit dishonest.
The divergence problem only exists for high latitude tree rings, and only over the past few decades. The data matches well with other proxies in mid and southern latitudes, and in northern latitudes until about 1960. For example, see Cook et al. (2004), particularly their Figure 6.
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/fac/trl/downloads/Publications/%20cook2004.pdf
The IPCC was very explicit about all of this. So where exactly is the dishonesty?
Was there a big warning sign on the graph saying
‘We have mixed up two different bits of data here to give a pleasing and iconic graph, but you should use this with extreme care because it is not telling you what a casual reader is likely to be misled into thinking it does. We know all about this likelihood but can’t be arsed to do it right. Caveat emptor’?
Because if it doesn’t, they weren’t explicit enough at the time.
Nor did they correct this misleading impression when the Hockey Stick became the ‘poster child’ for every green cause around the world before it was debunked and shown to be wrong.
The IPCC likes to think of itself as the Authoritative Reference on all matters climate related. With that power comes responsibility. The authors of the graph did not act responsibly in creating it, and the wider IPCC did not do so by allowing them that latitude.
When has there been “a big warning sign” in any figure in any scientific report ever?
We now go back to the same point Gavin was making. You’re holding the IPCC to an arbitrary standard which you do not apply to any other scientific report, and when they don’t meet that arbitrary standard, you accuse them of dishonesty. It’s absurd.
The lesson we have learnt today — if scientists do not put big child warnings on everything, the ‘skeptics’ will PR-spin it like a whipping top.
The lesson we have learnt today— even with big child warnings placed on the crook’d hockey stick, some people will still swallow it.
================
The IPCC report is five years in the making. It is supposedly the pinnacle of the entire ‘science’ of climatology. The summary for policy makers goes directly to senior government ministers and even Heads of State. It is commissioned by the UN. And its authors get the Nobel Peace Prize. Its publication is headline news in the MSM.
Does that suggest to you that is supposed to be taken no more seriously than a monograph on the mating habits of the lesser spotted whelk in Cardiff Bay in the 1860s to be published the in the journal of the Welsh Molluscian Society (Aberdare branch)?
Or should we just say…ah dear it was only scientists. We’ve only paid them zillions of bucks to come up with the science behind it, so a few mistakes here or there and a misleading graph are just par for the course. We don”t want to upset the poor incompetent little darlings – it might hurt their feelings. After all, we shouldn’t expect better from them
Of course its being held to the highest standard. If you think this is somehow ‘unfair’ because other papers are done to an inferior standard, then the answer to that question is to raise the standard all round.
Comments such as yours do a great deal to increase the ridicule and contempt that many people hold for the IPCC. And to reinforce Judith’s points about its many inadequacies.
Please carry on making them. You are the sceptics best ally.
The IPCC should be and is held to the highest standard. That’s why there have only been a few minor errors found in its thousands of pages.
You’re not asking that it be held to the highest standard, you are asking that it be held to an arbitrary standard, in which giant warning labels are affixed to random graphs that you don’t like.
I would also ask that you refrain from the petty childish insults.
I stand by my remarks about the IPCC and anything else I mentioned.
Fortunately for you it’s better to be consistently wrong than to display any signs of open-mindedness and true skepticism!
I have a low standard, Dana; I want the IPCC to justify their attribution of warming to humans. It’s an humble request.
==============
That is a low standard, and one which the IPCC met. Very clearly and explicitly, at that. Maybe you should try actually reading the report.
Or for a simpler explanation, see my article here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/how-we-know-recent-warming-is-not-natural.html
Dang, my 2:04 response was supposed to go here. The IPCC’s attribution of ‘very likely’ of man’s contribution to recent warming is unsupported, and made only after ignoring what wasn’t understood about natural cycles.
We are cooling, Dana; for how long even kim doesn’t know.
================
Actually it’s supported by an entire chapter. Chapter 9 of WG1, to be precise. I again suggest you try reading it.
http://ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9.html
I’m not even going to dignify the “we are cooling” nonsense with a response.
I read your sad little article. You say that scientists have examined natural causes and simply can’t explain the warming over the last century. Guess what, they can’t explain the warming into the Minoan, the Roman, and the Medieval Warm Periods either.
So you’ve documented their ignorance. Why is man at fault if we’ve no idea what causes the warming. Well, it’s because we readily assume guilt, even if not guilty. Such a species we are.
Global Cooling? Do you not know that the oceanic oscillations are concatenating in their cooling phases, probably for another two decades? Do you not know that the Sun is flirting with a Grand Solar Minimum with its Cheshire Cat grins?
So I don’t know if we are cooling for two more decades or for a century. But cooling we surely are.
=================
Actually natural forcings can explain previous warming events. The Medieaval Warm Period, for example, was mainly caused by solar and volcanic forcings.
I will repeat my request to Latimer, that you please cease with the petty childish insults, kim.
Oh, sure, vulkanism forced the warming into the MWP.
Petty childish insults? Show me one.
========================
I have never found any page on skepticalscience.com that doesn’t misrepresent, in some way, what it purports to show. In this case, you attack Roy Spencer, but fail to meet the challenge.
“Show me one peer-reviewed paper that has ruled out natural, internal climate cycles as the cause of most of the recent warming in the thermometer record.”
Instead you use a lot of words to prove nothing.
It’s a sad little article. Dana points right at the problem and still doesn’t see it.
=============
I wonder how many times I will have to ask you “skeptics” to dispense with the ad hominems? I wonder if you’re even capable fo doing so?
No ad homs from me.
Suggesting that you are the sceptics best ally is the highest compliment I could pay.
Please keep posting.
Show me one peer-reviewed paper that has ruled out unicorn farts as the cause for most of the recent warming in the thermometer record, Jim.
Until you can produce such a paper, you have failed to meet my challenge.
Don’t unicorn farts == anthropogenic CO2, though?
I believe the difference between the assertion that “natural variability” and “unicorn farts/human CO2”, is that “natural variability” is the null hypothesis.
No, unicorns are (i) not human and (ii) not real.
I recommend you read my article Jere, in which I discuss that there is absolutely no reason “natural variability” should be the null hypothesis at this juncture.
Asserting that “natural variability” should not be the null hypothesis is a slippery slope, because once you decide that we *must* assume “unnatural” drivers are controlling climate, *any* “unnatural” driver could be argued for. It could be human CO2, or unicorn farts, or cow farts (since cows are real), or plankton blooms, or the subtle effect of sunbathing on cloud cover. You cannot simply throw out the null hypothesis of “natural variability” without stepping into a world of muck.
Of course, this avoids the argument as to whether or not humans are “natural” or not. I always find it amusing that just because humans do something, it’s automatically “unnatural”.
Jere, the suggested null hypothesis isn’t “not natural”, it’s “anthropogenic greenhouse gases are driving the current warming”. The reason that’s the suggested null hypothesis is because it’s overwhelmingly supported by scientific evidence.
Again I suggest you read my article on the subject.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/how-we-know-recent-warming-is-not-natural.html
Dana, that’s a sad little paper and you and Kevin Trenberth are sad little ‘sciencey’ types. We know that natural processes can warm at the same rate as happened in the last quarter of the last century. We don’t know that CO2 can warm at that rate. So the null must be natural processes.
How do I know that natural processes can warm at the same rate as the last quarter of the last century? Why Phil Jones himself has pointed me to three times in the last century and a half in which temperature rose at that rate. Only during the last of those times was CO2 rising.
Your null is a farce, a sad little attempt to derail the scientific method. And for what, Dana, for what?
=================
I read your article, and it simply doesn’t make a viable case. Being “overwhelmingly supported” simply doesn’t change the basic rules of science…science is *not* majority rule, thank you very much.
I think you’re making a very creative, but ultimately disingenuous, end-run around the scientific method. Unable to actually come up with a falsifiable hypothesis yourself, you’re insisting that *your* hypothesis should be the default, and that the burden of proof be shifted to some other competing hypothesis. It’s a particularly clever argument, but not a very compelling one.
I’ll put it to you another way, imagine, for a moment, that we were back in say, 1976, when there wasn’t a stack of papers you call “evidence” for anthropogenic CO2 causing global warming. What would your falsifiable hypothesis have been *before* you got your stack of “evidence”?
So Jere, you think scientists should continue trying to prove that the Earth isn’t flat, that it revolves around the Sun, that matter is made of atoms, and so on?
The anthropogenic global warming theory is not my theory, it’s the theory that’s overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence.
Before the supporting evidence exists, the null hypothesis is that the warming is caused by known natural forcings. Now that the evidence clearly shows the natural forcings can’t account for the warming and anthropogenic forcings can, the null hypothesis changes. Just like the null hypothesis is no longer “the Earth is the center of the universe”. Science evolves, Jere.
Dana, you are sadly, but explicitly, mistaken. Natural processes can produce the warming seen and we do not know that CO2 can do so.
=======================
Dana, you’re conflating things that we can actually test repeatably (the spherical shape of the earth can be directly observed), with predictions regarding a trace gas on a complex system. That’s hardly fair.
Should we continue trying to prove that a low-fat diet is good for you? Yes, of course (mostly because, it actually isn’t and someone needs to start realizing that). Diet and nutrition is a terribly complex subject, not easily observed and experimented on like noting that matter is made out of atoms.
All that being said, you scrupulously avoided making any statement of a falsifiable hypothesis. Even if it isn’t *your* hypothesis, can you parrot back the falsifiable hypothesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming from someone else?
Modeling that shows “natural forcings can’t account for the warming” is simply that -> modeling. It’s not a statement of a falsifiable hypothesis, period, and the null hypothesis doesn’t simply change because you’ve built a model, or a thousand models, that behave in the way that you’ve programmed them.
Again, a very clever argument to make, Dana, but ultimately, one that fails.
I already gave you the falsifiable hypothesis – that human GHG emissions are driving global warming.
“I already gave you the falsifiable hypothesis – that human GHG emissions are driving global warming.”
So what observations (past, present or future) would falsify that hypothesis? Be specific.
If the upper atmosphere weren’t cooling (taking ozone effects on the stratospheric temperature into account).
If the diurnal temperature range weren’t decreasing.
If higher latitudes weren’t warming fastest.
If the planet weren’t warming in response to increasing GHGs.
If ocean heat content weren’t increasing.
There’s a very long list of observational data which would be inconsistent with the AGW theory. Those are a few examples.
Fair enough. Assuming that any one of those would falsify your hypothesis, I think you’ve got some serious problems:
“If the ocean heat content weren’t increasing.”
What with the “missing heat” problem mentioned by various warmists, I think that’s probably your achilles heel out of all of them. However, wouldn’t ocean heat content increase during a natural warming period?
“If the upper atmosphere weren’t cooling”
We know it cools and heats naturally -> how long would it not have to cool to falsify your hypothesis? Furthermore, wouldn’t natural warming also cool the upper atmosphere?
“If the diurnal temperature range weren’t decreasing”
We know that diurnal temperature range changes all the time -> in what areas, and for how long would diurnal temperature range need to *increase* in order to falsify your hypothesis? Furthermore, wouldn’t natural warming also cool the upper atmosphere?
“If the higher latitudes weren’t warming fastest”
Wouldn’t natural warming also warm the higher latitudes the fastest? And *which* higher latitudes? We all know there is a massive difference between “weather” and “climate” -> if I could find a single city where the higher latitudes were warming slower, would that falsify your hypothesis?
“If the planet weren’t warming in response to increasing GHGs”
That’s an assertion, not a statement of an observation.
All in all, I think your list of observations isn’t all that convincing -> either they cannot distinguish between “natural” and anthropogenic CO2 based warming, *or*, as in the case of the “missing” ocean heat, we’ve already seen your theory falsified.
Here’s a ref on ocean heat content -> flat since 2004 it looks like:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
So, since “ocean heat content weren’t increasing”, we can now rest assured that your hypothesis has been falsified!
Or do you have a specific number of years that ocean heat content has to stay flat? 10 years? 20 years? 30 years? Feel free to be more specific in your statement of what observations will falsify your hypothesis.
Jere, if I had an infinite amount of free time, I would gladly answer all of your questions. But since I don’t, and they’ve all been answered in various Skeptical Science articles (many written by yours truly), I’ll suggest you peruse that site.
Give me a clue where on your site you discuss that volcanos forced the warming of the MWP.
================
The volcanic forcing contributed to the MWP. So did the solar forcing, and probably the thermohaline circulation. We haven’t discussed this in depth at SkS, but here’s a pretty good paper on the subject.
http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/tcrowley/crowley_science2000.pdf
I’ve read the Skeptical Science articles, Dana, and frankly, they’re *terribly* lacking. And I think if you were honest with yourself, you’d admit that you’ve got no inclination to try very hard to falsify the catastrophic AGW hypothesis. While your arguments are clever, they’re not an honest attempt to search for truth.
I do understand how important it is for you to change the null-hypothesis though -> without being able to establish that, to be truly skeptical, you’d have to attack a hypothesis that seems very near and dear to you.
Anyway, thank you for the discussion, and I hope I’ve given you the opportunity to at least try to understand a perspective that differs from your own.
You are of course entitled to your own opinion (wrong as it might be), Jere. But I suggest before criticizing me, or the quality of the commentary at SkS, you look in the mirror first.
Dana, volcanic forcing cools the earth by raising its albedo. Did you read past the abstract? Why do I have the feeling that you are terribly confused?
=============
Well Dana, I’m actually quite good at realizing when I’m wrong…I’ve been lucky enough to have had several revelations during my life where I finally realized just how in error I was (gays in the military and the evil of carbohydrates being two notable ones). So, yeah, I’ve got a proven track record of being skeptical of even my own most closely held ideals.
I hope that after the next ten or twenty years continue cooling, while CO2 continues rising, that you take the opportunity to revisit your own very deeply held beliefs. But that’s your life, not mine :)
Gee, thanks Kim. Except there was reduced volcanic activity during the MWP.
Jere, I hope as the planet continues to warm, you will realize the error in your thinking and start supporting carbon emissions reduction efforts.
@Dana:
Actually, funny that you mention it, but actually, I do hope the planet continues to warm! I’m actually quite concerned about the problems with global cooling, and if I believed that CO2 emissions helped warm the planet, I’d be doing more to increase them.
Which, brings us to the second problem with the whole “human sourced CO2 causes global warming” trope -> what if you believe warming is a *good* thing? You can certainly believe that CO2 is a GHG, human CO2 is increasing average temperatures, *and* that this increase will benefit humanity and the planet with more plant life, better crops, and a more prosperous and healthy world.
Now, I know about all the various studies showing this animal will go extinct, or this disease will become more prevalent, or whatever particular horror story one can make up, but let’s face it, whether or not the effects of an increase in average global temperature will be good or bad are debatable.
Anyway, on the other hand, if CO2 keeps going up, and global average temperature keeps going up, and say, 30% of humanity is killed off by monster typhoons, floods, fires, droughts, sea level rise, etc, in the next 20 years, I’ll be more amenable to your point of view :)
Ah, Dana, it’s good to see you back of your assertion at 2:25 PM: “The Medieaval Warm Period, for example, was mainly caused by solar and volcanic forcings”.
=================
“what if you believe warming is a *good* thing?”
Then you should go live in a desert.
I’m glad to hear it will only take billions of deaths to change your mind. And I’m glad most people understand the concept of risk management.
“Then you should go live in a desert.”
Except a desert is defined by precipitation, not temperature, and we’re supposed to believe that more warming means more precipitation :)
“And I’m glad most people understand the concept of risk management.”
Again, see my comments about the precautionary principle and how it’s application towards diet and nutrition has caused immeasurable harm. Risk management is tough to do when you’re just making wild guesses about how bad something is going to be :)
Dana,
Show me one peer-reviewed paper which proves that AMO nor PDO can’t cause any short term turbulence (like in 1970-2000) in global surface temperature anomaly?
As I see it, you SkS folks (any many others) like to see the trends since 1970 completely man caused and a representative of the effective warming speed of the planet. Yet still, its only surface temperature, which is known to have large turbulence.
You should also be able to explain the missing heat, which as been currently found nowhere.
I completely agree on many of the posters here who have been arguing with Dana, I find almost no single article from SkS which wouldn’t misenterpret or cherry pick.
Dana,
All skeptics are looking for is a standard that is appropriate for people claiming the science settled and who want many many billions per year to sustain the settlement.
Right now, of course, climate science consensus is operating under the ‘because I said so’ standard.
By the way you are driving more people to dkeptical positions with your writing. Keep up the god work.
That figure gives some much neededperspective indeed, thanks!
Thanks Bart, I thought so. I think I feel another Skeptical Science post coming on. So many ‘skeptic’ misunderstandings, so little time…
I am already agog with anticipation….
But please keep posting here too. You are the sceptic’s best ally.
At least I have become more skeptical reading his articles (not that I alwady wasnt skeptical). So you are speaking the truth here…
Thanks for an excellent illustration of my point.
Dana – another satisfied sceptical customer. You the girl!
Sorry, the IPCC seems like voodoo science to me. Where’s the beef? I mean, where’s the warming?
Seriously, the IPCC has underestimated the influence of natural cycles, primarily by ignoring what is not understood. Their attribution of ‘very likely’ is not supported, nor all the king’s men nor all the king’s horses can support it.
============
If an engineer made the claim that his new radar would “very likely” detect an incoming missile without a direct calculation he would very likely lose the contract.
It seem overly coincidental hower, that the IPCC conclusions that were found in error were the ones that we the most catastrophic. glaciers, hurricanes, rain forests, oh my.
of the hundres of predictions the IPCC madem, what are the odds that the most catastrophic ones would be the ones that were wrong? That they hadn’t been peer reviewed? That they were from a WWF pamphlet?
It is 99.999% likely this was not an accident, that there is someone with authority above the reviewers, that inserted these predictions, that has not been identified, and the process still remains uncorrected.
For example, in Cancun the summary said that IPCC4 said “AGW was incontrovertable” when IPCC4 actually said “AGW was highly likely”. The problem remains. There is rot at the top of the IPCC. The evidence for this is incontrovertable.
Being a retired high school chem/physics teacher, I always considered my position to be one from which purpose and procedure of science should be conveyed. The purpose of anyone in education or research should not be to benefit oneself. Implicit in the warnings of former President Eisenhower, it seems that some of the scientific community has morphed itself into a political personality; that is, is is more concerned about winning and maintaining than serving.
What concerns me even more than ‘hide the decline’ is something I have never seen mentioned. If there was a desire to serve the public and not their own status, those involved would have done everything possible to present to the public the most accurate of information. Instead of fighting with obvious scorn to not allow documentation to get in the hands of someone with superior ability in statistical analysis such as Steve McIntyre, scientists with honesty and integrity would have fully engaged his assistance.
We teach that the first and greatest critic should be oneself. That is what it is all about. Regardless of what argument in semantics is made, too many have shown themselves to be of too little substance.
Be assured that many think like I do. Also be assured that in minds of many science in general has been at least temporarily tarnished.
Mann et al could be dead right on the money regarding climate change, and it wouldn’t make their behavior and overall methodology any less disturbing. McIntrye is right, it is crystal clear that the inner cadre of climate scientists have an agenda- to prove AGW. In and of itself, that’s not a big deal, the problem is that a culture has developed between this small group of scientists and the politicians and politician/scientists theyve been working hand in glove with at the IPCC. Errors that produce the wrong effect are spotted instantly, those that reinforce the preconceived notion are missed, because they provide the ‘correct’ result. Again, this isn’t unusual. What is unusual is that there would appear to be no devil’s advocates on hand pulling the other directions. The thumb of expectation is strictly on one side of the scale.
Kim, Feb 24, 2011, 2:16,2:29
“Global Cooling …etc… But cooling we surely are… ”
Cooling? Really? Okay I will assume you are pleading ignorance and have not yet researched this topic so see the link below and tell me which of the 10 (that’s right, 10!) major temperature indices, reanalysis datasets and measurements of the lower troposphere show that we are cooling without cherry picking?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Monckton-Myth-2-Temperature-records-trends-El-Nino.html
Jim Owen | February 24, 2011 at 2:40 pm | Reply
“I have never found any page on skepticalscience.com that doesn’t misrepresent, in some way, what it purports to show. ”
Okay Jim,
how did I misrepresent in the article mentioned above? Since you’re so inclined to open your mouth why don’t you be specific and not ad hom every person who ever wrote for SKS.
I’m not hindcasting fella, I’m forecasting.
=================
They will be the last to know.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Monckton-Myth-2-Temperature-records-trends-El-Nino.html
Jim Owen | February 24, 2011 at 2:40 pm | Reply
“I have never found any page on skepticalscience.com that doesn’t misrepresent, in some way, what it purports to show. ”
Okay Jim,
how did I misrepresent in the article mentioned above? Since you’re so inclined to open your mouth why don’t you be specific and not ad hom every person who ever wrote for SKS.
First – I don’t think you know exactly what ad hom means. If I ever decide to do to you what you think I’ve done, I suspect you’ll wish you’d never heard of me. I’m mostly pretty laid back, but I can definitely be otherwise.
Secondly –
it is evident that the oceans are indeed accumulating heat thereby contributing to global sea level rise.
The oceans are indeed NOT accumulating heat. They “have” accumulated heat in the past, but note the last 5 years.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content55-07.png
And third –
contributing to global sea level rise is an interesting phrase considering that the rate of sea level rise has been reduced for the last several (5?) years.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global.jpg
And finally – you’re no sceptic. Or skeptic, either.
That’s your first paragraph – and not all of it, at that. . Be glad that’s all you’ll be getting from me. For my part this is an exercise in futility.
BTW – “the warmest year on record” – is true only if you use GISS or NOAA numbers. And then only by 0.01 degC. The error bars on that are 0.07 degC, which negates the effect. 1998 or 2005 were the warmest by most other standards. Which means it’s been 13 years of no statistically significant warming.
You are incorrect, Jim. Eyeballing a graph is not a valid method of data analysis.
Pielke Sr. had a useful blog post on the subject of ARGO ocean heat content, showing a preliminary estimate of 0.255 Wm-2 increase in OHC since 2005. Of course 5 years of data is far too small to draw any conclusions, but saying the oceans have no accumulated heat over the past 5 years is factually wrong.
Those numbers are preliminary and the deep numbers are speculative. And wow, now you’ve noted Kevin Trenberth’s missing heat. Whatcha gonna do about it?
===========
Yes, I know about Pielke’s post. But you’re not answering the link I sent you either. And as kim said……
As for data analysis, I was doing that before you were out of diapers. Teach your grandmother to suck eggs.
If you look any reasonable datasets, like HadCrut, RSS or UAH, you see no warming in last 13 years.
If you use manipulated datasets (like GISS and NCDC) you will see warming. But thats only due to the mathetmatical excercises and interpolations on filling ‘missing data’ (and also DELETING SST data!). You can’t actually compare (nor average) those two datasets vs anything.
When the e-mails first came out it was suspected by skeptics that the whole block was a hoax, and the first point of evidence was the Hide the Decline e-mail. It was so ridiculous that people didn’t believe it was actually done.
Now people are defending the use of a misleading graph, appending temperatures to the end from 1980 and Briffa from 1960 to hide the decline.
The only remaining question technically, is does hide the decline refer to cutting off Briffa after 1960 specifically, or the general use of Mike’s Nature trick?
as i understood the email: you have a problem when computing running averages or similar smoothing when you come to the endpoints. so just cutting off the data at 1960 wasn’t enough. they had to use the post 1960 instrument data to fill in the tail of the average for the pre 1960 tree data, or the curve would not have fit smoothly. it would have been obvious to the eye that something was wrong, prompting people to go digging into the numbers.
What’s all the hubbub about? Temperatures did decline pretty dramatically for 2+ decades after 1960. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad proxy after all. Either way, the tree-mometer types didn’t like what it was telling them so they hid the decline.
The bigger scandal is still being uncovered and that’s the torturing of recent data and out and out revision of historical data to make the temperature record even hint at matching the predictions of the least outrageous model runs.
You know, I’m not sure why, but for some reason I expected better comments here than say at WUWT or Motl’s blog. I’m kind of disappointed that the difference is pretty marginal. Same old run-of-the mill conspiracy theories and baseless accusations of fraud.
As Bart said, so much for bridge building.
I’ve scanned the emails briefly. The point that stuck in my mind is that the warming from 1910-1940 is of equal magnitude to the warming of 1970-2000.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
This suggests the possibility that the two events have a similar cause. The IPCC agrees the first warming was not AGW. Is there absolutely zero chance that the second warming was also not AGW? Not even the IPCC claims that.
Thus, the first step in reconciliation is for the parties to admit what is already known. That there is a possibility that the second warming is not due to AGW. What is in dispute is the degree of certainty.
Don’t tell Dana(I already have and it didn’t sink in) that there is a third span in the 19th Century with the same rate of temperature rise as the 1910-1940 and the 1970-2000 spans. Only one of these times had significant anthropogenic CO2. It’s actually very nice eveidence that natural cycles are capable of all three temperature rises and some evidence that anthropogenic CO2 has small effect. And who told me about these similar rates of temperature rise? Why Phil Jones himself in an interview with Roger Harrabin.
I’ve mentioned this to Dana before, and he was non-responsive to the point. Where’s my 2X4?
=================
That’s not accurate. Anthropogenic GHG emissions certainly weren’t nearly as large in the early 20th century as they are now, but they weren’t zero, either. The early 20th century warming was partly ‘natural’ (most of ‘natural’ being solar), and partly anthropogenic.
The warming over the last half-century has been almost entirely anthropogenic. Is there a possibility that the majority of this warming was from a non-anthropogenic source? Sure, but the probability is extremely slim. Realistically, well under 5%.
Hello Dana
Joe here
Care to show your working for that probability calculation?
Y’know with numbers and statistics and stuff like that.
I know how to work out odds on a racecourse or a casino, but just wonder how you boffin types do it for things like this.
It must be ever so clever. Please share.
Sure, glad to do it. It will have to wait til morning though. It was a very rough estimate, but there’s reasoning behind it.
Hey Dana,
You wouldn’t happen to be related to another Dana who gave a damning book review to “The Hockey Stick Illusion” over at Amazon.com, without actually having read word one of the book, would you? There is something very familiar in your style of argument.
Just Askin’.
As promised, here’s the calculation. I did a similar calculation at SkS, so if you want to see my sources, go here (though the ad hom attacks on SkS here are making me think it’s a waste of time to provide references):
We know the CO2 radiative forcing is about 1.7 Wm-2 to high accuracy. I don’t think anybody disputes this (I wrote another article discussing how we know that too). And the surface temperature change is the forcing multiplied by the climate sensitivity parameter.
We know we’ve seen 0.8°C surface warming so far. And we know that about 0.4 Wm-2 has gone into the oceans. So that leaves a 1.3 Wm-2 forcing, which if ‘natural’ causes are the dominant factor in the associated warming (note that I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt by looking at the past several centuries, not just the past 40 years), could have caused no more than half the warming (0.4°C).
So if CO2 only caused half the warming, the climate sensitivity parameter is 0.4/1.3 = 0.31 Wm-2K-1. This corresponds to 1.14°C for a doubling of CO2. If the climate sensitivity is any higher, CO2 has been the dominant cause of the warming over the past century. If you look at studies on the climate sensitivity probability distribution, like Roe and Baker or Annan and Hargreaves (I’m publishing an article on SkS this morning discussing these, so visit the site if you want further details), the probability that sensitivity is below 1.5°C for 2xCO2 is almost zero.
So really, my giving you up to a 5% probability that the warming isn’t being driven by CO2 was extremely generous. I didn’t even focus on the past 40 years, over which natural forcings have been just about zero, and I gave you a lot higher probability on low climate sensitivity than is really realistic. But since the IPCC watered down its confidence at “very likely” (90+%), I decided to be generous and give you up to 5% probability.
I’ll try to make this not too simple. If the cooling from 1940-1970 was from aerosols then climate sensitivity to CO2 might be high enough to be worried about. If it was from natural cycles then climate sensitivity to CO2 is low. We do not know the answer to that question and cannot figure it out in hindsight.
My point, that there have been three periods approximately 30 years long, in the last century and a half, in which the rate of temperature rise was the same as it was from 1970-2000 shows that the recent coolings and warmings are from natural cycles. In neither of the two previous episodes of warming, or the intervening cooling spans, were aerosols or CO2 of much effect.
And how do you explain the relative flatness of the last ten years?
You are fooling yourself with your numbers in the above comment. Your technique is transparent.
===============
Interesting. Lots of numbers, but no actual answer to the question that Joe asked.
He said
‘Care to show your working for that probability calculation?’
and after three and a half paras of waffle, you state
‘If you look at studies on the climate sensitivity probability distribution, like Roe and Baker or Annan and Hargreaves (I’m publishing an article on SkS this morning discussing these, so visit the site if you want further details), the probability that sensitivity is below 1.5°C for 2xCO2 is almost zero’
In other words – the answer you seek is in another paper.
Not mega helpful, but might have fooled the unwary whose eyes would glaze over by para three.
Please keep posting. You are the sceptics best friend.
LOL!
I’m sorry, but this all too common “skeptic” allergy to science always cracks me up. Like some random yahoo commenting on some random blog’s ignorant “common sense” trumps actual scientific research by actual climate scientists.
This concept that it’s a bad thing to actually reference peer-reviewed climate science research when discussing climate science is somehow a bad thing – it’s like you’re living in some bizarro world where janitors can perform open heart surgery.
And then of course at the end you throw in your tired, childish, wasn’t funny the first 20 times you said it, petty insult, as though it validates your complete and utter ignorance on the subject.
Pathetic.
I wasn’t objecting to your citation of another paper. That is fair enough. I was objecting to your three and a half paras of irrelevant waffle beforehand.
And even the paper you cite doesn’t actually compute the probability that you claim.
And I have no ‘allergy’ to science. I even have two degrees in a ‘hard science’ subject. I have considerable aversion to ‘climate science’ since whatever it does, it doesn’t seem very much like real science to me. The same is true of many other contributors to this site (see Denizens thread).
And that explains why your mantra when challenged about anything
they are climate scientist and they are dead clever and you guys had just better believe what they say’
does not gain much traction here.
Keep them coming.
Dana
radiative forcing is about 1.7 Wm-2 ….surface temperature change is the forcing multiplied by the climate sensitivity parameter.
Taking into account clouds, feedbacks, do we even know the sign of the climate sensitivity parameter, let alone the size?
we know that about 0.4 Wm-2 has gone into the oceans
Has this been measured?
[the 1910-1940 warning was mostly solar-driven]
How do we know this?
“Taking into account clouds, feedbacks, do we even know the sign of the climate sensitivity parameter, let alone the size?”
Yes. The sensitivity parameter is positive, even if the net feedback is negative. Otherwise increasing CO2 would cause the planet to cool – obviously not true.
There’s 95% probability that the climate sensitivity is between 1.5 and 4.5°C for 2xCO2.
“Has this [0.4 W/m2 into oceans] been measured?”
Yes. That particular value I got from Schwartz 2010, as I discussed here.
“How do we know [early 20th century warming was mostly solar driven]?”
I wrote about this here. It’s from radiative forcing measurements.
“The warming over the last half-century has been almost entirely anthropogenic.”
— Dana
You’ve restated the warmageddon hypothesis as if it were an established scientific fact, which it most assuredly is not.
If it was, you would be able to state with precision what the globe’s UHI adjusted average global temperature was for every 20th century year in global warming/climate change question. You’d also be able tell everyone the precise temperature impact of each and every natural warming/cooling agent, along with the precise impact of each and every anthropogenic warming/cooling agent.
Warmageddon adherents are unable to do that. Instead, they are compelled to rely upon incredibly primitive climate models, tree ring proxies, data “massage” and other tea-leaf-reading-like measures to make their neo-scientology prophesies.
If you’re going to offer up a defense of the Hockey Stick Team’s pseudo-science, assuming facts not yet in evidence is most unpersuasive.
Hi Dana,
Just a basic question :
How do you explain that early 20th century warming rate, 0,15°C per decade observed between 1910 and 1940, is exactly the same as the one obsered between 1970 and 2000, whereas fossile fuels consumption (and subsequent anthropogenic CO2 emissions) have been multiplied by 5 in the mean time ?
The early century warming trend was similar because there were also natural forcings in play. There was about 0.2°C each from solar and CO2. And it was also a period of low volcanic activity.
C’mon, let’s be honest here -> you simply cannot definitively attribute global average warming contributions with that kind of accuracy. Error bars matter, dear Dana, and your confidence in this kind of modeled result is, to be generous, a bit unfounded.
Put more bluntly, though, we’ve been told that CAGW is something that is “unprecedented” -> seeing that we’ve already lived through periods with similar rates of warming, why do we continue to hear that trope? Now, I understand there is a semantic argument on the side of CAGW folk, the clever, yet unconvincing, “the *component* of warming due to anthropogenic CO2 is unprecedented, even if we’ve seem *overall* warming rates like this in the past”. What I haven’t seen is any sort of admission that CO2 warming has an upper limit, can and is overwhelmed by other natural forces, and that the calculations on attribution are *models*, not *measurements*. There is no Anthropogenic-CO2-warming-o-mometer, or Solar-warming-o-mometer that you can stick outside and get a reading from. Your results are the construction of assumption upon assumption upon assumption, all carefully crafted and tweaked to recreate some subset of past history when run backwards. While interesting, this isn’t science, much less skeptical science.
Neal Stephenson wrote about two types of people, neo-phobes and neo-philes. Neo-phobes would generally get exposed to one thing, and never let it go -> they were the ultimate “conservatives”, as it were, although it really didn’t matter if that first exposure was a “liberal” or “conservative” idea: whatever came first, they would latch onto, and be very fearful of letting go. Neo-philes, on the other hand were able to let go of beliefs they may have held for a long time, and would try new things, think new ideas, and perhaps even establish a new paradigm that future neo-phobes would latch onto one day.
It was the relationship between the two that simultaneously kept society stable (neo-phobes), and society evolving (neo-philes).
Dear Dana, with all due respect, and nothing but love in my heart for you, you’re a neo-phobe.
My arguments are based on empirical evidence and physics.
Your arguments are based on “common sense” and ad hominems.
’nuff said.
Again, my dear Dana, I think you misunderstand yourself. A model is *not* empirical evidence, and simply by including some physics equations into the model, along with a multitude of fudge factors and assumptions does *not* make it any more real.
As for ad hominem, I think you also misunderstand the term. I’m not saying you’re wrong because you’re a neo-phobe (nor do I mean that as an insult, we need both neo-phobes and neo-philes for society to work efficiently), I’m saying you’re wrong because your logic is flawed, your assumptions unwarranted, and your conflation of modeling output with empiricism is mistaken. By asserting you’re a neo-phobe, I simply identify the reason that your mind is closed on this matter.
Jere, cut the crap. I’m not your dear, and if you can’t comprehend the difference between fundamental physics and a climate model, that’s not my problem. I’m not going to waste any more time trying to explain it to you, because clearly you’re not interested in learning anything.
Dear Dana, calm yourself. I don’t mean to be possessive by noting how dear you are. Your anger is unbecoming and unwarranted, and your reflection of the critique against your misunderstanding the difference between a climate model and fundamental physics is really quite juvenile.
The fact of the matter, dear Dana, is that I’ve hit a nerve -> you can recognize the neo-phobe inside of you, and by exposing that otherwise ignored facet of your feelings, you’ve become uncomfortable. I accept that. Now your challenge is to overcome the discomfort you have with learning new ideas contrary to your old ones, so that you can truly understand (even if you don’t accept), the truth.
The problem with saying something is 90% probable, or any other number, is that any such calculation is based on the probability distribution of the underlying data. Most statistical techniques assume the distribution results from random events, such as a coin toss. However, weather is not random, it is chaotic. The probability distribution of weather over time is climate – a chaotic time series.
One of the main criticisms of modern climate science is that the results are not statistically sound. That the confidence levels result from the misuse of statistical techniques designed for random events that have been misapplied to chaotic events. Since applying the wrong numerical technique to data often provides the wrong answer, one cannot be confident in the confidence levels.
“Is there a possibility that the majority of this warming was from a non-anthropogenic source? Sure, but the probability is extremely slim. Realistically, well under 5%.”
I believe this statement shows that there is room for reconcilliation. The difference in positions is simply a matter of confidence levels.
Much of the analysis I’ve seen assumes linear response to the climate forcings. This is not likely in a chaotic time series. Also, there is an assumption in much of the work that the law of large numbers applies. That the concept of long term average has meaning. Again, not likely for a chaotic time series.
As such, I am not confident in the 95% confident level stated.
I explained the reasoning behind the confidence level in this comment. As I showed, 95% is actually very conservative, and giving you a 5% chance is very generous.
Hi Dana
Perhaps you know this already, Luboš Motl has decided to do a number on you.
I think for the sake of your reputation you should go to his site and defend yourself.
However be carefu, l as he is a real physicist and has an aversion to crackpotery.
http://motls.blogspot.com/
Right. He’s a “real physicist” who is convinced that string theory absolutely must be right, because it is so mathematically beautiful. I got to know his reasoning in the usenet “string theory wars” around 2000 and the following years. If anybody asked what it would take to just conceivably falsify string theory, he or she got blank incomprehension from the guy.
The poster child for a skeptical scientist, he’s not. My personal impression is that he’s not that big on that “empirical evidence” thing.
‘Believes theory must be absolutely right’
‘Not big on empirical evidence’
‘Blank incomprehension about falsification’
===> He is a Climatologist!!!!
I claim my £50.
Latimer, you’re not paying attention. Read what you’re replying to.
Thanks. I did. I was making a general point.
As I only have a pushbike as my means of transport, and have no interest in cars, I do not read Clarkson. James May can be quite entertaining however.
BTW, if you like Jeremy Clarkson’s writing, you’ll enjoy Motl’s.
And if you enjoy Motl’s, then you’ll love Glenn Beck’s writing! They’re both insulting, conspiratorial, don’t allow opposing views, and have about the same understanding of climate science.
From the stable of Real Climate and their chums then?
Or more like ‘Komment Macht Frei’ at the Guardian?
And who is this Glenn Beck character anyway?
Motl is deadly dull really.
Thanks for the link, Bryan -> very informative and detailed rebuttal to our dear Dana!
I full expect none of the arguments will shake Dana’s faith, however. Neo-phobes have a very difficult time accepting, or even acknowledging new ideas that contradict the old ones they’ve latched on to.
Hi Bryan. Yes I did see Motl’s error-riddled response to my article. And I did try to “defend myself” by pointing out just one of the errors in the blog comments. Motl immediately started backtracking, then after just 4 very polite comments, he permanently banned me from commenting on his site. It was quite cowardly, and proved that Motl is actually the posterboy for crackpottery.
Since he was too scared to allow me to comment on his turf, I was forced to respond on Skeptical Science.
Again, your response really isn’t that convincing. When you say something like:
“The supposedly ‘missing hot spot’ can mean two things. It could mean the planet is not warming, but we have many other lines of evidence that the planet has warmed over the past 30 years. The other thing this could mean is that the hot spot is devilishly difficult to pin down.”
That’s simply a false dichotomy. The ‘missing hot spot’ can also mean that the models which suppose that CO2 is a significant driver are simply wrong. Calling data “devilishly difficult to pin down” is a cop out, an attempt to survive a test of falsifiability that is quite ingenious, but fatally flawed.
Dear Dana, you do realize that your clever arguments are clever, not honest, right?
“That’s simply a false dichotomy. The ‘missing hot spot’ can also mean that the models which suppose that CO2 is a significant driver are simply wrong.”
No, it can’t. Do you have a learning disability or something? I spelled it out in the article. The ‘hot spot’ has nothing to do with CO2.
Please either read the article, learn some physics, or preferably just keep your mouth shut and ignorant opinions to yourself, sweet cheeks.
Good to see you back, Dana.
It is submissions like this that keep you as the sceptic’s best friend. Especially those who look not only at the arguments, but the way in which they are presented. There is plenty of evidence from personal testimony here that hectoring, bullying and insulting works no better to persuade in the blogosphere than it does in the school playground.
Keep them coming!
Gotta agree with Alder here, dear Dana. Your desperation is showing. Claiming that “the ‘hot spot’ has nothing do to with CO2”, while simultaneously saying that “the hot spot is devilishly hard to pin down” is a bit of cognitive dissonance on your part, isn’t it?
Why call it “devilishly hard to pin down”? Because it’s an important part of validating the models which propose CO2 is a primary driver. Why claim, contrary to that, that it has “nothing to do with CO2”? Why, because once we admit that the hot spot isn’t “devilishly hard to pin down”, and it *just isn’t there*, we need to defend our neo-phobe belief system.
I’ll certainly admit ignorance in a great variety of things, dear Dana, but none of that prevents me from spotting your clever, yet failed arguments.
@curryja:
Is it unfair to say that your decision to comment on this YouTube video is tied to your recent collaboration with Muller on BEST- e.g. you recently became aware of the video because of more interaction with Muller on BEST, or discussed the matter with Muller and found the video as a representation of his views?
Thanks.
I picked up youtube link to Muller’s video from a blog (don’t remember which one.) I paid attention to this video because of the respect that I have developed for Muller during the course of the BEST project.
HIDE THE DECLINE
I concur with his conclusion regarding Climategate completely that I have written the text for part of his presentation as follows. I was also one of those who were deceived by the “hide-the-decline” graph a decade ago.
Video presentation by Prof Richard Muller
Director of the Berkeley Earth Project
http://bit.ly/eGzSuJ
What about the Climategate?
The scientists have now been exonerated, acquitted, not guilty.
They did get a wrist slap.
They deceived the public, and they deceived other scientists, but they did nothing that was immoral, illegal, or anything like that.
What did they do to deceive the public?
This is in the report. This is in the review, not the charts.
But these are the data as they published it on the cover of the World Meteorological Organization magazine:
Plot 1. http://bit.ly/fmHLX3
These are the data that many of my fellow scientists at Berkeley used.
They say, hello, you know the public may not understand graphs, but I do.
Look at this. Here is the temperature for the last thousand years going all over the place. It is not actually temperature but they actually measured tree rings, corals, that is a proxy for temperature; goes all over the place.
Look what happened recently: Zoom! That is clear and incontrovertible. The public may not understand this so I have to now lend my prestige to this. I am a professor of Physics and I will now go and tell people global warming is clear and incontrovertible because I have seen the actual data [Plot 1] and it is. Unfortunately, a lot of my colleagues have behaved in this way.
In their paper, if you dig into it, they said they did something with the data from 1961 onwards. They removed it and replaced it with temperature data. So some of the people who read these papers asked to see the data; they refused to send it to them, the original raw data. They used the Freedom Of Information Act. The freedom of information act officer, on the advice of the scientist, would not release the data.
Then the data came out. They weren’t hacked like a lot of people say. Most people who know this business believe they were leaked by one of the member of the team who was really upset with them.
So I now can show you what the data that they refuse to release, the original data before they did anything. What they did was, and there is a quote. A quote came out on the emails, these leaked emails that said, let’s use Mike’s trick “Hide The Decline.” That is the word. Let us use Mike’s trick “Hide The Decline.” Mike is Michael Mann, he said, “trick” just means mathematical trick. That is all. Now, my response is, I am not worried about the word trick. I am worried about the decline. What do you mean hide the decline?
Let me show you this. Now we have the data. Now it has been released. This is what it is.
Plot 2. http://bit.ly/hmBIcs
That is the raw data, as any Berkeley scientist would have published it. It would have said, okay, we have had the medieval warming, ice age, and now we have global warming. And there is some disagreement, but this disagreement is all over the place and that just shows the technique is not completely reliable.
What they did is, they took the data from 1961 onwards, this peak, and erased it. What is the justification for erasing it? The fact that it went down. And we know the temperature is going up. Therefore, it was unreliable. Is this unreliable [pre instrument data]? No. How do we know? We don’t know, but [hand waving]. This [post 1961 unreliability] is probably some human effect. The justification would not have survived pear-review in any journal that I am willing to publish it. But they had it well hidden and they erased that and they replaced it with temperature going up.
Let me show you how cleverly this was done. Get back to this plot [Plot 1]. There it is. They added the same temperature data to three different plots giving the illusion that there are three different sets going up. And they smoothed it, because temperature changes smoothly. If they had not smoothed it, you might have noticed, wait a minute, what is the change going right there? Why is it abruptly different? You don’t notice that because it is smooth. Smoothing is legitimate in their mind, because temperature change is not discontinuous.
So that is what they did, and what is the result in my mind? Quite frankly, as a scientist, I now have a list of people whose paper I wouldn’t read any more. You are not allowed to do this in science. This is not up to our standards.
I get infuriated with colleagues of mine who say, “well you know it is a human field, you make mistakes.” When I showed them this, they say, “no, that is not acceptable.”
Now, here is part of the problem. The temperature I showed you before, this one
Plot 3: http://bit.ly/ewYmxR
Of the three groups I picked the one I trusted the most. Which group was this? Ya, the group that hide the decline.
Jim Hansen predicts things ahead of time. We have a group here that feels it is legitimate to hide things. This is why I am leading a study to redo all this in a wholly transparent way.
I disagree.
The public was intentionally deceived. Public funds paid for the deception.
The pawns who did this received a “slap on the wrist.”
The Watergate burglars also got a “slap on the wrist.”
The one who directed the Watergate affair was punished.
The one(s) who directed and channelled public funds for the Climategate affair have not even been identified !
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
On Thursday evening I recommended this thread to around five hundred students at Imperial College in London – more on that on Bishop Hill later this weekend. This got me thinking what the five minute summary would be. Here’s mine.
Hiding The Decline (HTD) was a turd. Judith Curry, Professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, and Richard Muller, Professor of Physics at Berkeley, are joined in this opinion by many, including Jonathan Jones, Professor of Physics at Oxford:
But HTD was only one of twelve issues with the Hockey Stick that have become clear since Climategate. One of the others, the hiding of adverse verification statistics, was addressed by Dr. Pat Frank, a research chemist, on Climate Audit five days ago:
The people responsible for Hide The Decline in the most famous variant of the Hockey Stick, for the third assessment report of the UN IPCC, were Michael Mann and Keith Briffa, John Overpeck and the whole ‘Hockey Team’. A wide range of opinion has been expressed about the people responsible, whether they should:
1. Accept that HTD was not best practice
2. Apologise
3. Be disgraced
4. Be excluded from the IPCC
5. Be ejected from climate science.
Pat Frank expressed the final point of view on Climate Audit a week ago:
The present author has taken this view since Climategate, for example on 27 Nov 2009:
Resolution of the differences expressed isn’t going to be easy.
It has always been the express mission of the IPCC to find ‘man’ at fault for any real or concieved global warming.
“The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change”
How can one believe anything that comes out of the IPCC. A truely un-biased IPCC mission statement would not include the words “humna-induced”.
Well Robert, that group was created because a fair number of researchers were getting the idea that maybe changing the thermodynamics properties of our planet might cause some problems.
Your comment is just like this whole topic. Some people don’t like the message they are hearing; so, they interpret the meaning of some words in the most damning way from an ad hominem standpoint, regardless of the original intent or meaning. Then they tell themselves they don’t have to worry about the message because it was told to them by bad people.
Well said, Chris. It’s pretty clear that most of the commenters here think climate science is just a political game, and that they can “beat” the laws of physics with semantics arguments.
Which laws of physics are you referring to? Sounds like non sequitur to me.
Dana—I disagree with your conclusion. I would suggest that most of the readers here actually accept that additional GHG’s will warm the planet somewhat, but do not agree that it is something dire. When I read the IPCC AR4 report, I see concerns that can be dealt with through infrastructure management. What concerns do you have that can not be managed, much more easily than not having power?
Rob, acknowledging that the Earth has a greenhouse effect doesn’t mean that one doesn’t deny other aspects of fundamental physics.
“What concerns do you have that can not be managed, much more easily than not having power?”
Not having power? Strawman alert.
As for what concerns I have that can’t be managed, food and water shortages are a good start to a very long list (resulting from increased drought, particularly near the equator). It’s pretty hard to manage famines.
The problem, dear Dana, is that a global average increase in temperature gives you no knowledge into what the specific distribution of that average will be. You cannot say “we’ll have a water shortage here, and floods there” with any sort of confidence. *Weather* matters to famines, *climate* does not.
Simply put, there are a close to infinite number of temperature distributions that can happen across the globe, at *any* global average temperature. The *distribution* counts, and no theory of CAGW that has ever managed to nail down any useful predictions of that distribution.
Put another way, what is your prediction on food and water shortages? Where and when will they happen? And if they happen in some other distribution, will that falsify your hypothesis, or will you simply call it “devilishly” hard to get right? :)
Jere is exactly correct. We cannot say “we’ll have a water shortage here, and floods there” with any sort of confidence. This is exactly why advocating adaptation instead of mitigation is foolish. This is exactly why continuing on our current course without even moderating it the tiniest amount is foolish.
PDA – you can make predictions based on climate models with some confidence, but it’s true, specific regional changes are difficult to predict.
But you have hit on one major “skeptic” own goal – uncertainty is not our friend. “Skeptics” love to argue that uncertainty is too high to take action to reduce emissions, but the higher the uncertainty, the less we can rule out really, really bad consequences.
For example, Curry has previously argued that we can’t narrow down climate sensitivity any more than 0 to 10°C for 2xCO2 at a 95% confidence level. If that were true (which it’s not – not even close), and there was a 5% chance that doubling atmospheric CO2 will increase global temps 10°C, we would be incredibly stupid not to rapidly reduce emissions to avoid the possibility of this unquestionably catastrophic scenario.
Physics as yet doesn’t even give us the sign of the sensitivity of temperature to CO2 in overall climate. If it turns out to be negative, by curbing CO2 output we’d be freezing rather than cooking our own goose.
@ Dana, I think she said 0 – 10 C at the 90% confidence level. Probably just a typo on your part, since the 5% number you mention fits with the 90%…
@ Punksta “Physics as yet doesn’t even give us the sign of the sensitivity of temperature to CO2 in overall climate. If it turns out to be negative, by curbing CO2 output we’d be freezing rather than cooking our own goose.”
So, what you’re saying is that maybe without the cooling effect of our CO2 emissions over the last century+, we would have warmed even more from the other unspecified forcings.
I see. Quite an interesting concept, I must say…
@PDA – “This is exactly why continuing on our current course without even moderating it the tiniest amount is foolish.”
On the contrary, because we cannot predict the specific weather patterns for any particular global average temperature, there is no reason to believe that a higher global average temperature will have a more damaging distribution than a lower global average temperature. The details matter, and at this point, there is a dearth of specificity here. Put another way, if our CO2 emissions *were* causing an increase in average global temperature, but reducing them, and therefore average global temperature created a *more* damaging distribution of weather events, we’d be better off *not* doing anything different with CO2. While I appreciate the sentiment behind the precautionary principle, it is pernicious in its application when we don’t have enough information (see: the USDA food pyramid, and it’s “precaution” against fat, which has increased our carbohydrate intake and therefore the rate of the diseases of civilization).
rust – thanks. I couldn’t remember if Curry said 90% or 95% confidence on that range (frankly her numbers were pretty obviously arbitrary anyway). If she’s claiming there’s a 10% chance doubling CO2 will increase average temps 10°C, that is of course even worse and even more reason to curb emissions immediately.
Punksta, please take some time to learn what climate sensitivity is before making silly comments about it. Even if climate sensitivity is negative (which it’s not), increasing CO2 will still cause warming, unless sensitivity is massively negative (which it’s obviously not).
DANA
To see the beautiful evidence regarding man-made global warming, you don’t need to be a science graduate. You don’t need to be even a university graduate. What you need to be is just a high school graduate.
You high school or higher graduate, look at the following global mean temperature pattern.
http://bit.ly/ePQnJj
Don’t you see a cyclic pattern?
Does not a cyclic Patten preclude man made global warming?
Does not the pattern indicate global cooling until about 2030?
I know your answers are YES for the above questions, showing the beautiful evidence that man made global warming is not supported by the data SO FAR.
@Dana – You’re doing it again. Using the precautionary principle here, with such incredible *lack* of knowledge, is incredibly dangerous. You continue to conflate several things -> 1) whether or not human CO2 can drive global average temperature, 2) whether or not global average temperature is going to increase, and finally 3) whether or not a global average temperature increase is *bad* for humanity. You clearly believe that human CO2 drives global average temperature, and that global average temperature is going to increase, and this is going to be a “bad thing”, but you simply cannot go from 1 to 2, or even 1 and 2 to three. None of these statements implies that the next in the chain must be true.
I understand that you cannot see the problem that people have with your chain of implications (which probably frustrates you to no end). You have *faith* in this chain of implication that is simply not based on any fundamental rationale.
Put another way, if we determined that there was a 10% chance that you might end up becoming a murderer, should we lock you up now to prevent that?
” If she’s claiming there’s a 10% chance doubling CO2 will increase average temps 10°C”
That’s assuming the propability estimate is linear. It is not. Like many other things you think are linear (like FEEDBACKS), are not.
Even if climate sensitivity is negative … increasing CO2 will still cause warming, unless sensitivity is massively negative .
Please explain how if increased CO2 causes cooling, it will still cause warming.
And for the record, we have absolutely no idea what value sensitivity actually is. We have precious little physics, just modelling. If we did know, there would be nothing to discuss.
because we cannot predict the specific weather patterns for any particular global average temperature, there is no reason to believe that a higher global average temperature will have a more damaging distribution than a lower global average temperature.
Pending some explanation of what the ambiguous term “damaging distribution” means (distribution of what? damage to what?), this is sort of a stunning counterfactual.
We know to a fair degree of certainty that adding more heat into the system will cause more storms and increase the intensity of some storms, will change rainfall patterns, will alter ecosystems. The fact that we don’t yet have a weather-report style prediction with exact places and times says nothing about the probability that these effects will occur.
If the goal is to postpone any reasonable action to moderate our carbon emissions until we have precogs from Minority Report telling us exactly when and where it will rain in fifty years, that’s effectively equal to counseling inaction. Is it unreasonable to assume that’s what you want?
what you’re saying is that maybe without the cooling effect of our CO2 emissions over the last century+, we would have warmed even more from the other unspecified forcings.
I see. Quite an interesting concept, I must say…
Yes, that would follow :-).
We don’t know this of course, any more than we know it is positive.
Punksta, I’m not really interested in giving you a lesson on climate sensitivity. I just ask that you put forth the effort to learn about it before making ridiculous comments.
Here’s a hint – when you say “climate sensitivity might be negative”, what you actually mean is “the net feedback might be negative”. And by the way, climate sensitivity estimates are based heavily on empirically-observed data.
juakola – if Curry is saying that we only have 90% confidence that climate sensitivity is below 10°C, then quite obviously there’s a 10% chance it’s above 10°C.
Grima – sure, there is a cycle in the detrended temperature data. Basically what you’re saying is that if we remove the CO2-caused global warming trend, then natural cycles are evident. I agree with that. Now let’s talk about something relevant to global warming please.
Dana
I suspect that your lack of desire to give Punksta a lesson in climate sensitivity is exceeded only by his lack of desire to receive one from you. On this or any other topic.
Do you really believe that you have some special insights that give you this compulsion to lecture people in blogs? Because your arrogant certainty in your correctness, with nothing to back it up only drives more people to the sceptic cause.
Please keep posting!
Dana – that’s ok, I’m not really interested in getting a lesson on climate sensitivity from a militant ignoramus on the topic.
Oh, and I’m still waiting for you to explain how if adding CO2 causes cooling, it will still cause warming.
Sensitivity based on empirial observation? Ever heard of post hoc ergo propert hoc? Care to tell us what you take on feedbacks is. Could be a Nobel prize for you in it (except that the Nobel committee are blinkered, political-correctness alarmists).
Yes, my “speciali insight” is that I’ve actually put in the time to learn some basic climate science, unlike a lot of the commenters here, who in addition to being utterly ignorant about the subject, also aren’t interested in learning about it. Thus I’m trying not to waste my time responding to these willfully ignorant individuals (present company included). The comments here are a textbook example of Dunning-Kruger.
And your arrognat certainty that only you have bothered to learn anything about the topic shows considerable self-absorption but no self-awareness.
Shouting ‘you are all wrong, only I am right’ went out of fashion for me round about 8yo.
Please keep posting. You are the best recruiting sergeant the sceptics have got.
Listen to Latimer when he talks about arrogance, Dana: he’s a domain expert.
I forgot to add that your inability to answer sensible questions, instead resorting back to an arrogant and condescending tone of intellectual and educational superiority, betrays a very shallow understanding of your subject. If you can’t answer pretty simple level 1 questions with some ease, it does not build confidence in your level 2 or 3 skills.
Please keep posting! We sceptics really appreciate the work you do for us.
Aw c’mon Dana dear, all your fans are eagerly awaiting your special insights into how even if adding CO2 causes cooling, it will cause warming. Might even be assistant professorship in logic in the offing too.
@PDA – “We know to a fair degree of certainty that adding more heat into the system will cause more storms and increase the intensity of some storms, will change rainfall patterns, will alter ecosystems.”
We also know to a fair degree of certainty that removing heat from the system can do the same thing, since it is *not* heat that determines the distribution of weather.
Put another way, increasing global temperature *could* mean that more violent storms will happen at sea, far away from any population centers, and decreasing global temperature *could* mean that more violent storms will happen on the coasts, right on top of population centers. You simply *don’t know*, and pretending that you do is unwarranted.
“Yes, my “speciali insight” is that I’ve actually put in the time to learn some basic climate science, unlike a lot of the commenters here, who in addition to being utterly ignorant about the subject, also aren’t interested in learning about it. Thus I’m trying not to waste my time responding to these willfully ignorant individuals (present company included). The comments here are a textbook example of Dunning-Kruger.”
The way I see it, only thing you seem to be interested is finding a “rebuttal” on ANY skeptic argument, and to deny every uncertainty involved in the AGW case. You fail to look at the studies in the contrary, and to look the uncertainities involved in the studies you cite – you have made up your mind before even studying the subject. On top of that, you are making unjustified generalizations on the commenters here, which in fact, have very diverse opinions.
Therefore I recommend you to take a careful look on your knowledge and comments before making such a statement. You’re not just an example of Dunning-Kruger, but also a perfect example of confirmation bias.
Take a careful read:
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/
@Dana – “Yes, my “speciali insight” is that I’ve actually put in the time to learn some basic climate science”
And so have many others here who have come to differing conclusions than you. The fact that you cannot accept logical critiques of your very clever arguments is a sign of just how much your belief system means to you. The cognitive dissonance you resonate with is simply palpable.
I’m afraid, dear Dana, that you’ve reached your personal limit of open-mindedness a very, very long time ago.
PDA, I would suggest that we cease feeding the trolls. It’s just a waste of time.
I’m not going to issue further response to those who have demonstrated that they’re disinterested and/or incapable of learning anything about the subject. I don’t view science as a political game, so I’m not interested in playing along with the trolls.
You simply *don’t know*, and pretending that you do is unwarranted.
I pretended nothing of the sort. You’re pretending that uncertainty about the exact places and times of storms is an argument for inaction. It isn’t. It’s the exact opposite.
@PDA – “You’re pretending that uncertainty about the exact places and times of storms is an argument for inaction. It isn’t. It’s the exact opposite.”
You’ve got your rationale wrong, PDA. Uncertainty is never an argument *for* action, because uncertainty means we simply don’t know what action will effect what result. Applying the precautionary principle on the basis of incomplete and uncertain information is simply *hoping* that you’ve picked the right intervention. Given the damage that the wrong intervention can do, the proper response to uncertainty isn’t *inaction*, but *further analysis and data gathering*. Measure twice, cut once.
Dana I don’t view science as a political game
Sure. You just want everyone to accept without question that politically-funded science doesn’t have a political agenda.
Given the damage that the wrong intervention can do, the proper response to uncertainty isn’t *inaction*, but *further analysis and data gathering*.
What is the evidence that reducing CO2 emissions may do damage? What is the evidence that not doing so may do damage?
What specific analysis do you recommend? What specific data should be gathered? And what would be the criterion for action, after the data is obtained?
What is the evidence that reducing CO2 emissions may do damage? ,
Perhaps not directly to the environment – though this is far from clear. What if nuclear (the only feasible partial alternative) turned out to be a big problem?
But certainly economic meltdown, due to greatly increased energy costs. And increased slide into totalitarianism (politicization of society) needed to impose it.
@PDA – “What is the evidence that reducing CO2 emissions may do damage? What is the evidence that not doing so may do damage?”
There is no substantial evidence on either side. We may postulate that reducing CO2 could do damage by inhibiting plant growth, and we may postulate that increase CO2 could do damage by increasing storm energy, but these are not backed up by any empirical evidence, as *expected* in such a complex system.
@PDA – “What specific analysis do you recommend? What specific data should be gathered? And what would be the criterion for action, after the data is obtained?”
Very good questions, and some of them may be beyond our technological limitations. Let’s start from the data -> we should have a world-wide temperature monitoring system that is audited and quality controlled separately from any analysis done on that information. Raw data should always be kept, and there should be tracking of deviations and errors so that we can reliably estimate where we may have systemic problems. Ideally, the data set includes surface temperature, and upper atmosphere temperature at different latitudes, and under water temperature at different depths, with coverage every, say 500sq. mi. Windspeed, barometric pressure and cloud cover measurements should also be recorded. Atmospheric composition should also be recorded (% of gases to start off with).
Proxy data, we pretty much throw away. That’ll give us *some* clue about the past, but we simply can’t assert that it is definitive, so using it to compare to our modern data gathering should be an interesting exercise, but not enough to drive policy decisions.
As for a specific analysis, I would assert that calibrated with this data, models should make predictions of the state of the sensor arrays 1, 5 and 10 years. Any model that fails any one of these milestones by say, more than 1% *anywhere* is considered falsified. Ad hoc adjustments to the model to make it “unfalsified” must be followed by another period of 1, 5 and 10 years worth of predictions, with the same criteria.
As for the criteria of “action”, specifically CO2 emissions reduction, there would be two criteria -> 1) we’d have to have a validated model (one that had passed tests at 1, 5 and 10 years), 2) we’d have to have evidence of harm during that time period that was significantly different that prior time periods (developing that metric will certainly be challenging), and 3) we’d have to have some evidence that the costs of the reduction would be less than the costs of either mitigation or recovery.
I’m sure further refinements of this basic idea can be made, but the long and short of the story is this -> we cannot assert that we *must* take a specific action simply based on the precautionary principle. It is a principle based on faith and hope, not science.
Pure policy speculation with no supporting empirical evidence.
“Rob, acknowledging that the Earth has a greenhouse effect doesn’t mean that one doesn’t deny other aspects of fundamental physics.”
So tell me then, how is the climate sensitivity derived from “fundamental laws of physics”? Like cloud parametrizations, hardcore physics, right? Or which fundamental laws of physics you meant the commenters are generally disagreeing with?
Please do not use the word “physics” unless you are willing to define what the heck you are talking about. Because otherwise it is just a DISTRACTION which will just dig your hole deeper, and is just annoying in general.
acknowledging that the Earth has a greenhouse effect doesn’t mean that one doesn’t deny other aspects of fundamental physics.
Accepting other aspects of fundamental physics does not mean one understands that fundamental physics is still silent on CAGW, playing 2nd (3rd? 4th? …) fiddle to modelling. Dana still seems to be confusing the two.
Why should we want to beat the laws of physics? A warmer planet will be a better planet overall.
Dear Dana, you really do project all of your own flaws onto the opposition, don’t you? Your clever and ingenious semantic arguments are logically flawed and require amazing leaps of faith to accept, but you claim your critics are the ones being semantic! Very, very clever, but terribly transparent my dear Dana.
The laws of physics, nobody has a problem with. Resting assumption upon assumption upon fudge factor upon assumption, in a model only loosely based on the basic laws of physics, is where problems occur. If you cannot understand that critical flaw in the CAGW rationale, you really aren’t thinking hard enough.
It’s pretty clear that most of the commenters here think climate science is just a political game, and that they can “beat” the laws of physics with semantics arguments.
It’s pretty clear you have it back-to-front. It is the politically-bought ‘scientists’ that think they can use politics and its funding, to corrupt science so as to achieve what physics currently cannot, and maybe never can. I refer you to to the hiding of data, evasive answers etc etc revealed in Climategate and the whitewashing of it.
Chris
You blithely skip over the endemic and unrepentant dishonesty in the bulk of the climate science business.
FYI, we’ve published a response to this blog post at Skeptical Science.
Still defending the indefensible. Keep posting.
Relevant scientific conclusion? Trees make poor thermometers.
And not only trees, but almost all of the proxies. And still the ‘team’ and the folks in SkS seem to have some kind of obsession in splicing thermometer readings (which have their own problems) on top of proxy-“temperatures”.
Let’s ask a few questions:
What was the original ‘hide the decline’ comment referring to?
Mann’s 1998 article published in Science
Did he tell the readers how he had constructed the graph?
Yes
Are the people who read Science competent readers?
One must assume so, for the most part.
So, what was hidden?
Nothing, really. Although, what was obscured in the graph was a decline in the correlation between the thermometer record and the tree ring record. It wasn’t obscured in from anyone who actually read the paper.
Look, you’ve got two sets of measurements with limited overlap, not necessarily temperature; it could be anything. You and everyone else knows that one of these sets is noisier than the other. (Anyone here believe there is no noise in the thermometer record, or no correlation whatsoever between Mann’s tree rings and the temperature under which they grew?) You want to produce a graph showing the best estimate you can produce with the sets in hand. What do you do? You make the graph as you see best and you tell people how you made it, and that is what Mann did.
BTW Peter317, if you read the article again, you will see a quote attributed to McIntyre: “Briffa’s reconstruction had a noticeable decline in the late 20th century, despite warmer temperatures.” So, apparently Pekka might have a point that some think it was a decline in temperature that was hidden.
I don’t get it. One guy (Mann) makes a judgment call on how to draw a graph, a few others consider it to be an acceptable solution, and suddenly all the work done by everyone since Arrenhius is called into question an the blogosphere. Look, Mann and the others were not writing for an audience which were not very good at reading and had no understanding of statistics. Nothing was ‘hidden’ from their intended audience.
Judith, as you note, Steve McIntyre drew an obvious inference from the “decline.” If the proxies are not responsive to 20th century warmth, then how do Mann et al. know the proxies were not responsive to Medieval warmth? Why should we trust a blade, based on the proxy data, that omits the Medieval Warm Period?
But another inference is also possible, namely, that the proxy and instrumental records diverge because old growth forests are not influenced by urban heat islands and not subject to the surface station malpractices documented by Anthony Watts, Roger Pielke Sr., and Joe D’Aleo.
Do the paleo-climate cognoscenti have a clear and compelling explanation of why we should trust the instrumental surface temperature record rather than the proxy record when the two diverge? They can’t explain the divergence, and yet they claim to know which of the diverging lines of evidence is wrong. Does that strike you as a bit odd?
Marlo Lewis | February 28, 2011 at 10:44 am | Reply
Judith, as you note, Steve McIntyre drew an obvious inference from the “decline.”
If the proxies are not responsive to 20th century warmth, then how do Mann et al. know the proxies were not responsive to Medieval warmth? Why should we trust a blade, based on the proxy data, that omits the Medieval Warm Period?
Well Mann’s first reconstruction didn’t go back that far. Also you exaggerate, the tree ring proxies were the specific proxies that diverged (after 1960 not the whole 20th century).
But another inference is also possible, namely, that the proxy and instrumental records diverge because old growth forests are not influenced by urban heat islands and not subject to the surface station malpractices documented by Anthony Watts, Roger Pielke Sr., and Joe D’Aleo.
Do the paleo-climate cognoscenti have a clear and compelling explanation of why we should trust the instrumental surface temperature record rather than the proxy record when the two diverge? They can’t explain the divergence, and yet they claim to know which of the diverging lines of evidence is wrong. Does that strike you as a bit odd?
No, because it is the behavior of the tree growth that changed, also the surface temperature record agrees with the satellite data, which underlines the claim that it’s the tree growth that has changed.
See K. R. Briffa, F. H. Schweingruber, P. D. Jones, T. J. Osborn1, S. G. Shiyatov & E. A. Vaganov, “Reduced sensitivity of recent tree-growth to temperature at high northern latitudes”, Nature 391, 678-682 (12 February 1998).
it is the behavior of the tree growth that changed, also the surface temperature record agrees with the satellite data, which underlines the claim that it’s the tree growth that has changed
Yes, fickle trees. The bedrock of the hockey stick.
Phil, I’ll go re-read the Briffa study and follow up. In the meantime I would just note that you exaggerate, sinced the statellite record does not go back to 1960, but only to November 1978. For nearly 18 years of the divergence there was no satellite data against which to compare the surface data. Also, until 1998, the satellite data showed hardly any warming.
Its much worse.
1) The “hide the decline” was fraud. A ten year old can see it.
2) It was about global warming, a $47 trillion dollar issue.
3) The whole establishment has ignored it and whitewashed it. The NSF, the NAS, the UN, professional societies, those thousands of peer reviewed scientists.
So here is the problem.
The gatekeepers condone fraud.
Therefore the average Joe has no rational reason to trust Anything coming from the academy. Not good.
Chris,
I think the word we are encouraged to use is “fudge” not “fraud”. It’s a climate scientist thing. They fudge, they don’t fraud. Just ask them.
But the same result is obtained. And you have stated it well.
“Is hiding the decline dishonest and/or bad science?”
It’s without a doubt dishonest.
This, it seems to me, is a problem of representation. Reviewing, once again, MBH98 Figure 5, it is clear, now, that that reconstruction is not within 2 sigma. The paper states:
“This variance increases back in time (the increasingly sparse multiproxy network calibrates smaller fractions of
variance), yielding error bars which expand back in time.”
This is clearly not the case since where the data was swapped out the variance should have been huge, possibly even as much as +/- 0.8C for the last 30 years of the chart.
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/mbh98.pdf
My 65 year passionate association with physics in general has calumniated in 168 A5 pages of work that stems from an attempts to provide a bases for physics. The work is titled “Matter and Associated Mysteries” and is available at Lulu.com. It ranges over subjects from the fundamental nature of Energy, on to explanations of matters mysteries, the explanation of which lead to what appear to be feasible explanations of various anomalies.
The interest with the blog I am responding to is with the description of the proposed fundamental nature of gravity and gravitation. Therein is a spinoff that provides an instant by instant description of the gravitation induced warming and also cooling of matter, and so an alternate explanation for Global Warming other than an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere. I therefore suggest that if you as the owner of this blog will make available to those scientists in your acquaintance whom would be prepared to criticize my work, I would promptly supply a copy by email or on a CD.
With regards and wishing you every success.
If I understand correctly the original aim was to base the entire temperature curve l on tree rings. But then, darn it, the tree ring temperatures just refused to show that warming at the end of the twentieth century that they all knew had to be there. And since they knew about this warming the tree rings were obviously wrong and had to be jettisoned in favor of thermometer values showing this warming. But there is also a problem with the warming they grafted on to their curve. They show a huge increase at the end of the twentieth century that does not even exist according to satellite temperature measurements. What we know about the twentieth century temperature is that the first part of it was taken up by warming that was probably a continuation of coming out of the Little Ice Age cooling and related to sunspot activity. It came to an end with the Second World War, more specifically in the winter of 1939/40 when the Finnish Winter War was fought in the bitter cold of minus 40 Celsius. This cold wave continued throughout the war despite NASA, NOAA, and the Met Office showing it as a heat wave. The temperature stabilized after the war and there was no warming for fifty years until the 1998 super El Nino arrived. But here again the three guardians of global temperature disagree. According to them a continuous temperature rise – the late twentieth century warming – began with the late seventies. So the warming they appropriated for the blade of the hockey stick is doubly phony – first for having been inserted into the data set and second for not even being there according to satellites. If you are dealing with a set of scientific measurements you are not permitted to arbitrarily exclude data that you simply do not like and substitute other data that you do like. But that is what they did. There has to be scientific justification for it and they had none. If the tree ring temperatures have been stable for a thousand years as they claim and if they do not show warming at the end of the twentieth century the correct scientific approach would have been to check whether the expected warming is real or not. They did not do that. They simply replaced the offending data with data that they did like. This should have been declared a scientific fraud by the investigators but was completely ignored. The warming advocates accused Bjørn Lomborg of scientific fraud when he did not do anything but write a book. He was immediately hauled in front of the Danish Commission on Scientific fraud and questioned. But the hockey stick that was revealed to be an obvious fraud by Climategate emails was not touched by the investigators and the perpetrators are still at large.
Dr. Curry,
You stated, “I would be particularly interested in hearing from any defenders of these global paleotemperature analyses by Mann et al.”
I would be willing to bet you never had any response from the “hide the decline” crowd.
The fact the Royal Society of Britain exonerated the “scientists” involved in the scandal has removed all credibility and respect for that organization. They also have joined the list of “do not bother reading”.
Is there not a single person among you with the requisite knowledge in statistical reearch methodology to rebut directly the reasons given by the IPCC, the 3 or 4 special commisions appointed after the “hide the decline” controversy erupted have all stated for why that phrase should not be conflated into something diaboloical? Not one of you?
Because I see hundreds of posts, each one simply ignoring the whle notion of whether or not what they stated may or may not be true. In place of it, nothing but reams of some of thye best data I have yet encountered on the psychological trait of sometimes called “confirmation bias” or epistemic “seizing and freezing” ….both traits found far more frequently in conservative (high-RWA : Altemeyer) personalities. No surprise then that climate denialism is a phenomenon occuring overwhelmingly among self-described conservatives and libertaians than any other motivated ideology..
Gary, The idea that you need advanced statistical knowledge to know that it’s wrong to stitch on unrelated, convenient data to replace inconvenient relevant data, so as to hide the truth, is absurd.
This psychological trait of giving preference to political correctness over objective correctness is associated with low-intelligence and left-wing / totalitarian tendencies, often seen here amoung Climategate Deniers.
Not to mention the use of Social Sciences Standards (LOL) of confidence levels: 95% is “very likely”, etc.
In real sciences, e.g. physics, that barely qualifies to make for an interesting speculation.
Here is the reality of global warming scaremongering.
The scaremongers have repeatedly and systematically falsified and/or deliberately misinterpreted climate data and the record of history. In absolute opposition to the scientific method, where one is supposed to test a hypothesis to see if it will withstand scdrutiny and is not contradicted by evidence, the GHG scaremongers have drawn a foregone conclusion and have then manipulated, or even created from scratch, data to support that conclusion without recognizing anything that argues against it.
The scaremongers have attempted to rewrite history to cover up past warming periods that occurred in the absence of any significant fossil fuel burning (the Hittite/Mycenean period, 1800-1400 BC, the height of the Roman Emoire, 100BC-300 AD, and the Medieval Warming Period, 900-1300 AD, all of which are amply attested to in the general historical record as well as in the available physical data; and not to mention the sudden end of the last glacial period 12,000 years ago, likewise without benefit of fossil fuels). Their tactics are reminiscent of Orwell’s Ingsoc, which rewrote history so as to deny the existence of “unpersons” — only here, it is “un-data” which the scaremongers are denying.
The scaremongers have not merely mistaken correlation for causation, but have deliberately misrepresented it as such. Sure, temperatures may correlate statistically to CO2 in the atmosphere. But an honest reading of the data shows that increases in CO2 FOLLOW, not precede, increases in temperatures. This is basic physics — when the oceans and soil are warmed by the sun, they can retain less CO2 in suspension and will then release more CO2 to the atmosphere. Incidentally also, the scaremongers claim that the oceans become more acidic when CO2 increases in the atmosphere — but that increase again is from the oceans releasing CO2, and since CO2 is acidic, that release renders the oceans less, not morfe acidic — the pH goes up, not down.
The scaremongers have ignored all of the most important factors determining climate and climate change. The BIg Three are, very simply: solar radiation, heat transfer from the earth’s interior, and water.
In re solar radiation: the amount of energy received on Earth from the Sun varies with cloud cover, the density of interstellar matter through which the solar system passes on its journey through the cosmos, and on actual variation in the Sun’s luminosity (which can change significantly with sunspot and solar flare cycles — even main sequence stars like the Sun are at least slightly variable).
In re heat transfer from the Earth’s interior — changes here are evident in tectonic and volcanic activity, and (for example) in the fact that melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet is occurring underneath it, not on top of it — no CO2 down there! Also, the amount of propellant gas (95% or more CO2) needed to fling volcanic debris in and to the observed quantities and distances is a huge multiple of annual fossil fuel production of CO2 (one calculation showed that when Mt. St. Helens blew in 1980, it emitted 2 to 3 times as much CO2 as a year’s fossil fuel burning; and Mt. Tambora in 1815 threw 60 times as much out as Mt. St. Helens, sending enough dust into the atmosphere to block sunlight so as to cause the Year Without a Summer, 1816, in which snow fell in every month of the year in much of the US and there were wsidespread crop failures due to killing frost).
In re water — simple calculations based on the vapor pressure of water at given temperatures show that the average H2O content of the atmosphere is 30 to 50 times its CO2 content, and on hot humid days can be 140 times as much. If you don’t think water vapor is a heat trap, then why does 100 degrees feel so much hotter at high humidity than when the air is dry?
Also in re water — the GHG scaremongers assume that the atmosphere warms the oceans, which is absurd. Proof of the absurdity? The relatively mild climates on the west coasts of North America and Europe, compared to farther inland, because they are directly downwind of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Further proof? The El Nino-La Nina phenomenon. Solar radiation and heat transfer from the interior of Earth are what warms the oceans, not the atmosphere.
Another factor completely ignored by the GHG scaremongers is animal respiration. Again, simple calculations — arithmetic, not second-order differential equations — based on respiration rates and volumes and the known CO2 content of exhaled air show that the average human being emits about 500 kilograms — half a ton — of CO2 every year. And with 7 billion humans on the planet, that’s 3-1/2 billion tons a year from humans alone! And then when you consider that (1) humans are a tiny percentage of the total animal biomass on Earth — probably well under 1% — and that most animals emit more CO2 on a per-pound-of-body-weight than humans do (especially small mammals and birds, which can emit 6 times or more CO2 per pound of body weight than humans) — you’re now looking at SEVERAL HUNDRED BILLION TONS OF CO2 from animal reespiration alone — on top of all the other natural sources of CO2. This alone can be as much as 40 to 60 times as much CO2 as comes from fossil fuels. If this seems extreme, how about small mammals like rats which may number in the trillions — and the 2 million species of insects, many of which have populations in the quadrillions and also emit more CO2 proportionately than humans? ‘Nuff said.
The bottom line is this: human fossil fuel burning accounts for an infinitesimal, statistically irrelevant portion of the CO2 being cycled through the atmosphere; and CO2 accounts for an infinitesimal, statistically irrelevant portion of climate change. The GHG scaremongers are wrong on both counts — by two orders of magnitude. Natural processes account for hundreds, if not thousands, of times as much of climate change as human activity does.
Why are they doing this? Out of a perverse desire to cripple the US economy, to “de-develop” the US and reduce us to third-world poverty — and tellingly, to make money off people’s fears.
And how about the bullying of skeptics by the GHG crowd? Shouting down speakers or cutting off their microphones at events where skeptics are attempting to present their case? Even physically threatening them? That’s fascism, plain and simple, and it is pretty compelling evidence that the scaremongers know their message is false.
And then there is the unbelievable hypocrisy, effrontery and sociopathy of Al Gore whining about oh, the poor folks in third-world countries and criticizing John Q. Public for driving an SUV — while he consumes 10 times as much electricity in his house (most of it coming from coal-fired power plants!) as the average American family, and flies hither and yon in a private Boeing 727. And making millions as he goes.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that all the money being put up for carbon sequestration, cap-and-trade and the like is money that could be spent on developing non-fossil fuels and renewable electric power, but isn’t and won’t be. And then there is the debilitating effect of carbon taxes on the economy, which will leave us with less resources either to wean ourselves from fossil fuels or to help and improve the quality of life for those poor folk in the third world.
Anthropogenic global warming is a lie.
“In re water — simple calculations based on the vapor pressure of water at given temperatures show that the average H2O content of the atmosphere is 30 to 50 times its CO2 content, and on hot humid days can be 140 times as much. If you don’t think water vapor is a heat trap, then why does 100 degrees feel so much hotter at high humidity than when the air is dry?”
The human body has limited range of temperature it can operate at, one’s temperate can’t exceed 106 F for very long [without brain damage and death].
It’s likely your body temperature is near normal when it is in hot and humid environment, but you feel hot, because your sweating isn’t resulting in much cooling- and the body’s response is to sweat to greater extent- though it doesn’t help because the evaporation rate is low.
Your body is over reacting- less sweat would be almost as effective- dripping in sweat doesn’t cause cooling.
If a person is acclimated to a hot humid environment the body won’t “think” it’s as hot- it won’t panic as much:).
So high humidity is straitjacket- it limits the body’s ability to cool itself.
As for hot and humid holding a lot H2O. Most climate scientist are well aware that H2O gas being a far more significant greenhouse gas as compared to CO2. But AGW believers who think increasing CO2 will create Venus like conditions, need only look at the tropics to grasp there has to be real limit to any greenhouse affect.
H2O is a more effective greenhouse gas as compared to CO2 and as you say far more abundant in a hot and humid environment. The tropics is hot and humid and yearly receives far more solar energy than in temperate zones.
So it has more 100 times the greenhouse affect and yearly more solar energy as compared to temperate zones.
So say there is 10 times more greenhouse causing gas globally [far more than anyone predicts] the added greenhouse gases will affect the tropics by small amount, and temperate zone can’t get close to tropics in terms warmth- they still have less year solar energy- perhaps or more likely even less yearly solar energy, and they still have a 1/10th of greenhouse affect as the present tropics does. So getting Hawaii temperature in Oregon is more than what one could possibly expect. And getting current Oregon temperature in the Yukon even more improbable- somewhere close to impossible. The only way it’s otherwise is believe [and somehow be right] that there is no science involved climate [and/or science useless]. That the real truth is in Conspiracy theories, Big Oil controlling our thoughts, aliens running our govt, CIA blew up the World Trade Center, etc.
Or other words the drooling insane people know the truth and everyone should get real and “open their eyes”.
Like I said, the debate is over — it just hasn’t come out the way the GHG scammers want us to think. The theory of anthropogenic global warning is nothing more than politics — authoritarian, antilibertarian, economically illiterate, exploitative, corrupt, dishonest and out-and-out fascistic politics – masquerading as science. Enough is too much already.
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“This raises the question as to whether there is any value at all in tree ring analysis…”
That’s easy- it has value when it fits in with Mann’s hypotheses and has no value when it doesn’t, proving that whatever Mann might be, he is no scientist.
But you are right : few people other than ideologues, are going to believe them even if and when they have legitimate research to release. Not only is he doing damage to free speech, but he is also damaging the public’s trust in science and scientists. We desperately need to sound the alarm about things like pollution of the oceans – but now Mann, et al, will make people turn a skeptical ear towards that as well.
On a slightly different note: based on current sun activity (you know – that big yellow ball in the sky that Mann thinks has nothing to with climate) I think that the scientists of the 1970s were more likely correct and that we are headed into an era of severe global cooling, not global warming.
Thanks to all participants in this “discussion” – I am doing an article about Bush & the Koch brothers, and I see, they did some great work in the US.
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