Society/Culture Historical temperature record proving climate change a result of fraudulent statistics?

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It appears that climate change scientists have been making conclusions first and then selecting a subset of data that confirms them second.

For technical details - http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168

Summary
1: In 1998, a paper is published by Dr. Michael Mann, then at the University of Virginia, now a Penn State climatologist, and co-authors Bradley and Hughes. The paper is named: Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations. The paper becomes known as MBH98.

The conclusion of tree ring reconstruction of climate for the past 1,000 years is that we are now in the hottest period in modern history, ever.

See the graph http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/image/mann/manna_99.gif

Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician in Toronto, suspects tree rings aren't telling a valid story with that giant uptick at the right side of the graph, implicating the 20th century as the "hottest period in 1000 years," which alarmists latch onto as proof of AGW. The graph is dubbed the "Hockey Stick" and becomes famous worldwide. Al Gore uses it in his movie An Inconvenient Truth in the famous "elevator scene."

2: Steve attempts to replicate Michael Mann's tree ring work in the paper MBH98, but is stymied by lack of data archiving. He sends dozens of letters over the years trying to get access to data but access is denied. McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, of the University of Guelph publish a paper in 2004 criticizing the work. A new website is formed in 2004 called Real Climate, by the people who put together the tree ring data and they denounce the scientific criticism:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.ph...-regarding-the-mann-et-al-1998reconstruction/

3: Years go by.McIntyre is still stymied trying to get access to the original source data so that he can replicate the Mann 1998 conclusion. In 2008 Mann publishes another paper in bolstering his tree ring claim due to all of the controversy surrounding it. A Mann co-author and source of tree ring data (Professor Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit) used one of the tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008, which has a strict data archiving policy. Thanks to that policy, Steve McIntyre fought and won access to that data just last week.

4: Having the Yamal data in complete form, McIntyre replicates it, and discovers that one of Mann's co-authors, Briffa, had cherry picked 10 tree data sets out of a much larger set of trees sampled in Yamal.

5: When all of the tree ring data from Yamal is plotted, the famous hockey stick disappears. Not only does it disappear, but goes negative. The conclusion is inescapable. The tree ring data was hand-picked to get the desired result.

These are the relevant graphs from McIntyre showing what the newly available data demonstrates.

http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/rcs_chronologies1.gif

http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/rcs_merged.gif
 
not-this-shit-again.jpg
 
You should always be wary when scientists refuse to provide the data they have used to justify their conclusions. And this shows why. Some of the research that the global warming alarmists have been relying on is grossly inept at best or possibly fraudulent.

Generallisimo, you should delete your stupid post. This is bang up to date and relevent.
 

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Indeed...

Look, even if this turns out to be an accurate criticism what does it prove? Not a great deal, Mann's "hockey stick" is supported by at least ten other proxy temperature reconstructions which all point to the same general pattern in the climate of the last 2000 years. It doesn't change all the other evidence that clearly points to AGW, both in the observed phenomena and modelling on the physical characteristics of CO2 and its effect on feedbacks around the globe. Paleoclimatology is a necessarily murky business, as is any field dealing with the distant past using often scant evidence, but it is only one relatively minor part of the overall AGW picture.
 
Indeed...

Look, even if this turns out to be an accurate criticism what does it prove? Not a great deal, Mann's "hockey stick" is supported by at least ten other proxy temperature reconstructions which all point to the same general pattern in the climate of the last 2000 years. It doesn't change all the other evidence that clearly points to AGW, both in the observed phenomena and modelling on the physical characteristics of CO2 and its effect on feedbacks around the globe. Paleoclimatology is a necessarily murky business, as is any field dealing with the distant past using often scant evidence, but it is only one relatively minor part of the overall AGW picture.

They all use the yamal data BP.

More news on this here.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/

A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers.
At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.


Combine this with the auditing of Gisstemp after many years fighting to get the data.

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/agw-and-gistemp-issues/

which seems to indicate that past temperatures are "adjusted" downwards as mush as 1.75C in the case of Pisa and the fact that CRU are claiming to have "lost" their raw data, you have to wonder if there has even been any prolonged warming at all.

Bear in mind the India Met bureau claim 0.5C in the last 107 years.
 
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/

From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.

In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which ten were alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the mid-19th century. The implication is clear: the dozen were cherry-picked.

It's not like CRU voluntarily released the data. It was an error on their part that made it available and since then they have removed it. This is what Phil Jones, who maintains the data had to say in 2004.

Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

Yeah they were 'invested' alright. Shame they were not invested in good science.
 
Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

So I guess it's unreasonable to suggest that various findings should be able to stand up to scrutiny from third parties.

"Don't worry about all those pesky little statistics and research, this is an important issue because I told you so. I'm a scientist, that should be enough for you"
 
They all use the yamal data BP.

An obvious point which the alarmists gloss over.

Those other hockey sticks use the same or very similar data sets (and most of them are colleagues of Mann).


It is reminiscent of Manns effort re the MWP when one data set consisted of a single pine tree.
 
Indeed...

Look, even if this turns out to be an accurate criticism what does it prove? Not a great deal, Mann's "hockey stick" is supported by at least ten other proxy temperature reconstructions which all point to the same general pattern in the climate of the last 2000 years. It doesn't change all the other evidence that clearly points to AGW, both in the observed phenomena and modelling on the physical characteristics of CO2 and its effect on feedbacks around the globe. Paleoclimatology is a necessarily murky business, as is any field dealing with the distant past using often scant evidence, but it is only one relatively minor part of the overall AGW picture.

ie so what if there is fraud or blatant error.

It does not really matter.
 

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Uh, no they don't.

Mcintyre covers that here.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7229

In summary, the apparent problems with Briffa's Yamal series impact multiple other studies:
Briffa 2000, Mann and Jones 2003 (used in the recent UNEP graphic), Mann et al (EOS 2003), Jones and Mann 2004, Osborn and Briffa 2006, D'Arrigo et al 2006, Hegerl et al 2007, Kaufman et al 2009 (and of course, Briffa et al 2008).
And because of the non-robust methods used in these studies, replacing the Briffa Yamal version with a more defensible alternative (such as Esper Polar Urals either individually or in combination with the subfossil Yamal data and Schweingruber russ035w in Yamal) is going to have a material impact on the medieval-modern differential.


Off topic , We recorded our lowest recorded maximum here yesterday, 1.8C below the previous.

September mean was 0.5C below average.

Probably all the cold air from all that ice in Antartica
;)


S_timeseries.png
 
Sheesh you'd think real climate or treehugger or whatever would have a stunning response by now? Hmm perhaps not. What a blow for the alarmist crowd.
 
Yeah, a blog post, a real blow. These things take time but there will be a response. Apparently next months Scientific American is going to be worth reading.
 
LOL, yup, good analogy! :thumbsu: :D

Science fiction, how appropriate, that's pretty much how you have to approach science if you want to deny global warming.
 
LOL, yup, good analogy! :thumbsu: :D

Science fiction, how appropriate, that's pretty much how you have to approach science if you want to deny global warming.

Feel free to argue against McIntyre's thorough scientific approach - as opposed to the charlatans who cherry picked evidence and denied access to the data for years.
 
Feel free to argue against McIntyre's thorough scientific approach - as opposed to the charlatans who cherry picked evidence and denied access to the data for years.

Nah, I'll leave that to the experts, because quite frankly, I don't know any more about statistics than you do - but I do think I have a pretty good idea of what they've done - but I do know enough about the "scientific approach" to know that this doesn't follow it. A scientific approach would have been to publish a paper and submit it for review, not to breathlessly announce on a blog that you've "killed the hockey stick. If you are going to go to such lengths to slander hard working scientists in this way then you had bloody well want to be sure that your claims can stand up to scrutiny, but McIntyre and the rest of the denial-o-sphere, are too desperate to wait, or they know it won't stand up to review and don't care, because they know that Copenhagen is fast approaching and their attempts to delegitimise the science of AGW will become les and less relevant.
 
And Real Climate responds - although I doubt those crowing about the death of the hockey-stick will bother trying to understand the issue and lower themselves to actually reading any response that contradicts what they want to believe. But just for the hell of it, here a few tidbits, follow the link for the sciency-stuff.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/09/hey-ya-mal/

More seriously, many of you will have noticed yet more blogarrhea about tree rings this week. The target de jour is a particular compilation of trees (called a chronology in dendro-climatology) that was first put together by two Russians, Hantemirov and Shiyatov, in the late 1990s (and published in 2002). This multi-millennial chronology from Yamal (in northwestern Siberia) was painstakingly collected from hundreds of sub-fossil trees buried in sediment in the river deltas. They used a subset of the 224 trees they found to be long enough and sensitive enough (based on the interannual variability) supplemented by 17 living tree cores to create a “Yamal” climate record. A preliminary set of this data had also been used by Keith Briffa in 2000 (pdf) (processed using a different algorithm than used by H&S for consistency with two other northern high latitude series), to create another “Yamal” record that was designed to improve the representation of long-term climate variability.
Since long climate records with annual resolution are few and far between, it is unsurprising that they get used in climate reconstructions. Different reconstructions have used different methods and have made different selections of source data depending on what was being attempted. The best studies tend to test the robustness of their conclusions by dropping various subsets of data or by excluding whole classes of data (such as tree-rings) in order to see what difference they make so you won’t generally find that too much rides on any one proxy record (despite what you might read elsewhere).
****
So along comes Steve McIntyre, self-styled slayer of hockey sticks, who declares without any evidence whatsoever that Briffa didn’t just reprocess the data from the Russians, but instead supposedly picked through it to give him the signal he wanted. These allegations have been made without any evidence whatsoever.
McIntyre has based his ‘critique’ on a test conducted by randomly adding in one set of data from another location in Yamal that he found on the internet. People have written theses about how to construct tree ring chronologies in order to avoid end-member effects and preserve as much of the climate signal as possible. Curiously no-one has ever suggested simply grabbing one set of data, deleting the trees you have a political objection to and replacing them with another set that you found lying around on the web.
The statement from Keith Briffa clearly describes the background to these studies and categorically refutes McIntyre’s accusations. Does that mean that the existing Yamal chronology is sacrosanct? Not at all – all of the these proxy records are subject to revision with the addition of new (relevant) data and whether the records change significantly as a function of that isn’t going to be clear until it’s done.
What is clear however, is that there is a very predictable pattern to the reaction to these blog posts that has been discussed many times.

And to add to what I was saying about slandering other scientists without even submitting your claims to review is pretty low, it is smear science, not a "thorough scientific approach".

One would think that some things go without saying, but apparently people still get a key issue wrong so let us be extremely clear. Science is made up of people challenging assumptions and other peoples’ results with the overall desire of getting closer to the ‘truth’. There is nothing wrong with people putting together new chronologies of tree rings or testing the robustness of previous results to updated data or new methodologies. Or even thinking about what would happen if it was all wrong. What is objectionable is the conflation of technical criticism with unsupported, unjustified and unverified accusations of scientific misconduct. Steve McIntyre keeps insisting that he should be treated like a professional. But how professional is it to continue to slander scientists with vague insinuations and spin made-up tales of perfidy out of the whole cloth instead of submitting his work for peer-review? He continues to take absolutely no responsibility for the ridiculous fantasies and exaggerations that his supporters broadcast, apparently being happy to bask in their acclaim rather than correct any of the misrepresentations he has engendered. If he wants to make a change, he has a clear choice; to continue to play Don Quixote for the peanut gallery or to produce something constructive that is actually worthy of publication.
Peer-review is nothing sinister and not part of some global conspiracy, but instead it is the process by which people are forced to match their rhetoric to their actual results. You can’t generally get away with imprecise suggestions that something might matter for the bigger picture without actually showing that it does. It does matter whether something ‘matters’, otherwise you might as well be correcting spelling mistakes for all the impact it will have.
So go on Steve, surprise us.
 
Beat me to the punch BP!
Do you think these denialist fools will slink off, tails between their legs, as they should.
Nah, too dumb to realise the extent of their humiliation me thinks.
Ah well, its good sport if nothing else.
 
Beat me to the punch BP!
Do you think these denialist fools will slink off, tails between their legs, as they should.
Nah, too dumb to realise the extent of their humiliation me thinks.
Ah well, its good sport if nothing else.

Young McIntyre: “Mr. Scientist, I want to drive your car. Give me the keys.”
Scientist: “No. You don’t know how to drive a car. You need training and driver’s ed.”
McIntyre: “I drive cars in video games all the time. I know how to do it. Give me the keys.”
Scientist: “No.”
McIntyre: “Why won’t you give me the keys? You’re trying to cover up something, aren’t you? I’ll bet the car is defective! You don’t want me to know that, do you!?!”
Scientist: “You’re an idiot. Come back when you know how to drive. In the meantime, I’m going to leave the keys on the counter here so my fellow scientists can drive the car if they need to.”
\McIntyre takes keys, gets into car, starts driving. Mistakes gas pedal for brake pedal, wraps car around a tree.
McIntyre: “See, I told you the car was defective!!”
 

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