Hockey Stick Fraud

There is no way to be generous or to dodge this bullet. We now have outright confirmation that the data was deliberately selected to provide the dramatic eye catching result that was made it so famous. This is not science so much as a publicist’s dodgy manipulation of data to support a doubtful scheme.

I am certain every scientist has faced the frustration of months of hard work merely showing no evidence for the proposed theory. Once again our scientists had no evidence. So they merely selected the best data points in a statistical distribution and discarded the rest. I can prove anything if I am allowed to do that. Hell, I know of this great gold mine in which the grades exceed five ounces to the ton. – see this assay sheet?

When these guys floated their paper, they had no expectation anyone else would care and result were important in order to push their spurious claims. Then the world paid attention and they hid the data for ten years so no one could discover what they had done.

That is now over and we now left with a paper that manipulated the data in several places and actually fabricated the hockey stick upswing. It does not get any worse than this and on top of that it has been poisoning the debate for a decade instead of been called to account immediately.

In fact, why did the referees not ask for the raw data they relied on? That chart was simply too good to be true and everyone was lazy. I know that I thought it suspect the first time I laid eyes on it. But then after years of reviewing assay results, I am a little more demanding perhaps and appreciative how difficult it is to get good data at all.

Monday, September 28, 2009

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2Q5ZGExZTc3ZTlmMTA5OTdhOGRjNzdlNmU4N2M4ZTg

Mann-made Warming Confirmed [Chris Horner]

It turns out that trees can scream.

A colleague in the climate-realist blogosphere sends along the following narrative which all Planet Gore readers, even the muttering monitors over at Team Soros, should find very interesting. The inescapable and powerful conclusion is that Mann-made warming is real, while man-made warming remains at best a theory, more likely a hypothesis. Really.

This story deserves to be told.

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.php/archives/2004/12/false-claims-by-mcintyre-and-mckitrick-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”

So now the question is, if tree rings scream and their message is one that few want to hear, does their message get heard?

Conclusive Evidence on GW?

Nice story, but it appears that we must wait a while to hear the evidence. I hope that they can bring in fresh proxy work to back these claims up. Two thousand years is a long time and the quality and consistency matter. Past work was only convincing for five hundred years after a big fudge.

Nobody disputes the two hundred year rise in temperature, except that it is better explained as a rebound from the little ice age. This leaves us exactly nowhere when is comes to current interpretation.

We must wait for follow up to this little bit. This item may be the recent rehash of the Mann report that is just as flawed but has been going the rounds. (that was the report that floated the famous hockey stick) The recent effort got panned for the same reasons.

Anyway, the claim here is 2,000 years and I am waiting to see what that means. If valid, it would be important.

yes the earth's tilt is taking us away and this is a contributer to cooling, except the time frames involved are in millennia. Somehow this is no fit for decadal behavior.

Conclusive evidence of man made global warming found in Arctic geological record

September 6, 11:50 AM

Environmental News Examiner Niki Fears

http://www.examiner.com/x-18564-Environmental-News-Examiner~y2009m9d6-Conclusive-evidence-of-man-made-global-warming-found-in-Arctic-geological-record

While some have argued that global warming is merely a natural trend, new conclusive evidence gathered from the geological record in the Arctic prove that the increasing temperatures are not a natural cycle and are indeed caused by human activity, mainly, the burning of fossil fuels.

Darrell S. Kaufman , a leading climatologist from Northern Arizona University, lead a team of researchers who collected tree rings, glacier ice samples, 14 ice cores from various lakes around the Arctic and other evidence that showed a clear trend, that temperatures in the Arctic did not begin to rise until the Industrial Revolution hit which is when we began to empty tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The past ten years has shown a sharper increase almost three times higher than any other period in the past 2,000 years.

So what about the arguments that this warming is just a natural trend? Because the Earth has been slowly tilting the Arctic away from the sun, the region should actually be a degree or so cooler. That would be the natural trend, for the gradual cooling of the Arctic not a warming as some naysayers have suggested. But instead, the Arctic temperatures have increased by more than a couple of degrees.

This evidence is also strengthened by the shrinking ice and high melt rate found in Arctic regions as well. With such overwhelming evidence, many are starting to realize that Global Warming deniers are clearly not motivated by the facts but are motivated by a personal, and profitable, agenda that has nothing to do with looking out for the best interest of the public.

Many are hoping that this large amount of evidence will finally get people to realize that the naysayers have been bullying them into supporting big pollution causing businesses such as the oil and coal industry for their own agenda which is harming all of us. It is time to say no to the oil and coal agenda and work together for a healthy and sustainable future.

1159 BCE Tree Ring and Climate Break

The major problem with the history of climate variation in the Northern Hemisphere has never been explaining why it warms up to temperatures better than today’s. It has been explaining why it cools down. The Northern Hemisphere has had several protracted warm periods that include an exceptionally long period during the European Bronze Age that ended abruptly around 1159 BCE. We also had the medieval optimum, which lasted about two hundred years.

The evidence points to a natural climate regime as warm as we are now experiencing that left alone will eliminate perennial ice in the Arctic and enhance growing conditions in the north. That little extra heat slowly pushes the trend line to the optimum over as many years as it takes. In this case, since the little ice age, it has taken a good two hundred years and more.

I had a chance to see a program on ancient Ireland and got an eyeful of the tree ring evidence. It was startling, in that occasional cold years were common and that conditions for the Bronze Age did not stand out that much. What did stand out was the eighteen year growing break between 1159 to 1176 BCE. Afterwards, the climate recovered as it normally did after a bad year or two.

One advantage with the Irish data is that the Irish climate is profoundly moderated by the Gulf Stream. This means that any modest increase or decrease in the available heat will be generally buffered by the incoming winds. It will always want to be cold, wet and miserable. As we go into the Baltic, we both get and expect a much broader variation in conditions.

More plainly, a cold summer in Ireland translates into a disaster in most of Eastern Europe.

Because the moderating effect is dominant, normal variation is suppressed strongly. When you get a sharply defined event, it is certain to be a global event. We get this with the 1159 event which is marked in the tree ring record as an eighteen years stretch of zero summer growth.

This means a major temperature drop in Northern Europe and that has been substantiated with other records. That is deep enough to end any cropping for a generation over vast areas. Fortunately the bulk of the inland folk relied on cattle husbandry, which perhaps contracted but they were likely able to sustain themselves.

This period is associated with the onslaught of the sea peoples throughout the Mediterranean and the movement of peoples from the north in general. It is nice to police up the actual decades of this historic movement.

What is becoming much more apparent is that both the protracted eighteen year cold spell of 1159 and the many shorter cold year events are caused the same way. We need to look for major volcanic activity.

Remember that our own knowledge of volcanism is still in its infancy. Surely we learned that after Mt St Helens. We simply do not have the full range of geologically inferred activity available to us for study.

We know that a single major blast can drop global temperatures for a year or so. We also know that an active spewing volcano that operates for months will do the same thing.

A very likely disaster is the activation of a large magma mass at near surface that erupts for years. Iceland has the needed features and I believe it is quite capable of flooding the atmosphere with fine dust for eighteen years. It would also be limited to the high latitudes, unlike any of the monsters in Indonesia.

My conclusion is that the one clear mechanism able to chill the northern hemisphere is volcanic activity in all its various expressions. A number of known cold intervals have in fact been associated with known volcanic events. The proposition that all chilling events in the Northern Hemisphere are directly linked to volcanic events is strongly supportable.

I have never seen any popular media actually attempt to describe the full range of volcanic possibilities. The onshore mega volcanoes appear very dormant, but that includes Yellowstone Park, Iceland and Hawaii. You get the picture. Imagine any of those becoming truly active and throwing many cubic mile of dust into the atmosphere for decades. This is no risk with Hawaii but that give as us a clear measure of the real size of these structures. The global temperature would nosedive and crops would be largely impossible outside the tropics.

It is quite clear that a year or two is quite survivable because of our current global infrastructure. It would just be inconvenient as hell and we all would be on wartime rations. Sustaining populations past that would require a crash program aimed at massive food production in the tropics. We would all learn to enjoy our recently recognized cattail starch ration.