Thomas Fuchs does an excellent job of presenting what's going on. after you read what he has to say, go to climate audit and read Steve's analysis. Kinda hard to argue that we should be setting policy based on a study that used a tiny sample of trees out of a much larger potential sample, and also magically included the trees with greatest anomaly skewed in the favor of CO2 warming theorists who created the study.
Obvious fraud is obvious
http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-E...f-tree-rings-global-warming-and-Fangorns-Ents
In the ongoing saga of the tree rings at the end of the world (the English translation of Yamal), there appeared today two responses from the coterie of scientists that have systematically used controversial techniques to create the impression that global warming is happening much faster than previously believed, but have fought tooth and nail to avoid releasing the data behind their publications.
The first was a fairly gracious response from the paper's author, Keith Briffa: "We have not yet had a chance to explore the details of McIntyre's analysis or its implication for temperature reconstruction at Yamal but we have done considerably more analyses exploring chronology production and temperature calibration that have relevance to this issue but they are not yet published. I do not believe that McIntyre's preliminary post provides sufficient evidence to doubt the reality of unusually high summer temperatures in the last decades of the 20th century. We will expand on this initial comment on the McIntyre posting when we have had a chance to review the details of his work."
But the second was a semi-hysterical rant from the Real Climate weblog where the scientists involved are principal contributors. As Roger Pielke Jr. points out, "Steve McIntyre must be on to something, judging by the nasty and vituperative comments coming from Real Climate, where Gavin Schmidt levels a serious allegation: 'So along comes Steve McIntyre, self-styled slayer of hockey sticks, who declares without any evidence whatsoever that [Keith] 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.
I have followed this issue closely, and it is clear that Steve McIntyre "declared" no such thing. In fact he declared exactly the opposite:
(McIntyre): "I don't wish to unintentionally feed views that I don't hold. It is not my belief that Briffa crudely cherry picked. My guess is that the Russians selected a limited number of 200-400 year trees - that's what they say - a number that might well have been appropriate for their purpose and that Briffa inherited their selection - a selection which proved to be far from random and which, as you and I agree, falls vastly short of standards in the field for RCS chronology (as opposed to corridor or spline chronologies)."
(Pielke Jr.) Gavin's outright lie about McIntyre is an obvious attempt to distract attention from the possibility that Steve may have scored another scalp in the Hockey Stick wars. Rather than distract attention from McIntyre, Gavin's most recent lie simply adds to the list of climate scientists behaving badly. When will these guys learn?
The sarcastic and insulting reply from Real Climate included a number of charts showing hockey sticks developed by other members of the team using the same suspect analysis and the same hidden data sets as if that would prove McIntyre wrong. What it proved was how important--and how threatening--McIntyre's analysis must look to these scientists, who have served as each other's co-authors and peer reviewers for over a decade.
However, McIntyre, while keeping fairly quiet himself, is not without his defenders:
We start with Ross McKitrick: "Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann, it was a statistical compilation of tree ring data supposedly proving that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Prior to the publication of the Hockey Stick, scientists had held that the medieval-era was warmer than the present, making the scale of 20th century global warming seem relatively unimportant. The dramatic revision to this view occasioned by the Hockey Stick’s publication made it the poster child of the global warming movement."
"Most of the proxy data does not show anything unusual about the 20th century. But two data series have reappeared over and over that do have a hockey stick shape. One was the flawed bristlecone data that the National Academy of Sciences panel said should not be used, so the studies using it can be set aside. The second was a tree ring curve from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, compiled by UK scientist Keith Briffa."
"Briffa had published a paper in 1995 claiming that the medieval period actually contained the coldest year of the millennium. But this claim depended on just three tree ring records (called cores) from the Polar Urals. Later, a colleague of his named F. H. Schweingruber produced a much larger sample from the Polar Urals, but it told a very different story: The medieval era was actually quite warm and the late 20th century was unexceptional. Briffa and Schweingruber never published those data, instead they dropped the Polar Urals altogether from their climate reconstruction papers.
In its place they used a new series that Briffa had calculated from tree ring data from the nearby Yamal Peninsula that had a pronounced Hockey Stick shape: relatively flat for 900 years then sharply rising in the 20th century. This Yamal series was a composite of an undisclosed number of individual tree cores. In order to check the steps involved in producing the composite, it would be necessary to have the individual tree ring measurements themselves. But Briffa didn’t release his raw data.
Over the next nine years, at least one paper per year appeared in prominent journals using Briffa’s Yamal composite to support a hockey stick-like result. The IPCC relied on these studies to defend the Hockey Stick view, and since it had appointed Briffa himself to be the IPCC Lead Author for this topic, there was no chance it would question the Yamal data.
Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top journals like Nature and Science, none of the journal reviewers or editors ever required Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre’s repeated requests for them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were ignored."
"The key ingredient in most of the studies that have been invoked to support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series, depends on the influence of a woefully thin subsample of trees and the exclusion of readily-available data for the same area. Whatever is going on here, it is not science."
Read the whole thing.
And Jeff Id from The Air Vent continues in the same vein: "Their (Real Climate's) post is very silly from a scientific perspective but will read well for their attack dogs." He goes on to pick apart their rant in thorough detail.
More to come. Including the explanation of Fangorn's Ents.
Obvious fraud is obvious
http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-E...f-tree-rings-global-warming-and-Fangorns-Ents
In the ongoing saga of the tree rings at the end of the world (the English translation of Yamal), there appeared today two responses from the coterie of scientists that have systematically used controversial techniques to create the impression that global warming is happening much faster than previously believed, but have fought tooth and nail to avoid releasing the data behind their publications.
The first was a fairly gracious response from the paper's author, Keith Briffa: "We have not yet had a chance to explore the details of McIntyre's analysis or its implication for temperature reconstruction at Yamal but we have done considerably more analyses exploring chronology production and temperature calibration that have relevance to this issue but they are not yet published. I do not believe that McIntyre's preliminary post provides sufficient evidence to doubt the reality of unusually high summer temperatures in the last decades of the 20th century. We will expand on this initial comment on the McIntyre posting when we have had a chance to review the details of his work."
But the second was a semi-hysterical rant from the Real Climate weblog where the scientists involved are principal contributors. As Roger Pielke Jr. points out, "Steve McIntyre must be on to something, judging by the nasty and vituperative comments coming from Real Climate, where Gavin Schmidt levels a serious allegation: 'So along comes Steve McIntyre, self-styled slayer of hockey sticks, who declares without any evidence whatsoever that [Keith] 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.
I have followed this issue closely, and it is clear that Steve McIntyre "declared" no such thing. In fact he declared exactly the opposite:
(McIntyre): "I don't wish to unintentionally feed views that I don't hold. It is not my belief that Briffa crudely cherry picked. My guess is that the Russians selected a limited number of 200-400 year trees - that's what they say - a number that might well have been appropriate for their purpose and that Briffa inherited their selection - a selection which proved to be far from random and which, as you and I agree, falls vastly short of standards in the field for RCS chronology (as opposed to corridor or spline chronologies)."
(Pielke Jr.) Gavin's outright lie about McIntyre is an obvious attempt to distract attention from the possibility that Steve may have scored another scalp in the Hockey Stick wars. Rather than distract attention from McIntyre, Gavin's most recent lie simply adds to the list of climate scientists behaving badly. When will these guys learn?
The sarcastic and insulting reply from Real Climate included a number of charts showing hockey sticks developed by other members of the team using the same suspect analysis and the same hidden data sets as if that would prove McIntyre wrong. What it proved was how important--and how threatening--McIntyre's analysis must look to these scientists, who have served as each other's co-authors and peer reviewers for over a decade.
However, McIntyre, while keeping fairly quiet himself, is not without his defenders:
We start with Ross McKitrick: "Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann, it was a statistical compilation of tree ring data supposedly proving that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Prior to the publication of the Hockey Stick, scientists had held that the medieval-era was warmer than the present, making the scale of 20th century global warming seem relatively unimportant. The dramatic revision to this view occasioned by the Hockey Stick’s publication made it the poster child of the global warming movement."
"Most of the proxy data does not show anything unusual about the 20th century. But two data series have reappeared over and over that do have a hockey stick shape. One was the flawed bristlecone data that the National Academy of Sciences panel said should not be used, so the studies using it can be set aside. The second was a tree ring curve from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, compiled by UK scientist Keith Briffa."
"Briffa had published a paper in 1995 claiming that the medieval period actually contained the coldest year of the millennium. But this claim depended on just three tree ring records (called cores) from the Polar Urals. Later, a colleague of his named F. H. Schweingruber produced a much larger sample from the Polar Urals, but it told a very different story: The medieval era was actually quite warm and the late 20th century was unexceptional. Briffa and Schweingruber never published those data, instead they dropped the Polar Urals altogether from their climate reconstruction papers.
In its place they used a new series that Briffa had calculated from tree ring data from the nearby Yamal Peninsula that had a pronounced Hockey Stick shape: relatively flat for 900 years then sharply rising in the 20th century. This Yamal series was a composite of an undisclosed number of individual tree cores. In order to check the steps involved in producing the composite, it would be necessary to have the individual tree ring measurements themselves. But Briffa didn’t release his raw data.
Over the next nine years, at least one paper per year appeared in prominent journals using Briffa’s Yamal composite to support a hockey stick-like result. The IPCC relied on these studies to defend the Hockey Stick view, and since it had appointed Briffa himself to be the IPCC Lead Author for this topic, there was no chance it would question the Yamal data.
Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top journals like Nature and Science, none of the journal reviewers or editors ever required Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre’s repeated requests for them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were ignored."
"The key ingredient in most of the studies that have been invoked to support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series, depends on the influence of a woefully thin subsample of trees and the exclusion of readily-available data for the same area. Whatever is going on here, it is not science."
Read the whole thing.
And Jeff Id from The Air Vent continues in the same vein: "Their (Real Climate's) post is very silly from a scientific perspective but will read well for their attack dogs." He goes on to pick apart their rant in thorough detail.
More to come. Including the explanation of Fangorn's Ents.
