Climate Audit

John A

Re: #2

Both links work for me. Try right-clicking and “Save as..”

David Stockwell

Well, I think TCO will like this. Its very clealy written. The last paragraph is the kicker. It recommends taking their funding away. They are not going to like this.

David Stockwell

#6. Yes I noticed a typos, and if I notice them there must be more.

John A

Well, I think TCO will like this. Its very clealy written. The last paragraph is the kicker. It recommends taking their funding away. They are not going to like this.

Which page is that on?

Paul Dennis

I have just read the report and will need to do so again. Several things strike me. First it is written with a clarity that many of us would do well to follow. It uses clear examples, and illustrates these with diagrams and elegant discussions that you don’t need to be a statistician to follow. Second, the authors have a very clear grasp of the nature of the science and proxies that would put many a scientist to shame.

I think this is an important document that highlights many inadequacies in the way we pursue publicly funded science. It throws open for all to see the social networks at the heart of science, impacts on peer review at both the grant awarding and publication stages, and the way scientists gain esteem amongst their peers.

mark

It recommends taking their funding away.

I’m not seeing where either of the two reports (full report or fact sheet) says their funding should be taken away.

Mark

mark

“They did not show our conclusions as wrong, therefore we stand by our work”.

Actually, they did, and they did it in such a blunt manner that Mann, et. al. will be hard pressed to dodge this one. Of course, this will become “a politically motivated attack”, but hey, it’s not like they didn’t start the political debate by using the IPCC as their sounding board.

Mark

Reid

Re #7: “Yes I noticed a typos, and if I notice them there must be more.”

The typos will be used by the AGW crowd to try and undercut the report in the mass media. The report will be spun as useful addition in creating a sustainable consensus on the impending climate change catastrophe.

No matter, the Wegman report is complete vindication for M & M. And a nail in the coffin of AGW. A M & M style debunking of the GCM’s would collapse AGW groupthink. The GCM’s are ripe for picking apart and devouring. Hopefully, Barton will start an investigation into GCM’s.

Paul Dennis

re #16: Yes it should be fought out in the journals. But the peer review process doesn’t always allow this. One aspect not touched on by the social network analysis in the report is just how difficult it is for an ‘outsider’ to get his work through peer review, when all the reviewers are playing for the same team.

MarkR

Mann et al., misused certain statistical methods in their studies, which inappropriately produce hockey stick shapes in the temperature history. Wegman’s analysis concludes that Mann’s work cannot support claim that the1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium.
Report: “Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis. As mentioned earlier in our background section, tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable.”

mark

One aspect not touched on by the social network analysis in the report is just how difficult it is for an “outsider’ to get his work through peer review, when all the reviewers are playing for the same team.

I think one can infer such a conclusion from the analysis of the mutual-admiration concept, however. Perhaps that should be brought up in the Barton hearing?

Mark

TCO

Steve: Congrats. Yes, one should be as careful about reports in support as reports in opposition. But you should be heartened that 3 studhorse statisticians broadly back up your criticisms of MBH work and of the softer policy issues (Mann’s resistance to examination, etc.) Take some joy in the day. It is a victory.

nanny_govt_sucks

Looks like Mann has a respons. From RealClimate:

The un-peer reviewed report commissioned by Rep. Barton released today adds nothing new to the scientific discourse on climate change and is a poor attempt to further personalize and politicize what should be a matter of scientific debate not politics.

The impartial and independent National Academy of Sciences convened a panel of experts in climate science and statistics and performed a far more extensive review of the science, confirming the key conclusions of our earlier work, as well as numerous more recent supporting studies. Namely that late 20th century warmth is likely anomalous in the context of the past 1000 years and cannot be explained
by natural variability. The scientific evidence for human influence on current climate comes from a large body of independent lines of evidence of which paleoclimate data is but a small part.

Barton’s report, written by statisticians with no apparent background at all in the relevant areas, simply uncritically parrots claims by two Canadians (an economist and an oil industry consultant) that have already been refuted by several papers in the peer-reviewed literature inexplicably neglected by Barton’s “panel”. These claims were specifically dismissed by the National Academy in their report just weeks ago. Barton’s report also reveals that his panel collaborated closely with the two Canadians, yet made no attempt to contact me or my collaborators at any point.

The panel makes the odd claim that there is “too much reliance on peer-review” which goes against every principle of current scientific practice. Barton in his “factsheet’ goes further and suggests that the anonymous peer reviewers themselves are in some way biased, a claim that he cannot possibly support since peer reviewers are in fact anonymous and this was not studied in the report.

Climate science, like many multidisciplinary fields, requires broad collaboration with researchers across many areas. Any well published scientist would show a wide-ranging pattern of connection with other researchers in the field. While I am flattered that the committee seems to think that I am at the center of the field, the same analysis would have shown a very similar pattern for any researcher engaged in widespread interdisciplinary research.

My colleagues and I continue to work on reducing the uncertainties in past climate reconstructions and understanding the mechanisms of past and current climate change. Policy-makers should more constructively focus their attention on the consensus findings on climate change as presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the National Academies of all G8 countries, rather than on pursuing politically-motivated attacks against individual scientists.

mark

Impartial, independent? Weren’t some of the panelists co-authors, and even Amman’s supervisor at NCAR? He’s a joke. Of course, hucksters have to sell themselves.

Mark

welikerocks

Yeah TCO.

“Barton in his “factsheet’ goes further and suggests that the anonymous peer reviewers themselves are in some way biased, a claim that he cannot possibly support since peer reviewers are in fact anonymous and this was not studied in the report…”

BUT…

“…While I am flattered that the committee seems to think that I am at the center of the field, the same analysis would have shown a very similar pattern for any researcher engaged in widespread interdisciplinary research.”

–interdisciplinary research as defined by Mann’s idea of what that is!!!!!

welikerocks

Yeah TCO.

“…While I am flattered that the committee seems to think that I am at the center of the field, the same analysis would have shown a very similar pattern for any researcher engaged in widespread interdisciplinary research.”

–interdisciplinary research as defined by Mann’s idea of what that is!!!!!

Ken Fritsch

As mentioned in our introduction, much of the discussion on the “hockey stick’ issue has taken place on competing web blogs. Our committee believes that web blogs are not an appropriate way to conduct science and thus the blogs give
credence to the fact that these global warming issues are have migrated from the realm of rational scientific discourse. Unfortunately, the factions involved have become highly and passionately polarized.

I finished my first reading of this report and find it has put most of the arguments that I have seen from Steve M on this blog into a well organized and clear form. This finding indicates to me that a blog can provide a wealth of information from which one can learn. That the factions on blogs can be passionately polarized is not in doubt, but if one can separate and tolerate the more passionate side of the debate (and in some cases be entertained by it) one can learn not only from the technical discussions but get a view of how the debate is being battled by interested citizens (which is not available from reading scientific papers). I do not see science being conducted on this blog (even though science could be conducted online in some form) in the true sense, but we can attempt here to understand better that science that is being conducted elsewhere.

My libertarian eye was struck by Recommendations 3 and 4 which could, in effect, be easily construed as a pleading for some government money for the statistical community even though I agree in general terms that studies often could benefit from having statisticians involved. It worked for me in my experiences in the private world of R&D.

Recommendation 3. With clinical trials for drugs and devices to be approved for human use by the FDA, review and consultation with statisticians is expected. Indeed, it is
standard practice to include statisticians in the application-for-approval process. We judge this to be a good policy when public health and also when substantial amounts of monies are involved, for example, when there are major policy decisions to be made
based on statistical assessments. In such cases, evaluation by statisticians should be standard practice. This evaluation phase should be a mandatory part of all grant applications and funded accordingly.

Recommendation 4. Emphasis should be placed on the Federal funding of research
related to fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of climate change. Funding
should focus on interdisciplinary teams and avoid narrowly focused discipline research.

And this one is for you, TCO:

9. Based on discussion in Mann et al. (2005) and Dr. Mann’s response to the letters from the Chairman Barton and Chairman Whitfield, there seems to be at least some confusion on the meaning of R2. R2 is usually called the coefficient of
determination and in standard analysis of variance; it is computed as 1 — (SSE/SST). SSE is the sum of squared errors due to lack of fit (of the regression or paleoclimate reconstruction) while SST is the total sum of squares about the mean. If the fit is perfect the SSE would be zero and R2 would be one. Conversely, if the fit of the reconstruction is no better than taking the mean value, then SSE/SST is one and the R2 is 0. On the other hand, the Pearson product moment correlation, r, measures association rather than lack of fit. In the case of
simple linear regression, R2 = r2. However, in the climate reconstruction scenario, they are not the same thing. In fact, what is called àƒÅ½à‚Ⱐin MBH98 is very close what we have called R2.

I think the friends of Mann are going to see the paper’s attempt to statistically document the networking involved in and lack of independence in the HS papers as a form of high tech McCarthyism.

James Lane

Over at RC, poor Gavin is “bored of this subject”!

*yawn*

MarkR

Re #27
Mann says, “politically-motivated attacks against individual scientists”

Looks like someone will have to drive a stake through his heart to finish him off. Metaphorically speaking of course.

Michael Jankowski

Wegman et al say what Mann et al did wasn’t PCA. Does this mean the “PCA for Dummies” section over at RC was aplty named?

Steve McIntyre

#27. I just went to realclimate and couldn’t find this posting. Do you think that they took it down?

Ken Robinson

Steve re: 43

They didn’t bother starting a thread on it. It’s an inline response to a comment in their “The Discovery of Global Warming” Update thread.

Regards;

James Lane

Mann says:

Barton’s report, written by statisticians with no apparent background at all in the relevant areas, simply uncritically parrots claims by two Canadians (an economist and an oil industry consultant) that have already been refuted by several papers in the peer-reviewed literature inexplicably neglected by Barton’s “panel”.

Actually, the report does cite W&A (2006), and notes their misrepresentation of MM’s work as an “alternative reconstruction”.

Ross McKitrick

Barton’s report also reveals that his panel collaborated closely with the two Canadians, yet made no attempt to contact me or my collaborators at any point.

Mann has an amazing way of finding non-existent patterns in data. The panel did not “collaborate” with us, I only heard of Wegman’s involvement through an article a while ago in the WSJ and only today did I learn that there were 3 people on it.

And like Steve, I’m speechless. In a happy way.

fFreddy

Re #49, Ross
So long as you have recovered your power of speech by next week’s hearings. Give ’em a version of that excellent speech of yours about a national auditing office.

And bloody well done to the both of you.

David H

The way the Mannians run RealClimate and Mann’s comments today says it all. As the saying goes “They can fool some of us all the time and all of us some of the time but they cant fool all of us all of the time.” I need to look at the spectacles Mann used to read the NAS report.

Michael Jankowski

simply uncritically parrots claims by two Canadians (an economist and an oil industry consultant) that have already been refuted by several papers in the peer-reviewed literature inexplicably neglected by Barton’s “panel”

Yet the NAS panel report, which Mann uses to bolster his claims of being correct, also “uncritically parrots claims” by the “two Canadians” (how in the world is this relevant?!?!? is this like “the South Park Movie” where the US is at war with Canada?!?!?), a fact which Mann “inexplicably neglects” to mention time-and-time again.

Steve McIntyre

A while ago he accused Richard Muller of not simply “parroting” but “scurrilously parroting” our claims.

TCO

The report is devestating and Mann is reeling.

John A

Security backup to a comment I submitted on RealClimate:

With reference to Dr Mann’s dismissive reply to a careful report composed of real statisticians (of which he is not one, having said so to the NAS Panel), I’ll bring up just one misrepresentation out of the many: What Wegman et al actually said was

"In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent"

So far from complaining about too much reliance on peer review, Wegman was pointing out that the peer review was done between a small coterie of the author’s friends who had also staked their scientific reputations on similar results in studies that had lots of the same non-independent proxies.

Francois Ouellette

Steve,

Congratulations! That is one beautiful report IMHO, better than NAS. You should not be afraid of it. I enjoyed the part about the social network. I disagree about their statement on blogs, but as you know, I’d like to know your own opinion on this, so I’ll keep my comments to myself for now!

Prediction: Michael Mann will become more and more isolated as a researcher. But given the way he’s acted and continues to act, I don’t sympathize at all.

Franàƒ⦯is

John A

I disagree about their statement on blogs, but as you know, I’d like to know your own opinion on this, so I’ll keep my comments to myself for now!

Actually I have written a post on this, but it will have to wait for a while (and may turn up somewhere else). The stage is Steve’s while he addresses the points made by Wegman.

Paul Penrose

While informed readers here will certainly enjoy this report (I finally ‘got’ the decentering issue), I think it is even more important for people who have not been closely following this debate. It is written in a style that even people with only a smattering of statistics can understand, and boils down years of arguments and counter-arguments into a report that’s not frightenly long. It’s clear, to the point, and for the most part, clear of weasel wording (unlike the NAS report). It’s a nice counter-point to the NAS report and since Dr. Wegman is the chair of the NAS panel on Applied Statistics, it will be pretty difficult for Mann supporters to easily dismiss him, not that they won’t try of course. They will undoubtedly circle the wagons even tighter, but in the process they will become even more isolated, which should be no surprise to anyone that has read the networking section.

Reid

Re #63: “Prediction: Michael Mann will become more and more isolated as a researcher.”

Mann may be losing scientific credibility but he is simultaneously gaining martyr status amongst those that hold AGW to be an article of faith. Mann can now go on the speaking circuit commanding big fees describing the scientific McCarthyism he has been subjected to and plugging AGW. I’m not predicting Mann will take the loot but radical blogs have been hailing Mann as a latter day Galileo. The truthsayer persecuted by entrenched interests. I view Mann as The Wizard of AGW who has had his divining exposed.

John A

Security backup:

Gavin replied:

Response: Hmmm… So Wegman had access to all the peer reviews and who did them for all of the relevant studies then did he? I don’t think so. He just looked at co-authorship – which is not the same thing at all. Statements about who the peer reviewers were are just speculative with no actual facts to back them up. – gavin

My response:

So Gavin, are you confirming that neither you, nor the 41 others mentioned in the “mutual admiration society” mentioned by Wegman performed peer review on each others key studies that backed AGW?

Michael Jankowski

Re#70 – Mann/RC’s explanation is that “likely,” as in IPCC terminology, is 66-90%. The NAS panel conclusion in the audio was 2:1 in agreement – 66.7% – but used the term “plausible” in the report. So Mann/RC is equating “plausible” with “likely” since 66.7% is in the 66-90% range.

Of course, I haven’t listened to all of the NAS audio, so I’m not sure exactly what they approve of in 2:1 fashion – it could be “anomalous warmth of the late 20th century,” and not what Mann said was likely – “1990s were the warmest decade, 1998 the warmest year,” which the NAS didn’t seem too confident with in the report.

Someone here might be able to clarify exactly what the NAS panel was in 2:1 agreement with.

Dave Dardinger

One thing though. I did a quick search just now and it shows that Both of Wegman’s co-committee members have published papers with him before. So while it doesn’t mean too much, it does mean that it’s not like they were three independent statisticians who banded together to check out MBH98-99. More likely Barton talked to Wegman who then called a couple of his friends and they decided to check things out.

mark

Unfortunately, the HS was what has been used for the past 5 years to show “unprecedented” temperature changes. Nobody disputes climate change, Lee. The problem is saying “global warming” and then “unprecedented” and “anthropogenic” in the same paragraph/sentence without pointing out the problems with making such a connection.

Oh, and FWIW, the instrumental record that is oft used is not geographically balanced to be a true representation of global “mean” temperature. Like it or not, it needs to be corrected.

Mark

PHEaston

Steve. Make sure you enjoy you’re family get together. I think the truth about climate change can wait another few days!

TCO

Lee: I agree with all that. The thing that bothers me is that Mann will not admit an error.

TCO

Mann is imploding. Climatology needs to push him off the cliff before people trhow the whole field over for being liars.

TCO

NAS report was peer reviewed. (Although I think the reviewers had much less ability to influence publication then the norm.) But still.

Terry

#87:

Mann is imploding. Climatology needs to push him off the cliff before people trhow the whole field over for being liars.

This has been one of my main concerns about Mann all along — the damage he will do to real climate science and the damage he will do to the credibility of the real evidence in favor of AGW.

Credibility matters.

BTW, above, I asked about Wegman’s credentials. I just looked at his resume, and he has 172 published papers. Good God.

mark

But he apparently does not have the requisite experience to assess a geologist’s climate claims based on statistics.

Mark

Pat FranK

Leaving aside my usual grave demeanor and presuming that the Wegman analysis will stand, one comment comes to mind in response to their report, which is” ‘Holy-kafuckies!’. 🙂

They said what the NAS panel should have said, and did so with all proper detachment and personal respect. What seems clear is that they were quite properly committed first to the professional standards of statistical methods, and were most concerned that these standards should be followed in a scientific publication that referenced them as central to the scientific conclusions offered. What they found was that the standards of statistical methods were not upheld and that, therefore, the science-based conclusions that had been offered in their name were insupportable.

It was also very good to see Wegman & co. point out that the science of tree-ring dendrology was itself far too incomplete to support any sort of analytical temperature reconstruction. It was further good to see the report comment on the “cryptic” way Mann et al., described their methods in their peer-reviewed articles (how did their peer-reviewers ever figure out what they did, anyway, in the course of their we-know-they-were-very-searching reviews?), and follow on with a well-qualified recommendation about archiving the methods and results that have huge monetary and social impacts. This kind of rational analysis has been sorely lacking from the public debate on climate.

In passing, the Wegman report makes me, as a scientist, ashamed of the NAS panel. They didn’t entirely drop the ball, but they disguised it with hearts and cherubs. There is just no substitute for clarity and forthright adherence to analytical standards. The NAS panel clearly did not do what the Wegman panel did, which is to put their professional standards foremost and let the chips fall where they may. Instead, they waffled.

Congratulations Steve and Ross. You have been entirely corroborated by those whose corroboration is to be most valued.

Pat FranK

#76 “excess”

Is it? It may be just the right amount. Or not enough. How would anyone know?

John M

TCO

Stop taking advantage of Steve M being busy and John A being asleep. All you’re going to do is get the numbering on this topic thread all screwed up. (Where the heck did “Jasmine” come from all of a sudden?)

Terry

#74:

Scientists are not deaf, dumb nor blind. Whilst most of them may agree with the so-called “consensus” (by definition), they are nevertheless scientists at heart. Blind faith is not part of their qualifications, and I don’t think they particularly like the kind of language and rhetoric he uses to defend himself. They can read the NAS report, and read it as scientists: see what’s in between the lines, and it’s pretty damning. Even more so with this report. Who, now, wants to be part of his “social network”, and be tagged as such? So what’s going to happen next time Mann submits a paper for publication? The Editor will make damn sure that he choses referees that are not related to him at all. The reviewers will think “So this is this Mann guy? I’ll make sure I make a really thorough review”. And what about conference program committees? Are they going to give him an invited talk? Not sure.

Of course, he’ll have close collaborators and friends to support him (I hope), and a cheerleading crowd. But scientific credibility? Naah.. he’s lost it all by now.

I think you are on to something here. We may be near a tipping point here where climate scientists become seriously concerned about being tagged as dishonest for continuing to whitewash the obviously serious problems in Mann’s work. Mann’s tactics may be able to fool non-technical cheerleaders, but real scientists understand the problems the NAS report and the Wegman report have highlighted and hewing to Mann’s party line is starting to become risky — something academics do not like.

It is quite sad too. A couple of years ago, some carefully crafted language from Mann that his work was less than perfect and there was room for improvement could have somewhat graciously headed all of this off. Christy and Spencer have been paragons of this, much to their credit.

Pat Frank

#96 -“As a human, I note that a discussion of social networks that a particular individual belongs to is, by definition, an ad hominen attack.”

Not when the network is made to test whether there is a closed conviviality in what should be an open discussion.

Your next comment imposes a subjective political cast on what should be a discussion of objective merits. It matters not a whit to what social networks the Wegman group belongs. What matters is whether their points withstand analytical scrutiny. I am so tired of various climate proponents, with those supposing AGW most especially guilty, making subjective ad hominem innuendoes about the authors of works that should be assessed on the basis of objective standards.

With regard to your proffessional standing as a PhD who understands applied mathematics and your personal position of happiness with regard to, “discuss[ing] the mathematics of climate in the peer-reviewed literature,” can we presume you have read MBH98, 99 and understood the methodological narratives that the Wegman group described as “cryptic”? If so, did you consider them clear, and Wegman, et al. merely inept? Or did you, too, find them cryptic? If the latter, then how could the confusion resulting from obscurantism be called a “discuss[ion]”?

Mike Carney

#76
If you want to say Mann’s work is “essentially irrelevant” to the question you want answered that’s fine. Be clear though that the question of AGW warming has never been the primary question for Steve on this site. This site would attract no attention if Mann said “the study had mistakes and here is what we learned from them”. That is all it would take. But instead Mann has insisted on a take no prisoners approach, trashing Steve (called him a Canadian!) and anyone else that disagrees in the harshest terms, never admitting any possibility of error. Steve persevered not because Mann got an answer he did not like, but rather Steve did not like the way Mann got the answer. You are concerned about the answer, this site is about the method.

The question for you is whether it helps the consensus view to support a bad methodology just because it agrees with the consensus. Or would it be better to get a good methodology that gives an answer that everyone can trust? If the study really is irrelevant to the question you are concerned about, you should have no trouble joining Steve and Ross in calling for better methodology from Mann.

Jasmine

*what* is a gavin-girl???

What a *bizarre* website you all have!

john lichtenstein

Jasmine you have a PhD but you are arguing in public over manners with an Ozzie. Doesn’t add up.

TCO can we declare a 4 pint maximum while SteveM is on vacation?

Lee

re 108:

Gee, people with PhD’s don’t argue about trivial matters in public?

Since when? I thought that was a required skill in every grad program, right up there with eating a lot of free food.

J. Sperry

John A’s comments got through at RC. I’m still waiting for mine to show up, so in case it gets lost over the weekend, here it is:

This may be off-topic for this post, but not for this website. Mann’s comments above are disingenuous. It’s with rose-colored glasses that he could claim that the NAS report confirmed the key conclusions of his earlier work. The phrases “lower our confidence” and “even less confidence” come to mind (pg 4).

Further, the statisticians who wrote the Barton report clearly have a background in the relevant area, namely statistics. That Mann fails to comprehend that his earlier work is largely a statistical exercise is baffling. (“The process of reconstructing climate records from most proxy data is essentially a statistical one…”, NAS report, pg 79)

Finally, the NAS report simply did not dismiss the claims of McIntyre and McKitrick (the topics of spurious trends, robustness, proxy selection, validation, and data archiving come to mind). I’m sorry, Gavin, if this bores you, but it truly is important to both climate change and science in general.

Geoff

Security posting (in queue at RC):

“Having read the recent NAS report and the new Wegman report, I am surprised at some of the comments here. In scientific study, one part is clearly physical (growth rates of trees, IR absorption, etc.) and a separate part is the statistical treatment of the data.

Dr. Wegman’s analysis is only of the latter (aside from some sociological mildly interesting analysis of the network of investigators, which in and of itself says nothing about the importance or handling of the data). He is well qualified to analyze statistical methods, as chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, and a board member of the American Statistical Association.

The conclusion of the Committee headed by Dr. Wegman is clear – the statistical methods of MBH 98/99 cannot be relied upon to support the claim that the 90’s were the hottest decade of the past millennium. If one wants to argue with Dr. Wegman’s conclusion, it will be necessary to show how he has misunderstood or misrepresented the statistical methods used in those studies.

This conclusion does not “prove” that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the present, it does not “prove” that CO2 is not causing warming, it does not “prove” that all climate science of the past decades is rubbish. However, if one wants to argue against any of these points, unless one can show reasons why the Wegman Committee analysis of the statistical methods of MBH 98/99 is incorrect, the obvious scientific approach would be to accept that MBH 98/99 cannot be the evidence to support such argument.

Anyone with an interest in climate in general and paleoclimatology in particular should read the NAS report and the Wegman Committee report.

“

Louis Nettles

85 95 116 and 91 I think Jasmine might have been offended by 91 instead of 85 unless she is referring to a post has been deleted. (I still haven’t figured out why my first post from 7/14 was deleted). I don”t think 91 passes the Principal Component test.

Jean S

re #50: Mann is so easily predictable… actually sometimes his comments look like they were written by PoMo with a vocabulary supplied by Carl Christensen. 🙂

welikerocks

It is so transparent how Mann’s and Gavin’s comments thus far sound the way they do. You think they would defend the methods or the math, or at least show some outrage if the report misrepresented something completely wrong. Instead they direct every one to read what the IPCC says or other topics “already discussed” on Real Climate, and then act bored with the whole thing.

What I am seeing is no respect for this report, no respect for other scientist not in their clique, and no respect for the people who actually run this country and represent it’s citizens.

I see no respect for the citizens who work and pay taxes to support policy action and research, and should always demand that the top scientists “in the news” and at the forfront of important issues to at least be honest ones.

No respect for parents who have children who are taught in school that the Hockey Stick proves GW is man made.

I could go on and on…

It is disgusting.

Terry

The Wegman Report at page 49 (point 7) and page 14 discusses how the tree-ring analysis removes low frequency variations, and that, because the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information, the hottest-in-a-millenium claims are essentially unverifiable.

This sounds important. Does anyone know the status of work on this problem? I seem to remember someone doing an analysis to correct for this.

Dave Dardinger

re: #122-123,

Let me give what I’ve absorbed on this issue and people can correct what I’ve gotten wrong.

The ultimate trouble is that trees don’t produce rings of uniform size, even if the external situation remains unchanged. They gradually produce more narrow rings as they get older. Partially this is simply the change in surface to volume ratio (productivity is a function of surface area while rings have an increasing volume at the tree gets older So if you want to be able to look a the climate, an adjustment must be made to each tree’s ring width’s to compensate for its age. Of course this is only going to be approximately accurate and there will remain some problems with any given tree. But assuming we sample a number of trees in any area the differences should largely average out. Still, there may be problems, especially in the lower frequency data.

I think this is a bit different than the problem which there’s an attempt to correct in the article Jean S is looking for, however. It seems to be concerned with differences caused by varying stand densities over time. But I don’t have access to it either so I don’t know for sure.

TCO

RC censor-save:

The NAS concluded that Mann had an undocumented, never before used method of “off-centering his PCA. THat this method mines for hockey sticks. They BACKED up this conclcusion of Steve’s. WEgman found the same thing. Mike has never addressed this particular issue. Why is the off-centering there? Was it a mistake. We’ve heard the misdierction (it doesn’t matter, other studies show same thing, etc.), but never a direct addressal of this problem. So, Mike, WHY is that in the code and WHY didn’t you report it in the article?

Jean S

re: #125: After reading #111 I saw #115 and had a thought: that was quick 🙂 (Peter J. Bickel, a famous statistician)

Jean S

re #129: Hmmm.. I think data mining is a more general term.

Gerald Machnee

Re #129 and #130 – When you look at the list of papers and talks Dr. Wegman has done, there are several on “data mining”. I have not read them, but he may give his view of “data mining” there. That was part of my joke in comment 14 in the other thread.

TCO

The calibration period and the off-centering are two different issues, Ken. Also Mann never stated in the paper that the PCA was off-centered nor has he ever said why it was done or if on purpose or not.

MarkR

Note: Although the House Committee on Science initiated the Academy study, the Academy decided not to address the specific questions of the House Committee on Science and decided to focus of the Academy study away from the specific questions and address broader issues. Page 64

PS JohnA remember when you chided me for pointing this out?

beng

RE 113:

And Mann’s response (everybody collaborated against me!) shows an amazing amount of paranoia.

AFAIK, Climateaudit has most or all of M&M’s methodologies here available to the public for download. Wegman prb’ly emailed M&M for alittle help finding it all.

It obviously pays to have available data & methods that makes replication relatively easy.

TCO

save from CT: A. The post seems to say that Wegman thinks it notable that the Mann co-author group all contains coauthorship with him. If you read the report, it is clear that Wegman’s remarks are explanatory of a general feature of the network: are not meant to be showing some special discovery. More like explaining why you have a row of ones down the diagonal of a comparison matrix. This reminds me of the people who cackled on this site about Ross not knowing the difference between radians and degrees when the error was clearly one of input (that he did not know that the program needed him to convert conventional lattitude to radians before inputting). I think everyone knows that degrees and radians are different. They also know that a network selected to be coauthors, will all be coauthors! Sheesh.

B. Some examples: “as mentioned before, Mann is his own group since he has co-authored with all of the 42”, “The first database is Mann-centric with the idea of investigating relationships among his closest associates”. (There are a couple others, but I’m too lazy to retype from a pdf.) Anyhoo…it’s clear that this guy who has published networks is being explanatory to a general audience of a feature. Not citing a discovery.

TCO

saved from Crooked Timber:

I agree that the social network is the novel thing about the report. It is NOT the only noteworthy thing about the report. What you have also is

A. A very, very good statistician (better then either Mann or McIntyre) looking at the Mann work, the McI critique and finding for McI. (One has to wonder, do you find any flaw with that part of the report? Did you already agree with McI about how the off-centering mines for hockey sticks? Did the rest of the field agree?
B. That same experienced statistician saying that Mann’s descriptions of method were vague and opaque in his papers, that he used non-quantitative language to describe his method’s skill, and that the data and code was insufficient to allow verification.
C. Some minor things (some new, some repeats) like that Mann confuses r and R.
D. Also new: that the method will mine for shapes IN GENERAL from white noise. Not just hockey sticks. But any low freq sample with white noise will be magnified. See Fig 4.7. (This actually interesting from purely intellectual stance.) That the Mannian method will extract a shape from 1 out of 70 noise samples, whereas conventional PCA would give a noise-looking PC1.
E. That Mann’s method can not be technically PCA (because of the transform when he offcenters). It’s not actually a PRINCIPLE component.

Ken Fritsch

Re #134:

Where TCO says:

The calibration period and the off-centering are two different issues, Ken. Also Mann never stated in the paper that the PCA was off-centered nor has he ever said why it was done or if on purpose or not.

The Wegman paper says with my emphasis italicized the following:

The key issue in dispute is the CFR methodology as used in MBH98 and MBH99. The description of the work in MBH98 is both somewhat obscure and as others have noted incomplete. The essence of the discussion is as follows. Principal component methods are normally structured so that each of the data time series (proxy data series) are centered on their respective means and appropriately scaled. The first principal component attempts to discover the composite series that explains the maximum amount of variance. The second principal component is another composite series that is uncorrelated with the first and that seeks to explain as much of the remaining variance as possible. The third, fourth and so on follow in a similar way. In MBH98/99 the authors make a simple seemingly innocuous and somewhat obscure calibration assumption. Because the instrumental temperature records are only available for a limited window, they use instrumental temperature data from 1902-1995 to calibrate the proxy data set. This would seem reasonable except for the fact that temperatures were rising during this period. So that centering on this period has the effect of making the mean value for any proxy series exhibiting the same increasing trend to be decentered low. Because the proxy series exhibiting the rising trend are decentered, their calculated variance will be larger than their normal variance when calculated based on centered data, and hence they will tend to be selected preferentially as the first principal component. (In fact the effect of this can clearly be seen RPC no. 1 in Figure 5 in MBH98.). Thus, in effect, any proxy series that exhibits a rising trend in the calibration period will be preferentially added to the first principal component.

See also from Wegman:

Two principal methods for temperature reconstructions have been used; CFR4 (climate field construction) and CPS (climate-plus-scale). The CFR is essentially a principal component analysis and the CPS is a simple averaging of climate proxies, which are then scaled to actual temperature records. The controversy of Mann’s methods lies in that the proxies are centered on the mean of the period 1902-1995, rather than on the whole time period. This mean is, thus, actually decentered low, which will cause it to exhibit a larger variance, giving it preference for being selected as the first principal component. The net effect of this decentering using the proxy data in MBH98 and MBH99 is to produce a “hockey stick” shape. Centering the mean is a critical factor in using the principal component methodology properly.

TCO

Ken, you are still confused. I know how you were confused. I knew it before. Let me teach you:

calibration period issue: has to do with the trend inside the data and how valid proxies are judged to be based on accordance and the danger that this does not tell much given possibility of autocorrelation.

Off-centering: has to do with a transform used before putting data into the matrices of the PCA.

It’s ok, old man. But you are WRONG!

Hans Erren

from wiki:

Definition
Data mining can be defined as “the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data” [1] and “the science of extracting useful information from large data sets or databases” [2]. Although it is usually used in relation to analysis of data, data mining, like artificial intelligence, is an umbrella term and is used with varied meaning in a wide range of contexts. It is usually associated with a business or other organization’s need to identify trends.

Data mining involves the process of analysing data to show patterns or relationships; sorting through large amounts of data; and picking out pieces of relative information or patterns that occur e.g., picking out statistical information from some data.

TCO

I don’t know why he used it. If it was a mistake or on purpose. I’m interested in knowing.

Also interested in having him admit that he did so and that it has an influence. He needs to start being a truth-facing scientist. Not a debater and a baby of a debater (look at review #2 on BC paper).

TCO

we are not communicating.

Joel McDade

TCO and Ken:

Sorry if I am a Cargo Cult Scientist. Can I post again my lame attempt at simplying the issue, so that I personally can understand it? Please DO tell me where I am wrong.

1) Normalization, aka Centering.

a) Mann was not statistically abliged to normalize the data, as it was somehow in non-dimensional form (nor would he have to if it was in temperature degrees in all cases).

b) But some series were tropical and others were from northern or even arctic regions, with far different ranges. So in an effort to “Globalize” it, he had to normalize it. Then in percentage terms he is comparing apples with apples.

c) So if I have a series that ranges from 0 to 1 and another that ranges from 0 to 100 (exaggerating), after normalization the percentage changes are equal.

d) Now, even this Cargo Scientist would never dream of normalizing the data to ~~the last 8% of the data series (the 20th century) and hope to find meaningful data relationships or infomation way outside of that period. The volatility may be WAY different.

e) Paraphrasing the RC for Dummies FAQ, “We did this to examine how the data related to the known instrument record.” (To me this is some sort of weird attempt at calibration.) Then paraphrasing Wegman, “MBH couched the reasons for normalizing the data to 1902-1980 in terms that would seem reasonable to many, but was fundamentally unsound.”

2. Calibration

A different process, and not to be confused. My lame description: AFTER the PCA temp reconstruction if you are off a couple of degrees compared to the instrument record, you simply adjust your whole reconstruction accordingly.

3. Verification

Was this done? It would imply splitting up the already short instrument record and seeing if you could reproduce the other part of it, right?

Just asking if I have and approximately correct handle on the issues. Thanks.

Joel McDade

btw, I would appreciate it if someone with more understading of the statistical issues would “frisk” the above post (#154). I’ve not had a single course in statistics and have been struggling with all this, though I still “have one or two marbles rolling around up there”

TCO

Come back, Jasmine.

TCO

Don’t sweat it. Mann is becoming a joke even in his own coterie. We will never get to say I told you so, because the fanboys will say that they knew it all along (re offcentering and the like). It’s ok, though. At least we crushed the hockey stick.

Russ Steele

Re #145 John:

Thanks for reminding me of John Daly’s contribution. It was his web site that sparked my global warming skepticism, which inturn led me to Climate Audit and the other excellent blogs on this issue. May John rest well with the publication of the Wegman Report.

Charlie (Colorado)

Jean S, I just noticed your comment (#2 on the previous thread:

How about this: he’s a statistician, and he has zero qualification in climate science! You have to be a qualified climate scientistist to understand these things

Compare Mann, quoted above:

Barton’s report, written by statisticians with no apparent background at all in the relevant areas, ….

I’d say you have a predictive model there.

David Stockwell

#165 Hi Pat. I have a plot brewing. How about I try to write a ‘straight’ news article on the Wegman report, and then submit it to social news sites digg and Netscape. Then, we all go in and vote for it so it gets on the front page of these sites. I feel outraged that the media are not giving people the opportunity to reflect on the information. Its possible for the internet to flex its muscles with social networking.

Bruce

Not quite MSM, but a Google New search on “Hockey Stick Wegman” yielded this:

John A

The Detection and Attribution sections will definitely need to be revised.

My impression is that as a result of both the NAS Panel and Wegman reports, the IPCC report will be even more shrill and dismissive, especially in the Summary for Policymakers. Having lead so many men to the top of the hill, they’re going to struggle to march them back down in retreat.

To swap metaphors, this gravy train has a lot of momentum.

Steve Bloom

Re #169 and 170: I’m afraid your mutual desire to overturn the entirety of climate science has led you to misunderstand the significance of the HS to D+A. Did you both fail to read the AR4 draft? I see no reason to expect a substantial change in it.

Ferdinand Engelbeen

Re #145

I only can add my admiration for the “amateur” John Daly, unfortunately passed away too soon, for his immediate reaction on the publication of the HS, with lots of facts all over the globe contradicting the HS graph.

Thanks to him and the Mc’s and the NAS panel and now Wegman e.a., the road is free for the Climate Science community to look at better proxies and better methods to know what really happened in the past thousand(s) years…

Ferdinand Engelbeen

Re #172

Steve, my reaction on your last post on RC didn’t make it (yet). The main point about variability in the pre-industrial past is that models need to adjust their overall sensitivity or their specific sensitivity (for GHGs/aerosols), accordingly to match the 1.5 century old instrumental record (as far as that is reliable). If there was a large natural variability in the past (like Moberg, Esper,… indicate), then there is less room left for GHG/aerosol variability in current times and 2xCO2 influence will end at (or below) the lowest range of the IPCC with a benign warming. If Mann98/99 or Jones98 were right, then sensitivity to GHGs/aerosols must be high and 2xCO2 ends at the upper limits of the IPCC range, which includes disaster. This has nothing to do with denialists, see the opinion of Esper e.a. in comment #171.

About the newest aerosol/cloud connection, I downloaded the Science article, but haven’t digested it yet. Some fast comment: they suggest a 5% increase in global cloud cover from anthropogenic aerosols, which is the difference between an increase by white (sulfate) aerosols and a decrease by black (soot) aerosols. That number is pretty high. The influence should be visible in huge changes in cloud cover over North America/Europe and SE Asia, as there is not much change in global pollution, but a firm reduction in Europe/NA and a firm increase in SE Asia since 1975. The resulting increase in pollution thus should lead to an increase of clouds around the NH equator, but actually there is a decrease in cloud cover in the 20S-20N band since 1985… The only exception is over the Indian Ocean, where there is an increase in cloud cover, but equally over the highly polluted NH as over the much cleaner SH near the equator. See the work of J. Norris

Jean S

re #177: Additionally, reading the abstarcts and conclusions, I think even MBH98 was essentially meant as a D&A study, and the focus changed to the temperature reconstruction in MBH99.

Another point (not related to D&A) I’d like to raise is that I think the claim in MBH99 about “1998 being the warmest year in millenium” was never actually peer-reviewed: it does not appear (naturally) in the preprint (submitted Oct. 7 1998), and from the final version we find: Received October 14, 1998; revised January 21, 1999; accepted January 27, 1999. I seriously doubt that the editor sent (and received the comments back) between 21.1. and 27.1.

The original manuscript (from Conclusions):

Nonetheless, even if these uncertainties and caveats are taken into account, certain important conclusions are possible. While the early centuries of the millennium approach 20th century levels of warmth, the late 20th century still appears anomalous: the 1990s is almost certainly among the warmest few decades, if not the warmest decade this millennium. Several recent years are almost certainly among the few warmest, if not the warmest.

and the final:

Although NH reconstructions prior to about AD 1400 exhibit expanded uncertainties, several important conclusions are possible, notwithstanding certain caveats. While warmth early in the millennium approaches mean 20th century levels, the late 20th century still appears anomalous: the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium.

Also, notwithstanding 🙂 English is not my native language, the original one actually seems to be bolder in their claims, which puts Mann’s comment (from RC/NAS post) to a different light (emphasis mine):

The authors of the report accurately report the considerable uncertainties that were acknowledged by seminal earlier studies. In particular, Mann et al 1999, which was entitled (emphasis added) “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations, emphasized the uncertainties and caveats, particularly with regard to reconstructing large-scale surface temperature patterns prior to about AD 1600

So regarding these now complete rebutted (I start liking the word) 1990’s claims, the uncertainties were (slightly) emphasized likely by the request of the reviewer(s). Notice also the AD1400 –> AD1600 change in the RC comment 🙂

kim

Thanks, TCO, for the response to Tim Lambert at JOM. Rick Ballard pointed me to Motl’s statement.
===================================

fFreddy

Re #180, kim
Worth a link. Well done, TCO.

TCO

I’m glad Tom Maguire at Just One Minute picked this up. He has medium level traffic and gets checked out by all the big blogs like Powerline and Michell Malkin. Even by some of the lefty ones. I hate to bring the hoi palloi in, but getting this freeped would probably not hurt. They took down Rather after all…

Jasmine

158: Ad hominem attacks, like those in this discussion, and in this report, are offensive and nonsensical. I’ll watch from here, thank you.

I have to admit, there are amusing aspects to this report. For instance, these remarks totally cracked me up:

“This Ad Hoc Committee…has no financial interest in the outcome of the report”

paired with

“…evaluation by statisticians should be standard practice. This evaluation phase should be a mandatory part of all grant applications and funded accordingly.”

Anyway, I will be there on Wednesday morning, wearing violet. If there’s time, perhaps we can continue this discussion in person. In the meantime, I’m going sailing.

Jasmine

uh oh… just checked my email and thought I better clear up any confusion I might have generated.

Jasmine is not my name… I’m not foolish enough to put scientific matters up for discussion in an environment that is not peer-reviewed. The stakes (academic integrity) are too high.

So to answer the email:
I’m not Dr. Said! I earned my PhD in 1994 and not 2005.

1. Not at all. Nor did I find the paper confusing. Finally, I don’t have any trouble implementing my own code. In using someone else’s code, it would be trivial to replace machine-specific directory structures.

2. My own experience with the peer review system suggests that it is surprisingly independent. I can not imagine how the authors drew another conclusion unless they were reviewers or editors for those papers. Incidentally, I’m quite sure there are more "climate scientists" than those who have published on "temperature reconstruction" and so the entire discussion of "cliques" is ludicrous.

3. What reaction? I must have missed it.

4. I’m going to make a wild speculation and guess that Yasmin, a recent PhD and a lecturer, was merely still working with his advisor. Unfortunately for him, it was bad advice.

Jasmine

187: nope… definitely not a guy.

TCO

Bradley and Hughes were happy to take in the credit and ride the young prof’s coat tails. Now they are hanging back and not fighting with him. Typical.

MarkR

Re#188 “In using someone else’s code, it would be trivial to replace machine-specific directory structures”

If it’s so trivial, why has no-one done it, not even Wegman?

s.y.

Regarding the attribution issue (sorry if this is off topic), I was wondering how you folks find the “mainstream” arguments spelled out at:
http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=are_you_a_global_warming_skeptic_part_iv&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
What George Musser says there about the “vertical patterns” and the “temporal patterns” seem to be pursuasive, at least at first blush.

Pat Frank

#166 That sounds like a good plan, David 🙂 But to give the media their full opportunity to behave ethically, maybe it would be better to wait and see what response, if any, follows Wednesday’s congressional hearings.

fFreddy

Re #199, Ken Fritsch

He should have properly used the mean and standard deviations from the longer period and by doing what he naively did was a major factor in producing the HS shape. Is my understanding correct?

Yes. All else is hand-waving and wiggling on the hook.

Jasmine

An SUV??? Actually I rode the metro and got on the boat from there. That comment was ALMOST as bad as repeatedly commenting on whether I’m a woman or not.

I did bring up that I was a woman. It’s been my experience that reminding "sailors" that "a lady is present" helps temper the conversation into discourse that belongs in a public place.

I haven’t defended Mann other than to say that I didn’t find his writing obscure. The original paper was in GRL… any "Letter" has pretty tight word-count requirements.

Ad hominem arguments are ineffective regardless of who makes them.

directory structure… can’t answer why Wegman couldn’t do it… don’t know if he could or not. It would involve something like changing:

/usr/local/bin/TRecondata/GRL.dat

to

..\AUDIT_DATA\check.dat

really truly not a big deal. Hardly something I’d write to congress about.

What’s at stake beyond academic integrity?

ENERGY: Wouldn’t the world be a better place if OUR Honorable Members could spend their time discussing pertient issues regarding energy self-sufficiency instead of an ad hominem attack against a junior scientist from non-citizens who are "drop-outs from physics in little backwater places?"

fFreddy

Re #202, Jasmine

An SUV??? … That comment was ALMOST as bad as repeatedly commenting on whether I’m a woman or not.

Why ?

I haven’t defended Mann other than to say that I didn’t find his writing obscure.

He managed to be obscure enough that he fooled you. Or are you saying that you saw through his nonsense ?

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if OUR Honorable Members could spend their time discussing pertient issues regarding energy self-sufficiency instead of an ad hominem attack against a junior scientist from non-citizens who are “drop-outs from physics in little backwater places?”

Not sure what you are trying to say here. TCO’s reference to physics drop-outs referred to Michael Mann.
What did you mean by your reference to “non-citizens” ?

fFreddy

Re #203 – Strange. Is Spam Karma feeling stroppy tonight ?

Ken Fritsch

re #199

Joel McDade, if you have trouble reading Mannian verse,pages 9,10 and 11 of the NAS report here on “Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years (2006)” give an excellent description of the steps in constructing a multiproxy reconstruction of temperatures including data collection, data pre-processing, calibration, validation and reconstruction.

The top of page 11 warns of the lowering of the reconstruction variability from the use of linear regression model for calibration and the uncertainty of the regression holding over the entire time period of reconstruction.

fFreddy

Re #206, Jasmine
Neither McIntyre nor McKitrick are physics drop-outs.
Please tell me you are not suggesting that your government should listen to Mann because he is American, but should ignore McIntyre and McKitrick because they are Canadian. Please tell me that is not what you are suggesting.

John M

Not sure what happened to Jasmine’s comment #202 that fFreddy references, but assuming she really said what he quotes her as saying:

Jasmine, you say in #206 that the car you drive is irrelevant, but fFreddy quotes you as saying that discussions should focus on “pertient issues regarding energy self-sufficiency.” Isn’t the car you and everyone else drives pertinent to energy self-sufficiency? And if you’re offended by my comment about an SUV, I think you’ve been in the PC world of academics or government for too long.

By the way, if the Spam monster got you, I hope you don’t waste dozens of posts complaining about it. It happened to me too when I first started to post comments. It’s just the way it works.

John A

This weblog has more important business to attend to than an ad hominem attack.

Jasmine

I don’t drive a car (thanks for asking)… why the pertinent details of my personal life are so important to some of you are a bit beyond me. I hadn’t asked for the gender, transportation choice, or any other details of any others’ lives.

I’m used to environments where ideas matter and where we’re working towards a future in the face of some fairly pressing issues. I clearly stumbled into the wrong place here. My apologies.

David Stockwell

#198.

That sounds like a good plan, David 🙂

Well I got my fingers rapped for encouraging people to digg Lubos’ article. I tend to take action, and think if the media won’t get the word out you have to do it yourself. Hopefully some of the bigger blogs will report it next week with the hearings, because the pickings apart from Lubos have been pretty poor. I think Lubos has written a useful article. It has links to the main documents. It has some thinking, and some humor.

John A

fFred, I was replying to Jasmine, not you old bean. Maybe she’ll take her special brand of humour to Deltoid, because they love a good chinwag about people they have in common.

Jasmine

huh? industry? deltoid? I seriously need to get out more… I have *no* idea what you’re talking about.

Let’s talk on Wednesday. I’ll be there in a violet dress.

welikerocks

#214,
You don’t speak for me.

mark

I’m used to environments where ideas matter and where we’re working towards a future in the face of some fairly pressing issues. I clearly stumbled into the wrong place here. My apologies.

It’s a good thing you are fully against ad-hominems (based on many of your posts), otherwise, someone might take you for a hypocrite.

Mark

welikerocks

Oh my gosh! The Hockey Stick is to science is like steroids is to baseball! LOL

welikerocks

Tell me something I don’t already know Jasmine! 🙂
Have a good one too!

David Smith

I am wondering how the New York Times will handle this story. My thoughts:

* wait until the hearings, at which Henry Waxman will be the attack dog. Quote him.
* the story will discuss paleoclimatology as an infant science tackling a critically important subject. Speed is essential. 2006 so far is the warmest ever in the US (sixth warmest worldwide, but that’s an inconvenient fact, so focus just on the US).
* Mann’s report is said to have statistical errors but, per the NSC, the results (hockey stick) have been confirmed.
* Mann speedily tackled an important subject and, even with claimed errors, he acted on the behalf of mankind.
* Politicians should not be meddline in the processes of science.
* The Congressman is probably owned and operated by Exxon and other oil interests.
* If the calls to George Mason, Rice, etc, can reveal dirt on the investigators, toss that in, too.

Tim Ball

url

Well it looks like the Mannicles are starting to come undone. Next we tackle the data and the models until we achieve some real science.

Dave Dardinger

Jasmine,

This obsession I’ve witnessed over ancient history has been …ummm.. ODD to say the least!

The operative quote should be, “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana – The Life of Reason 1905 I.e. if we cannot determine what mistakes were made, they will be repeated.

welikerocks

237 Dave Dardinger,

Thanks for bringing those wise words up.
I didn’t understand what Jasmine said there at all.
And I still think this report is very important: for studying the past and for tackling the future.

Sheesh, it really bugs me this report is not in the news.
If it had “Frogs” in the title, it would have been all over the AP two days ago!

McCall

re: 237 (231) “This obsession I’ve witnessed over ancient history has been …ummm.. ODD to say the least!”
It’s simpler than that: Dr. Jasmine practices more than hypocracy (ad hom’s). Why is she here at a largely subject-related blog (bad practices and arguments in the AGW science community as represented and most prominently spearheaded by MBH9x)?

re: 229 “The issues concern nuclear power, innovative nano-technology storage sources, renewable energy sources, etc.”
Are you arguing these technology’s adoption and advancement rates are somehow enhanced by scary “new” AGW scenarios, as opposed to scary “ancient history” AGW scenarios? If so, such “ends justifies the means” arrogance is unnerving if not frightening. Do you actually believe these technology initiatives are better served by falsifying justification to the public; or if you prefer, offering up umproven scary scenarios in the hopes of stimulating demand? Then again, perhaps those not believing, or wanting to suspend/control such things as the law of supply and demand will benefit from the religious marketing of the hockeystick — but then that would be unfair for me to paint all AGW-proponents as anti-capitalism. But beyond that choir of anti-capitalists, the rest of us know that neither nuclear power nor nanotech, nor renewable fuels need AGW and it’s cost-ineffective IPCC or Kyoto-led CO2-limiting bureaucracy initiatives to progress.

But thanks to Dr. Jasmine anyway, for blowing sunshine where it wasn’t needed. If only one could generate aerosol/cloud-cover with such arguments, one could slow down GW regardless of forcing?

Ferdinand Engelbeen

Jasmine,

There are good arguments to focus on non-fossil fuel energy alternatives. That these will end (except coal) in the near future. And that one need to be more independent of not so stable countries (as again is proven nowadays) for geopolitical reasons. But if greenhouse gas emissions are a big player in this all is rather questionable. The problem is that current measures (like the Kyoto protocol) will not have any measurable effect but at a high cost, and are aimed to reduce CO2 without much funding for alternative energy initiatives (much of the money probably will benefit the Russian maffia…)

It is not very important that the HS was right or wrong in its conclusion. It is far more important that political decisions with a huge economical impact are based on the best science available. In this case, one of the pillars of the decisions is proven wrong, and many of the newer reconstructions are probably wrong, as they are based on the same disproven proxies. The effect of past variability on climate models, whatever the future scenario’s might be, is huge. Thus one need much better reconstructions of the past millennium/millennia to know what the real impact of natural variability on climate is (and thus what the real impact of GHGs is) and what the cost/benefit is of urgent or less urgent measures to reduce CO2 levels to near zero (which is the only effective goal if you believe that CO2 has a huge impact).

per

My unsolicited advice: pay attention to this millenium and not to obscure letters from the past one.

???
jasmine makes it sound so reasonable. MBH’98 is just an obscure letter, and not (as the nas panel said) a ground-breaking scientific paper which has spawned an entire field.

Wouldn’t it be so easy if we could just paint out the inconvenient bits of our history, just like 1984 ?

Back in the real world of science, Nature and Science papers are meant to meet standards; high standards. When they are shown to be fatally flawed, then that is a signficant issue. It has major repercussions for the field that has been spawned. Some of the other issues around MBH98 are equally deserving of attention, not least the self-serving approach to statistical testing.

yours
per

jim karlock

Do you suuppose Mann thinks like Schnider:

Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research described the scientists’ dilemma this way: “On the one hand, as scientists, we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but-which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but; human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might. have. This `double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” DISCOVER OCTOBER 1989, Page 47

kim

Tim Lambert is still defending Mann’s method on JustOneMinute.typepad.com, claiming that the off-centering is immaterial and the PC can be retained thanks to Preisendorfer’s n. Hat tip MJW.
============================================

Jean S

re #248: Thanks for the tip 🙂

Charlie (Colorado)

ENERGY: Wouldn’t the world be a better place if OUR Honorable Members could spend their time discussing pertient issues regarding energy self-sufficiency instead of an ad hominem attack against a junior scientist from non-citizens who are “drop-outs from physics in little backwater places?”

Wow. There’s a red herring, a straw man, two ad hominem circumstantials, and a quote out of context in the space of one sentence.

Ladies and gentlemen, call Guiness, this may be a record attempt.

kim

You may have hit on the solution, H. Erren, Xeno’s Paradox. If someone nicks a half of your contribution, then a half of the remainder, where does it all end? What’s it all about, Alfie?
===========================================

Jim Edwards

It’s easy to understand why Mann et Al wouldn’t want to get real statisticians involved in this sort of paleoclimatological ‘evidence’. You don’t have to believe in a pro-AGW conspiracy to see what’s going on.

There are scientists out there whose job entails actually travelling to Antarctica or Outer Mongolia to recover various proxy samples, and / or actually spending the time to make and record measurements from proxy samples.

There are others, like Mann, whose job it is to sit in their office and massage other people’s data – and perhaps go on the lecture circuit.

Once real statisticians get involved in this exercise, Mann et Al, become superfluous and quickly lose their jobs. What would have happened if, eight years ago, Mann had gone to a Wegman and said, “I want to write a groundbreaking statistics paper with potentially significant public policy effect but I don’t know how to do it. If you do the work for me I promise I’ll mention you in the acknowledgements…”

uhohraggy

I am sooo disappointed. I am in the camp of believing global warming is occuring and caused by humans, BUT I am open to other possibilities and I read EVERYTHING with scrutiny. So this report intrigued me, but it relys heavily on the statisticians that disputed the Mann paper. Although, the whole “clique” section was stupid. Pick any field and narrow it down (ie study of South American Sparrows) and there will be a “clique” or an interconnection between the experts. If there weren’t there would be no point, any moron that knew nothing about the subject could just write something up, with no peer review. No one publishes a scientific paper without either fully understanding the statistics or having it reviewed by a statistician. Unfortunately statistics can almost always be skewed either way. Anyway, I digress… I then looked into Stephen McIntyre (one of the authors quoted in this report and published disputing Mann, as a starting point.

http://www.marshall.org/experts.php?id=98

The guy has been involved in mineral exploration for 30 years. Think there is a conflict of interest?
Also, the George C Marshall institute is funded by Standard Oil and Exxon (It appears most scientists that dispute global warming are connected to old GCMI) They have written such scientific gems as this;

http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=54

This is an argument for the mentally challenged. “If a 50% increase in CO2 levels caused a 0.5C increase in temperature then a 100% increase in CO2 levels will only cause a 1.0C increase in temperature.” Yeah…if there is a direct 1:1 correlation in the most simple relationship (ie a 45 degree line on a graph), which no one has ever claimed. Then they go on to try to explain why it will actually be lower than that due to minor temperautre fluctuations within the noise of the 20th century. The author should be embarrased by his stupidity.

As I read more and more about global warming I find I am more and more convinced of the validity of the theory and the threat, and of the alterior motives of the people refuting it. It frightens me the number of uneducated people who either are too close-minded or too ignorant to really investigate the various reports, papers, funding sources and motives of the people making the arguments. I really wish this “Report” offered some sort of value to a false global warming theory, but it is really just more political hot air.

Dave Dardinger

I am sooo disappointed.

Yeah? Well so am I by the lack of quality in your post.

but it relys heavily on the statisticians that disputed the Mann paper.

By which I assume you mean McIntyre & McKitrick. But that was the whole point of the report; who’s correct, Mann or M&M. Answer, M&M.

Also, the George C Marshall institute is funded by Standard Oil and Exxon

A. So what? who someone is funded by has nothing to do with whether the findings are correct or not. Again, that’s what the Wegman report was about and they, once again, said it’s M&M who are right.

B. It’s misleading; The Marshall institute may have received funding from them, but it’s a small % of their total budget. It’s nothing but an attempted ad hom on your part. Verry disappointing!

If a 50% increase in CO2 levels caused a 0.5C increase in temperature then a 100% increase in CO2 levels will only cause a 1.0C increase in temperature.

Actually a 100% increase will produce less than a 1.0C increase, not just because of any temperature fluxuations [i.e. natural variations], but because the CO2 absorption bands are largely saturated so that the increase in CO2 warming comes from increasingly marginal bands which require more and more CO2 to saturate. Thus temperature goes up with a roughly log of CO2 concentration. I assume you’re thinking of H2O positive feedbacks, but they’re not proven, probably small if they exist and also likely to peter out at some point since CO2 concentration has been hugely greater at various times in the past (though not in this interglacial AFAIK), and the earth’s temperature hasn’t heated out of control. [Though let me put in the disclaimer that undoubtedly it’s true that higher temperatures evaporate more H2O; the question is to what extent this is ofset by increased cloudiness, etc.]

the alterior motives of the people refuting it

Yes, well we skeptics do try to be up-front about our positions. It’s the warmers who want to hide both their data and their motives behind their backs. (I.e. thanks for the freudian typo – It should be “ulterior”)

Jean S

Off-topic (admittably tired Jean S, not wanting to feed the troll): Where do these new “I-do-not-understand-anything-nor-have-I-anything-new-to-add-but-it-must-be-wrong-as-there-is-this-link-to-eXXXon-and therefore-I-comment-what-i-saw-over-DELTOID”-people keep coming here? Is it just me, but I feel like I’ve seen substancially the same comment as #248 dozens of times before, even in this thread. Are these people paid to comment?

uhohraggy: Steve Bloom, Tim Lambert, Carl Christensen, and dozens others whose names I’ve forgotten (sorry), have already educated this site about these issues, so please, read a bit more this site before repeating the same stuff. Even a stupid European like me knows already about “special interest groups”, “George C Marshall institute”, “wingnuts”, …

fFreddy

Blimey. I’m getting slow off the mark …

Hans Erren

ET, CO2 saturation is already incorporated in the log effect. The “some point” is somewhere in the 25% CO2 region, when animal life on earth can’t breathe anyway so nobody cares about global warming.

fFreddy

Re #265, ET SidViscous
Yes, but that was a transposition, which, charitable fellow that I am, I am willing to believe is an honest typo. ‘Alterior’, on the other hand, is just ignorant.

Dave B

“I read EVERYTHING with scrutiny.”

just not enough of ANYTHING. a good place to start might be “OVERVIEW”, or ross mckitrick’s, “what is the hockey stick debate about?”, found under “favorites” in the right column.

Mark T.

Where do these new “I-do-not-understand-anything-nor-have-I-anything-new-to-add-but-it-must-be-wrong-as-there-is-this-link-to-eXXXon-and therefore-I-comment-what-i-saw-over-DELTOID”-people keep coming here?

Jean, I think this is because the work that has transpired on these blog pages has threatened the entrenched belief system of AGW adherents. Without the HS, they are madly attempting to recapture the “proof” they had prior to M&M. The easiest method is to attack the source of their now lacking proof.

Belief works that way. Fortunately, science does not.

Mark

uhohraggy

Unfortunately Mann’s hockey stick has been verified and re-verified again and again. I was actually looking for something scientifically sound to dispute it, but actually you all seem to fit the typical response. Let’s attack the spelling… not the science. I wasn’t arguing with their statistics, only that they weren’t always applied very well. As in the “clique” theory. Wish you were right. Go on fighting your windmills with your heads in the sand though. I’m sure you’ll all prove the world flat and that man never landed on the moon either. Best of luck to you

John Brignell

And he is not the only one prone to typos.

ET SidViscous

UH

Might I suggest you look here for a variety of scientific arguements against the validity of methods against the Hockey Stick.

http://www.climateaudit.org

Oh wait.

Okay so you know where the site is, might I suggest you read it.

ET SidViscous

PS John Brignell

I was just thinking today its a shame we don’t see you here more often. Then you pop in. Good show.

And your numberswatch for July 06 is looking to become a real good one.

jae

RealClimate is really stumbling on this one, LOL.

Response: I don’t see how the ‘battle’ has moved at all. There is nothing original in the Wegman report except the neat, but basically meangingless, social network stuff (I’m in a clique!), and so the scientific discussion hasn’t moved on one iota. In particular, Wegman completely fails to address the issue of whether any of these critiques ‘matter’ – which was the point of the earliest responses on this topic, here or in Rutherford et al, 2005, Wahl and Ammann (2006), or the NAS report etc. The answer was, and remains, no they don’t. They could have, but they didn’t. Them’s the breaks….- gavin]

Talk about people being in denial!

Mark T.

Wegman completely fails to address the issue of whether any of these critiques “matter’

Actually, the report says quite clearly that MBH98/99, nor any reconstruction that uses the same methods, can be trusted. I.e., they matter. Painfully, apparently.

Mark

John M

What was that line in Stalag 17?

“Alright men, back in your bunks…like nothing happened.”

miss J

TCO… where’d you go?

I’ve moved on in a non-fickian way.

“tag” you are it.

Paul Penrose

Uhohraggy,
OK, you want to engage in the science, then fine, let’s give this another try. The scientific method states that theories can’t be ‘proven’ true. They can be tested, and if not falsified over time they are generally accepted as true and eventually become enshrined as ‘laws’ if they are really useful. However, it only takes one failure to falsify a theory regardless of how many times it’s been ‘verified’ (or more correctly, tested and not falsified). Mann’s novel statistical method of pulling temperature data out of these proxy records (tree-rings, ice-cores, etc.) has been proven, by a number of statistical experts, to be flawed, so his theory has been falsified. All other theories and papers that depend on his results or methods fall with it.

If you believe that the statistical experts are wrong, then please, by all means, present your case. Maybe you can show that the decentering in the calibration period does not affect the results. Or maybe you can show how Mann’s modifications to the standard PCA method somehow preserve the low-frequency information that is needed to make the conclusions he makes. Or pick your own issue, there seem to be plenty to choose from. I await your answer.

David Stockwell

#287 Very good and strong Op-ed John_A. Another thing that could be added is the list of organizations that lined up behind Mann when asked to defend his behaviour (from RC).

# A statement from the EGU
# The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
# A Nature editorial
# A letter from US scientists (including leading members of the NAS, a Nobel Prize winner and two of us (ES, GS))
# A letter from the head of the National Academy of Sciences, and
# A commentary from Tom Crowley in EOS
# Other politicians, the House Committee on Science and Henry Waxman.

Together with IPCC it paints a picture of gross-failure-of-our-scientific-instititutions.

mark

Another thing that could be added is the list of organizations that lined up behind Mann when asked to defend his behaviour

It’s almost like they’re all guilty of suborning perjury…

Mark

Armand MacMurray

Re: #285
“In most places in the U.S. today, all it took to be an “ultra-warmer” was to walk outside.”
Come on, SB, even the RC folks have denounced that fallacy. You don’t want to leave folks with the impression that you don’t have any valid scientific arguments.

ET SidViscous

Cold in Winter, warm in summer?

Damn this weather is really wierd.

David Stockwell

#285 ROTFL SteveB.

Steve McIntyre

#287. Lee, whlie I don’t agree with everything that you say, thank you for your thoughtful post. It has taken me nearly two years and much effort to get supporting data from Esper. If you can imagine, I still don’t know even what sites were used in Briffa et al 2001. As I’ve mentioned before, I think that the NAS panel report clears the air for dealing with some of the other studies and hope to do so in the near future.

Lee

re 303: here is the msot relevant thing that columnist says:

“Admittedly, I possess virtually no expertise in science.”

His citing of that Time cover as an indication of the state of the science confirms his self-diagnosis.

Lee

Gore clearly spent the time to read and learn a lot about the science. This columnist clearly and admittedly has not. His ad hom about ‘dogmatic environmentalists’ with some power to craft public policy is unsupported. His ad hom against gore ignores the well-publicized fact that Gore has purchased carbon offsets to more than cover the carbon cost of his activities – and is irrelevant to the science.

“LOL”

welikerocks

Whatever makes you happy Lee. But the man is entitled to his opinion.
You can decide what you think about it. He has that right, like all of us do to express it right or wrong. It’s also his job. You don’t have to read it.

Besides, there’s probably thousands of articles that support the opposite written by non-scientists. So with your logic, they should not be written either.

Bob K

“Piltdown Mann.” LOL. Good one.

David H

#295
He does not give up easily. And are some of his playmtes new to the team?

T J Olson

[My apologies for reposting #301, but sans the link (which is missing above), how does one know what to make of my remarks?]

Colorado State University’s noted hurricane predictor, William Gray, has thrown his chips behind the anti-ACW position

Here’s a Denver weekly’s article built around him and several other prominant Colorado-based researchers in climatology and elsewhere. "The Skeptic: Celebrated and shunned, CSU’s Bill Gray is taking heat in the global-warming debate," Jun 29, 2006, westword.com

In my opinion, this detailed portrait accurately conveys the complexity of the scientific debate and personal perceptions of personality that roil the field. It’s concluding mis-characterization about the June NAS report, cliaming that is bolstered the pro-ACW position, I corrected in a letter published in mid-July (also at the above web site).

Now, as to whether the Wegman report comfirming M&M’s critique constitues “a nail in the coffin” of ACW, it’s only one – or in the broader scheme may only amount to half of one.

You’ll notice in the article above how much weight pro-ACW’ers hope polluting aerosols may save the theory. The trouble is that the historical data collected is – as with tree rings in paleclimatology – too dodgy. Thus, only future and ongoing research to precisely measure the phenomenon will clarify matters – much as corrections on satellite based temperature measurements are now undergoing debate.

But the net results of all three debates will be to put the focus back on the data, instead of a priori theories, where it belongs! Kudos, Steve!

Dave Dardinger

re: #315,

In the present study, we describe a plausible solution to this conundrum.

Just started reading the article but the above sentence jumped out. Let me suggest a plausible solution to the conundrum which is likely not the one they’ve come up with: There aren’t Bristlecone pines in Europe.

Ferdinand Engelbeen

About the Luterbacher (2004) reconstruction, have a look at Hans Errens page, where it is discussed.

Further, there is a nice graph of European instrumental summer and winter temperatures. It looks like that there are different natural cycles in the temperature trends, not directly related to GHGs…

Mark T.

but is there actually a response that contains also some substance?

Why yes. It is not peer-reviewed by one of the cabal, therefore every conclusion is (obviously) wrong.

Oh wait, that’s one of the non-responses.

Mark

Ken Fritsch

re #307 and continuing my impressions of the NAS report:

The NAS report to me says on one hand that the results from long-term proxy temperature reconstruction (all, not just Mann’s work) include much uncertainty and gives much evidence that at least one group used flawed statistical methods, but on the other hand computer models (at least some and at least some of their runs) and these flawed studies agree in general terms on historical temperatures and temperature variations.

On the uncertainty of reconstructions, the NAS committee on page 82 of their report emphasizes that predictions of temperatures from regression will have less variability than actual values, but that attempts to overcome this problem using alternative statistical approaches leads to losses in accuracy. Taken together their concerns sound close to giving an inherent limitation to such methods.

It is my understanding that climate models can be tuned or calibrated with instrumental data and long-term climate reconstructions. From the NAS report I was unclear how interrelated and interdependent the climate models that they cited were to the long-term reconstructions. I also found nothing on the performance of computer models tuned/calibrated with instrumental temperature measurements in predicting past temperatures based on long-term temperature reconstructions.

I was also curious as to how the climate modelers adjust for the number of fine tunings they use to get a reported fit, as in Bonferroni multiple significance testing, knowing that that can be very tricky business. Could it be that they contend that their models are or cannot be subjected these statistical methods, since they start from basic physics? Surely they have considered the Bonferroni problem, even if not directly applied to significance testing, but after the Wegman report on the lack of consultation of climatologists with statisticians I am not so sure.

jae

I know very little about climate models, but I fail to see how you validate a model that gives a different result for every run…

John Creighton

I am reading the Wagner Report and one conclusion I made is that since both tree rings are a high frequency indicator of temperature but have a low frequency autocorrelation due to the growth of the previous year that Mann should of used a moving average model to relate tree rings to temperature. Auto regressive is not necessary because I don’t think the correlation length is that long.

I think that the moving average model should have been obtained by calibrating to local temperatures and only once a good model is developed of how tree rings relate to temperatures in local climates should Mann have tried to weight the temperature estimates from each proxy via his principle component analysis.

kim

It’s my ignorant but considered opinion that animal and vegetable metabolism has converted a huge amount of carbon to mineral in an ongoing process of carbon sequestration; and that we are kept on the cusp of glaciation by the action of water vapor, and gradually increasing insolation.
=========================================================

Steve Sadlov

RE: #266 – RC were claiming that the “de facto thermal resistance” effect of CO2 would increase (linearly?) with PP CO2 clear up to 1000 ppm. I have no idea what their basis was for that pronouncement.

Steve Sadlov

RE: #309 – Blackshirts far and wide cringe at the thought! LOL!

jae

The “warmers” still refuse to say that we just don’t know yet what is happening. Now that the HS has been splintered beyond all recognition, the “warmer” position is now becoming: “Maybe there was a MWP and LIA, but warming is taking place MUCH FASTER this time, signifying that evil CO2 molecule is causing it.” Gawd, they always find a new justification for panic. It is hillarious!

TCO

The warmers are not as morally correct as we are. They are not so virtuous. They would not be the cell mate that you would want in the Hanoi Hilton. They are little liberal pussies. Plus they have long hair.

Ferdinand Engelbeen

Re #325

Dave, the proxies used are described in chapter 3, page 291. Two Europe-wide reconstructions (Luterbacher e.a. 2004 and Guiot e.a. 2005), the others are more regionally oriented. Several proxy series used in Luterbacher e.a. are tree ring series, one of them the notorious Yamal series, which probably lowers the overall variability (compared to the updated Polar Urals series)…

Some more remarks: for solar forcing, they used the Lean e.a. and Bard reconstructions. The Hoyt & Schatten reconstruction wasn’t used. Remarkable is that they used a model which has a quite low sensitivity: 1.8 C increase for 2xCO2, near the lower end of the IPCC range.
Further, I have some doubts about the weight (forcing and/or sensitivity) that is given in all models to land use change at one side and to GHG/aerosols at the other side. For the latter, there is a huge change in aerosol emissions in Europe (an over 50% drop in SO2 emissions since 1975), but that is not visible as a difference in temperature trends of stations up and downwind of the largest emissions. See my comments here

Poster

Censorship continues. Desmogblog.com posted a pretty severe criticism of the Alan Mark piece in the Australian (see Bruce at 327 above). Desmogblogwas apparently confused the Wegman report with the NAS report. When a comment was posted recommending they clear up their NAS-Wegman confusion by viewing the House hearing tomorrow, they deleted the entire post. (It once was viewable at http://www.desmogblog.com/the-australian-debate-isn-t-over-and-we-ll-cherry-pick-nas-report-to-prove-it).

I conclude they really, really do not want to draw attention to Wegman’s conclusions.

McCall

Hypothetically speaking, if Dr. You-Know-Who married a certain former VP and they conceived, would the offspring be called Piltdown-Mann-Bear-Pig?

Armand MacMurray

Re: #340
RC has decided to create a side forum to keep pesky topical subjects like the NAS report off the main page and out of the sight of casual visitors there. They asked for comments on this plan, so I asked whether the side forum would be moderated/censored like the main one; given the disappearance of that and another post, it seems the answer is “yes.”

Ferdinand Engelbeen

Re #343,

Ken, volcanic aerosols can have a huge, but temporarely influence on climate. The Pinatubo eruption was really huge, with a VEI (volcanic explosion index) of 6, of which there were only 9 in the past 600 years. Only the Tambora eruption (1816) was stronger with VEI 7. See Fig. 6 of the Briffa reconstruction.
The net effect of the Pinatubo was a global cooling peaking at ~0.6 C and lasting not more than 3 years. All together, volcanic explosions in the past 600 years in average have had less than 0.1 C cooling influence. Even that may be more than real, as trees (used in Briffa) not only respond to cooling, but also to reduced sunlight due to aerosols in the growing season, if that is a limiting factor. The Pinatubo makes a rough estimate of the (primary) effect of human emitted aerosols possible, see my comment at RC

The remaining temperature variation (0.1 C for MBH98/99, 0.7 C for Moberg) in the reconstructions is natural variation, other than volcanic, mainly solar. That means that any attribution based on MBH98/99 quite certainly underestimates natural (solar) variability…

David H

Re #344 I thought I’d test-drive RC’s new forum with this:

One of the less attractive instincts of Homo sapiens is to have a monopoly on property, power, justice and ideas. History is full of examples, some recent, of the disastrous consequences of such monopolies. Science has never been excluded from this tendency. Newton was every bit as self assured as Michael Mann and Fred Hoyle did not exactly welcome Stephen Hawkins’ new ideas. Much of what we call civilisation is structure that has developed over time to limit monopolies.

In the past it mattered little whether there was balance or “self reinforcing networks” monopolising particular fields since the consequences of great scientific debate did not reach outside their community until the science was demonstrably settled such as radio communication, the atomic bomb and the transistor.

I will no doubt be slammed for saying so but AGW is more like politics or religion in that the absolute truth is unlikely to be manifest in our lifetime. What is sad is that with all our experiences of dictatorships and religious hegemony we in Europe have the least tolerance in this matter. The unique nature of AGW theory with drastic consequences if we get it wrong mean that we should encourage and indeed fund skeptics and require full disclose from all working in the field.

Jean S

re #348: I guess you are writing to the thread under this article by “our old friend” Paul D. Thacker.

Let me add my few cents here. The article made me deeply sad. Although the facts are mainly true (European vs. US media coverage), the sad thing is that these interviewed journalists really seemed to yearn for the media where all the dissenting voices are suppressed for the “common good”. This is an extremely scary and dangerous attitude giving me grim echos from the past: I’ve seen it in action and I don’t want to experience it again. The society is no longer free, if the marginal voices are suppressed, no matter how “good” the reason is. No matter if there is a unambiguous “consensus on foreign policy” or a unambiguous “consensus on climate change”. A thing to learn from our past: when you hear every day media chanting “consencus” on something… it’s a big lie! If it were true, there would be no need to repeat it all the time.

Paul D. Thacker and other similarly minded people, I challenge you to think hard about it: would you really want to live in a “1984”-society?

Steve Sadlov

RE: #258 – “As I read more and more about global warming I find I am more and more convinced of the validity of the theory and the threat, and of the alterior motives of the people refuting it. It frightens me the number of uneducated people who either are too close-minded or too ignorant to really investigate the various reports”

I am a degreed scientist, with over 20 years of experience working in high technology. One of the selling points of current products I work on is “greenness” and “carbon emission reduction.” And yet, I find the work of M and M to be more valuable than the sum total of what the Hockey Team have done. Even if it is eventually proven that essentially, AGW, in a scenario not far different that that purported by the climate science orthodoxy, is in fact the key reality, what M and M have done will have gotten us to the point of proof far more than all the collective arm waving of the Hockey Team over the years.

Jim Cripwell

I hope you will forgive a complete stranger posting here, but I came across this site, almost by accident. I have been interested in GW for many months, and have come across a question that I cannot find an answer to, nor can I find anyone to talk to about the subject. I was in touch with Gavin Schmidt at one time, but he was no help. I am looking at Myhre et al 1998 New Estimates of Radiative Forcing due to Well Mixed Greenhouse Gases; Geophys. Res. Lett. 25 14 pp2715-2718; specifically Fig.1. This shows the change in radiative forcing for concentrations of CO2 from about 280ppmv upwards. What I want to find out is, using the same methodology so that the results are comparable, what is the change in radiative forcing between 0 (zero) ppmv and 280 ppmv? If anyone can provide an answer, or direct me to a forum where I might find the answer I would be most grateful. If it is not too rude on my part, could anyone who thinks they can help please contact me at bf906@ncf.ca. TIA.

Terry

#309: ArthurW said:

I hear that, behind his back, Mann is increasingly being referred to as “Piltdown Mann.”

Is this really true (or are you just trying to make it true)?

I am actually serious about this. Actual climate scientists know what is what in this debate — they can read the papers and understand the issues. He may be at a tipping point where he is an embarrassment to the profession and people don’t want to be associated with him.

There seem to be hints of this. The party line now seems to be “Mann’s evidence plus reliable evidence of AGW adds up to reliable evidence of AGW.” (Hat tip to Steve Bloom for making this clear.)

Let’s do the math:

Mann’s evidence + reliable evidence = reliable evidence (1)

Subtract “reliable evidence” from both sides, and we get:

Mann’s evidence = 0 (2) QED.

Terry

#358:

With respect, then how come peer review of MBH9X failed so catastrophically ? Surely this implies that either your statement is incorrect, or else it is correct in which case the “actual climate scientists” have been downright fraudulent ?

Peer-review is actually quite weak in finding the type of flaws infesting MBH9x, and standards of publication are actually quite low. The criterion is more “does it contribute ANYTHING” than “is it completely correct in all its details.” Since most of the flaws were well hidden and even the procedures themselves obscure, there was no way for a typical peer-review to find them. That is why it took so long to dig into it.

Also, keep in mind the incentives. Eveyone wants to publish, and there is way too much journal space looking for articles in comparison to the number of good papers out there. each person’s incentive is to keep the publication threshold low so that their marginal papers get published, and if this means that a lot of other marginal papers get published, then that is a small price to pay.

This is also why the climate journals may very well never come to openly repudiate Mann. He is quite powerful now and has established a repuation for vindictiveness. Your criticise him at your peril. For a young academic and for politically ambitious academics, criticising Mann gets you little and creates a substantial risk. It will tend to be the older, don’t-give-a-damn academics that will carry the ball. Academics in other fields may also be able to get some quick publications by picking the low hanging fruit of correcting Mann. It is possible that we will see a series of papers in statistical journals correcting Mann.

john lichtenstein

Terry I think that there will be interest from stats and signal processing folks in the low hanging fruit. Someone already mentioned the late breaking session at the jsm including Wegman and Nychka. I bet a lot of grad students are just now taking their first look at climate science.

Dave Dardinger

I’ve found that it’s best to leave a space between your link or quote before closing a tag. I’ve never had one run over when I do it that way and so I’ve just made it automatic. I hit, say, b-quote, then the space bar then ctl. v then the space bar and then close b-quote.

TCO

I think Daly’s point of how the instrumental is appended to the recons (in such a manner that you can’t read recent recon history) is still a big part of the hockey stick. Look for instance at the southern hemisphere Mann and Jones 2003 piece. All of these things look much less dramatic if proxy only is shown. But if proxies can’t really track with recent warming, how can they tell us old warming?

TCO

talking about acentering.

Jeff Norman

Re#368 – N. Joeseph Potts,

Sorry but I’ll have to give you low marks for reading comprehension.

TCO

I’m fine with weblogs in addition to real science. But not instead. It’s easily evident that people put more care into writing a paper then into a blog post. Plus the systems of editors and peer reviewers add value as quality screens for science and for writing. In addition, there are the issues of record-keeping and abstracting and the like.

An intersting thing is to look at the CPD paper by BC and the discussion on it. BC (one of them) admitted that the paper was poorly written and (part of) the reason for that was condensing it into GRL length. Now don’t get me started on letters, that is another abomination. But the interesting thing is that they thought so little of CPD that they did not rewrite the paper once length limits no longer an issue. And who does this hurt? Who does it show disdain for? THE READER.

bender

TCO, you have to fine with weblogs. How else would you get such an audience? 😉
P.S. “I’m fine with weblogs” is not a Rush lyric.

web design

Free These are, the back (or?Visitors first ignoring, up a $.Then cant figure, obstacles like people.Does not solve web design, and leave on Good abdominal and.And fake gun, them submit them.,