In a presentation on April 7, 2009, Steven Chu uses the Graybill strip-bark bristlecone chronology (aka the Mann hockey stick) in a presentation. See page 7 here. (h/t to reader Gene).
The Chu graphic even uses Mann’s overlay of temperatures, opportunistically ending at the high point of 1998.
I wonder how Chu does at identifying the purpose of aluminum tubes.
Climate Audit 
52 Comments
Come, give the guy a break, he’s only a laser guy. Its not like they are known for pinpoint accuracy or anything…
This is disheartening. Is his staff completely unaware of the issues? Dr Chu is about to get quick lesson in climate science 😉
Re: TAC (#2),
Maybe he’ll ask his staff for Dr Thompson’s thermometer.
Re: Steve McIntyre (#4), Why even ask? Surely their minds are teleconnected? The request is out in the inter-brain ether waiting for some downloads to process.
snip – sorry. No discussion of policy.
How it was smoothed & how they calculated CIs. Shouldn’t be that difficult to figure it out 😉
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1564
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=647
He seems to have dropped supporting nuclear too calling storage the problem. Maybe it was a sudden market shortage of aluminum tubes.
Re: Jeff Id (#7), More likely pressure from the series of tubes…
“(h/t to reader Gene)”
h/t to commenter Steven Kopits (10:14:22), 5/1/09 at WattsUpWithThat.
This also may be of of interest to an auditor today at WattsUpWithThat.
This is why Climate Audit doesn’t matter. Until the New York Times, NBC News and PBS’ Frontline call Shenanigans on this, they can go on citing the Hockey Stick till doomsday. If we go another 20 years without a global temperature increase, then people will look back at Steve McIntyre and give him credit. Until then, if a phoney hockey stick falls in the forest and no one pays attention to it, then it doesn’t exist.
Re: MarkB (#10), And Gene above. This is why FOI does matter – the graphic (in the version I saw) had no source reference. I think a US citizen should be able to request that and depending on the reply should be able to point out concerns over the provenance of the material.
I’m not sure whether this website has noted it previously, but Chu has given a speech in which he said that a change of three degrees Centigrade is equal to eleven degrees Fahrenheit:
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/12/obamas-cabinet-may-be-first-wi.html
(It’s at one minute into the video.)
Re: Norman Yarvin (#11), Wow, er, maybe this guy should be kept locked underground with the veep before they embarrass themselves further. One would think that he would at least have the training to go from Celsius to Fahrenheit…
Mann et al have been tightfisted in giving out their methods. So what I’m wondering now is there some sort of law that requires government officials make available to the public the data, computer code, etc., used in making the graphs, etc., for their presentations? If there is such a law then Secretary Chu would be the avenue to obtaining Mann et al’s code.
Re: Gene Nemetz (#13), The FOIA has been through a lot of battles which have shown it to be pretty feeble, so its no surprise that it can and probably (definitely?) does fail in these cases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_(United_States)
Re: Andrew (#17), Given Obama’s views on it I doubt asking for the source of a graphic should be too much:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/FreedomofInformationAct/
Re: curious (#18), There are often significant gaps between rhetoric and reality, and Obama is no exception as far as I can see. But you have a point.
Re: Andrew (#19), Who knows? – maybe the choice of graphic was intended to invite a challenge? I find it hard to believe that the Administration doesn’t have some awareness of the doubts around the HS – perhaps this gives them an opportunity to revisit it?
Re: curious (#19),
snip- policy
A very simple question that would lead them off the rails is,”Have you used the -updated- cores on those same trees?”
Factual accuracy is not the strong suit in Chu’s card game. Slide five title says “US oil became a net oil importer in the 1940s” graph says 1990’s. If memory serves it was 1994 or there about when imports were 50%.
And he claimed the coal in the arctic was due to plate tectonics……nothing to do with those polar forests….no nothing at all.
Re: Andy (#23),
Is this the plate tectonics you are referring to? The question to Secretary Chu was about oil and gas in Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean, not coal. Geologists would know if he is correct. I have never studied it myself so I don’t know if Secretary Chu is correct or not.
Re: Andy (#21), are these wrong? – the arctic (what?) looks more equatorial than arctic.
http://www.palaeos.com/Paleozoic/Carboniferous/Carboniferous.htm
http://www.wales-underground.org.uk/coal.shtml
Re: thefordprefect (#33),
please look at the relevant map on the Chu thread. You’ve grabbed the wrong end of the stick here.
To win a Nobel Prize without being blessed with a Newtonian intellect you probably have to specialise and be obsessesed with your narrow field to the exclusion of all else. So that in many ways you could be a scientific innocent, highly vulnerable to the Climate Conmen. There’s no point complaining about his ignorance of economics however; in my experience that’s par for the course for scientists.
Re: dearieme (#24),
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/
Sorry couldn’t resist that one 🙂
chf:
Re: chf (#21), The slide says “Net Imports” for the green line, not “Imports.” Thus, the point in the 1990’s when they cross is not relevant to when the U.S. became a net importer.
I don’t have any idea whether the U.S. became a net importer in the 1940’s — just pointing out that the graph isn’t necessarily wrong.
Regarding Chu and plate tectonics, he was basically right.
Link
What Barton was probably fishing for was some admission that the earth was much warmer in the past.
Chu’s more vulnerable on the economics of energy generation than he is on geology.
BTW, we’re straight in the path of Zamboni machine with this gas & oil stuff.
Re: John M (#26),
Nope. Chu was 100% wrong. Barton must think that he’s a total fool. I’ve done a post on this.
Re: John M (#26), John M
If you take a look at your reference you’d see that tha North Slope was north of 60deg (the Arctic Circle) during the Cretaceous. You and Chu were both 100% wrong, as Steve has pointed out.
Re: Roger Dueck (#38),
Roger, see the comment I just made on the other thread.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5880#comment-339957
In the event anyone ever finds behavior that sinks to the level of ‘research misconduct’ in work being done by researchers at or contractors of NASA I found some policy at this government web site.
What is research misconduct?
Here are some definitions of these terms:
Since some of the readers of this blog suggest that researchers may be manipulating their research processes to give the result that they desire, they may wish to charge ‘falsification’.
How does one report allegations of research misconduct?
Sound good? Hold on a sec, here’s what happens:
In other words, circle the wagons boys!
However, the decision may be appealed. Still, I wouldn’t place much hope in the Office of the Inspector General being able to understand the subtleties of strip bark pines & principle components.
That presentation is on a .gov web site. So the U.S. Government requirements for information quality.
The Chu PDF file does not include a disclaimer, so the information is being presented as if the organization agrees with it.
Hmm. And page 30 mentions “The Population Bomb” as if that is relevant to grain production, but does not show what actually has happened to world populations; as a U.S. presentation it should show what has happened to U.S. birth rates.
I have found the stick in a presentation of Slovak media-famous climatologist M. Lapin – http://www.sazp.sk/public/index/open_file.php?file=CMZP/konferencia/Lapin.ppt – page 24. To use Mann stick and UHI-contaminated HadCRUT3 speaks for itself. That gentleman when I contacted him claimed strongly that satellite data are suspect and there is no UHI effect at Hurbanovo station (Slovakia), despite it sits in the middle of town – http://blog.sme.sk/blog/560/190772/wie-hurb.jpg (top – Vienna met station, bottom – Hurbanovo).
thefordprefect:
That map would be a better argument if it referred to a relevant time period, rather than one when northwestern Laurentia was at a (relatively) low latitude. For your information North Slope source rocks are of Triassic through Cretaceous age, i. e. about 100-250 million years after the Serpukhovian, at which time North Slope was at a high palelatitude.
Forests covered the arctic until the end of the cretaceous about 65M years ago. Those forests were in the polar regions and contributed to the present coal and oil reserves now found there. Even those Dino’s found it habitable.
Does this mean Chu is a fool? No, he is obviously anything but a fool. But he has been caught out and as someone above posted was about as wrong as one can get.
But hey, I have no idea about Lasers.
Forests were present in the Canadian Arctic as little as 45my ago, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Heiberg_Island
Unfortunately, the entire point of these arguments is to end up with “points”.
Yes, it was quite dishonest of Mann to fail to include future temperatures when he published that graph in ’99.
Re: pete (#40),
So what does that say about Chu, who used the graph in 2009?
Re: John M (#41),
Pretty much nothing?
Re: pete (#42),
So if the 1999 date was important to you wrt Mann, why is 2009 meaningless to you wrt to Chu?
We can’t expect the Secretary of Energy to update his graphs? Maybe his department needs some more stimulus dough.
Re: John M (#43),
1999 is relevant because that’s when the graph was made. It’s not “opportunistic” to use all the data available.
Chu isn’t deliberately choosing to end the graph at 1998. That’s just where the graph he used ends.
Re: pete (#44),
Blame it on the graph! He is DELIBERATELY CHOOSING a graph which ignores what has happened since 1998. Up-to-date graphs are available although the behaviour of the temperatures may not conform with the advocacy of the AGW message. That’s NOT opportunistic?
Re: RomanM (#45),
Or he’s just thrown together some powerpoint slides and used the first picture he found on Google.
Re: pete (#46),
So, we’re talking some sort of amateur production here…
Re: pete (#46),
Wow, if he was just casually using any old figure, it’s a good thing this didn’t turn up first in his intern’s Google search.
Re: John M (#49), I think the best thing to do is to write to him to ask the source of the graphic – perhaps he’ll be grateful for the clarification 🙂
Re: curious (#50),
I suppose I could, but with such an old graphic, you’d think someone would have told him it was time to “move on”.
RE #40-45, the important part of Chu’s graph on slide 7 of the linked 4/7 talk is not the instrumental record, but the fact that he is passing the long-discredited HS itself off as science.
The graph he shows is essentially Fig. 1(b) of TAR WG1, with the captions rearranged, and some background coloring added in. This in turn evidently comes from MBH99, even though it is truncated at 1000 AD. See, eg, TAR HS graph at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy. Even the politicized IPCC AR4 had the discretion to suppress this graph as a stand-alone figure. Let’s hope Barton gets a chance to nail him on this one as well as the source of the Alaskan oil.
Chu’s equation of 3°C with 11°F in the talk linked by Norman Yarvin (#11) is downright bizarre, since this appears to be a prepared talk and not just an off-the-cuff slip of the mental calculator. Any 8th grade science whiz with a pencil and paper could tell him that 3°C = 5.4°F. Chu is 100% wrong in more ways than one!
(Speaking of corrections, the Arctic Circle is not at 60°N as per Roger Dueck #38, but rather at 66° 33′, though some might count 60°N as “sub-arctic.” At least Roger, unlike Chu, is only about 6% wrong.)
Noted 🙂 – like the new post on trends!
Chu also has his bibles mixed up. His slide 30 shows 1962 as the year “The Population Bomb goes to press”. In fact, 1962 was “Silent Spring”. The Population Bomb was first published in 1968.
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