Comments on: Briffa on another Mann Hockey Stick

By: FTM

FTM — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:51:37 +0000

Cherry picking?

Sorry for not replying sooner – its been a hectic week (or two)!
The new Mann and Jones 2000-year series I don’t actually have. It appears in Figure 1 of our EOS piece, of course, but Scott Rutherford generated that figure. I generated Figure 2 for EOS and that has the Yamal, Tornetrask, western US and western Greenland O18 stack in it. So I have these data and they are attached in the following files. western US and western Greenland are in file “mann12prox.dat”. I didn’t have time to extract just these two series from the full file, so the file contains 11 others series too. Please do *not* use the others because I’m not sure whether I am free to distribute them or not – I just haven’t time to extract the 2 you want. I’m sure I can trust you not to use anything that I shouldn’t have sent! The top of the file lists the 13 series and the start/end years. These are in the same order as the 13 columns of data that then follow (the first column is simply year AD). So you should be able to find westgrpfisher.dat” and “wustrees.dat”.

http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=340&filename=1057944829.txt

By: Chris W.

Chris W. — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:50:47 +0000

I did some research on the Briffa 2000 piece on the CA main site, and it appears that if nothing else, the number of samples claimed for the -200 -> 2000 reconstruction was overstated by more than 100%.

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7644

Apparently the 611 trees cited came from yamal.rwm, which was sent to Briffa from Rashit Hantemirov in Oct of 98. The file is in the yamal directory in the leaked files, the explanation is in an email from Rashit (Just search for yama.rwm in the leaked emails, it will be the only occurrence.)

But… The trees go back to 4999 B.C and only 257 of the 611 samples cited actually contained any post 200B.C. data.. Whoops!

Also here is a plot (with 21 year mean in red) of the actual (un-regressed, un-”corrected”) Yamal tree ring data for the last 2000 years.

http://incp.us/img/yamal_2000_21.jpg

(Please excuse the data format being jpeg.. I will be re-encoding as png and releasing the matlab source later today…)
Chris

By: stephen richards

stephen richards — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:36:53 +0000

The MP was Gibson who I believe was deselected over expenses fiddling. Not 100% sure but I do believe I’m right

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:30:10 +0000

“That is too funny. I know Briffa hasn’t been very helpful to you Steve, but in these emails he frequently sounds like the voice of restraint and reason.”

Maybe Briffa did know he was going to be asked for the sources when he earlier this year published in Royal Society?

By: lesley brown

lesley brown — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:08:12 +0000

Re: Kevin M

The Times had this today:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6927598.ece

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:31:43 +0000

Of course, Dr Trenberth is a Kiwi (Kev, Please don’t make me regret saying this).

Kevin’s also been on record stating that the IPCC don’t make predictions. So everyone’s catastrophic predictions aren’t coming from the IPCC.

Nuff said.

By: Kazinski

Kazinski — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:17:23 +0000

I’d also like to add my kudu’s to Steve. He has been completely vindicated by all of these disclosures. The most amazing thing about it is he kept his cool, didn’t say anything incendiary and kept coming at them with problems that eventually were too big to fit under the rug.

All the dismissive snarks in the emails and at RC should be worn as badges of honor.

By: Jeff Norman

Jeff Norman — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:00:27 +0000

I am inclined to agree that Briffa actually appears to be one of the more reasonable(?) contributors in all those released e-mails.

I wonder how my health would respond if I found out that I had been working with apparently unscrupulous people and had no apparent way out.

I wonder if I would be tempted to clean my soul by becoming a whistle blower.

Just wondering.

By: Mike Lorrey

Mike Lorrey — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:57:02 +0000

Briffa does seem reasonable, but Trenbarth seems quite objective and fair and unlike the others, acknowledges the weaknesses in their data and theories, as well as admits to the validity of skeptics arguments. I’m also curious what Andy Revkin thinks now that he knows that Phil and the gang don’t see him as reliable.

By: Mike Lorrey

Mike Lorrey — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:52:42 +0000

The Tom Harrison who is fanatically editing the Climategate (now renamed CRU Hacking incident) page seems to be an alarmist according to his commentary in the discussion page for that article, denying the validity of any of the emails and insisting that that is not how scientists behave. At the same time according to his user talk page, it appears he is banning any skeptic who is posting more information as a “sock puppet” of some other previously banned skeptic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Tom_harrison