Lousie Gray of the DT reports
Prof Hand praised the blogger Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit for uncovering the fact that inappropriate methods were used which could produce misleading results.
Stranger and stranger.
Unfortunately, Oxburgh “regrettably” “neglected” to mention this in his report.
Maybe this is a little more schizophrenic than it appeared at first blush. Like the NAS report.
Update: The New Scientist reports:
Hand said he was “impressed” by McIntyre’s statistical work. But whereas McIntyre claims that Mann’s methods have “created” the hockey stick from data that does not contain it, Hand agrees with Mann: he too says that the hockey stick – showing an above-average rise in temperatures during the 20th century – is there. The upward incline is just shorter than Mann’s original graphic suggests. “More like a field-hockey stick than an ice-hockey stick,” he told New Scientist.
While I appreciate the compliment, I wonder what authority Hand has for his assertion that I claimed “Mann’s methods have “created” the hockey stick from data that does not contain it” – this is obviously untrue. The Mann data set obviously contains the hockey-stick shaped Graybill bristlecone pine data sets – I’ve talked at length about bristlecone pines as every CA reader knows. Had the Oxburgh Inquiry bothered to ask me, I would have been happy to clarify this point for them.
Hand says that the shape is more like “a field-hockey stick than an ice-hockey stick” – wonder how he knows that.
Climate Audit 
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I wonder why they felt the need to say anything about the Hockey Stick. This can’t have been in the scope of their report.
Steve: Their 11 articles conveniently excluded CRU’s own hockey stick contributions. The stick (and in particular the Mann PC1) crop up in CRU literature e.g. Mann and Jones 2004, Jones and Mann 2004; Osborn and Briffa 2006 and in IPCC sections authored by CRU figures e.g. Briffa in AR4.
I sense a split between Hand and Oxburgh.
“I wonder what authority Hand has for his assertion that I claimed “Mann’s methods have “created” the hockey stick from data that does not contain it”
I suspect he is referring to your red noise experiment — put red noise into the Mannomatic, get hockey stick out.
1) If I think it is wrong for scientists to refuse to share data (i.e. refuse to subject their work to the essence of the scientific method), wrong to encourage each other to break the law, wrong to produced biased reports, wrong to use corrupted data, etc, etc,
2) And evidence exists which clearly proves that scientists have done these and a lot of other things that are ethically improper,
3) Are the ethical improprieties no longer ‘improper’, if the scientists’ friends convene a panel which announces that there is nothing wrong with what they did?
Is that what I am supposed to believe? It’s as if we are being asked — “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Perhaps he meant that if you leave off the instrumental data that always overlays the HS, the HS per se doesn’t have much of a blade, and in particular does not exceed even the understated MBH 95% CI’s. See TAR SPM p. 1.
(Of course, as UC has shown on CA, the smoothed TAR HS must have been generated using instrumental endpadding, but even that illegimately smoothed series does not have much rise in it. Not to mention the data and PCA problems.)
‘Hand agrees with Mann: he too says that the hockey stick – showing an above-average rise in temperatures during the 20th century – is there’
It’s not even the end of the stick that is the main issue – more the shaft of the stick that ignore’s the MWP, making these latter temperatures ‘unprecedented’, therefore ‘clearly’ attributable to AGW.
Perhaps an email to Prof. Hand would be in order. On what basis is he making his hockey stick statement? And he is missing the point. After all, the shape of the blade is not the big issue, it’s the flatness of the handle.
The basis to the comparison to a field hockey stick is the instrumental record. The late 20th century is warmer than 18th and 19th century. Before that, it is a lot of what is technically “guesswork”.
snip. ot
Considering a field hockey stick fails the vertical line test, I would hope Hand is simply trying to be funny.
It would indeed be fun to pursue that line of thought, that it will get so hot in the future that temperatures will double back on themselves and makes us hotter last year than it actually was. What a learned Hand.
I enjoyed this quote:
Prof Hand said many of the reproductions of the graph do not make clear when these different sets of data are used.
“It is only misleading in the sense they merged two different things,” he said.
I wonder what the journalist chopped off that sentence?
“It is only misleading in the sense they merged two different things,”
It probably went something like this:
‘….for example, if one were to plot the value of your newspaper versus time, then merge in the price of an internet company after a certain date, in order to mask a decline in the value of your paper, that might be considered misleading in a financial sense. In climatology such manipulations are simply called tricks.’
Perhaps Prof. Hand was referring to the question mark character of the rounded field hockey stick?
HS exaggerated.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7589897/Hockey-stick-graph-was-exaggerated.html
From The Telegraph
The important part of the hockey stick is not the blade. It is the flat shaft which discounts the MWP. The flat shaft is what makes the current warm period “unprecedented” in a 1000 years. it doesn’t matter if the shape is of the form of a field or ice hockey stick. The shaft is flat in both of them and that is what counts.
And since the blade is produced using thermometer readings, I find this statement puzzling.
I particularly liked Mann’s quote at the bottom of the DT article:
“In fact, the statistician on the panel, Peter Bloomfield, a member of the Royal Statistical Society, came to the opposite conclusion of Prof Hand.”
whereas Bloomfield actually said:
“We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr. Wegman”
Small topic content formatting issue, Mr. McIntyre: (unless this is intentional), could you restrict the [i]italicized[/i] text to that quote from article, and make your comments normal?
Agree about Dr. Mann’s complete mis-characterization/lie about Dr. Bloomfield’s comments. But recall that Bloomfield’s specific and candid comment(s) agreeing with Dr. Wegman’s statistical criticism of Mann etc, were made under cross-examination; he started out at worst, whitewashing Mann’s work in his testimony.
What is it called when a person inserts a claim that is in no way related to the task at hand or makes claims based on hand picked data? Does the term RED HERRING apply. Or would Cherry Picking be a better description.
Steve – talk to the Hand
It could be a 5-wood, or as they now say, a 5-metal.
Most of the stick is the result of the Bristlecones and the mining algorithm.
Steve
You may wish to correct the spelling of Louise Gray’s name.
Professor Hand possibly requires only a little bit more information to turn him from somebody who thinks the hockey stick was exaggerated into someone who thinks it is no hockey stick at all.
I’m curious, is Peter Bloomfield the same Bloomfield mentioned in this CA post? If so would it have any relevance?
Might help if I provide a link…. Here and Here.
We are speaking of the same statistician… he was the North (belatedly sworn-in) stat expert, who only ack’ed agreement with Wegman (re: the wrong-doing) under cross.
This post summarizes the state of climate science. A says there is a hockey stick. B says the hockey stick is a kind of principal component fiction. C says there is a hockey stick but not as long as A says. Interminable arguments about the validity the magnitude the existence or non existence of data, tree rings, temperatures, ice cores, proxies. Ad infinitum.
Does anyone remember the original question? No? It concerns man made CO2’s effect on the climate. It is the intellectual poverty of climate science that almost everyone talks about data and its manipulation. Few if any about what actually maters.
Steve writes “While I appreciate the compliment, I wonder what authority Hand has for his assertion that I claimed “Mann’s methods have “created” the hockey stick from data that does not contain it” – this is obviously untrue.”
I have read somewhere on this blog that one of Mann’s programs outputs a hockey stick shaped result regardless of what data is fed into it. Was that comment by Steve? I thought so. It seems that this is what Hand refers to.
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