JD

http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/#comment-46633

Over 800 comments in less than a day. Gavin appears a bit cross as well.

The gloves appear to be completely off with respect to ‘Hide the Decline’ folliwng Professor Beddington’s thoughts on psudo-science recently.

Judith Curry:

“However, two things this week have changed my mind, and I have decided to take on one aspect of this issue: the infamous “hide the decline.”

The first thing that contributed to my mind change was this post at Bishop Hill entitled “Will Sir John condemn hide the decline?”, related to Sir John Beddington’s statement: It is time the scientific community became proactive in challenging misuse of scientific evidence.”

AND:

“McIntyre’s analysis is sufficiently well documented that it is difficult to imagine that his analysis is incorrect in any significant way. If his analysis is incorrect, it should be refuted. I would like to know what the heck Mann, Briffa, Jones et al. were thinking when they did this and why they did this, and how they can defend this, although the emails provide pretty strong clues. Does the IPCC regard this as acceptable? I sure don’t.

Can anyone defend “hide the decline”? I would much prefer to be wrong in my interpretation, but I fear that I am not.”

I’m a chemist myself and understand exactly what you mean. After over 27 years in this discipline starting with RND and QC, even with advances in instrumentation, I’m fully aware about how much are the difficulties involved in measuring low concentrations like ppm and ppb and measuring nanogram levels. And I’ aware of error margins and sensitivities and the need for absolutely ruthless data and method validations and controls.

So when you see these so called ” scientists ” with their sloppy data, lousy methods, non-existent data archiving, blatant data manipulations, lousy maths and lousy statistics proclaim accuracies to the order of 3 decimal points, I feel like throwing a boulder at the whole lot of charlatans.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/bias-at-the-netional-broadcaster-is-as-easy-as-abc/story-fn59niix-1226009060141

Although I cannot know this, I suspect that many chemists first learning of the GHG theory of global warming started from a base of scepticism, from the knowledge that very small concentrations need extraordinary care and interpretation.

I’m sorry, but I have not risen far above that base, despite thousands of pages of reading and study.

That is my concern, rather more than the conduct of people who call themselves climate scientists. They might deal with climate, but the standard of the science if often poor. (Oh dear, I just corrected a bad typo, “slimate scientists”.)

Full Multiproxy Network Data
No Tree Ring Data
Tree Ring Only Data

NH temperature reconstructions based on all records, and on subsets excluding or comprising exclusively of, tree-ring data.

Note that the NH reconstruction based on the sparse “non-dendro” multiproxy network (19 non-dendro indicators available back to 1760) is remarkably similar to that based on the full (more than 100 indicators) multiproxy network of MBH98. Because the sampling of the “no-dendro” dataset is much sparser, we expect that it will be more influenced by regional variations, and less representative of the true NH mean temperature.

Now, let’s test your claim that “Anyone can use their own eyes to see that they are limiting it to going back to 1760.”
Clearly the text says the “non-dendro” multiproxy network only goes back to 1760. Click the (second) link right there and… voila, it is true: they only provide data back to 1760.

Is it clear that the reconstruction “based on the full multiproxy network” is likewise limited? Click on the first link. Hmmm… sure appears to go back to 1400 to me.

Even more telling: we know their dendro data went back earlier than 1760: it was part of their selection criteria (further up the page). And we know they had non-dendro (ice etc) data going back earlier than 1760.

So… why limit the graph to this period?…
* Why include physical temperature records in the non-dendro “proxy” data, as SM has noted?
* Why use this limit when we know they had data for earlier periods? And,
* Why is there no mention of the proxy failure in earlier periods?

Now that I’ve read through it, I too am curious. Sure looks like a cherry-picked “good” result.

You can’t win on the technical points so you shoot for semantics (not that you can win there, either.)

You’re pathetic.

Mark