Climate Audit

Bernd StràƒÆ’à‚⵨er commented that Cubasch told a German radio station about incorrectly located series in MBH98. Does this sound familiar?

Bernd’s comment was as follows:

In the German radio station, WDR III (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 3. Programm) this week, Cubasch told a reporter, that he his very critical on Mann’s hockey-stick. Mann’s Hockey-stick is now under critical examination. Cubasch explained they have found that real-measured temperature data-series are not correct. They have found temperature series in Paris, which belongs to Berlin, some temperature sets are twofold etc.

This reminds me about one of the matters we pointed out in MM03 – that a precipitation series located in MBH98 in New England was almost certainly a Paris, France precipitation series due to its extraordinarily high correlation with the Paris series in Jones and Bradley [1992], the citation. Subsequent to MM03, we determined that the precipitation series in question had 100% linear correlation with the CDIAC-TR051 version of Paris, France, indicating that the MBH98 version likely came from that source rather than Jones and Bradley [1992]. “The rain in Maine falls mainly in the Seine”, as it were. Or perhaps this was a prescient re-branding as “freedom precipitation”.

We experimented at the time with identifying other precipitation series and the following table summarizes the closest we were able to get. The Toulouse, France precipitation series is re-located to around Washington; the Marseilles precipitation series to Spain. The fascination with emigré French precipitation series was difficult to understand.

Madras, Prague, Eallabus, Kew Gardens and Edinburgh were all exactly identified, but only Madras was located in precisely the correct grid cell. The others were generally in neighbouring gridcells.

The series in gridcell 42.5N, 7.5E (near Genoa) corresponded most closely with Boston precipitation; the series in gridcell 47.5N, 2.5E (near Paris) was not Paris, but was closest to Klagenfurt 2 gridcells away. I couldn’t identify any plausible location for the series in gridcell 17.5N, 72.5E (near Bombay), but its correlation to Bombay precipitation excluded that being the correct location. It looked closest to Philadelphia or something in the eastern U.S.

We informed Nature of these problems during the Corrigendum process, but the errors are perpetuated in the Corrigendum SI – even the incorrect location of the Paris series mentioned in MM03.

Other geographical errors mentioned in MM03 and not corrected in the Corrigendum SI are the location of the Northern Patagonia and Central Patagonia series (reversed in MBH98) and the location of Fisher’s Greenland dO18 series. Not mentioned in MM03, but noticed recently are erroneous locations for the Yakutia series and the Svalbard series, both many gridcells away from their correct locations.

Mann’s comment to this, as to nearly everything else, is that it doesn’t “matter”. The reason why nothing “matters” is because only the bristlecone pines matter. But try to touch the bristlecones and see all hell break else.