Ross McKitrick has an engaging presentation of the Hockey Stick Debate presented on April 4, 2005. Here is the abstract: The hockey stick debate is about two things. At a technical level it concerns a well-known study that characterized the state of the Earth’s climate over the past thousand years and seemed to prove a […]
There appear to be some important sampling differences between subfossil and modern (living) cores. Briffa et al [CD 1992, 114] provide the following caveat with respect to using the RCS method (global curve fitting) for Tornetrask: “In applying this [RCS] method, each individual tree ring series should ideally start with the innermost ring (preferably near […]
The three cores which account for 1032 being the "coldest" year of the millennium are 862450, 862470 and 862030. One other core (862460) is dated to the late 10th and early 11th century and contributes to early 11th century "coldness". The placement of these 4 cores has to be interpreted from the ring width information […]
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a consortium of 68 North American research universities, sent out the invitation shown here for a Senate briefing.
The tree ring dataset for the critical Polar Urals site has gaps of up to 59 years, has cores with as many 7 breaks in them. The problems are so pervasive that COFECHA testing simply fails – an almost unprecented occurrence in a tree ring data set.
The Polar Urals site is a staple of multi-proxy studies. The Briffa et al. [1995] version is used in Jones et al [1998], MBH98, MBH99, Briffa et al. [2001] and most recently Jones and Mann (2004). An earlier version by Graybill and Shiyatov was used in Bradley and Jones [1993], Hughes and Diaz [1994] and […]
In most "long" presentations of climate change in the IPCC framework, we see Vostok ice core going back to about 800 Kyr, covering most of the Pleistocene. What easily gets lost sight of in this format is just how unusual the Pleistocene itself is. It is one of only a few glaciations in the entire […]
Briffa’s Ph.D. student, Thomas Melvin, discusses the important impact of “modern sample bias” on RCS chronologies, discussing Tornetrask and Finnish sites in detail.
Climate Audit 
McKitrick: What the Hockey Stick Debate is About?
Ross McKitrick has an engaging presentation of the Hockey Stick Debate presented on April 4, 2005. Here is the abstract: The hockey stick debate is about two things. At a technical level it concerns a well-known study that characterized the state of the Earth’s climate over the past thousand years and seemed to prove a […]