A commenter at Real Climate asked the following interesting question about the Urals/Yamal area reported in Briffa et al 2013: So, for this region, what data do you wish you had, that could be plausibly gotten (i.e, not like 1000-year-old measured temperature records), that you don’t have? And why? Jim Bouldin of RC described the […]
Not in so many words, of course. However, Briffa et al 2013 took a position on the use of radially deformed tree ring cores that would prohibit the use of strip bark bristlecones in temperature reconstructions, thereby emasculating Mann’s reconstructions. And not just the Mann reconstructions, but the majority of the IPCC reconstructions used by […]
Briffa’s new paper on Yamal is online today here, together with Supplementary Information here. Yamal has been a longstanding issue at Climate Audit. The new article appears to be their long awaited response to criticism from Climate Audit (though this criticism is not referred to anywhere in the aticle.) In resisting FOI requests for their […]
In March 2010, Eugene Wahl admitted to the NOAA Inspector-General that he had destroyed his email correspondence with Keith Briffa about changes to IPCC and falsely stated that “all” the emails were in the public domain. This was untrue. The attachments were not in the public domain. Not only were the attachments not in the […]
There has been some recent discussion of the Briffa bodge – an early technique to hide the decline. I had drafted a post on the topic and its handling by the Muir Russell “inquiry” in early July 2010, but did not publish the post at the time. In today’s post, I’ve slightly updated my July […]
Recently I noticed that there was an (otherwise digitally unavailable) version of the Briffa reconstruction in a second (undocumented) sheet attached (the worksheet tab denoted “Science3”) to the Jones et al 1998 archive at NCDC (see here). Using this version, I was able to replicate graphics that had hitherto been impenetrable. Although the spreadsheet itself […]
The Muir Russell Inquiry was supposed to examine the email controversy. One of the issues that they purported to examine was the surreptitious Wahl-Briffa correspondence of 2006 that Fred Pearce described as a “direct subversion of the spirit of openness intended when the IPCC decided to put its internal reviews online”. In April 2010, I […]
“Hide the decline” refers to the decline in the Briffa MXD temperature reconstruction in the last half of the 20th century, a decline that called into question the validity of the tree ring reconstructions. (I’m going to analyze the letters on another occasion.) In the IPCC Third and Fourth Assessment Reports, IPCC “hid the decline” […]
Like many other people, I’m gradually digesting the CRU letters. Obviously I’m going to comment on them but I’m going to start a little slowly. Here’s one that’s a little fun,
As noted at CA last week, Briffa published a partial response to Yamal issues at the CRU website, one post discussing the impact of the Yamal chronology in various studies and another post discussing the Yamal chronology itself. For a response to Briffa’s online article on the impact of Yamal, I refer readers to last […]