Author Archives: Stephen McIntyre

Unthreaded #41

New thread.

Sea Ice – October 2009

Continuing from http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6734

Core Counts and Reverse Engineering

Recently, after the posting of the Phil Trans B archive on Sept 8, 2009, I determined that the Yamal data set as used by Briffa is not more “highly replicated” than the Polar Urals data set and thus there is no basis for the preferential selection of the Yamal chronology over the Polar Urals chronology […]

Yamal and the Divergence Problem

One of the aspects of the Yamal discussion that is perhaps clearer to regular CA readers than to new readers is that Briffa’s Yamal chronology was very different from ring width chronologies previously reported in the area (including by Briffa itself.) Shortly after the publication of Osborn and Briffa 2006 and D’Arrigo et al 2006 […]

Yamal and IPCC AR4 Review Comments

I was one of the more industrious reviewers for IPCC AR4. In my Review Comments, I made frequent reference to Yamal versus the Polar Urals Update, expressing concern about the rationale for using Yamal rather than Polar Urals, an issue that is once again in play. Keith Briffa was the section author and can be […]

Gavin's Guru and RCS Standardization

Obviously, there has been considerable controversy over the past few days over the Yamal data. First, let’s observe the continued silence of field dendros on the dispute. None have stepped forward so far to support Briffa’s use of 10 cores in 1990 (and 5 in 1995). As others have observed, their silence is rapidly becoming […]

A Thread for Lorax

Reader Lorax has many things to say about Climate Audit, all bad as far as I can tell. Editorially, this is leading to OT discussions on many threads, so I’ve established a thread for discussions with Lorax. (I’ve backdated the thread slightly so that it’s not at the top of the masthead right now.)

Keith Briffa Responds

In spite of suffering a serious illness (which I understand to be a kidney problem), Keith Briffa has taken the time to comment on the Yamal situation. The comment should be read by interested readers. If Briffa or any of his associates wishes to post a thread here without any editorial control on my part, […]

YAD06 – the Most Influential Tree in the World

Obviously there’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days about the difference between the CRU 12 and the Schweingruber 34. In making such comparisons, it’s always a good idea to look at the data in detail – something that obviously should have been done by Briffa and the Team before the widespread […]

Verifying RCS Methodology

One reader asked whether my RCS results held up using “standard” software. There is no “standard” software for RCS. It is different than ARSTAN. Further, despite the use of Briffa’s RCS chronologies in many multiproxy studies, until the present data sets were archived, to my knowledge, there were no public examples where both a measurement […]