Category Archives: Briffa

The Euro Hockey Team and Yamal

Readers of this blog are familiar with the Yamal subsitution. Briefly, Briffa et al 1995 reported in Nature that 1032 was the coldest year of the millennium based on no more than 3 poorly dated and short cores in the 11th century. Subsequently new cores were dated to the 11th century by Schweingruber, resulting in […]

Hegerl Proxies: #1 – Mann PC1

The Hegerl et al 2006 climate reconstruction is finally online here . I’m going to go through the proxies individually before talking about method. Obviously the first one to look for is Mann’s North American PC1. Although they say that they’ve “moved on”, Mann’s PC1 was used in Osborn and Briffa 2006 and was one […]

Jacoby in Mongolia

Trying to check even simple things like the correlation of individual Osborn and Briffa 2006 series to gridcell temperature always leads to complications. Today I’ll look at the situation with respect to Jacoby’s Sol Dav, Mongolia series, one of the 6-7 mainstays of Hockey Team reconstructions. Needless to say, nothing can be confirmed. Instead of […]

Briffa 2000 and Yamal

If you actually look at the medieval proxy index of the "other" studies (Briffa 2000, Crowley and Lowery 2000, Esper et al 2002, Moberg et al 2005), the medieval proxy index is usually just a razor’s edge less than modern proxy index – just enough that the study can proclaim with relief that the modern […]

In the Mail

I’ve reported before that Science decided not to require Osborn and Briffa 2006 to provide supporting measurement data for their Taimyr, Tornetrask and “Polar Urals” (Yamal) chronologies. While I disagree with that decision and may pursue the matter further with them, I asked Osborn to voluntarily provide the measurement data. I received a reply from […]

Science – Email #39

One more attempt to extract data. This the 39th email in my correspondence with Science and I still don’t have a complete record on either Esper et al 2002 or Osborn and Briffa 2006. And people wonder why I haven’t published more. Continues from here Dear Dr Hanson, Thank you for your continued efforts in […]

More O.B. Confidential

Osborn and Briffa site chronologies differed from Esper site chronologies for 4 sites. Site chronologies can differ depending on the standardization method used; in order to analyze the effect, one needs to see the measurement data. Hundreds of measurement data sets have been archived at WDCP. The really weird thing is that the Hockey Team […]

O.B. Confidential

I’m up to 38 emails back and forth with Science now in trying to get data. A little more drifted in April, about which I’ll report on in a couple of posts. My most recent progress report was here One of the questions pertained to a discrepancy between the correlation between gridcell temperatures and foxtail […]

Taimyr in Esper and Osborn-Briffa

The chronologies for Taymir in Esper et al [2002] and Osborn and Briffa [2006] differ – not a whole lot but enough to be noticeable. Esper provided measurement data for Taymir, while Osborn and Briffa have refused. The letter from Science said: The other three series contain some non-identical tree-ring series derived from the same […]

Another Inch at Sciencemag

Update: Continued here I just heard back from Science on the continuing and frustrating effort to obtain data from Esper et al. [2002] and Osborn and Briffa [2006], last discussed here . I got interesting but incomplete information in February and March. The latest installment is very disappointing in comparison even though, in my opinion, […]