While there has been a great deal of discussion in other locations about possible urban heat island effect, there has been relatively little discussion about SST (sea surface temperature) adjustments and NMAT (night marine air temperature) adjustments. This is too bad. I’m not going to get into this, but there are some handy sources which I’ll direct interested people to and make a few short comments. 19th century temperatures are used to "verify" proxy models, but there are some curious inconsistencies between 19th century temperatures and proxy behavior, which I’ll not get into here, but made me go back to look at some of the 19th century adjustments. Generally, it worries me when "adjustments" become as large as the effect. One of the biggest changes in later IPCC reports resulted from new assumptions on 19th century use of wooden versus canvas buckets!. Parker, Folland and Jackson [1995] reported:
Overall global warming in SST between the 1860s and the 1970s is about 0.3 °C greater in the present analysis than in Folland et al. (1984), mainly owing to reduced early corrections applicable under the assumption of the predominant use of wooden buckets (Section 3).
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I was browsing through some Jacoby articles for a different purpose and was reminded of the very interesting references to a relationship between high-latitude tree ring growth and southern exposure to the sun in two of his 1980s articles, which do not get mentioned any more once the GW campaign is on. Continue reading →
I have a lengthy op ed in today’s National Post go here summarizing some of the debate since publication of our 2005 articles. The article is on page FP19. Update: The link is now offline. Here is the text as I submitted it to National Post; it may differ a little, but not much. Continue reading →
‘Tis nearly the Atlantic hurricane season, a traditional time for battening down the hatches, making sure the family are safe in the storm shelter, and making sure you are safely marooned in the local bar (this is what I did during one hurricane in the Bahamas in 1995).
‘Tis also the time for people to pop out of the wordwork to exclaim that this is exactly what we expect from our climate models, and that the climate models predict more storminess, more severity, more damage, more "Durm und Strang" and so on.
Since we like to check facts here on climate audit, I thought I’d check the latest posting on realclimate regarding hurricanes by looking back at the original data. Here’s what I found:
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A new study on Alpine glaciers has shown that the recent melting since the lowest point of the "Little Ice Age" in the 17th Century is not extraordinary in the context of climate change since the end of the last Ice Age:
The Alpine glaciers are shrinking, that much we know. But new research suggests that in the time of the Roman Empire, they were smaller than today. And 7,000 years ago they probably weren’t around at all. A group of climatologists have come up with a controversial new theory on how the Alps must have looked over the ages. He may not look like a revolutionary, but Ulrich Joerin, a wiry Swiss scientist in his late twenties, is part of a small group of climatologists who are in the process of radically changing the image of the Swiss mountain world. He and a colleague are standing in front of the Tschierva Glacier in Engadin, Switzerland at 2,200 meters (7,217 feet). "A few thousand years ago, there were no glaciers here at all," he says. "Back then we would have been standing in the middle of a forest." He digs into the ground with his mountain boot until something dark appears: an old tree trunk, covered in ice, polished by water and almost black with humidity. "And here is the proof," says Joerin.
Link to article This disappearance of glaciers coincides, obviously by chance, with the Holocene Maximum previously mentioned.
Bunn et al. [2005] have an interesting discussion of 20th century tree growth (especially foxtail pines) in the Sierra Nevada and White Mountains, in the current Holocene, which, needless to say, was interesting to me. The extraordinary and uncritical embedding of MBH98-99 in paleoclimate mentality recurs here in a curious way. Roger Pielke wondered whether the emphasis on deconstructing the hockeystick is warranted in policy terms ( a question that I mean to discuss some time); here is a case where the embedding of the hockeystick leads to problems in a scientific paper relying on Mann et al., without fully understanding its assumptions and defects. Continue reading →
Today’s Nature has an editorial criticizing two researchers issuing a press release merely when they submitted a paper for review. Apparently scientists in the field have been protesting. Has anybody seen any climate scientists protesting about Ammann and Wahl’s press release? I guess it depends upon whose ox is being gored.
But the manner in which the Newcastle team made its discovery public has consequences that reach beyond one day’s headlines. As researchers in the field have been angrily informing Nature since the two pieces of work appeared, the approach taken in this case risks damaging science and its public perception.
The Newcastle team submitted its work to an independent Cambridge-based journal, Reproductive BioMedicine Online, which has the unusual policy of making abstracts of submitted papers available on its website as soon as the articles are sent out for peer review. The full paper is kept confidential until it is accepted and published. So science reporters informed of the findings by a telephone briefing had access to an abstract that had not been peer reviewed “¢’¬? and to nothing else.It can’t yet be determined for certain if the Newcastle team was intending to ride the wave of publicity for the South Korean paper, or if it simply submitted its paper to the journal at a fortuitous moment. And in an ideal world, science reporters would know the difference between a significant breakthrough and a local, incremental result.
But the premature release of this incomplete information, without any form of peer review and without making it clear to journalists that the work had not been refereed, is contrary to good scientific practice. The paper could, in principle, be revised or even rejected after peer review, in which case the public would have been misinformed. The absence of a paper also prevents other researchers from assessing or responding to the Newcastle results.
Industrial companies already release claims to the media while keeping data confidential for commercial reasons, and that’s frustrating enough. The last thing the science community needs is for publicly funded academic researchers to start playing the same game.
One point that many people do not understand is that merely labelling something a "proxy" and putting it in a multiproxy dataset does not mean that it has any correlation to temperature.
I’ve plotted up the 22 proxy series in the 15th century MBH98 dataset so that others could see a little more clearly what this means – the proxies are in black. This type of detailed plotting is really needed in presentations of multiproxy studies and is not really suited to academic journals (one of the many gaps that would be filled by the equivalent of engineering-calibre analysis of these studies before policy usage.)
The blue in Figure 2 is the Wahl-Amman version of the AD1400 MBH98 reconstruction based on the 22 “proxies” plotted individually; the red in Figure 1 is the last portion of the MBH98 stepwise reconstruction using 112 “proxies”. The level change in the MBH98 proxy index about 1930 is quite distinct.
Figure 1. The first 11 proxy series in the AD1400 network
Notice that most of the proxies look like white noise, but the Gaspé series has a distinct trend. I’m sure you can pick out Gaspé without it being identified. Of course the updated Gaspé series (which Jacoby has withheld) does not have this trend and they have "lost" the location. The series at bottom left (Svalbard ice melt) is obviously very non-normal, but no consideration is given to this in MBH98.
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I’ve been looking recently at some issues in the post-1820 proxy data and re-noticed some things that I’d seen before but lacked my present context.
Most of you are familiar with the CRU temperature series since 1850. Of course, there are instrumental series that go before that. MBH98 used 12 long instrumental series. There are 14 such series archived at the UVA FTP website (in standard deviation units). Here is a graph showing the average of these series up to 1980 (as archived.
Figure 1. Average of MBH98 long instrumental series up to 1980.
Below I show the individual times series. Continue reading →
There’s a front page story, complete with an eyecatching picture, in the National Post today asking Is De Guzman Alive? I’ve posted up some comments on Bre-X before in connection with audit procedures, consensus, skeptics etc. at Bre-X #1, Bre-X #2 and Bre-X #3. De Guzman is the geologist at the heart of the salting of Bre-X assays, who supposedly committed suicide in March 1987 after the fraud was discovered. I’m also writing this note because I wanted to figure out a way to mention the season finale of 24 (which I watch faithfully.) Continue reading →
Climate Audit 
National Post: Re-visiting the Stick
I have a lengthy op ed in today’s National Post go here summarizing some of the debate since publication of our 2005 articles. The article is on page FP19. Update: The link is now offline. Here is the text as I submitted it to National Post; it may differ a little, but not much. Continue reading →