More papers from the Canberra conference

Apr 12, 2005 – 11:05 AM

I thought it would be interesting to look up more details of presentations made by people at the recent conference in Canberra. I found some materials at this site.

Of more relevance to the research of Steve McIntyre is this presentation by Dr Bob Carter of the James Cook University on the question of climate change prediction, which starts off with a zinger of a first sentence:
Continue reading →

By John A | Posted in News and Commentary | Comments (1)

Water Vapor #2: HITRAN 96 Errors

Apr 11, 2005 – 11:47 AM

By 1999, systematic errors in the HITRAN-96 database for NIR water vapor absorption (which oppose water vapor feedback!) had been identified and widely reported by the most eminent authorities. For example,

Systematic errors have been found and corrected in the HITRAN (High Resolution Transmission Molecular Absorption Database) water vapor line absorption intensities in the visible and near-infrared spectral regions. The HITRAN data base has been used extensively in the calculation of atmospheric absorption of solar radiation. The most important corrections found were a 14.4% increase of the intensity of the 940 nm band and an 8.7% increase of the intensity of the 820 nm band. These systematic errors in the HITRAN tabulations were due to errors in the unit conversion from the measurements published in cm-1/(cm-atm) to HITRAN’s common units cm-1/(molecule/cm2). Since the absorption of water vapor in these important regions is greater than has been used in model calculations for the earth’s atmospheric absorption, there is a diminished necessity for an hypothesized "continuum absorption" in the atmosphere.

These errors impacted all the GCMs used in IPCC TAR, but the potential problem was not disclosed by IPCC as a factor of potential concern. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Modeling | Comments (1)

Water Vapor #1

Apr 11, 2005 – 6:43 AM

I notice that some posters have been discussing water vapor feedbacks and thought that I’d chip in a little. One aspect of water vapor’s role in the climate system that I find intriguing is absorption of near infrared (NIR) and visible solar radiation by water vapor. This is a topic of very active research by molecular spectroscopists, for several reasons, not least being the very significant discrepancy between observed atmospheric absorption of solar radiation and modeled absorption in the IPCC TAR models (up to 30 wm-2 as compared to 3 wm-2 for CO2 doubling).

Part of the recent interest was prompted by the discovery of a delicious clerical error under-transcribing the NIR absorptions in HITRAN-96 by an amount greater than the impact of 2xCO2. I’ll locate some references to this. New experimental work has shown that NIR absorption by water vapor was under-estimated by much more than even these clerical errors. Jonathan Tennyson, Professor of Physics, Head of Department, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College, London and an extremely eminent near infrared spectroscopist, provided an interesting popular summary of some of these issues in 2003. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Modeling | Comments (15)

SMH: A cold, hard look at a hot topic

Apr 11, 2005 – 12:31 AM

As one of our correspondants has pointed out, there was a conference on global warming attended by skeptics in Canberra, recently:

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Although heavily outnumbered, global-warming sceptics believe the stakes are so high they must step up their fight, as Michael Duffy reports.

Members of a species widely believed extinct – scientists sceptical of human-produced global warming – met at a conference in Canberra on Monday.

One of them, Professor Bob Carter, an environmental scientist at James Cook University in north Queensland, puts their view plainly: "Attempting to stop climate change is an expensive act of utter futility." According to Carter, more than $50 billion has been spent on climate research since 1990, yet there is still no unambiguous evidence of human-caused global warming.

The conference organiser was Monash University’s APEC Study Centre, concerned about the economic consequences for Australia of responses, such as the Kyoto Protocol, to global warming.

According to the centre’s chairman, Alan Oxley, a former diplomat and managing director of the consultancy ITS Global, "People who go into the technical aspects of global warming find out there are many large questions in the science that are just disregarded. It’s surprising how many government officials haven’t bothered about this. It seems to me quite important to have some airing of these questions."

Continue reading →

By John A | Posted in News and Commentary | Comments (6)

More Mann Deletions

Apr 8, 2005 – 1:41 PM

ORIGINAL: A little while ago I mentioned that the original SI at Nature for MBH98 had been deleted. It contained some information which is not in the Corrigendum SI, such as RE statistics for the various steps and the original (incorrect) data listing. Now Mann has either deleted the UMass SI for MBH98 and MBH99 previously located at ftp://eclogite.geo.umass.edu/pub/mann/ONLINE-PREPRINTS/MultiProxy and at ftp://eclogite.geo.umass.edu/pub/mann/ONLINE-PREPRINTS/Millennium, or he has put a block on my access (I’m blocked from the UVirginia server). Some, but not all, of this information formerly at UMass is at the WDCP archive. Mann had previously attempted to delete the UMass dataset in the aftermath of MM03, but the late John Daly protested to UMass and it was restored.

UPDATE: To add a little context to the deletion comment for recent followers of this debate, the original Mann deletion, which got a little publicity in 2003, was the deletion of a dataset showing MBH98 data from Mann’s website, the URL to which had been provided in response to my original request for MBH98. MM03 discussed many problems in this dataset. Mann’s response to MM03 was that this was the "wrong" dataset and was not the dataset used in MBH98, even though it was on his website, was the one to which I had been directed and on which I had sought specific re-confirmation prior to publication of MM03 that it was the dataset actually used in MBH98. Although Mann has sought to argue that we used the "wrong" dataset and failed to notice the errors in it (as recently as Rutherford et al [2005]) , we had obviously noticed errors and re-collated over 300 tree ring series to avoid the problems in the principal component series. See MM03 Scorecard.

As an excuse for errors in this dataset, Mann falsely said that this data collation at his FTP site had been prepared especially for me, but it had actually been posted up in August 2002, about one week after the ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu website was started, and long before my original request. The deletion removed this evidence, but I’d looked up the date (which I had not originally paid attention to) about 1 day before the deletion. (He also falsely said that I’d asked for an Excel spreadsheet, which was manifestly untrue, since I’d asked for an FTP location.) Nothing ultimately turns on this bizarre turn of events, but it was a huge surprise to me at the time and an interesting introduction into the world of academic politics. In business, you would never be able to delete a dataset in controversy (particularly when the date is an issue), but climate scientists didn’t seem to care. They mostly thought that Mann had taught me a lesson.

That’s why "Mann deletions" is something that concerns me.

UPDATE: 7 pm EDT April 8. I can access the UMass FTP site now. I’m still blocked from the UVA site and the original Nature SI is still deleted.

UPDATE: April 10 10 am EDT. There are some advantages to the amount of traffic on this website. After putting up the post below on Friday, my access to the UVA website has suddenly changed and today (Sunday) I can access the ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub site for the first time in over a year.

UPDATE: My access to ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub is blocked again.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in MBH98 | Comments (14)

McKitrick: What the Hockey Stick Debate is About?

Apr 8, 2005 – 5:48 AM

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 recent and unprecedented global warming. I will explain how the study got the results it did, examine some key flaws in the methodology and explain why the conclusions are unsupported by the data. At the political level the emerging debate is about whether the enormous international trust that has been placed in the IPCC was betrayed. The hockey stick story reveals that the IPCC allowed a deeply flawed study to dominate the Third Assessment Report, which suggests the possibility of bias in the Report-writing process. In view of the massive global influence of IPCC Reports, there is an urgent need to bias-proof future assessments in order to put climate policy onto a new foundation that will better serve the public interest.

Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in MBH98, News and Commentary | Comments (104)

Polar Urals #4: “Heartrot Bias”?

Apr 6, 2005 – 1:11 PM

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 base) of each tree. In practice, there is invariably some uncertainty in assigning the biological age of the rings. Here we have simply assumed that the first year of the sample data represents the first year of tree growth. This will result in a variable but generally small (though systematic) underestimation of the true ring age. In the case of the density data, the effect will be negligible. In the ring-width data, the final standardization curve probably slightly underestimates the width of young trees and could therefore impart a small positive bias to the standardized ring-width indices for young trees in a number of series. However, this effect will be insignificant when the biased indices are realigned according to calendar growth years and averaged with many other series.”

Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Jones et al 1998, Multiproxy Studies | Tagged | Comments (1)

Polar Urals #3: Crossdating

Apr 5, 2005 – 8:20 AM

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 itself. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Jones et al 1998, Multiproxy Studies | Tagged , | Comments (18)

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

Apr 4, 2005 – 5:11 PM

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. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in General | Tagged | Comments (5)

Polar Urals #2: Broken Core

Apr 4, 2005 – 4:53 PM

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. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Jones et al 1998, Multiproxy Studies | Tagged | Comments (6)