The Wall Street Journal published this editorial last Friday, on the Hockey Stick controversy and the work of Steve McIntyre:
Hockey Stick on Ice
Politicizing the science of global warming.
Friday, February 18, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
On Wednesday National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman canceled the season, and we guess that’s a loss. But this week also brought news of something else that’s been put on ice. We’re talking about the "hockey stick."
Just so we’re clear, this hockey stick isn’t a sports implement; it’s a scientific graph. Back in the late 1990s, American geoscientist Michael Mann published a chart that purported to show average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1,000 years. The chart showed relatively minor fluctuations in temperature over the first 900 years, then a sharp and continuous rise over the past century, giving it a hockey-stick shape.
Mr. Mann’s chart was both a scientific and political sensation. It contradicted a body of scientific work suggesting a warm period early in the second millennium, followed by a "Little Ice Age" starting in the 14th century. It also provided some visually arresting scientific support for the contention that fossil-fuel emissions were the cause of higher temperatures. Little wonder, then, that Mr. Mann’s hockey stick appears five times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s landmark 2001 report on global warming, which paved the way to this week’s global ratification–sans the U.S., Australia and China–of the Kyoto Protocol.
Yet there were doubts about Mr. Mann’s methods and analysis from the start….
Read on
Gridcell standard deviations for the MBH98 temperature dataset were archived for the first time (together with the temperature dataset) in the Corrigendum SI. Here the difference between detrended and undetrended standard deviations is examined, as well as the difference between using anomalies-new (MBH98) and HadCRU2. Link
Huldén, Lena, 2001. Terra 113, 171-8. Oak barrels and the medieval warm period in Satakunta [Finland] (Finnish) . Continue reading →
There is a new (December 2004) archive for Jones and Mann [2004] at WDCP here. Jones (pers. comm., July 2004) had previously sent me another version of this data. Here are some comments to save others some time in considering this archive. Continue reading →
I’ve been working through Jones and Mann [2004] and Mann and Jones [2003] and the following graphic caught my eye. I quickly compare it here to the version used in Jones et al. [1998] and the Mann and Jones [2003] SH reconstruction (shown in Jones and Mann [2004]).
Figure 1. Replication of Figure 4 (bottom panel) of Jones and Mann [2004], which is standardized to 1750-1960 and smoothed. Continue reading →
“Hagiography” according to Wordnet, at Princeton University means “a biography that idealizes or idolizes the person (especially a person who is a saint)”.
Now that you know this, try reading here this Scientific American article written by David Appell about Michael Mann, creator of the Hockey Stick.
I’ve quite a strong stomach, but it’s difficult to keep digestive juices in their proper location when faced with a description filled with this much schmalz. It’s interesting to me that David Appell doesn’t bother with any hard questions about Michael Mann’s “science”, preferring instead to let the saintliness shine through:
Continue reading →
I received this email today from Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute stating the following positions on Kyoto:
“1. The IPCC review process is fatally flawed.
2. IPCC willfully ignores the paradigm shift created by the foremost meteorologist of the twentieth century, Edward Lorenz.
3. The behavior of Michael Mann is a disgrace to the profession.
4. Hans von Storch and Steve McIntyre have shown the courage of their convictions.
5. The scientific basis for the Kyoto protocol is grossly inadequate.”
One of the two strongest contributors to higher temperatures in Moberg’s 20th century proxies is higher incidence of subpolar glob. bulloides Continue reading →
Since the start of this blog on Feb 7, there have been nearly 27,000 hits. The biggest traffic was on Feb. 14, when there were nearly 4,000 hits (the link from the Wall Street Journal obviously caused this spike). Today is going to have the 2nd most traffic with over 2,500 hits in 20 hours so far.
The page with by far the most reads has been the Disclosure and Due Diligence “op ed”. I’m surprised at the traffic to some fairly dense notes on replication (which I’ve had in inventory for some time, but never been sure what to do with them.)
The MBH98 Corrigendum purported to explain the discrepancy of 35 series between the series listed in the original SI and the series actually used as follows:
These series, all of which come from the International Tree Ring Data Bank (ITRDB), met all the tests used for screening of the ITRDB data used in Mann et al. [1998] (see Mann et al. (2000)), except one”¢’¬?namely, that in 1997, either it could not be ascertained by the authors how these series had been standardized by the original contributors, or it was known that the series had been aggressively standardized, removing multidecadal to century-scale fluctuations.
In this note, I show that these criteria do not explain either the exclusion of many of the 35 series or the seemingly inconsistent inclusion of series, which have been "aggressively standardized". For example, the Corrigendum exclusions include several Schweingruber series, even though many Schweingruber series are used in MBH98. More
WSJ: Hockey Stick "on ice"
The Wall Street Journal published this editorial last Friday, on the Hockey Stick controversy and the work of Steve McIntyre:
Read on