scienceofdoom.com

May 2, 2010 – 9:13 AM

I would like to refer CA readers to an excellent and relatively new blog scienceofdoom.com. Its policies commit it to a couple of things that are important departures from realclimate, climateprogress and similar sites, which spend much of their energy persecuting infidels, agnostics and perceived heretics on even minor creeds, the latter attracting particular venom.

According to its policies, it is committed to treating the “public” (which, in the technical blogosphere, is very often highly educated scientists and professionals from other fields) with respect, even if they ask heretical questions, rather than treating them as “part of an evil empire of disinformation”. It is committed to questions like: “What is this particular theory built on? How long has theory been “established”? What lines of evidence support this theory?”. These are obviously the sort of questions that are regularly addressed at Climate Audit in respect to proxies – and ones that I would have liked to be able to address in the physics if I could clone myself so that I had more time and energy.

SDoom commenced its life with many useful posts outlining the fundamentals of sensitivity of CO2, drawing heavily on Ramanathan’s work on radiative-convective models in the 1970s. (They describe him as the “great Ramanathan”.) In a few CA posts, I’ve drawn readers attention to Ramanathan’s articles on radiative-convective models, expressing my considerable frustration at IPCC’s failure to properly present a canonical and approved version of the fundamentals, embodying any advances since Ramanathan. My own sense – a view previously expressed at CA – is that in order to provide the appropriate food for a scientist from another field, there is a pressing and long overdue need for exposition somewhere between a primary school cartoon and merely reporting the results of GCM runs, meritorious as they may be. I suggested this long ago to one of the scopers of AR4 and it is something that the scopers of AR5 need to consider. My guess is that an exposition building on radiative-convective models a la Ramanathan would be the most fruitful way of accomplishing this. SD’s fresh presentations of Ramanathan’s work should be of considerable interest to people trying to understand the larger problem.

Their statement of objectives very much represents my view of the world – despite the efforts of opponents to paint me otherwise. Their emphasis on politeness is very much along the lines of what I try to do here. I try to be polite personally; I ask commenters here to be polite and have spent a considerable amount of time enforcing politeness rules. SDoom note that they may “use satire now and again as it can make the day more interesting” – something that I also do. From personal experience, I’d advise SDoom that it’s a voice that one has to watch as it requires a pretty deft touch to pull off successfully and won’t always give the intended results. On the other hand, satire and a light touch are far more agreeable than the angriness that one sees all too often in the blogosphere.

I quote their policies in full below:

What’s the blog about?
Climate science.

Who’s it for?
People interested in the science behind the climate stories we read about every day. People who want to learn. People who want to contribute to other people learning about climate science.

What does the author think about Science?
Science is not a religion. It’s good to ask questions. Being skeptical is a positive thing. When people of an alternative viewpoint use catchy but insulting labels for you, keep asking questions and thinking for yourself. Science isn’t settled by being able to come up with the best insults, although it can be a lot of fun – even for grown ups.

What does the author think about Climate Science?
It’s a fascinating subject and something really worth trying to understand.

A little more specific?
Some aspects of current “Climate Science” have become more like a faith. The science has been pressed into a political agenda and consequently the spirit of free inquiry has been squashed.

Opinions
Opinions are often interesting and sometimes entertaining. But what do we learn from opinions? It’s more useful to understand the science behind the subject. What is this particular theory built on? How long has theory been “established”? What lines of evidence support this theory? What evidence would falsify this theory? What do opposing theories say?

Anything else?
This blog will try and stay away from guessing motives and insulting people because of how they vote or their religious beliefs. However, this doesn’t mean we won’t use satire now and again as it can make the day more interesting.

Comments and Questions
These are encouraged. But check out the etiquette. Otherwise the spam filter may eat your comments for breakfast. If not, the moderator will lunch on them.

A Calmer World
It’s easy to trade blows on blogs. It’s harder to understand a new point of view. Or to consider that a different point of view might be right. And yet, more constructive for everyone if we take a moment, a day even, and try and really understand that other point of view. Even if it’s still wrong, we are better off for making the effort.

And sometimes others put forward points of view or “facts” that are obviously wrong and easily refuted. Pretend for a moment that they aren’t part of an evil empire of disinformation and think how best to explain the error in an inoffensive way.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (72)

Krummholz and the Yamal Chronology

Apr 28, 2010 – 4:07 PM

Just before Climategate, we were reflecting on the apparent non-“robustness” of the Yamal chronology to inclusion of Khadyta data. Briffa’s response was that he could still “get” a HS by adding in Yadoyayakha and Porzayakha ring width data that hadn’t been used in Briffa (2000). As noted in other posts, Khadyta isn’t the only site with a divergence problem. Divergence, if anything, is the rule, rather than the exception. Briffa didn’t discuss why there were such differences between the sites – something that I’ll consider briefly today.

First here is a plot showing the ten YAD core chronologies (the chronologies, as usual, divide ring width by a negative exponential to adjust for aging.) YAD061, the “most influential tree in the world”, surges off the page, closing at an astonishing 8 units.

Next is a plot showing 15 Khadyta River core chronologies that go to 1990. None of these core chronologies are rocketing off the top of the page – an entirely different impression to the YAD chronologies.

Statistically, the inconsistency between the two sites creates all sorts of problems. The idea behind using chronologies as a proxy for temperature is that ring widths, after an allowance for aging, are a linear function of temperature. However, something else needs to be invoked in order to explain the huge difference between nearby sites. How can one “thermometer” read 8-sigma, while the other is below normal?

This is a difficult and interesting statistical question – one that isn’t even posed in Team literature.

A relatively recent study, Devi et al 2008 (needless to say, not cited by Oxburgh), appears to me to shed considerable light on the conundrum. here’s their Figure 8, showing ring widths for Siberian larch that switched from a creeping (krummholz) form to an upright form in the 20th century. The generic shape of these diagrams is highly reminiscent of the YAD core plots at issue.


Devi et al 2008 Figure 8.

Devi et al described their observations as follows:

Vertical stems started to appear after 1900, with most of them appearing in the 1920s and 1930s (Figs 7 and 8). The change from creeping to vertical growth led to significant growth enhancements of the multi-stemmed trees, as indicated by the increases in the ring widths of the horizontal stems of multi-stemmed trees (Fig. 8). Approximately one to two decades after the stems had started to grow vertically, ring widths increased 2- to 10-fold, which were much greater than the increases in ring width of single-stemmed trees during the same period.

2- to 10-fold increases in ring width! The same sort of thing that we’re seeing at the YAD site. Look back at core YAD061. It grows at relatively low rates for its first 100 years or so and then surges to 8 times the growth rate around 1950 – in this case, a little later than the growth surge in the Polar Urals cores shown here.

Now look at core YAD041 – its fluctuations are highly correlated to YAD061, but it experienced a growth surge early in the 20th century and has dramatically tailed off in the second half of the 20th century.

The shapes of these curves is very similar to the Polar Urals krummholz-to-upright curves. It sure seems plausible to me that the huge “late-life” growth surge in important YAD cores might be due to the same effect.

Reference: NADEZHDA DEVI, FRANK HAGEDORNw, PAVEL MOISEEV, HARALD BUGMANN, STEPAN SHIYATOV, VALERIE MAZEPA and AND REA SRIGLING, 2008. Expanding forests and changing growth forms of Siberian larch at the Polar Urals treeline during the 20th century, Global Change Biology, 14, 1581–1591

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Yamal and Urals | Tagged , | Comments (78)

Yamal Aerial Photo

Apr 28, 2010 – 9:51 AM

Here’s a Gazprom aerial photo which illustrates this better than 1000 words. (Yamal is the location of some huge Gazprom natural gas fields.) From the colors, I presume that the picture is taken in fall as the larch have changed color. Spruce do not appear to be in evidence here – they have a more southerly treeline. The remarkable relationship between the rivers and the larch “forest” is not discussed in Briffa (2000) or Briffa et al (2008).

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Yamal and Urals | Tagged | Comments (93)

Yamal and the Decline

Apr 25, 2010 – 3:19 PM

Contrary to a myth believed in by the climate science “community”, most recent multiproxy reconstructions are not “independent” – they merely recycle the same stereotypes with slightly different weighting methods. In an email (1140039406.txt) in which Briffa urges Overpeck not not to “over egg the pudding”, he stated: “Peck, you have to consider that since the TAR , there has been a lot of argument re “hockey stick” and the real independence of the inputs to most subsequent analyses is minimal.”

CRU contributed three of the canonical proxies – Tornetrask, Taimyr and most importantly, Yamal. Yamal was very much in the news when Climategate broke. In my submissions, I identified Yamal as an important issue. Needless to say, it’s been ignored.

I’m going to re-visit the inconsistency issue today – I’ve collected information from a number of sites in the general Yamal area on the Hantemirov and Shiyatov location map below (Polar Urals and Nadim are from slightly outside the four corners of the location map.

Figure 1. Inset chronologies on H-S location map. For the purposes of this map, I’ve done the chronologies by making a age-curve from the entire population of subfossil cores in the Climategate documents and developing a chronology for each site from the residuals for this standard fit (taking one size fits all to a regional scale). Red – slarch; green – spruce. The original Yamal chronology (modern portion) is also shown. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized, Yamal and Urals | Tagged , | Comments (51)

Yamal and the Vaganov Network

Apr 23, 2010 – 3:49 PM

As a spin-off from looking at Mann of Oak proxies, I did (what I regard) as a pretty bit of decoding of some measurement data in the Climategate documents.

The Climategate directory documents/briffa-treering-external/stepan/ contains a large number of tree ring measurement files dated July 1996 (with the characteristic suffix .rwl) with 3-character labels,

“ala” “all” “and” “ary” “aya” “bat” …

Interesting as the data might be, it’s hard to do much with it without a lexicon providing locations – and there isn’t such a lexicon in the briffa-treering-external files.

I browsed through the MBH98 proxy rosters when I was looking for oak chronologies, which reminded me that MBH98 had used a network of 61 Vaganov chronologies. No measurement data was available. I’d downloaded Vaganov chronologies from Mann’s University of Virginia website in November 1993 when it was temporarily online. (Shortly afterwards, Mann told Jones in a Climategate email that Scott[Rutherford] had messed up “big-time” in what he had left on the FTP site.)

I remembered that there had been a file in the MBH98 FTP site that had contained lat-longs for the Vaganov network, which had also had 3-character IDs. (The file is once again available in the Climategate documents – look for TREE/VAGABOV/ORIG/sib.dat in mbh98-osborn.zip.) The file sib.dat had 61 entries. They proved to be a perfect match to the *.rwl files at documents/briffa-treering-external/stepan/ .

This little bit of detective work yielded previously unavailable measurement data for MBH98 (measurement data that Mann might not have had access to.)

Of particular interest to me were the data sets in the Yamal area:

V1 V2 V3 V4
1 26 SOB 65.46 66.48
2 27 SOP 65.46 66.48
3 1 SCH 69.17 66.49
4 2 KHA 69.50 67.12
5 3 KHD 69.54 67.07
6 4 JAH 70.58 67.25
7 5 NID 71.40 66.13
…

Here there is a little additional information from an email in the Climategate documents (documents/briffa-treering-external/ecat/yam9610/ymiss.dat) dated Dec 10, 1996 which stated:

1. As regards individual ring width data of living trees from
Yamal we would remind you that you have them. Stepan gave to you
in England one diskette. There are data for Larix sibirica from
three sites (KHA – from Khadyta river, 67 12’N 69 50’E; JAH –
from Yahody river 67 07’N 69 54’E and POR – from Portsa river
67 27’N 71 00’E) and for Picea obovata from two points (SCH –
Shtshutshya river 66 49’N 69 50’E and KHD – from Khadyta river
67 07’N 69 54’E).

Many CA readers will recall Khadyta River as the Schweingruber site that occasioned considerable controversy in October 2009 just before Climategate (the Oxburgh “report” included Briffa’s online response in its bibliography, but did not discuss any particulars.) The JAH and POR sites were also discussed at the time. (Note that the YAD site – the one with the Dos Equis tree – is not mentioned in the above email.)

The Vaganov version of Khadyta River larch (KHA) included some (but not all) of the Schweingruber cores – the cores that Gavin Schmidt had accused me of finding randomly on the internet.

I did a quick RCS-emulation on the four Yamal measurement data sets in the Vagnov network, shown below. The first three Yamal data sets (kha, khd, sch – one larch and two spruce) have very pronounced divergence problems and all have late 20th century values below the average of the last few centuries. (Even though JAH has an upward trend over the past few centuries and closes above the average of the last few centuries, it also has a divergence problem with the last half 20th being somewhat lower than first half 20th.)


Figure 1. Four Yamal Chronologies from Climategate Documents

CA readers may also recall that, unlike the above chronologies, Briffa’s Yamal chronology has a pronounced HS shape. The figure below show Yamal as it contributes to Kaufman et al 2009 – where it closes at a remarkable 6 sigma. Another accessible version is in the AR4 spaghetti graph that Overpeck (a Kaufman coauthor) included as part of his efforts to deal a “mortal blow” to the myth of an MWP.

The difference between the decline observed in the large-population Schweingruber network and the opposite behavior in Briffa’s Yamal chronology has always been a big problem for me. If most (or even a number of) chronologies in the area decline, then any competent analyst would inquire into the reliability of a chronology showing opposite behavior.

It’s very disappointing that David Hand didn’t assess the problem. It would really be much healthier if inquiries actually inquired into the problems that are at issue.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate | Tagged , , , | Comments (33)

Curry on the “Inquiries”

Apr 23, 2010 – 8:52 AM

The majority of the climate science “community” appear to be so desperate for affection that they’ve proclaimed wind utility chairman Oxburgh’s love to the rooftops merely because of a few sweet nothings whispered in their ears. (Words of love so soft and tender.) Their gratitude is so great that they are willing to overlook the embarrassing brevity of Oxburgh’s report, Oxburgh’s negligible due diligence and failure to address any of the questions that were actually at issue.

Judy Curry has not compromised her standards.

Uniquely among the “community”, she’s noted the embarrassing brevity of the Oxburgh “report”:

When I first read the report, I thought I was reading the executive summary and proceeded to look for the details; well, there weren’t any.

Uniquely within the “community”, she realized that Oxburgh avoided the questions that were at issue:

And I was concerned that the report explicitly did not address the key issues that had been raised by the skeptics. … I recall reading this statement from one of the blogs, which seems especially apt: the fire department receives report of a fire in the kitchen; upon investigating the living room, they declare that there is no fire in the house.

She even picked up on an interesting loose end – that the provenance of the selection of the eleven “key” papers (the ones in the living room) remains “unknown”. (Thus far, the Royal Society has been highly evasive, to say the least, when asked to confirm Oxburgh’s claim that the eleven “key” papers were selected on the advice of the Royal Society. Despite supposed commitments to openness and transparency, the Royal Society has refused to identify the person at the Royal Society who made the selection or what criteria were used or to repudiate the claim in the Oxburgh report that the eleven were selected on the “advice of the Royal Society”.)

But the “community” doesn’t care about such things. It’s springtime and Oxburgh loves them. And the newspapers will respect them in the morning.

Read Judy’s trenchant comments in full.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (65)

Mann of Oak

Apr 21, 2010 – 9:13 AM

Doug Keenan has received a favorable decision from the FOI Commissioner in his lengthy FOI/EIR battle for tree ring data collected by Mike Baillie of Queen’s University, Belfast. The data is from Irish oaks and was collected mostly in the 1970s. The decision has been covered by the Times, the New Scientist and the Guardian and at Bishop Hill here and here.

Responses to the decision from Baillie, Rob Wilson and Phil Willis are as interesting as the decision. Baillie and Wilson argued that oak chronologies were “virtually useless” as temperature proxies and “dangerous” in a temperature reconstruction. Nonetheless, as I report below, no fewer than 119 oak chronologies (including 3 Baillie chronologies) were used in Mann et al 2008 without any complaint by Wilson or other specialists. CA readers will also be interested in Baillie’s 2005 response to a Climate Audit post urging climate scientists to update the proxies. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (104)

Hide the Decline II

Apr 20, 2010 – 6:35 PM

On March 8, Michael Mann’s lawyers, Cozen O’Connor, sent a legal letter to Minnesotans for Global Warming (of the famous Hide the Decline video) threatening them, ironically, with misappropriating Mann’s likeness and, almost as an afterthought, defaming him “by leaving viewers with the incorrect impression that he falsified data to generate desired results in connection with his research activities”:

We are writing to demand that you cease and desist any and all use of Dr Mann’s likeness, which you have misappropriated in various videos posted on your webpage http://www.minnesotansforglobalwarming.com, including the video Hide the Decline –Climategate. You are hereby advised that the use of Dr Mann’s likeness, which you clearly misappropriated from PSU’s webpage, http://www.meteo,psu.edu/~mann/MRG/index.html, is not authorized and infringes on various copyrights. Such use also improperly misappropriates Professor Mann’s likeness for commercial exploitation, given that the video clearly supports Minnesotans for Global Warming’s efforts to sell various products and merchandize. Finally, the referenced video clearly defames Professor Mann by leaving viewers with the incorrect impression that he falsified data to generate desired results in connection with his research activities. This false impression irreparably harms Dr Mann’s personal and professional reputation.

For these reasons, we demand that you immediately cease and desist using Dr Mann’s likeness and that you immediately remove the defamatory video from your webpage (including cashed [sic] versions.) If you persist with this defamatory activity, please be advised that we will be compelled to enforce Dr Mann’s rights, which may include the recovery of damages from you. Please contact me to confirm your intentions or if you wish to discuss this matter further.

The letter was copied to Mann and to Tom Cogill, Photographer.

The original video has been removed from Youtube.

However, the story doesn’t quite end.

Earlier today, the following announcement was made:

the No Cap-and-Trade Coalition, a group that includes M4GW, responded today at an event at the National Press Club, releasing Mann’s threatening letter and an updated version of the “Hide the Decline” video.

See a release of Hide the Decline II, available here. The new version carefully avoids any use of the “copyrighted” Mann photographs. It is also more precise in its presentation, evidencing a much clearer understanding of the trick than the wilfully obtuse Oxburgh “Report” or Willis Parliament Committee Report.

A blog report here states:

Minnesotans 4 Global Warming hope Mann will proceed with his lawsuit so that the legal discovery process will force exposure of data and methods Mann has still not released and that the official whitewash inquiries refuse to investigate.

Jeff Davis of the coalition stated:

“I hope Dr. Mann does sue us,” Said Davis, “The legal discovery process would give us an opportunity to expose Dr. Mann’s research – or lack thereof to public and legal scrutiny.”

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate | Tagged | Comments (79)

Dijkgraaf: “emails not directly related to IPCC”

Apr 20, 2010 – 6:45 AM

On March 10, 2010, the UN and IPCC commissioned the InterAcademy Council (IAC), the umbrella organisation of all science academies in the world, to “conduct a thorough, independent review of the processes and procedures” followed by the IPCC in preparation of its Assessment Reports.

The request letter is online here signed jointly by Pachauri and Ban ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN. (In contrast, the terms of reference of the secretive Oxburgh inquiry remain undisclosed.)

The request letter didn’t mention the Cimategate letters, noting only that “a very small number of errors have been brought to light” in the Fourth Assessment Report, a document which they described as containing “thousands of peer-reviewed and independent scientific studies“.

An interesting turn of phrase. Peer-reviewed and “independent” scientific studies. I wonder what this means – is this term supposed to encompass NGO pamphlets?

They continue:

Given the gravity of the global threat posed by climate change, it is vitally important to ensure full confidence in the scientific process underpinning the assessments of the IPCC. Governments and the public at large look to the IPCC as the world’s most authoritative scientific body for assessing climate risk and informing climate policy.

As the IPCC embarks on its Fifth Assessment Report, it is imperative that its work be as accurate, objective, comprehensive and transparent as possible, and that the potential for future errors is minimized. It is vitally important that every step of the assessment process be clear, consistent and comprehensible.

Agreed. Unfortunately, one of the ongoing themes of this blog has been the failure of IPCC to live up to these pious objectives. Climate Audit readers have been aware of IPCC obstruction and non-transparency for some time.

Their acceptance of the UN-IPCC request by the Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council is online here. The IAC is co-chaired by Robert Dijkgraaf, president of the Dutch National Academy and Lu Yongxiang, president of the Chinese science academy.

In a recent interview, Dijkgraaf was asked:

What about ‘Climategate’, the hacked emails from the British climate institute?

Dijkgraaf stated:

Those emails are not directly related to the work of the IPCC.

It is very tiresome to see one eminent scientist after another make untrue statements, apparently without making any effort to familiarize themselves with the topic on which they are opining. No matter how smart you are, you have to do the work. CRU scientists Jones, Briffa and Osborn were all important IPCC figures (together with Trenberth, Jones was a Coordinating Lead Author of chapter 2 on observations, while while Briffa and Osborn were Lead Authors for the controversial section on thousand-year proxy reconstructions.) Climategate emails in 2005 and 2006 are dominated by correspondence about IPCC activities of CRU’s Jones, Briffa and Osborn. The “trick … to hide the decline” arose in the context of a 1999 IPCC authors’ meeting and the most important manifestation of the “trick” was in the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports.

The Climategate emails provided relevant evidence on how IPCC scientists discharged or failed to discharge their duties to make the IPCC process as open and transparent as possible. Dijkgraaf’s claim that the emails are not “directly related to the work of the IPCC” is untrue and ill-informed. A bad start to this inquiry.

Dijkgraaf continues:

This affair shows how sensitive the issue is and what is at stake. Transparency is paramount. Scientists live in a glass house. The more the impact of knowledge grows, the more important it becomes to make clear how you reached a conclusion. Science often deals with public funding and public institutions. We should serve as an example. There are guidelines as to how a scientist should behave: ethical, honest, professional, open and respectful of the community.

Unfortunately, these pieties continue to be flouted by climate scientists – most recently by the Oxburgh “Report” – a report that not only fails to be “open and respectful of the community”, but whose secretiveness, tricky terms of reference and lack of due diligence is an obvious taunt to CRU critics and targets.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (33)

Laundering Oxburgh’s Interview

Apr 18, 2010 – 6:13 PM

The LA Times laundered Oxburgh’s BBC interview, a laundering which tricked even Pielke Jr.

In the original BBC interview, Oxburgh was asked:

Obviously there has been a lot of concern from climate change sceptics who brought this matter to the public eye. If you look at the wording of the emails, the fact is that Prof Jones talked of a trick to hide the decline.

Oxburgh replied:

Look, our concern was not primarily with the emails, other people are looking at that. Our concern was with the published record of the group. And we went back well over 20 years looking at their publications, right up to the present day. Then we spent something like 15 person-days interviewing and talking to the people um in detail. It’s absolutely and transparently clear that they were… uh, in their published science, they were honest. I think that sometimes all sorts of people say silly things in emails. When these things are looked at afterwards, frequently people don’t have the full story, they don’t know what was said on the telephone or letters or in other ways in between. And I think that some of the sceptical comment was in fact justified, and some of it was just plain nasty and ill-informed.

In a widely disseminated story, the LA Times cherry-picked Oxburgh’s statement, leaving out his observation that “some of the sceptical comment was justified”. The LA Times:

He [Oxburgh] said some of the criticism by skeptics, who pointed to the e-mails as proof of a massive scientific coverup, was “just plain nasty and ill-informed.”

Despite his usual attentiveness in such matters, Roger’s account was even further from the original:

Of the criticisms of CRU raised by climate skeptics?

just plain nasty and ill-informed

No mention of Oxburgh’s original admission that “some of the sceptical comment was justified”.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in climategate | Tagged | Comments (37)