More hanky panky by climate "scientists"

Thanks for sharing, Tim.

To save others the trip: it's some statisticians, software engineers and former mining consultants hooting over one report from 1999. Hot stuff, that. I suppose next they'll uncover a shocking example of the plate tectonics hoax from 1963.

As always, for discussion of the facts of global warming by climatologists and atmospheric physicists see
http://www.realclimate.org

 

I actually LOL'd at that one.

Actually, "Dr." Kent Hovind has been trying to do just that for decades. He actually succeeds in brainwashing children and many adults by using bad math, false science and a heavy dose of Creationism. Well, he did before going to prison. "Since January 2007, Hovind has been serving a ten-year prison sentence after being convicted of 58 federal counts, including twelve tax offenses, one count of obstructing federal agents, and forty-five counts of structuring cash transaction."

 

Interesting article. First one I've seen in quite awhile that appears to be plausible. Unfortunately, it would take several hours to really dig into it (and apparently $15 to get the original published research paper, although this seems to cover it fairly well in English), and even then I'm not sure I'd understand the math involved. I've done some normalizing of data and such, but this is probably much more sophisticated. The code snippets don't really tell me much (and I'm a software engineer) without knowing what the function calls do, etc.

The intent of the original paper by Briffa and Osborn was to show that there's some uncertainty in using tree-ring proxies for past temperature reconstructions, and questions some results presented by Mann earlier, suggesting that recent warming may not be as much as Mann was saying. So it's rather odd that this study would be attacked by global warming skeptics, but apparently McIntyre feels that even they were hiding unfavorable data that would show even more uncertainty.

Given that this was published over a decade ago, I would expect considerable research has been done since then to narrow down the uncertainties. There's one study where calibrated tree ring samples have matched surface air temperature readings fairly well, despite apparent questioning by Briffa and Osborn. (http://mgg.coas.oregonstate.edu/~rob/15_Harris&Chapman_GRL02.pdf)

Only other post I see on the subject since this allegation was published:
DocSkull: Page 926 of Briffa and Osborn 1999 explains the ranges

 

Okay, re-read the code and many of the comments below at the ClimateAudit site. The question about the code is why the code has a different range in years than the published data. The code as they mentioned, dates from after the published data, so it looks to me that after they published their initial data, they then expanded their scope. Doesn't show to me that they tried to hide anything in the 1402-1550 time period. They may not have even had that data at the time of producing their report, or they may not have been able to understand it well, or it didn't have a big enough sample size. Whatever happened, they published the data of one line that approximately matched the other lines, and disregarded outlying years that (according to McIntyre) do not match the other lines. One line significantly diverging from the other 4 (or 5) lines tells me that the diverging line is suspect, but it doesn't change the overall story. They didn't change that data or try to massage it away thru some fancy normalization, which is what I thought the initial claim by McIntyre was.

Yes, I would like to know why they selected those years in particular, but it's too early to speculate on what that reason would be. Changing data is fraud, but I don't see that here. Selecting one time period over another, and telling people what time period you chose, is done all the time in all disciplines.

 

Nerfer, if there are specific publications you'd like to access, PM me. Altenatively, a local library could help?

I have not examined this hanky as closely as nerfer has. But it certainly seems to belong to a category. I mean the search for one thing, just one thing, that refutes all the other diverse paleotemperature proxies. Causes people to abandon quite a lot of evidence.

The One Ring, as it were.

Anyway, I still promote (cheer? shill for?) Lonnie Thompson' s glacial research. I consider it the best way to know how (and where) things were during those now-controversial centuries.

Tree-ring reconstructions will always nag at us a bit because tress respond individually to many environmental, resource and competition factors. This means more math/stat steps are required, and that's where the 'diversity of opinions' comes in. There is hope ahead, based on more extensive examination of stable isotopes, so I'm not giving up on The Many Rings yet (it's supposed to contrast The One Ring above - my clever for the day).

But if you look at glaciers and icefields, you find that they are melting now and didn't during the Medieval. I find this much easier to assimilate than the subtleties of tree rings.