The ultimate debunking of the global warming “hockey stick”?
Via Belmont Club.
Update: 10/02/09
Here’s an even better summary of the issue.
I’m moving from being skeptical but open minded about the hockey stick, to the belief that it is an intentional fraud.
And as others have mentioned, I’m afraid we’re far enough along in the game that the meme has already been effectively established in the popular mind.
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That is a serious and extremely credible critique. I am deeply troubled by the cherry picking of data.
I would like to see the IPCC redo teh calculations using all 34 cores and see what impact that has on the actual “hockey stick” before jumping to conclusions about whether this “debunks” climate change or not. There is much more data and observation out there besides Yamal that does support the theory and as yet I still think the empirical evidence in favor f climate change is overwhelming. But the damage done to the credibility of climate change theory as a whole by these few overenthusiasic, unethical scientists is all the more unforgivable if climate change is true than if it is false.
Ill be paying attention to this and have set up a google searh so i can stay abreast. Thanks jay for bringing this to attention.
Wow.
Just wow.
We skeptics always suspected there might be something fishy in the raw data, but… wow. They not only used a very small and suspect sample, the sample gives every indication of being handpicked to produce the hockey stick! That does not appear to be an innocent (but egregiously awful) error but deliberate (and even more egregious) manipulation (Mannipulation?).
This is like investigating an unpaid parking ticket and finding a serial killer.
Dean’s jihad against peer review gets yet another overdue vindication.
“…I still think the empirical evidence in favor f climate change is overwhelming…”
Right you are, Aziz! The climate has in fact been changing for literally billions of years on the planet Earth. However, if you intend the statement to mean that climate change is man-made, then I’m afraid there is significant evidence that you should objectively consider before jumping to these kinds of conclusions. You’ll find Anthony Watts’ site very illuminating if you put in your regular rotation: Watt’s Up With That?
This is not the only case of obfuscation in the AGW movement. The “modelers” who write computer programs to predict future climate routinely refuse to publish the algorithms and admit that both their data and models are incomplete. Despite this, they trumpet the apocalyptic predictions made by these “models” as truth, rallying many poorly educated and uncritical persons to their cause.
I admire your stated objectivity on this issue, so I’ll be comforted to know you’ll examine both sides of it.
ok added Watts site to my RSS bundle, along with climate audit and real climate
Remember, this “hockey stick” was the PRIME INDICATOR in Al Gore’s famous “Inconvenient Truth” (Isn’t that Orwellian?) mockumentary which launched the worldwide AGW scam (which Al Gore has made about 100 million dollars from).
And that is what has led to Nancy Pelosi’s latest Cap and Trade (Tax) bill which Obama calls a “moral imperative” to address the “impending catastrophe” of climate change, all predicated on that famous hockey stick.
That cherry picking of data from six trees has the legitimate potential to create a multi-trillion dollar economic catastrophe for the entire world. All of which coincidentally puts the governments in charge of the entire global energy market.
Makes you wonder…..
Oh, does anyone else cringe with disgust when they hear Nancy Pelosi call her Cap and Tax bill “more exciting” than giving birth to her own kids?
Man, that is one creepy chick.
And just to clarify my position, I think anthropogenic global warming is an interesting and plausible theory, and it deserves funding for further study. But I also think it is a phenomenon that is extremely ripe for exploitation and over reaction. So I am against governmental mandates at this point.
The “hard” sciences all point to the fact that Earth is getting warmer, the ice caps are indeed melting, and the seas are rising. But this has been going on for at least 10,000 years. We know that the glaciers Al Gore showed falling apart once stretched all the way south to Pennsylvania and Michigan. And the Maryland and Virginia coats where explorers first landed in the 16th century are now estimated to be 2-3 miles out to sea from the current coastline.
So a rise in global temperature over the last century, (the only period for which we have actual measured data), should be expected. If the man made global warning theory is correct, we should see an increase in the rate of change. And as far as I know, the “hockey stick” study is the only study to date to show such a major increase. Most of the rest have been simulations. And that hockey stick was also used to great effect to motivate many folks into action.
So, IMO, yes, we need to study these things, and prepare for future changes. But the time for knee jerk reactions is not yet upon us.
I have always been skeptical about cataclysmic scenerios that predict the end of the world as we know it for a lot of reasons.
In this case, I don’t think it matters. Global Warming is now a political vehicle to change life as we know it, and the data is no longer particularly relavent. IMHO, it is better than using the courts because there is an element of democracy in changes that are occuring (although I do not agree with the changes).
Jaymaster– do you have a source for your claim that the eastern US coastlines were significantly different within recent centuries?
European exploration and early settlement is pretty well documented, comparatively speaking, and many sites and artifacts exist to show that places like Jamestown and Roanoak were established near a coastline pretty similar to our own. Hell, the shoreline of Manhattan Island was already well built up by the mid-1600s, and nobody’s complained of lost real estate at the waterline since then. Nor has Holland had to redesign its sea dikes every few decades to hold back ever rising seas.
I agree in general with what you’re saying, though. I’m more amused on this point by Glacier Bay in Alaska:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacier_Bay
In 100 years since its discovery in the late 1700s to about 1900, the bay lost 60 miles of ice. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because of people driving Hummers.
Jaymaster– do you have a source for your claim that the eastern US coastlines were significantly different within recent centuries?
In many cases, we’ve actually ADDED coastline.
There’s a fascinating time-lapse of Boston showing how we’ve added quite a lot of land to it over the past 200 years.
Brian, yes I do, (I think) but I can’t find it right now. I’ll keep looking though.
I was doing some research on ship wreck locations a few months ago when I stumbled across some data from an effort to map the sea bed off the MD/VA coast with side scan RADAR. I’m pretty sure that statement was made in that document, and I’m also pretty sure I downloaded the pdf. But I can’t find it now, or a link to the study. It’s possible I did that on my netbook, so I’ll have to wait till tonight to take a look at that.
I was a bit surprised by that claim too, and that’s why it stuck with me. I think it is related to the structure of the barrier islands located in that part of the coast. I seem to recall they mentioned that some of the effect might be due to beach erosion, and not entirely caused by rising seas.
Stay tuned….
Barrier islands change shape all the time; the fact that they occur from the Carolinas up to Montauk Point shows that they arise as a result of prevailing weather/current action rather than geology, and as such they’re bound to change a lot over the centuries.
Inside the barriers, I’d be very surprised if any of the coastline has been significantly affected by a change in sea level. I mean, there are places all over the world that should have been monumentally altered in a highly visible and documentable way by even a foot of change since the advent of science; Venice and St. Petersburg come to mind.
Most of climate change hysteria is bovine scatology. It’s purely agenda-driven science.
The agenda — making a cleaner planet — ain’t so bad of an idea. But it’s been greatly distorted by exaggeration and fear-mongering.
–HB
Coastlines have moved forward in some areas and backwards in other areas. Perhaps the most sensitive locations on earth to sea level rise are places like Holland and Venice. Venice has in fact had some rising, but on the order of inches (but those inches are important) over the past 200 years. Holland has not had any significant issues, certainly nothing that has caused them to rebuild their extensive infrastructure of dikes and dams.
The ice caps are not melting. Certainly they are not melting at anything like the precipitous rates that the AGW zealots proclaim. The last studies I have seen of polar ice indicates a genreal INCREASE in seasonal adjusted ice mass in both the North and South poles. However, there are areas in both north and south where glaciers and ice shelfs have been collapsing.
I am reminded of the National Geographic special on Yosemite where they spent 40 minutes going through the park showing how the landscape had been carved by ancient glaciers. They repeatedly stated that the glaciers had hit a maximum about 10,000 years ago and had been steadily receeding since then, to the point that only two were left in the park.
The last 20 minutes was an AGW rant about how people driving Hummers were melting the final two glaciers.
This passes for science in the modern world. Somehow 10,000 years of steadily melting glaciers was totally forgotten and irrelevent as the producers of the documentary shifted from scientists and documentarians to zealots and propagandists. Somehow, I guess around 1849 or so, all climate change was supposed to suddenly STOP. Melting of glacier ice once estimated to be SIX MILES THICK in the park was somehow supposed to have reached a stage of climatic perfection just before evil white Europeans showed up and started industrializing the area. All of the melting glaciers prior to 1849 was pure and natural and good. All melting glaciers SINCE 1849 was man-made, environmentally destructive and evil.
The whole thing just makes me crack up with the total absurdity of it when I’m not gnashing my teeth at the gullibility and malleability of human beings who apparently can be made to believe ANYTHING, even that their own existence is a vile infection on an otherwise pristine and perfect planet.
And that’s the mindset of our national “leaders” today, who are deliberately pursuing political goals of punishing human beings for creating a vibrant, powerful economic engine that has taken us from near stone-age to our modern information age lifestyle.
They are environmental luddites with a romanticized and unrealistic view of life, the environment and the place of human beings on the planet.
I’m all for studying the situation, but when the supposed scientists who are supposed to be impartial and reliant on data are obviously spinning their own research to advance a political agenda, you can’t really believe much of anything anymore.
The RealClimate guys have responded – and it looks like the Yamal data is *not* critical to the Hockey Stick at all. They give plenty of examples of temperature curves without Yamal data in them, all of which still show the hockey stick. What strikes me is just how reproducible the hockey stick is via so many different methods of measuring temperature, from ice cores to satellites to boreholes to glacier retreats and more.
Whats more, it looks like McIntytre at CA was just as selective in his choice of tree rings purporting to show there was no hockey stick as he claims teh original Yamal researchers were. The authors (Briffa et al) have published a defense of their methodology which makes it clear that McIntyre excluded their points and substituted others, and even when he included the originals he arbitrarily weighted them lower:
The basis for McIntyre’s selection of which of our (i.e. Hantemirov and Shiyatov’s) data to exclude and which to use in replacement is not clear but his version of the chronology shows lower relative growth in recent decades than is displayed in my original chronology. He offers no justification for excluding the original data; and in one version of the chronology where he retains them, he appears to give them inappropriate low weights. I note that McIntyre qualifies the presentation of his version(s) of the chronology by reference to a number of valid points that require further investigation. Subsequent postings appear to pay no heed to these caveats. Whether the McIntyre version is any more robust a representation of regional tree growth in Yamal than my original, remains to be established.
Since teh scientific community responded immediately to McIntyre’s claims, and even gave him all the data with which to make his accusations, its clear to me that claims of a GW conspiracy are overblown. The scientific response is rigorous and immediate, they arent dismissing teh skeptics but taking the time to painstakingly answer them.
Since I am a scientist, I am biased in favor of the establishment and the peer review system. So this is pretty conclusive in my view.
Aziz:
It is quite coincidental that your “scientific” conclusion so thoroughly matches your ideological bias…
Pure science… nothing to see here…. move along…
OK, I found my book marks, and have reread the documents. I forgot the one was 100+ pages! (although it is one of the best documents I’ve found on the history of the Delmarva shore, and just damn fine reading all around IMO).
And I am going to have to correct myself a bit. This document (the big one) discusses the effect of ice cap melting on sea rise in the area.
http://mht.maryland.gov/documents/PDF/Archeology_MMAP_OceanCity_Survey_DNR.pdf
Unfortunately, after skimming through it again, I found no mention in it of the rate of change of the sea level during modern history. But it states that lands once populated could now be located up to 200 miles off shore. Based on my interpretation, that includes Native Americans dating back 10,000 years.
From page 13:
“Following the retreat of the last major North American Glacial advance, both the continental shelf and the ancestral Susquehanna River were transgressed as sea levels began to rise. These transgressions began at 14,000 to 15,000 years ago and at 10,000 years ago, respectively…It was not until approximately 3000 years ago that the Chesapeake Bay, as it exists today, was essentially complete. (Dent, 1995:69)
The last transgression, from around 10,000 years ago, coinciding with the end of the Wisconsin glacial advance, to 3000 years ago, the end of the Archaic period, has particular relevance for the prehistory of the study area. The general temporal divisions for prehistoric cultures in this region are: Paleoindian (11,000-10,000 years ago), Archaic (10,000-3,000 years ago), and Woodland (3,000 years ago to European contact) (Op. Cit., 9). The Archaic and Woodland periods are often further divided into Early, Middle and Later sub-periods; Early Archaic (10,000-8,000), Middle Archaic (8,000-5,000), Late Archaic (5,000-3,000), Early Woodland (3,000-2,300), Middle Woodland (2,300-1,050 years ago, or 2300 BP – AD 900), and Late Woodland (1,050 years ago, or AD 900 – 1607) (Ibid.). Based on these dates and the rise of sea level, vast areas of the Continental Shelf (up to 200 miles in some places), which would have been exposed and peopled, are now underwater.”
That’s actually a much larger number than I recalled, but again, it goes back 10,000 years, not 400.
Now that my memory has been refreshed, the 2-3 miles for 16th century artifacts came from my own calculations based on this reference.
http://books.google.com/books?id=ttn82hcr6nUC&pg=PA4&lpg=PA1&ots=4dDsqPLHQM&dq=shipwreck+beaches+ocean+city+MD&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=html
From the second paragraph:
“the waters have been rising as much as 6 inches or more per century since the last Ice Age”
Now I admit that is a pretty crude number, and I never tracked down the source cited in that book. But I took the 6 inch per century number, extrapolated it to 2 feet since 1600, and mapped that to the local terrain.
So upon further reflection, you might not want to cite that as a hard number.
On the other hand, that 200 mile number in 10,000 years is even more impressive to me, and it appears to be well referenced.
Briffa’s Yamal series is .. below average quality data, even for climate research.
The sad thing is that a large percentage of climate research is below average quality compared to similar activities in other fields.
The entire field seems to have adopted a “process” of ad hoc, post hoc. Even the recent Arctic survey, which started out with a solid process plan, degenerated into ad hoc.
McIntyre has been finding problems with papers and research for years. “The Team’s” response has been to try to hide the data from him rather than trying to fix the problems, or even prevent their recurrence.
Dish:
McIntyre has become a sort of “peer review bogeyman” where people start to duck as they see him coming….
Aziz wrote:
Since I am a scientist, I am biased in favor of the establishment and the peer review system. So this is pretty conclusive in my view.
Since I’m an engineer, I am biased in favor of process, methodology and review. As best I can tell, the whole IPCC is a charade. There’s no underlying process.
Would you trust an aircraft that was “peer reviewed” with the same level quality as this crap? No, you can’t do that in the US.
I’ve said this before. I filed a FOIA with NASA requesting the base quality assurance documents for GISTEMP and GCM Model E. The answer I got back was “No Responsive Documents”.
These people are not passionate about quality.
You want me to trust the workmanship of someone who isn’t passionate about quality? What kind of a moron do you think I am?
“You want me to trust the workmanship of someone who isn’t passionate about quality? What kind of a moron do you think I am?”
… an appropriately gullible one, Dish.
Scientists are terrible about judging their peers. It’s a similar problem with military — we figured out a long time ago it was better to have civilians (ie, the Prez & Sec Dec) to run our military.
Same thing for all these scientific boondoggles — there’s a lotta jargon, but little understanding.
–HB
Since I am a scientist, I am biased in favor of the establishment
I would hope not, as that would make you a bad scientist. “Nullius in verba” is more than just a motto, it’s the beating heart of the scientific method. Without it, scientists are little more than priests.
The RealClimate guys have responded – and it looks like the Yamal data is *not* critical to the Hockey Stick at all. They give plenty of examples of temperature curves without Yamal data in them, all of which still show the hockey stick.
Actually, no they don’t. They give two proxies, and the surface record. Then they post a CO2 chart, which is irrelevant, then a chart of the name Gavin — haha, good one. Not.
Gavin’s just flailing around finding anything with a hockey stick, no matter how irrelevant, to the point of self-parody.
Meanwhile, there are dozens of proxies which do not show a hockey stick — including the full Yamal.
Furthermore, one doesn’t get to just say “Oh, sorry, some of our data was horribly flawed and probably handpicked — but hey, look at this other data over here!” and pretend the whole thing is a joke.
The article is also full of misattributions and smirky personal attacks on skeptics. Gavin Schmidt is not a scientist, he’s a propagandist and, frankly, a douchebag.
The “hockey stick” chart is a classic example of drawing the graph first, then plotting the data points. A scientific no-no.
In some ways, it is much worse than the famous stem cell fraud of 2006 . There, you had detectable, discreet fraud.
Here, you have an entire wave of bad, unscientific thinking affecting whole swaths ofthe population, and billions of dollars riding on the phony “green” revolution.
–HB
Hank, it isn’t billions. It’s trillions.
And we can name names, as for who gets the trillions: General Electric for one, who has been pushing AGW on its media outlets and lobbying fanatically for cap&trade for several years. If you want an honest-to-God example of a corporation pushing its requests for corporate welfare using its media outlets, GE and {C/MS}NBC are Exhibit A.
So much for the heroic narrative of starving, ragged scientists fighting The Good Fight against Big Oil and evil SUV-driving Americans.
The irony is I actually agree with much of what they’re pushing; we need to get beyond hydrocarbons, for numerous reasons that have nothing to do with glaciers or hockey sticks – and everything to do with telling the Saudis, Ahmadasahatter, and Der Hugofuehrer what to do with themselves and their oil.
But these goofballs are blowing any chance for reasoned policy discussions by turning it into a Cause, where you’re either one of the Elect of Gaia or you’re an evil tool of Big Oil.
Aziz Poonawalla – You might have missed some of the critical charts. As far as I can tell, the chart was done twice, with and without Briffa’s selected trees. Without them, the proxy prediction is a strong temperature drop in the 20th century. With them, it’s ‘more of the same’.
The political case is that the science is settled and there is no more debate. All the indicators point in the same direction and you’re a loon to suggest otherwise, Mr. Skeptic. With the bursting of one of the foundational papers, one that is relied on by a lot of others, the proper scientific response is to see:
1. Is it true.
2. How much does this foul up change the reliability of papers further on.
This is not what seems to be happening so far. Briffa’s response seems measured, if not exactly responsive. He demands methodology that he himself had been unwilling to provide for 7 years for his own work. Double standard much Dr. Briffa? Gavin’s response is snarky and mocking and completely unuseful in a scientific sense but great propaganda for the true believers.
If Briffa does fall, the scientific weight for AGW will change a bit but the political line of “the science is settled, there is consensus” will be decimated. This is why there is panic in the AGW camp because they’re worried much more about the politics. And that’s been the problem all along.
As far as I can tell, the chart was done twice, with and without Briffa’s selected trees.
From what I understand, McIntyre actually replaced the original set of data with other points.
Aziz: I thought he did it twice, once without the original cherry picked data (which showed a significant drop in temperatures) and once merging the cherry picked data with the other data, which showed a fairly stable temperature.
Aziz, that is my understanding as well.
The alternate collection of data from the same area produced the opposite direction during the calibration period. The Yamal trees appear to have been selected for matching the temperature data within the calibration period. That is no guarantee that they were temperature limited outside the calibration period. It’s outside the calaibration period where we care.
The biggest question that the historical reconstructions (including dendroclimatology) attempt to answer is how our current temperature compares with Medeival Warming Period (or if there was such a thing). The Yamal series does not provide a high quality answer to this question.
There were three charts made with the new data
1) the original hockey stick with just the 12 cherry picked rings
2) one chart with ONLY the missing data
3) one combined chart with both the 12 cherry picked rings AND the missing data
This one has all three
Note the link I added in the update above. I found that one at the site where deadrody got the chart.
The Wegman Report, issued just a couple of years ago, really already devastated the credibility of much of the climate change industry’s research. Its conclusions were devastating; that researchers in the field routinely failed to share the data used to reach their conclusions, routinely failed to reveal the source code used to generate their models, and that the “peer review” process was all but completely broken down, with nothing but scientists with a direct personal stake in the outcome allowed to review each others’ work, with no independent auditing by disinterested researchers even possible most of the time.
This latest news is just exactly as anyone who really read the Wegman report could have predicted. You can still read it in PDF form right here. That one report should have caused an absolute crisis of confidence and a scramble to reform themselves and make good on their commitment as researchers to be utterly honest to the data. Instead they obfuscated, pooh-pooh’d the report, yawned and said it was old news and moved on. I pretty much stopped taking the guys as “realclimate” seriously after that, and pretty much stopped taking seriously anyone who said that global warming was “proven science.”
This is a big mess that can’t be swept under the rug anymore. Too much of the supposed “science” behind global warming is simply garbage.
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