264 thoughts on “Steve McIntyre to Appear on CNN”

  1. I saw him on CNN — he appeared pretty nervous – a bit like a deer in the headlights – but he did manage to come off as neutral compared to the other guests.

    Now’s the perfect time for him to come out and provide a clear statement of where he stands on the issue of global warming and his ties to oil interests rather than rely on the old “just a puzzle solver” auditor with no bias or interests beyond diddling with data. While he does keep the denialist rhetoric to a minimum on his own part, reading his blog shows that he has a lot of contempt for climate science and climate scientists in particular. The fact I haven’t seen him debunk any of the denialist dreck out there, focusing instead on IPCC authors who support AGW, is suspect IMO.

    YMMV.

  4. Lord Monckton: Global Warming big scientific fad

    BBC Professors Singer and Watson on climate change debate 13:25 GMT, Monday, 23 November 2009

    Climate Depot’s Morano on FoxNews.com’s Strategy Room

    Andrew Bolt On ETS & Hacked CRU Climate Change Emails 1/2: Alan Jones Show

    Climate Change Corruption, Hacked CRU Emails: Dr Tim Ball

    Senator Inhofe

    Chris Horner v Howard Gould

    The Team appears to be working from well rehearsed talking points. Has anyone seen that talking point list? or transcribed it?

  5. greenaway,
    Steves stated intent is to examine papers used to support the IPCC conclusions to verify that the science, especially the statistics, is sound.
    You seem to agree that he’s sticking pretty closely to that.

    Your view that he is contemptous of certain IPCC authors likely stems from him pointing out their actions and and methods. Climategate has confirmed that what many suspected from reading Steve’s travails in obtaining information needed to replicate their climate research.

    John

  6. greenaway (Comment#27404)
    December 10th, 2009 at 5:55 pm

    Now’s the perfect time for him to come out and provide a clear statement of where he stands on the issue of global warming and his ties to oil interests rather than rely on the old “just a puzzle solver” auditor with no bias or interests beyond diddling with data.

    If you have any specific information regarding “ties to oil interests”, let’s hear it.

    Otherwise, if you’re going to deal in cheap innuendo, why don’t you come out with a clear statement on whether you are involved with Tiger Woods in any way.

  7. Greeaway, have you read ANY of the “Climategate” emails? “The Team” in these emails (and RealClimate) have been so dismissive and demeaning of the skeptic side and the players, that whatever has appeared on ClimateAudit appears pale in comparison.
    And the “ties to oil” is a tired old lie almost not worth responding to but here’s proof that “Big Oil” isn’t behind any skeptic conspiracy:

    http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/blog2/2008/03/27/shell-virent-energy-systems-form-5-year-partnership-to-make-biogasoline-demo-plant-in-2010-increases-momentum-of-biocrude-biogasoline-trend/

    And:
    http://www.enn.com/business/article/39338

  8. “The fact I haven’t seen him debunk any of the denialist dreck out there, focusing instead on IPCC authors who support AGW, is suspect IMO.”

    yep, MMVs. The point is CA concentrates on the suspect science relied on by the IPCC. The case for AGW is a proposition which has not been proven – it is up to the supporters of the theory to do so. In the face of justified criticism they resort to subterfuges and ad homs. If everything was as it should be they’d just hand over the data and code and say “have at it and let us know when you are done”.

  11. If you have any specific information regarding “ties to oil interests”, let’s hear it.

    As a “Strategic Advisor” to CGX Energy Inc. I would think this qualifies as ties to the oil industry. Before CGX was CGX, it was known as Northwest Exploration Company Inc, for which Steven McIntyre was a Director, and he was the founder of Northwest Explorations Company Limited.

    I’ve read all his brush offs about this at Climate Audit, so don’t bother pointing them out to me. As someone in the business and with previous, if not current interests in the fossil fuel industry, I look at his activities in this not as an objective auditor, but as someone who might be expected to be biased because of his background and interests. That he teamed up with McKittrick, who has ties to the Fraser Institute, which is a known right-wing think tank opposed to Kyoto also speaks volumes.

    As someone looking at this from a larger political perspective, as in who are the players and what are their interests, I’m actually fine with both, in the sense that everyone has a right to an opinion on this matter. But they should be clear about their interests and not try to pose as disinterested “auditors” only interested in playing with data.

    In my view, their intention is to cast doubt on the IPCC by attacking the research so as to discredit it, if not for purely economic interests then for ideological ones.

    You may shrug it off, but I don’t. If McIntyre was introduced as “a retired director of a minerals exploration corporation and strategic advisor to CGX, a gas exploration company instead of an “auditor”, when referred to in the press or in media, he’d be seen in quite a different light to the public because they would recognize that he is not neutral.

  12. greenaway (Comment#27432)
    December 10th, 2009 at 8:19 pm

    You may shrug it off, but I don’t. If McIntyre was introduced as “a retired director of a minerals exploration corporation and strategic advisor to CGX, a gas exploration company instead of an “auditor”, when referred to in the press or in media, he’d be seen in quite a different light to the public because they would recognize that he is not neutral.

    I guess the fact that Brian Williams continued to work for NBC after GE took them over means that Williams should always introduce himself as “being tied to windmill interests”.

    Any comment on CRU seeking funding from Shell?

  13. greenaway,
    .
    There is nothing, absolutely nothing, more pathetic than an alarmist who thinks that they can evade arguments they can’t refute by screaming ‘big oil’.
    .
    If you were consistent you would be telling everyone that Hansen’s ties to NASA clearly make him biased because NASA has been facing budget cuts and climate catastrophe brings in funding.
    .
    Same goes for Jones and Mann who have shared in millions of dollars of research funding showered on their institutions as a direct result of the climate scare.
    .
    I will be waiting patiently for your calls that all climate scientists stop pretending to be ‘disinterested authors’ and fully divulged how they have benefited personally from the climate alarmism so people can better judge the ‘reliability’ of their science.

  14. greenaway, yes, he was director there. His motives, who knows?

    The question is, was he right about MBH? Is he right about upside down Tijlander? Is he right about the technique used to ‘hide the decline’? And so on. Are there actually the deficiencies in the IPCC reports that he alleges?

    Many in the AGW movement have a very striking attitude to matters of evidence and proof. We have a series of arguments based on analysis, that tend to show that the temperature reconstructions in a particular publication are invalid. Are these arguments and these analyses valid?

    The AGW movement starts to assess this question by finding out facts about those making the arguments. From those facts it infers but does not prove motivation. From motivation it then infers validity. The argument is basically, if you ever made money from the extraction industries, it can be concluded that your motivation for any analysis done is interested, and this is evidence against its validity.

    We can point out that this is a style of argument much in vogue in the extreme reaches of the Old Left in Eastern Europe, and it is silly and unpleasant. But that is not perhaps the striking point. The striking point is the incoherence. The AGW movement genuinely does not seem to understand what evidence is. They don’t understand what is and is not evidence of motivation. They don’t understand what is and is not evidence for an hypothesis about temperature reconstruction.

    It cuts both ways, you see. Just as they think facts about where you worked are proof of motivation, and this is proof of validity or not of analysis you may have done, so they are also totally disconnected on the other aspect, the evidence for the original studies. It is only in the context of a similar lack of understanding about what evidence for an hypothesis is, that one can understand why Mann thought that the result of his truncated PCA procedure was evidence for the existence of a certain trend in the MBH proxy data. It is only because of blindness about what is and is not evidence that one can understand how the Tijlander proxies could be used upside down. The idea that if we reverse Tijlander, we now have evidence of warming, is a bit like reversing the observed colors of cars, and thinking the resulting scores are evidence of which colors are most popular. If you do this sort of thing, you are intellectually disabled. You simply do not understand what is and is not evidence for propositions.

    It is only in the context of blindness about evidence that one can understand how anyone could think that any facts whatever about the famous bristlecone pines are evidence of anything to do with past temperatures.

    This is a really fundamental point about the movement. Its main adherents simply do not understand what counts as evidence for an hypothesis. We need to realize that it is a movement with this serious intellectual disablement that is seeking to spend trillions of dollars on doing things for which there is no evidence in the usual sense that they will in any way improve anything about quality of life. They also notably do not seek to take any action on things for which there is ample evidence that action albeit of a sort which doesn’t attract them, would improve quality of life.

    This inability to use argument and evidence to assess hypotheses runs all through AGW and explains many things which deeply puzzle outside observers. Let me mention one in conclusion: why it is that the movement is so attached to windmills? It can only be that they simply don’t understand that there is no evidence they generate usable electricity. This is not because they do not know the facts. It is because they do not understand what is and is not evidence for windmills being able to product usable electricity.

    Its real tough to argue with people who do not understand the concept of evidence. As Steve McIntyre has discovered.

  15. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, more pathetic than an alarmist who thinks that they can evade arguments they can’t refute by screaming ‘big oil’.

    Doesn’t really look much like “big oil” — more like little gas.

    Speaking of evading arguments they can’t refute… Do you deny that McIntyre has had and recently had and may still have interests in the fossil fuel industry and ties to it?

    If you were consistent you would be telling everyone that Hansen’s ties to NASA clearly make him biased because NASA has been facing budget cuts and climate catastrophe brings in funding.

    At least we all know that Hansen works for NASA and is a scientist working in the field of climate science. It’s clear what his interests are.

    Same goes for Jones and Mann who have shared in millions of dollars of research funding showered on their institutions as a direct result of the climate scare.

    Yes, but as I said, we all know this about them. McIntyre and McKittrick do not reveal their interests, posing as either climate skeptics or “auditors” merely interested in quaint statistical problems and the like.

    Frankly, the only skeptics I’m interested in hearing from on global warming are scientists working in the field. I couldn’t care less what some average jo thinks about the research. I have been looking for credible climate scientists who are skeptics and have credible research challenging or debunking the science and theory but so far, they all seem to be either outright shills for fossil fuel interests or have ties to organizations that are fronts for same or are just plain bad scientists with bogus research.

    I’d really really like to find some clear evidence of research that debunks AGW so I could keep driving my car and living in a cold climate without concern. I’m comfortable in my lifestyle and don’t want to have to change.

    I will be waiting patiently for your calls that all climate scientists stop pretending to be ‘disinterested authors’ and fully divulged how they have benefited personally from the climate alarmism so people can better judge the ‘reliability’ of their science.

    Once again, we all know what their interests are.

    People generally understand that if you own or have owned or are an executive or a strategic advisor for a fossil fuel company, you might tend to have an interest in its well-being and might be inclined to seek to promote its interests and maybe work against legislation that might hurt it. Makes sense to me.

    I’m just asking that when people introduce Steven McIntyre and Ross McKittrick, they make sure to note what their interests are since everyone else’s interests are pretty clear.

    Fair play.

  16. I would add perhaps the clearest sign of this intellectual disablement is the continued insistence that we have to act now to reduce CO2 emissions by amounts which, if the IPCC is 100% right about climate sensitivity, will have no material effects on temperature, because the amounts involved are too small.

    People must know that if the US totally stops emiitting CO2, the effect on global temperatures will be negligible. The US simply does not emit enough carbon for its abolition to do much. But they still want to do it as a way of lowering those temperatures.

    I hypothesize that this can only be because they do not understand what counts as evidence for the effectiveness of a policy. They don’t understand that in order to know whether the policy will actually achieve the ends to which it is directed, you have to write down what effects it will have and see whether these are commensurate with what you are trying to achieve.

    It sounds crazy, I know. But the evidence is that this sort of impairment in intellectual functioning is very widespread in the AGW movement.

  17. Greenaway once again doesn’t want to answer the question then of why the CRU was getting funding from Shell Oil, BP Amoco and looking for more funds from Exxon. Of course there is the little fact that Mick Kelly from CRU stateded in one of the Documents that Shell isn’t interested in Basic research only in areas of their interests: Emissions trading and CDM’s. Nor do you address the fact that Shell Oil was allowed to have a say in the CRU agenda.

    http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:CkVDqAMroC0J:junkscience.com/FOIA/documents/uea-tyndall-shell-memo.doc+%22uea-tyndall-shell-memo%22&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

  18. bollalab, you’re committing the same error. it does not matter a bit where they tried to get funding. Its funny of course, and it permits an ironic ad hominem argument. But the real thing that greenaway is avoiding discussing is the science, the evidence for the various hypotheses. Does greenaway understand what is and is not evidence? That is the question inquiring minds are asking.

    Greenaway asks, with the air of one producing a conclusive argument about something “Do you deny that McIntyre has had and recently had and may still have interests in the fossil fuel industry and ties to it?”

    My dear G, why do I care? I am interested in whether he is right about the proxy studies. Why on earth do you think that your assertion has any relevance to that? Do you have any idea what is relevant to the question of whether the proxy studies, and the uses made of them by the IPCC reports, are valid?

    Is this a general problem for you? Do you walk down the street thinking, like the Roman generals consulting augurers, that birds flying in certain directions are evidence for the likely success of your battle plans?

  20. I’m just asking that when people introduce Steven McIntyre and Ross McKittrick, they make sure to note what their interests are since everyone else’s interests are pretty clear.

    Still waiting for Phil Jones to be introduced as “a climate scientist working for a research institute funded by Shell Oil, which has an aggressive stance in support of cap and trade”.

    Or Michael Mann being introduced as “a climate scientist who runs a blog hosted by Fenton communications”.

    But it would still be interesting to hear if you think funding from oil interests has any impact on whether data is used upside down or declines are hidden.

  21. Greenaway (Comment#27442) December 10th, 2009 at 9:13 pm

    “Once again, we all know what their interests are.”

    Yes we do indeed!

    http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,579956,00.html

    U.N. Bodies Want Up to $60 Billion to Monitor … Everything

    Thursday, December 10, 2009
    By George Russell

    An organization representing the grandest ambitions of climate scientists wants Western nations to spend at least $2.1 billion a year for the next five years — and as much as $60 billion overall during that period — to glean huge troves of still undiscovered climate information from the world’s land, air and seas.

    —

    Sweet! By the way, Greenaway, are you affiliated in any way with the global warming industry (including academia)? If so, I believe your ship has come in!

  22. Michel

    There is actually a difference . If you read the document that I linked Shell Oil was looking to direct CRU research not just hand them a wad of cash. There in their own words they are making an agreement were Big Oil is directing Climate Research, but not on the Skeptic side but on the AGW side.

  23. greenaway (Comment#27432)
    To be credible, you must address both the corruption of massive funding, and the scientific evidence. See I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train Mises Daily: Monday, May 28, 2007 by David Evans

    I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened that case. I am now skeptical.. . .
    The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too.

    I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn’t believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; there were international conferences full of such people. We had political support, the ear of government, big budgets. We felt fairly important and useful (I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet!

    But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence above fell away. . . .
    There is now no observational evidence that global warming is caused by carbon emissions. You would think that in over 20 years of intense investigation we would have found something.. . .
    Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. Climate change has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly blames carbon emissions, to the point of silencing critics.. . .
    The cause of global warming is an issue that falls into the realm of science, because it is falsifiable. No amount of human posturing will affect what the cause is. It just physically is there, and after sufficient research and time we will know what it is.

    David Evans, a mathematician, and a computer and electrical engineer, is head of Science Speak. Send him mail. Comment on the blog.

    Until you honestly face both these issues, your comments are ad hominem attacks on Steve McIntyre and a direct attack on the foundations of science. i.e. a scientific yellow journalist unable to civilly address either scientific issues or objective public policy.

  24. greenaway, yes, he was director there. His motives, who knows?
    The question is, was he right about MBH? Is he right about upside down Tijlander? Is he right about the technique used to ‘hide the decline’? And so on. Are there actually the deficiencies in the IPCC reports that he alleges?

    Frankly, I don’t know if he was right about MBH98 since there still seems to be a vigorous debate about it.

    It comes down to trust. I don’t know dick (or is that “I know dick all”?) about climate science. I don’t know who to listen to or what to see as significant. I imagine there are many people like me out there. I’ve tried to read as much dendro as I could get in given the fact I also work full time and have a life, but still, the complexities of the science and the problems in trying to use tree rings as a temperature / climate proxy and the quality of the research is beyond me. I admire all the folks who feel so comfortable trusting the main players to be careful with the facts but I don’t honestly know who to trust in this.

    Since I can’t do the analysis myself without much work and research and perhaps years of study, it comes down to who I trust.

    Obviously, climate scientists put their work out there and their careers and reputations ride on how their work is received and how it advances their careers, etc. I understand the pressure of doing “sexy” work in academia, getting grants and the whole bit. So I can see the point of skeptics who talk about group think, confirmation bias, and small groups of people promoting each other’s works. How much that damages the research and its findings and the theory, I don’t really know.

    If I truly believed that the “skeptics” were motivated solely by an interest in finding the facts, and evaluating the science in order to promote good science so that policy based on it would be likewise good, I’d be a happy camper. But I’m not so sanguine. When I read of ties to corporate front organizations, and ties to fossil fuel interests, I get nervous. Nervous that they have an agenda and that it is not to find the facts, but to play with them, raise questions about them, and cast just enough doubt to muddy things up. Not because they are interested in the facts, or in good science, but their own interests.

    You see, I can’t even judge the work of the “skeptics”. Sure, some of it looks pretty impressive, but damn if I don’t really know much about the complex statistics discussed in M&M and Wegman, etc. I don’t know much about satellite data, or the ins and outs of dendro, or paleoclimate or models and how they work, etc. So when some skeptical blog posts a pretty graph with trend lines — or absence of same — I can’t tell if what they show or what the skeptics claim is important or a load of bunk.

    So you see my dilemma. I need to know what people’s interests are because of a problem of trust. Since I can’t judge the science, I have to judge the people and their interests and see who I think might be best able to present the facts and evaluate them and their significance.

    So far, I’m leaning towards the actual scientists just because they are scientists and at least have training it science. And any scientists who work for fossil fuel companies or have shown ideological interests against AGW and the notion of action on global warming? People who are not scientists?

    Not so much.

  25. Good grief greenaway.

    You might as well just blindly put your trust in politicians. After all, they’re the professionals.

  26. You might as well just blindly put your trust in politicians. After all, they’re the professionals.

    Ha!

    I worked for them. Not a chance.

  28. Greenaway once again doesn’t want to answer the question then of why the CRU was getting funding from Shell Oil, BP Amoco and looking for more funds from Exxon.

    You’re deflecting.

    The issue is McIntyre’s interests and ties and why he gets to claim this “skeptic” or “auditor” position, appearing as a disinterested data diddler when he has known ties to fossil fuel interests.

    But in answer to your question, from what I can see, the other oil corps have given up the campaign to discredit climate science through the usual methods and suspects, and have decided “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”.

    They’ve jumped on the bandwagon, seeing that GHG regulation is a fait accompli, one way or the other. Funding AGW research achieves a number of goals — makes you look good in the public eye (greenwashing) and also might allow you to influence the direction that research takes.

  29. Come on good folks, time to wake up and give your head a shake: Greenaway is just a good ol’ troll, showing up after the CRU train wreck and on time with the Jule Tide happenings in Copenhagen to reposition all the worn out alarmists straw men, rehash all the true and tried alarmist “explain-aways” and generally derail a thread.

    If it walks like a troll, smells like a troll and sounds like a troll, experience is it’s probably a troll.

  30. So, tetris, your definition of “troll” is anyone who doesn’t what? Agree with the “consensus” on this board? You want only people who agree with you and your views on AGW? If someone doesn’t, they are to be rejected as a troll? Hmmm.

    Sounds familiar…

  31. The incessant claim of “ties to Big Oil” always reminds me of the old “running dog lackey” party line. They have about the same level of validity and absurdity.

  32. Greenaway

    Here is a simple way you can find out who to trust, who is open to honest discussion.

    Go to three AGW warmist blogs, Real Climat e, Climate Progress, and Open Mind and try posting sceptical arguments, links to Climate Audit, Rank Exploits, The Air Vent etc

    Then do the same and post alarmist viewpoints and links at the sceptic blogs.

    See what happens, see if your comments are posted, see how you get treated.

    You’re already doing it here, none of your posts are getting deleted, people engaged you, you got called a troll as you started yapping about McIntyre and big oil with no proof.

  33. greenaway,

    “You might as well just blindly put your trust in politicians. After all, they’re the professionals.

    Ha!

    I worked for them. Not a chance.”

    Excuse me, if you support AGW not only are you working for Politicians, but, you will be insuring that you will be working for them the rest of your life!!!

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

  34. greenaway (Comment#27404) December 10th, 2009 at 5:55 pm.

    Nice try. Parroting the same old crap. If you want to play devils advocate you have to do better than that. fenton fenton fenton.

    There is no point to debunking sceptical junk when lightweights like Tamino can already handle the job. Steve is built for bigger game than that. WRT the puzzle solver thing. I remember by dinner with Steve back in 2007. He likes Puzzles. He absolutely loves them. Sorry, until you’ve met the man in person and talked at length with him, your opinion doesnt really matter

  35. “Frankly, I don’t know if he was right about MBH98 since there still seems to be a vigorous debate about it. ”

    The errors were inconsequential. Tamino ran over the numbers done the right way and the wrong way, there was very little difference. McIntyre his findings to the NAS who realised it was all a beat up, thanked him kindly, then pretty well ignored him. For a publicity hound like McIntyre, the internet, where you can publicly attack individuals, question their motives and use the old rhetorical trick of “I’m not saying it’s fraud” is far more preferable.

  36. heh, speaking of Tamino, his real name is plastered all over the emails

    wonder if he still thinks he can maintain the mask

  37. fenton fenton fenton

    But I agree with greenaway. It’s very likely that Steve McIntyre has motives. He’s human. If the Climategate mails show us anything they show us that scientists are human. Jones doesnt want to change the base period from 1960-1991 because its too much work. Briffa doesnt want to confront mann. hes concerned about his objectivity. Motives galore. Jones doesnt want to release his data to warwick hughes because…… he questions hughes motive. Hughes wants to prove him wrong. One process works against the ulterior motive: free the data; free the code.

    So ya, steve has motives. He gives me his data; he gives me his code. I’m free to expose his EFFECT his motives may or may not have.

    Show that his motives make the math wrong.

  38. tetris greenaway has already copped to being a troll. Overfeed the troll. he wants to play at arguing, throw stupid arguments at him. make shit up. two ways to handle a troll: starve him or overfeed him.

  40. Greenaway if you want to know why McIntyre gets away with have big oil connections just look at his BIO. he doesnt hide them. Unlike Michael mann and gavin who hide the fact that they are being paid by fenton.

  41. michel (Comment#27444)
    People must know that if the US totally stops emiitting CO2, the effect on global temperatures will be negligible. The US simply does not emit enough carbon for its abolition to do much.
    This is an absurd argument. Firstly the US emits about 20% of the world total, and is about the largest emitter per capita. Our real problem is not the 350 Gtons C or so that we have burnt so far, which has caused noticeable warming. It’s the 3000 Gtons that we could burn.

    At present, the bulk of the world’s population, incl China and India, is burning C at a much slower rate per capita. The US emits 20 ton CO2 per person, China about 5 and india a little over 1. If China and India move towards western levels, we’ll burn that 3000 Gt pretty quickly, and have all sorts of problems. Everyone, especially the US, needs an agreement on this, and it will never be easier than now.

  42. steven mosher (Comment#27473)
    Unlike Michael mann and gavin who hide the fact that they are being paid by fenton.
    I think it is extremely unlikely that MM & G are being paid by Fenton.

  43. No Nick its true. i heard it just the other day. Has to be true. i’m just pully greenaways leg. or not.

    Funny thing is I have no issues with people having motives. i could care less.

  44. windnesea we outed Tammy a long time ago. Now he’s so famous he has to wear Foster Grant sunglasses backwards

  45. Steve’s never hid what he did.

    Short Bio: Steven McIntyre 2003.

    Coauthor, Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series

    I have worked in the mineral business for 30 years. For the last 16 years, I have been an officer or director of several small public mineral exploration companies. This has required at various times: the acquisition of exploration properties in Chile, Guyana, Venezuela and Canada; the financing of exploration and development projects, including specific responsibilities (on the company side) for the preparation of several prospectuses, qualifying reports and feasibility studies and numerous offering memoranda; general corporate management, including specific oversight of company audited financial statements, annual reports, numerous corporate disclosure documents; oversight of exploration programs; direction of several corporate re-organizations. Previous to that, I primarily worked for a large international mining company, but also worked for several years as a policy analyst at both the governments of Ontario and the government of Canada.

  47. The claim that funding distorts research in the AGW argument probably stems from the fact that it was such a common argument made by a scientifically illiterate press when confronting cigarette companies.

    It was much easier for the press to say that the funding was the problem with the junk science produced by cigarette companies than point to the real reasons why cigarette companies generated junk science.

    We’re all scientifically literate here so we can see if Steve M’s work has the problems of the cigarette companies’ junk science.

    First and foremost, the cigarette company science was irreproducible. Steve has no problems here, he publishes all his results and algorithms. You can reproduce his work by copy and paste into R which is free, downloadable software. Now if he had some witless excuse for not generating reproducible results, say, “It would be reproducible but I wanted to save office space,” then that should certainly raise suspicions.

    Secondly, cigarette companies would cherry pick data. If an experiment was done and 8 rats died, a cig. scientist would find an excuse for excluding those proxy data rats from analysis. Steve generally audits work so cherry picking really can’t be a problem for him.

    Finally, the cigarette companies needed to disseminate their work. To do this, the work would be published in peer-reviewed journals BUT the journal editor and referees were carefully screened. No problem here for Steve since most of his work seems to be published on his blog. However, if we find that his work is being published in journals where the editorial process is being manipulated, I think that should raise eyebrows.

    So now that we have compared Steve’s work to the canonical example of corporate funded junk science and found Steve in the clear, I think we can all breath a sigh of relief that the despicable practices that were used by cigarette companies to help poison people are not being used.

  48. NIck:

    . Firstly the US emits about 20% of the world total, and is about the largest emitter per capita. Our real problem is not the 350 Gtons C or so that we have burnt so far, which has caused noticeable warming. It’s the 3000 Gtons that we could burn.

    In my opinion, comparing CO2 emissions versus GDP is a better measure (“CO2 intensity”).

    The US emits 20% of the world total but is responsible for 24% of the worlds GDP. Obviously it’s doing pretty decent in that respect.

    Also, most developed countries, it’s total CO2 emissions probably have already peaked. The issue isn’t the developed countries, but the “threat” of increased economic activity from the developing ones.

    So, no the original statement was not absurd in that respect. All of developed nations could go to zero emissions, and we’d be in basically the same shape by 2100, if the developing nations don’t throttle their CO2 emissions growth.

  49. bugs:

    The errors were inconsequential

    In fact the realclimate scientists are incapable of error.

    Secretly they are super heros.

  50. Carrick (Comment#27485)
    In my opinion, comparing CO2 emissions versus GDP is a better measure (”CO2 intensity”).
    Well, it doesn’t have quite the ring of natural justice. To him that hath shall more be given etc. But with China’s 10pa GDP growth, it’s also probably not a good strategic choice.

  52. Carrick (Comment#27489)
    Nick, what does justice have to do with science or economics?
    It’s important when you are trying to negotiate an agreement between nations. Which we all need.

  53. Nick Stokes,

    Fine, just post numbers. Tell us how many tons the US is emitting now, then how many are going to be ‘saved’ by the reductions, and then tell us what the effect on the temp of the planet is in degrees C.

    If its so important, the answer should be easy. Everyone should know. It should be all over the place, the evidence for the wisdom of the policy is the effects on temps, isn’t it? Its not that we are making God happy by making less smoke?

    Hint: the number 1.8 million comes into it somewhere.

  54. windansea (Comment#27480) December 11th, 2009 at 12:04 am
    I know he’s been outed before
    but not like Climategate

    as a joke i used to slip his name into RC posts. I Grant you that Foster some bad blood!

  55. greenaway, if you don’t know whether SM is right or wrong about MBH, you do not know enough to assess motivation of the participants. Motivation is secondary. When you really understand the question, then you can tell who is arguing straight and who is not. After that, you can, if you feel like it, wonder about why. You will find out however that once you understand the issues, you will no longer be very interested in why.

    Whether truncated PCA is an appropriate statistical method has nothing to do with trust. Whether bristle cone pines are thermometers has nothing to do with trust, no amount of it is going to tell you. In the case of Lucia, trust has nothing to do with whether the IPCCs 2001 forecasts have been falsified, as she asserts. You cannot test this by finding out what brand of detergent she uses, or whether a white bird flew by this morning as you walked out the front door.

    You need to start work making up your mind. The future of the planet, and our children, is at stake.

  56. Joe Triscari (Comment#27482) December 11th, 2009 at 12:35 am

    moshpit approved. script flipping the frame. very nicely done.

  57. Nick:

    It’s important when you are trying to negotiate an agreement between nations. Which we all need.

    Only if the final agreement amounts to anything. I am afraid that this one won’t amount to a hill of beans.

    I’m afraid the only real solutions we have to climate change are mitigating its effects (whatever they may be) rather than trying to prevent them. If the alarmists are correct, I really think there is no political path that can be taken that will lead us to the necessary future CO2 emission levels they say we need to reach.

    If you have developing countries that are willing to starve and wage genocidal war against a third of their nation because they belong to a different tribe, do you really think they are going to weep tears over a coral reef or some polynesian island that may get inundated?

    I’m guessing they’ll tell them to learn to swim.

  58. Assets of $3m and turnover of $200k – yes Steve’s really been involved in big oil! Ludicrous. As someone who seems to have spent his life working as a statistician primarily in the mining industry it’s hardly surprising he’d end up a director on a small exploration company.

  59. On CO2 total v CO2/capita v CO2/GDP: I think most of you are wrong because you use territorial CO2 emmission when you should be using embedded CO2. If you buy a TV from China you should count not just the CO2 emmitted during transport from dock to your home but the CO2 emmitted during construction of the TV, during transport from the manufacturing country and from the refining of the metal used in manufacturing etc. If we did this then China would drop down the list as a lot of theirs is ours since we import stuff from them.

  60. Greenaway

    Trust temperature measurements from satellites. Watch another five years, perhaps ten years, and a trend should become clear.

    I do understand your point, though, that as a laymen it is not easy to judge the science. You can judge the predictions, though.

  61. “You’re deflecting.

    The issue is McIntyre’s interests and ties and why he gets to claim this “skeptic” or “auditor” position, appearing as a disinterested data diddler when he has known ties to fossil fuel interests.

    But in answer to your question, from what I can see, the other oil corps have given up the campaign to discredit climate science through the usual methods and suspects, and have decided “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”.”

    This is the most ridiculous answer I’ve seen until now in this climate debate.

    So in your argumentation When McSteve is related to Big Oil they are the bad guys and the minute they’ve been approached by the alarmists they are the good guys who have been converted to the Word. Yeah, right.

  62. Greenaway
    You say:
    “McIntyre and McKittrick do not reveal their interests, posing as either climate skeptics or “auditors” merely interested in quaint statistical problems and the like.”

    I don’t know how you reach this conclusion.
    In MM03 M&M reported: “No funding from any source was sought or received for this research”.
    In MM05(EE) M&M reported: “Financial support for this research was neither sought nor received. The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests to declare.”
    In MM05(GRL) M&M reported: “No funding was sought or received for this work”.

    In what way do you feel that “McIntyre and McKittrick do not reveal their interests”? From where I’m standing they seem to be absolutely transparent. You seem to be so bound up in conspiracy theories that you just can’t accept clear declarations that don’t fit in with you preconceived narrative.

  63. “Carrick (Comment#27486) December 11th, 2009 at 1:26 am

    bugs:

    The errors were inconsequential

    In fact the realclimate scientists are incapable of error.

    Secretly they are super heros.”

    No, not at all.

  64. Bugs, the effect of MBH using an eccentric version of principal components analysis (which they deny was an error, though it was not mentioned in the original article that they had done anything different from conventional PCA) was to promote the infamous bristlecone pines to the first PCA from the fourth. I.e, far from being the most important part of the variance in the series it was a relatively minor part. It is, of course, true, as McIntyre and Mckitrick clearly stated in 2005 that including the bristlecone pines, whether as fourth PCA or neat, gives the MBH results. This is essentially what Tamino showed again in 2008. Then the whole issue is about, as Mc and Mc said in 2005, about the sensitivity of the MBH reconstruction to the inclusion of the bristlecone pines (and some closely related species) and whether they are good proxies. There is no dispute that the bristlecone pines are not local temperature proxies. The MBH argument was that nevertheless they somehow (teleconnections) proxied Northern Hemisphere temperatures. Alternative, more plausible, explanations were CO2 fertilisation (the explanation offered by the original authors) and response to stress when strip bark was formed. You and Tamino need to keep up.

  65. It continues to seem, and various of the comments on this thread are instances of it, that the AGW movement participants do not understand the concept of evidence. They simply do not understand when establishing the truth of one proposition is a way of establishing the truth of another.

    Consequently they run around the place getting totally distracted, and thinking, for instance, that if they can prove it is getting warmer, this somehow is evidence for the proposition that CO2 caused it. And thinking that if they can establish this, it will be evidence for the proposition that lowering CO2 will cool us.

    The problem is not that the factual propositions they keep asserting are mistaken, though they often are. It is also that their truth or falsity has nothing to do with what they are trying to prove.

    This is the practice of science and public policy on Prozac. It bears the same relationship to serious science that the dotcom stock reports bore to Graham, Dodd and Cottle.

  66. Nick S,

    We really do want to know. How many gigatonnes reduced by cap and trade or whatever your proposal of choice is for the US, how much temp reduction for the world as a result?

    Otherwise, its like saying, lets solve the housing shortage in Chicago by giving some builders a couple of hundred million. Then refusing to say how many houses are needed and how many are going to get built.

    If you cannot explain what implementing your proposed solution will do, and why doing that will have the effects that are used to justify adopting it…. Well, WTF is all this stuff about?

  67. i have a question for SM if you could……

    That tree ring record, i talked to Michael Manne about it and he said it became unreliable in the ’60s for reasons other than a temperature decline. Do you agree with that or disagree with that.

    Well no one knows why it became unreliable,

    Didn’t answer the question, rapid reframing going on.

  68. michel (Comment#27515)
    We really do want to know…
    So do I but I don’t. I do know that we can’t afford to burn that 3000 Gt C, and we have to find some way of agreeing not to do it. And the sooner we start the better.

  69. Nick Stokes (Comment#27523) December 11th, 2009 at 6:45 am

    “I do know that we can’t afford to burn that 3000 Gt C”

    Why?? Do you suppose it’s better for people to starve and freeze to death than to burn carbon-based fuels?

    I just don’t get you CAGW types…

  71. Why?? Do you suppose it’s better for people to starve and freeze to death than to burn carbon-based fuels?

    yes. the few who did not starve under the clean air act, a finally going to die from hunger now. it IS a communist conspiracy.

    Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm is an example, of what environmentalists want to do with us. people there are forced to live with 50% environmental impact.
    you really need to look at these pictures:

    http://www.cleanenergyawards.com/top-navigation/nominees-projects/nominee-detail/project/66

    those green clowns will learn soon enough, how their plans end up in reality. Denmark is running on 20% wind. basically the whole conference doesn t have any electricity, if the wind gets too weak. they have already been sitting in the dark for at least a day or too.

  72. Just saw SteveMc on tv. Seemed very uncomfortable. Because he’s considered a skeptic they had a proponent (forget the name) from the Climate Institute. Steve, of course, took his usual position that he deals with technical issues in a relatively small area, but the questions were of a general “is it or isn’t it” nature. Because of that there was a total lack of balance in the discussion, since there was no advocate for the non-CAGW position. Very disappointing because it really didn’t address any of the issues.

  73. Nick, please answer the question.

    The US is currently emitting how much CO2 in gigatonnes annually? The answer to this question is about 6.

    How much do you want to reduce this by? You are the only one who knows the answer to this.

    What effect will this reduction have, annually, on global temperatures, according to the IPCC estimates?

    If you cannot answer the last question, just answer the second, and we’ll use that as input and answer the last one for you.

    If you do not know the answer to these questions, you do not know why or whether we should refrain from burning any particular amount of carbon. You do not know what you are proposing or what effects it will have. There is nothing to talk about. This is, once more, about evidence, giving reasons. Once you state what you want US emissions to be over any given period of years, we can state what effect those reductions will have. Until you do that, we have no idea, and thus have no idea what you are proposing.

    Something like, do not burn 3000Gt, tells us nothing. It is not couched in terms of emissions, point one, and it is does not say what reductions are proposed, point two. And it gives no reasons not to do it, point three. It is not a proposal. There is nothing to discuss.

  74. sod (Comment#27526) December 11th, 2009 at 7:45 am

    “yes. the few who did not starve under the clean air act, a finally going to die from hunger now. it IS a communist conspiracy.”

    Well, I’m glad we cleared that up.

    By the way, we now have a new “bad gas” to worry about…

    http://www.icecap.us/

    Dec 10, 2009
    Forget Carbon, Copehagen Scientists Find New Target to Spend Our Money on – Nitrogen!

    An international group of scientists say there is an immediate need for a global assessment of the nitrogen cycle and its impact on climate.

    —

    So – let’s see, CO2 (check), Nitrogen (check), Water vapor (check)…

    I’m sure that the climate scientists will find that Oxygen has a negative impact on climate. And the mitigation strategy will then be to destroy the entire atmosphere before it kills us!! Just think, with no atmosphere, there would be no floods, no hurricanes, no drought, and most important, no biosphere to spoil the planet! Perfect!

  75. I propose the following rule: the next person to invoke Big Oil as a slur will be liberated from Big Oil. No low cost energy, gasoline, petroleum derived products (just about everything), electricity. food grown far away…

    Surely a better way to live, and besides, It’s only fair.

  76. Andrew23:

    If we did this then China would drop down the list as a lot of theirs is ours since we import stuff from them

    So we are responsible for their inefficient energy production and manufacturing processes now?

    This is a path for incorporating maximum personal guilt while creating the circumstances where nothing can be done about it.

  77. michel (Comment#27491)

    Yes Michel and perhaps he could start with the total % of CO² emmited per ann by ALL sources with the human % at 3.27%.

    Put these figures into his equation and Bingo. Stopping all economic and domestic activity in the US, inc keeping warm in -30°C, and you will save 0.82% of total carbon emmisions per ann.
    Sadly many millions of americans will be unemployable and many will die from the cold. But hey, we will have saved the planet, :))

  78. The issue of who is being paid by whom is irrelevant when the research and data are transparent, freely available and replicable. Having said that it is not immaterial to an understanding of how hard one must look at the research in order to ensure that it is what it is purported to be. This is why the FDA has such a detailed audit process in place for evaluating drug research.
    One major issue that sufaced via the climategate letters is that the understandable self-interests of the climate scientists involved and their desired conclusion (viz Jones wish for catastrophic events to prove his theories) increases the need for FDA-like mechanisms to ensure that any distortions due to “confirmation bias” is eliminated.
    As for Greenaways inability to follow the details of the HockeyStick debate – I fear that this is because he has not simply taken the time to read Wegman’s report which was written to be digested by Congressmen so we know that most here would have no trouble understanding it.

  79. “The US is currently emitting how much CO2 in gigatonnes annually? The answer to this question is about 6.

    How much do you want to reduce this by?”

    6, obv.

  81. greenaway:
    I know you’re fairly new around here. There are a few important rules you need to know:

    1. Never question the teachings of St. McIntyre
    2. Never say anything good about the IPCC

    It excites the regulars and derails the conversation.

  83. JohnV — at least he can come here and launch these baseless accusations with no interest to discuss science (while admitting he has none) without getting banned. At your gospels of choice (real climate etc) you’ll find that any dissension, even scientifically based, is immediately deleted. But yes, the commentators response to random assertions of a skeptic being compromised over imagined up monetary ties to oppose warming are clearly signs of orwellianism!

  84. JohnV–
    Clearly, discussions of SteveM can’t derail this thread. He was supposed to be on tv this morning. Looks like he may be appearing on a variety of shows now. It will be nice to see a calmer voice that we usually get on those shows.

  85. JohnV
    “I know you’re fairly new around here. There are a few important rules you need to know:
    1. Never question the teachings of St. McIntyre
    2. Never say anything good about the IPCC”

    Do you honestly think:

    1. Greenaway was serious, he copped to plying devils advocate before.
    2. Questioning Steve’s motives is the same as questioning his teachings.

    WRT the IPCC, my take after reading all the mails is that the process needs some re engineering. Reading all the mails back and forth about the authoring of AR WG1 Ch06 Gave me a lot of sympathy for the scientists who put it together. It was a circus.
    Did they bend and break the rules? did those rules make sense,
    Not on your life. The stupidity of combing through documents and tossing those out that cited personal communication, fudging publication dates, page limits, cramming as much crap as they could into 1 chart ( a la Lucia) turgid mind numbing crap.
    If I had to criticize the IPCC it would be the same criticisms I level against every committe approach.

    Anyways, I’m grumpy. dont take it personal, you’re still my favorite warmist.

  86. michel (Comment#27528)
    If you do not know the answer to these questions, you do not know why or whether we should refrain from burning any particular amount of carbon. You do not know what you are proposing or what effects it will have. There is nothing to talk about.

    This is like the obese man who could never start on a diet because he could never decide exactly how many pounds he wanted to lose. We need to cut down a lot – the best that can be negotiated. Politicians can make targets – I just hope they are not small.

    There is a large but finite amount of C that can be burnt – say 3000Gt. We can burn in an uncontrolled way; it will go quite quickly, and then we’ll have to stop, with all the difficulties plus a wrecked climate. Or we can try to control our use, which gives time to make a smoother transition to a C-reduced economy, and some chance of moderating the warming.

  87. sod (Comment#27526)
    December 11th, 2009 at 7:45 am

    Denmark is running on 20% wind. basically the whole conference doesn t have any electricity, if the wind gets too weak. they have already been sitting in the dark for at least a day or too.

    No darkness, because when the wind dies down, they just import electrons from Norway and Sweden and their nasty hydroelectric plants.

  88. Anybody who doesn’t understand how M&M have thoroughly dismantled MBH98, and has made a serious effort to do so, is an idiot. Anybody who, in seriousness, repeatedly makes ad hominem arguments as their sole point is an idiot. that is all.

  89. Anybody who doesn’t understand how M&M have thoroughly dismantled MBH98, and has made a serious effort to do so, is an idiot. Anybody who, in seriousness, repeatedly makes ad hominem arguments as their sole point is an idiot. that is all.

    No comment from me. Too easy.

  90. Anybody who, in seriousness, repeatedly makes ad hominem arguments as their sole point is an idiot. that is all.

    Gosh, yes – there’s some expression to mull over for the lovers of irony!

  91. Nick,

    Your analogy of an obese man is strained. Eating less by the overweight has immediate health benefits without trade-offs. Carbon reduction does not work that way. There are economic costs that have real impacts on peoples’ lives, particularly in a global economic recession. These costs have to be balanced against the benefits of carbon reduction. To go ahead without this context is just foolish. The governments of India and China have obligations to improve the still poor average living and economic conditions of their citizens and therefore very good reasons to oppose limits on carbon emissions. A failure to acknowledge the legitimacy of these concerns is to no-one’s benefit.

    There have been some attempts to perform the required economic analysis, e.g. the alarmist Stern Report (though his 0.1% time discount rate is out of line with mainstream economic thought and brings his whole analysis into question), by Nordhaus at Yale (who thinks Stern is off the wall), and by Weitzman at Harvard (who says Stern was right but for the wrong reasons). Whether or not you agree with any analysis, you can’t ignore the economic trade-offs. Just saying we need to reduce emissions as much as we possibly can is both naive and dangerous.

  92. This:

    –Anybody who, in seriousness, repeatedly makes ad hominem arguments as their sole point is an idiot. that is all.–

    Prompted these:

    –No comment from me. Too easy.–
    –Gosh, yes – there’s some expression to mull over for the lovers of irony!–

    As I assumed was well known, the ad hominem logical fallacy is attempting to prove or falsify a subject by a personal attack.
    The observed use of ad hominem attacks as a sole point of argument leading to the conclusion such use indicates a mental deficiency is not necessarily ad hominem in nature, as such repeated argument may indeed indicate the person is stupid. The person making the “idiot” charge may very well be mistaken if by idiot he only means extremely stupid, in that the ad homs may be invoked for reasons other than stupidity. But it is not an ad hominem fallacy in and of itself and consequently is neither “too easy’ nor “ironic”.

  93. lucia (Comment#27578) December 11th, 2009 at 12:25 pm

    JohnV–
    Clearly, discussions of SteveM can’t derail this thread. He was supposed to be on tv this morning. Looks like he may be appearing on a variety of shows now. It will be nice to see a calmer voice that we usually get on those shows.

    Did he reframe in that quote I gave or not? He was asked a simple yes/no question, to which responded with his own question. As for being calm, I was disappointed he didn’t do his usual climate audit act.

  96. Nick Stokes writes;

    There is a large but finite amount of C that can be burnt – say 3000Gt. We can burn in an uncontrolled way; it will go quite quickly, and then we’ll have to stop, with all the difficulties plus a wrecked climate. Or we can try to control our use, which gives time to make a smoother transition to a C-reduced economy, and some chance of moderating the warming.

    Billions of dollars on research and thousands of scientists involved. Four assessment reports printed, Untold numbers of papers printed in prestigious journals.

    And this is what we have come up with.

    General Groves visited the researchers at the University of Chicago to see what progress they were making in the development of the atom bomb. He found them arrogant, condescending and making absolutely no progress. There would be no bomb cooing from that group. He found Robert Oppenheimer and started the Los Alamos lab to build the bomb.

    The world is facing a similar problem now. We are faced with a possibility of catastrophe and a stronger possibility of serious difficulties. Just what are these possibilities? We have no way to quantify them. The scientists put on the job have failed to produce any number that could be used to guide policy. The current climate science group should be fired just like the University of Chicago group was fired. They can be left to run their computers and disparage people in their Emails but the real work should be given to an organized project. This sort of project can be based on engineering standards to generate engineering answers to what is essentially an engineering problem.

    We need a new Robert Oppenheimer and a new Lesley Groves. Instead we have Al Gore – creator of the Internet.

  97. brid (Comment#27594)
    The governments of India and China have obligations to improve the still poor average living and economic conditions of their citizens and therefore very good reasons to oppose limits on carbon emissions. A failure to acknowledge the legitimacy of these concerns is to no-one’s benefit.
    I absolutely agree that China and India should oppose being unable to expand their currently low levels of C usage, for that reason. They were not restricted at all under Kyoto, and obviously room for expansion under any new agreement has to be allowed. That’s part of the negotiation issue – how can that room be made without wrecking the climate, which would impact very severely on … China and India (and ROW).

  98. The answer, or one answer, to the question, in round numbers, is roughly

    [b] 0.003 degrees C per year[/b]

    What was the question? The question was, what would be the effect on global average temperatures, if the US were to reduce its emissions by 80%?

    OK, this is evidence based policy. Do we still think that this reduction is evidence for the view that the US ought to make that reduction as a way of stopping the planet warming?

  99. As for Greenaways inability to follow the details of the HockeyStick debate – I fear that this is because he has not simply taken the time to read Wegman’s report which was written to be digested by Congressmen so we know that most here would have no trouble understanding it.

    I read Wegman. The statistical analysis is beyond me — I can’t judge if he is right or not, but given who he is, he must know something. Still, I have to go on trust rather than actually doing the stats and proving his arguments. The fact that congressmen apparently agree with him means nothing to me. Nothing.

    The social network analysis critique is nothing more than what I’ve done by pointing out the interests of and connection between people like McIntyre and McKitrick, Seitz, Idso, Lindzen, Randall, Milloy, Patrick Michaels, Soon, Baliunas, Christy, and the groups they are involved with, such as Global Climate Coalition, APCO, CPI, and etc.

    I’ve written materials that were meant to be digested by politicians. You cut out a lot of detail and nuance. What is left are the bare bones that are politically relevant to the case being made. What I worry about are the missing bits — the explanation scientists have for using certain techniques and methods. Can pure statisticians appreciate the science of trees, corals, ice cores, sediment, etc.? Does it even make a difference or is a critique of the stats good enough to debunk the claims arising from them? I dunno. North doesn’t seem to think so.

    From what I can tell after reading Wegman, there were questions raised about the PC method MBH used to analyze proxy records to reconstruct the temperatures. This mathematical and statistical esoterica don’t seem to overturn anything in the end, according to North’s report.

    Whom do I trust to put it out there in unbiased terms? A politician (Barton) and his crew, including Wegman – a very notable statistician no doubt and his engenue Said, who btw, applied for a patent for her social network analysis tool) or a scientist (North) and his like minded associates?

    I gotta tell ya, the scientists edge out the politician and his handpicked group for me.

    Here’s Wegman:

    In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling … We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians… In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface. Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

    So Wegman claims there was improper use of statistical analysis, too much social networking among climate scientists, and some selfish behavior towards the data, and ultimately that MBH conclusions about the 1990s and 1998 are not supported by his analysis.

    I find it strange that the report refers to “Dr. Mann” without reference to Bradley and Hughes…

    And here’s North:

    The standard proxy reconstructions based on linear regression are generally reasonable statistical methods for estimating past temperatures but may be associated with substantial uncertainty.
    There is a need for more rigorous statistical error characterization for proxy reconstructions of temperature that includes accounting for temporal correlation and the choice of principal components . . .

    So a nod to the criticisms of M&M about the statistical analysis and its problems.

    The report continues:

    The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years.

    So, according to North, while there are problems with some of the statistical analyses in MBH, the conclusions of the MBH98 papers is plausible due to the fact that multiple other lines of evidence also have similar findings using different proxies. The report highlights the uncertainties in being able to draw conclusions about the temperatures before 1600 due to the uncertainties in the proxies, etc.

    When I look at this debate in the blogosphere, I see each side pointing to these reports as “proof” that the hockey stick was either broken or intact, but maybe with a bit more of a wobble in the handle.

    I see supporters of Wegman point to the social network analysis as proof that there was some unconscious or even nefarious group think among climate scientists associated with Dr. Mann. I see supporters of the hockey stick pointing to the connections between climate denialists, each other and the various “front groups” and “astroturf organizations” created by the API and APCO.

    What I don’t see is that paleoclimate findings about 20th century warming have been overturned. I don’t see a groundswell of papers proving that the MWP was as warm or warmer than late 20th century.

    So, reading both the North report and the Wegman report (and Climate Audit and Real Climate) doesn’t help this poor soul figure out what is what.

    I am tempted to side with the scientists once more just because I don’t trust politicians nor do I trust public relations firms or oil companies to present the facts or best evidence. WHile it’s true that scientists also have a vested interest in seeing their work validated and accepted, at least it’s science! It’s the science.

  100. Anybody who doesn’t understand how M&M have thoroughly dismantled MBH98, and has made a serious effort to do so, is an idiot. Anybody who, in seriousness, repeatedly makes ad hominem arguments as their sole point is an idiot. that is all.

    The irony! It burns us!

  101. 1. Never question the teachings of St. McIntyre

    I didn’t realize this was his official fan club, but I’m beginning to see that. 😀

  102. Why?? Do you suppose it’s better for people to starve and freeze to death than to burn carbon-based fuels?

    An economic alarmist…

    What happens when carbon-based fuels run out? Even the most skeptical agree that’s in our future, whether we’re at peak now or in 20 years or 300. Won’t people starve and freeze to death then?

    Oh — you think they’ll be forced to find alternatives?

    Exactly.

  103. When you really understand the question, then you can tell who is arguing straight and who is not. After that, you can, if you feel like it, wonder about why. You will find out however that once you understand the issues, you will no longer be very interested in why.

    Sorry, but this yodaish explans did nothing to allay my uncertainty.

  104. Trust temperature measurements from satellites. Watch another five years, perhaps ten years, and a trend should become clear.
    I do understand your point, though, that as a laymen it is not easy to judge the science. You can judge the predictions, though.

    Ah. Some useful advice. Thanks.

  105. So in your argumentation When McSteve is related to Big Oil they are the bad guys and the minute they’ve been approached by the alarmists they are the good guys who have been converted to the Word. Yeah, right.

    You seem to have a basic problem with reading comprehension. Those like Shell and others left the API much earlier than ExxonMobil and joined various groups who, at least on the face of it, claim to support action to curb greenhouse gasses. I am not saying they are now the “good guys” — I am saying they are realists who see either than global warming is a real threat and actually think something should be done (yeah, right), or else see that government regulation is a given, and so they want to be on the right side of history (greenwashing) and perhaps be able to ensure their preferred method of carbon control is in place.

  106. You’re already doing it here, none of your posts are getting deleted, people engaged you, you got called a troll as you started yapping about McIntyre and big oil with no proof.

    Yes, reasonable people engaged me, and I do appreciate their efforts. I think I said “his ties to oil interests” and posted actual links to evidence of said oil interests.

    Why, yes I did.

    Not “big oil” – those are your words. And yes, proof.

  107. So now that we have compared Steve’s work to the canonical example of corporate funded junk science and found Steve in the clear, I think we can all breath a sigh of relief that the despicable practices that were used by cigarette companies to help poison people are not being used.

    The tobacco campaign went beyond funding junk science. I believe Steve McIntyre and others in his vein have found a very productive means of achieving the ends they appear to have in mind — raise enough doubt to cast a shadow over the whole science without really doing much to actually overturn anything.

    For the life of me, I’ve looked at many of the skeptical papers and claims and they all seem to have been addressed or pointed out as flawed or sham. The science appears to be intact. Except of course in the minds of the public… Which, I suspect, was the goal.

  108. Show that his motives make the math wrong.

    Show me that the math overturns all the other evidence and then we’ll talk.

    When both sides claim victory and point to the other side’s defeat, it’s hard to know who’s telling the truth. In the end, I must resort to looking at who is most trustworthy and who has inherent biases and what their motives might be.

  109. Greenaway, what you are trying to do in the area of climate is impossible to do successfully in any area of life.

    You cannot decide what a smart investment policy is for your retirement by considering the social affiliations of the people who make recommendations. You cannot decide on medical treatments for your condition by looking at the hypothetical motivations of the people who advocate them.

    You are making an idiot of yourself by not accepting that you have to decide about the arguments, and what you think of the people offering them, and what you conjecture to be their motivation is neither here nor there.

    You say you don’t understand the minutiae of PCA. It is actually quite simple, and you are fully capable of grasping the point, if you will just get your head away from personalities. The question is whether, when performing a statistical procedure that calls for the use of the mean of a series, it is permissible to perform that procedure using the mean of a subset.

    Your basic problem is illogicality coupled with laziness. Its illogicality in that you think you can find the truth by considering facts which are irrelevant to the propositions you are trying to assess. Its laziness in that you are spending all kinds of time that you could be using on the hard work of considering real evidence, on pointless conjecture about personalities and other matters which may be amusing or diverting, but have nothing to do with the key hypotheses of AGW.

    In the end, to make up your mind about the tobacco – health link, there was no alternative but to consider the statistics. To make up one’s mind about cholesterol, statins and heart disease, you have to get down and look at the numbers. Same with climate. Everything else but the data and the logic of the various hypotheses is simply a waste of time. Their obsession with irrelevancies is one reason why to many of us, the AGW movement seems not to be very interested in the science.

  110. You cannot decide what a smart investment policy is for your retirement by considering the social affiliations of the people who make recommendations.

    Ah, but Wegman and his protege Said think you can.

    You cannot decide on medical treatments for your condition by looking at the hypothetical motivations of the people who advocate them.

    And yet, people read emails and make conclusions about the motivations of Jones and others based on that.

    You are making an idiot of yourself by not accepting that you have to decide about the arguments, and what you think of the people offering them, and what you conjecture to be their motivation is neither here nor there.

    In the anti-AGW websites I’ve visited, that is pretty much the talk de jour when it comes to Climategate — climate alarmists are all out to take power away from the USA, create a communist world government, redistribute the wealth from rich countries to poor, hoax everyone because of their liberal leftie tree hugging anti-carbon ideology.

    I figure what’s sauce for the goose…

  111. Greenaway, you are doing it again. Once more you are declining to think coherently about climate and in preference distracting yourself with irrelevancies

    I suggest you focus on the one key issue in this matter; feedbacks, and in particular, cloud feedbacks. Get into the detail, and try to figure out whether Spencer’s arguments on the subject are correct – that is, how we measure the extent of feedback, how models handle them, to what extent the direction of causation between clouds and temperatures is certain.

    You need to take one key issue and focus on it till you really understand it. Whatever tin-hat stuff various fools say about irrelevant matters is not the point.

    Well, it depends. You may find all that stuff diverting. Just do not think that by participating in it you are getting any closer to understanding the merits of the AGW hypothesis.

  112. SOD,

    “Denmark is running on 20% wind. basically the whole conference doesn’t have any electricity, if the wind gets too weak.”

    Not to worry, the experts KNOW about wind and have about 160% installed electrical capacity allowing them to keep running on NO WIND days!!

    Oh, and they don’t really use 20% of the wind capacity. They EXPORT it! Their grid could not handle it otherwise!!

  115. Greenaway (Comment#27659)
    The main response to silly claims of the debunking of the hochey stick is this diagram. As you suggest, this work was sure to be replicated, and it has been, with very similar results. A truly wrong result would be overturned very quickly.

    MBH98 did make, I think, a mistake with their unusual normalisation, but it probably had small effect. These later replications would not have made such a publicised error.

    The more up-to-date “debunkers” haven now shifted from complaints about Mann’s stats to complaints about bristlecone pines.

  116. Greenaway,

    In your apologetics you select,

    “So, according to North, while there are problems with some of the statistical analyses in MBH, the conclusions of the MBH98 papers is plausible due to the fact that multiple other lines of evidence also have similar findings using different proxies.”

    Unfortunately for your position, the other proxies show the LIA and MWP. Mann’s doesn’t. All proxies before MBH98 did not show what Mann did. That is why it was such a big deal. The proxies that show what Mann’s did AFTER MBH98 used Bristlecones, upside down Tiljanders, Mann’s special PCH, one tree in Yamal…

    North was wrong.

    Keep barking!!

  117. Nick Stokes,

    I am so depressed that you did not mention that Mann’s math (I refuse to call it stats) managed to create hockey sticks out of noise. All ya gotta do is add more data (is that why he did a spaghetti reconstruction???) and you WILL get a hockey stick unless the data itself has no variation!!!!

    Oh yeah, as an apologist you can’t admit that.

  118. According to SMc, Mann’s original method was a data mining technique. It did not create hickey sticks but would seek out any hockey sticks that were present.

    Mann’s new 2008 technique of using proxies that correlate with 20th century temperature operates in a similar way. Get a bunch of data sets and choose only those that correlate with 20th century temperatures. Outside of the 20th century, the “proxies” are just noise so their result averages to zero. So there you have it, a flat shaft at zero and proxies chosen for a blade.

    The method is so good that it doesn’t matter if the proxy is used upside down or not. Nothing matters, it is hockey sticks all the way down.

  119. You need to take one key issue and focus on it till you really understand it. Whatever tin-hat stuff various fools say about irrelevant matters is not the point.

    Actually, that’s what I’m doing with dendro. I wanted to look at models because a lot of the argument for action is based on them, but frankly, I haven’t really scratched the surface with the paleoclimate yet and don’t want to divert myself from that just now.

    Here’s the thing that still bothers me. I have a science background, minimal though it may be and limited to a BSc in Biology. I can grasp some of the science, but to tell the truth, the stats are what get me. I did take university level stats, but even so, I must admit that while I grasp the concept of PC analysis, I couldn’t actually work through it without a lot of help. So I do acknowledge from reading Wegman and North that yes, Wegman had a point about the way PC analysis was used in MBH. Point taken, I think. Even so, I’ve read rebuttals to Wegman that were also convincing, arguing that not using MBH’s method does not make any significant difference to the results. And as Nick has pointed out, the issue is now “divergence” and bristlecone pines and we get into the whole debate about whether trees are good proxies, etc. But then other works I’ve read suggest that taking BCPs out likewise makes no never mind.

    So that’s where I am right now — reading Briffa and others to get a sense of the issues. Actually, I might be able to make an educated decision about what work holds water or leaks too much to use.

    But my dear sainted 75 year old mother isn’t up to it and yet she has a vote. She will cast a vote and determine which group of politicians get power and which agenda gets a shot. She will be polled and referendumized on her views about global warming. How can she be expected to decide this case? She’s a smart woman, but I know for a fact that if faced with having to read Wegman or just going by her sense of who to trust based on conflicts of interest, she’s going to go with the scientists rather than the skeptics and their arguments about statistics and errors and hoaxes. She’s likely similar to a whole whack of laypeople. They will trust scientists rather than politicians and oil companies.

    And I suspect that is what this climate war is all about.

    Scientists are generally seen as a trustworthy group. Eggheads with coke bottle glasses tromping off in the wilderness, coring trees and studying the results, sitting around campus classrooms with others of their kind, debating the meaning of this or that variable — somehow they come off as more trustworthy when compared with slick willy politicians or former ones selling books, and three-piece suited oil barons with $$ in their eyes and their hands in the politician’s pants.

    The layperson is the battleground. People involved in this war are vying for their ear and heart and mind.

    In some ways, the facts are irrelevant when it comes to this war. It’s perception and appearances and trustworthiness because for many people, the facts are either just too complex to judge or there just isn’t enough time to gain competency to be able to understand.

    Regardless, they will still be expected to vote and they will still be polled by politicians, hoping to gauge the public mind.

  120. i>kuhnkat (Comment#27687)
    I am so depressed that you did not mention that Mann’s math (I refuse to call it stats) managed to create hockey sticks out of noise.
    I think even the Mcs have given up on this one. As Mosh has pointed out, the HS has two parts, a flat shaft and a blade. The blade is from thermometers. The argument about Mann’s multiproxy PCA is whether the shaft is roughly flat, and this is what those replications tell you.

    Whether the proxy turns up at the end to follow the blade is of some interest, but isn’t needed to tell you that modern temps are rising. We knew that.

  121. Unfortunately for your position, the other proxies show the LIA and MWP.

    I don’t *have* a position such that the existence of a MWP or LIA will make or break it. You’re mistaking me for you.

    I don’t know if there was a global MWP or whether it was regional, and I also don’t know if it was warmer than late 20th century North America / globe or cooler. As I understand it, the farther back you go with proxies, the greater the uncertainties, so even though the error bars are wide, less can be really claimed about earlier periods – from what I understand. According to North, we know pretty damn accurately what the temperature was in 1998, and 1928 but less so in 1598 and 1528, and even less so in 1128, etc. The truth is that none of us can say with certainty that the MWP was warmer than today, because the proxy records used to reconstruct the temperature back then are not as accurate as satellite temperatures, or land-based records, etc. In the end, although there may have been a warm MWP globally, that says nothing about current climate.

    From my understanding, paleoclimate is useful in showing how the climate system responds to forcings like the Milankovich cycles, volcanos, plate tectonics, greenhouse gasses, etc. and shows us how rapid climate change can happen and give us an idea of how our civilization might be affected by such a rapid change were it to happen. So even if the methods used in MBH are suspect, and even if the MWP was found to be global and warmer by a half a degree or so, this says nothing about the potential warming caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gasses today.

    We’re still left with the rapidly rising CO2 emissions and the potential for much much more over the next 20 – 300 years depending on how much of our coal we burn and how fast. Even if paleoclimate can tell us nothing with absolute certainty about how warm it was in 1200 or 200 or 20,000 bce, it can show us that CO2 has acted as a forcer in the past, that climate can change very rapidly — in decades or less, and that species are vulnerable.

    So, hockey stick broken? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not convinced it ultimately matters.

  122. Aww Nick, I am going to cry now.

    You don’t even seem to understand that a tree’s growth depends on the soil, CO2, moisture, and sunlight in the LOCAL area it is exposed to!!

    How can it grow according to hockey stick temps that didn’t happen in its neighborhood?? That 1 Yamal tree must have been teleported not teleconnected!!

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

    The real data mining in the later reconstructions is the staff being made up of a lot of trees and the blade just a few!! You know it and ignore it as the good little apologist you are!!

    Why are the validation statistics for a group of trees, with a relatively flat response, as good as the hockey stick Yamal trees??

    If trees were thermometers those shafts wouldn’t be as flat now would they?? Oh yeah, that is just a statistical artifact isn’t it.

    But then, we really need to talk about how those trees have been validated as thermometers. How is the 3000 year tree study doing Nick?? Got about 2960 years to go??

  123. Greenaway,

    It has warmed in the last 150 yrs. CO2 does (all else being equal)have a warming effect.

    Maybe you won’t take my word for that since I’m not a climate scientist.

    AGW theory depends on three points.

    1) Dendrochronolgy because this helps us determine if current warming is “unprecedented”. If it’s not unprecedented, maybe it’s natural. If it is, then I’d tend to be concerned. It is not conclusive that CO2 causes warming. It may be that warming causes CO2.

    2) The temperature record, for obvious reasons. Although any reasonable person will concede that it has warmed over the last 100+ years, there are good reasons to wonder how accurate the record is. HADCru releasing the raw data and the methods they use to adjust it would go a long way to resolving this issue.

    3) Models are important because they enable us to project into the future. Models are only worth using as projections if they have demonstrated an ability to correctly predict the future. At the moment, it’s not looking too good for the climate models (see elsewhere on this site).

    A reasonable person doesn’t have to throw up their hands in despair everytime they’re faced with something that they are not specialists in. People make decisions all the time without being scientists, economists, lawyers or doctors. While the opinions of the specialists are very worthy of consideration, a reasonable person should be in a position to object if a doctor wants to stop your headaches by amputating your arm. Why are you so frozen with a lack of knowledge only in the area of Climate Change?

    Scientists are known to defend the consensus to the death, especially when they are on record as supporting it. This doesn’t mean that the consensus is wrong, just that scientific opinion is not unanimous and the consensus does not suddenly change once the “truth” is discovered.

    About the only thing that bothers me about your posts is that you honestly seem to think that Steve McIntyre’s work has been influenced by his past. I would recommend you investigate the “big fossil fuel connection” so see how vapid such claims are, but I understand you to say that you have and, yet, still feel that it is a problem. That’s the only real indication you’ve given that I might not be dealing with a reasonable person here.

    And, by the way, what kind of person would honestly believe that the world is in great danger and yet lie to people about the threat just because they stand to lose some money if the problem is addressed? If the choice is losing money or your life (or your grandchild’s) that an easy choice for anyone not named Jack Benny.

    The simple truth is that people actually have different opinions on what good and bad, right and wrong. You can’t just look up an issue in “Truthapedia” and find out what to think.

    What’s the right thing to do in Afghanistan? Well, certainly it seems like you’ll probably want to ignore everyone else and just do whatever the generals recommend. Right?

  124. kuhnkat (Comment#27693)
    The real data mining in the later reconstructions is the staff being made up of a lot of trees and the blade just a few!!
    Again, you just don’t seem to know what the hockey stick is. It is the diagram, starting with MBH98, which shows a multiproxy PCA representation of NH (later global) temperatures, representing the shaft, with an instrumental NH temperature set, representing the blade. The PCA, which was Mann’s new contribution, assembled all the processed Yamal etc proxies.

    Maybe you just don’t like dendro. But you can’t blame MBH98 for that.

  126. Re: Nick Stokes (Comment#27695) December 11th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
    Again, you just don’t seem to know what the hockey stick is. It is the diagram, starting with MBH98, which shows a multiproxy PCA representation of NH (later global) temperatures, representing the shaft, with an instrumental NH temperature set, representing the blade. The PCA, which was Mann’s new contribution, assembled all the processed Yamal etc proxies.

    Nick, I am probably behind on a point of historical position, so I would like to clarify — was the methodology of MBH98 correct in your assessment?

  127. Greenaway, we are making progress.

    We now realize that we do not know whether today is warmer than the MWP or RWP. Hold on to that. We do not know. We know it has warmed somewhat over the last hundred or two hundred years, but we do not know why. We know that there were previous warming cycles, we know that there has been a recent warming cycle, but we have no evidence for thinking that the present one is meaningfully different from the earlier ones.

    You have done a lot of reading, and so far you have not come upon anything to convince you differently. You have noticed that various other people have looked at the same evidence and come to a range of conclusions about it. You have found no-one who has been able to give what seems to you a decisive argument one way or the other.

    That is a very important datum in the search for understanding and decision.

    Now you go on to say that “Even if paleoclimate can tell us nothing with absolute certainty about how warm it was in 1200 or 200 or 20,000 bce, it can show us that CO2 has acted as a forcer in the past, that climate can change very rapidly — in decades or less, and that species are vulnerable.”

    Now you need to do the same thing about this. Are you sure it shows this? The issue of CO2 forcing turns on the issue of feedbacks. People on both sides of the debate agree that doubling CO2 in itself produces a warming of 1 – 1.2C, in the absence of feedbacks. If there were no feedbacks, and CO2 ppm were to rise from 300 to 1200, the global temperature would rise 2C or so. If it merely doubled, it would rise by 1C. What exactly makes you think that Paleo shows previous fluctuations were due to CO2 rises?

    Go through and do the same thing about feedbacks. See if you can find evidence which convinces you that feedbacks will impose a long term multiplier of 2 – 4 times any initial warming. Never mind what North or anyone else says, never mind why they said it, go through everything you can find, and make up your mind about feedbacks.

    Once you have done that, even if you simply say about feedbacks that you do not know, you will have advanced in understanding enormously. Liken it to, you have been told to take statins. You spend months reading biographies of the various researchers, you find out about grants to the universities they work for, you know which ones are good husbands, wives and parents, you know what detergents they buy and where they went to school. And you still do not know anything about statins.

    Next however, you start reading the studies and the journals and work your way through what statins actually do. At the end of this, you lift your head from the books and say, I have found no real proof that taking statins does any good commensurate with the risks. It may, or it may not, I do not know.

    Well, now you have made some progress. Get on to feedbacks. You know we do not know the present warming is remarkable. Now start thinking about future warming. It might be real, but if so, you are not going to find out about it by worrying about what companies McIntyre used to work for. Or what your grandmother can or cannot understand.

  128. And by the way Greenaway, even if the whole hypothesis is right, even if feedback is huge, even if CO2 does what is hypothesized, if the US reduces its emissions by 80%, that is, it takes its emissions per capita to the levels of the 1870s or earlier, the effect on global temperatures will be to reduce them by , count it:

    3 thousands of a degree C per year.

    Seems like a lot of trouble for very little gain. Still think the so-called precautionary principle, aka Pascal’s Wager, applies?

  129. oliver (Comment#27703)
    was the methodology of MBH98 correct in your assessment?
    As I said above, the non-centred normalization is irregular, and probably a mistake, although it may well make little difference. I think Mann should have acknowledged that. But otherwise I haven’t seen any error convincingly demonstrated in the mathematical processing of the proxies. More recently, people have moved on to criticising the proxies themselves, which is a separate issue. But still the refrain of the broken hockey stick lingers in the echo chamber.

    And as I said above, if Mann had really got it wrong, it would have been supplanted by a corrected version by now. But the later work pretty much agrees.

  130. Re: #27695, Nick, while you’re waxing didactic on MBH98-99, could you elaborate on how the Yamal series was used? 😉

  131. “Billions of dollars on research and thousands of scientists involved. Four assessment reports printed, Untold numbers of papers printed in prestigious journals.

    And this is what we have come up with.

    General Groves visited the researchers at the University of Chicago to see what progress they were making in the development of the atom bomb. He found them arrogant, condescending and making absolutely no progress. There would be no bomb cooing from that group. He found Robert Oppenheimer and started the Los Alamos lab to build the bomb.

    The world is facing a similar problem now. We are faced with a possibility of catastrophe and a stronger possibility of serious difficulties. Just what are these possibilities? We have no way to quantify them. The scientists put on the job have failed to produce any number that could be used to guide policy. The current climate science group should be fired just like the University of Chicago group was fired. They can be left to run their computers and disparage people in their Emails but the real work should be given to an organized project. This sort of project can be based on engineering standards to generate engineering answers to what is essentially an engineering problem. ”

    They are way ahead of you. There are multiple, independent, research centres around the globe working on AGW and climate in general. They all come up with pretty much the same answer. As for climate sensitivity, that is incredibly complex to calculate, as it involves so many variables that cannot be nailed down, hence the large spread of opinions on just what it will be. They all agree, though, it means warming.

  132. Nick Stoke writes:

    Whether the proxy turns up at the end to follow the blade is of some interest, but isn’t needed to tell you that modern temps are rising. We knew that.

    Just what makes a “proxy” a “proxy”. In this case, it is something that tracks another measure. A temperature proxy should track temperature. Now if a temperature proxy does not track modern temperatures, just what does that tell us?

    Perhapsi it tell us that the ‘proxy’ isn’t a proxy

    And following from that, any ‘reconstruction’ based on a questionable ‘proxy’ is itself questionable.

    perhaps Mann and company should begin working to quantify the temperature response of their ‘proxies’ (together with all confounding parameters) then coming up with yet another rearrangement of undergraduate statistics and linear algebra to be published in Nature.

  133. Nick is distorting the record when he says “The more up-to-date “debunkers” haven now shifted from complaints about Mann’s stats to complaints about bristlecone pines”. He is well aware the questions raised on the more recent reconstructions are far more numerous.

    For example, problems identified on Mann ’08 include the inversion of the Tiljander sediment series (Nick knows this well as he was part of a discussion at CA. How about conceding this error, Nick?), the weird “pick two” methodology, the screening of proxies by calibration-period correlation (discussed above) and statistically inappropriate calculation of confidence intervals, among a series of other problems.

    It is quite funny for Nick to talk about an “echo chamber” when he has quite the reputation of being a knee-jerk defender of all things AGW, no matter how bad the analysis, and his refusal to concede even the smallest point (still defending Rahmstorf?)

  134. brid (Comment#27731)
    You’re right that I discussed the Tiljander series at CA, and had this to say.
    In recent times agriculture etc makes the proxy appear to get colder (more clay), and if you calibrate with instrumental temperature it comes out upside down in the earlier period. On that basis, presumably Tiljander data can’t be reliably calibrated at all with instrumental temperature, and should indeed be omitted.

    And yes, I’m still happy to defend Rahm’s endpoint treatment.

  135. i>TAG (Comment#27730)
    Now if a temperature proxy does not track modern temperatures, just what does that tell us?
    Perhaps it tell us that the ‘proxy’ isn’t a proxy
    Yes, maybe. It depends on whether you can still find a satisfactory period of correlation. Then you worry about the divergence.

    What is doesn’t tell you is anything about modern temperatures. You have thermometers for that. And that’s the point about MBH98. It said preindustrial temperatures were flat, measured by proxy, and post-industrial temperatures are rising rapidly, measured by thermometer. And that isn’t affected by whether there was a shortage of trees in 1990.

  136. Nick,

    That is a pretty half-hearted concession on Tijlander (“presumably”). What do you think about Mann’s response: “The claim that “upside down” data were used is bizarre. Multivariate regression methods are insensitive to the sign of predictors.” Give us a definitive statement – Man is just wrong, right?

    I find it hard to believe that anyone could defend the R endpoint smoothing. Not to rehash the whole discussion, but his approach results in confidence intervals so wide that the graph is meaningless.

    Do you accept that you were wrong in saying that ““The more up-to-date “debunkers” haven now shifted from complaints about Mann’s stats to complaints about bristlecone pines”? Seems to me that M&M (among others) have levied significant shots against the statistical methods.

  137. The apparent loss of signal that previously apparently existed is a big, big deal. There is no way around it.
    At a minimum it argues that if you want to continue to use this particular location and species then you have to significantly increase the sample of trees covering the period for which you believe you previously had a signal.
    It also means that the full sample of cores from all trees for this location need to be archived, including those discarded for any reason, in order to more tightly define what constitutes a valid proxy as opposed to ones that just happen to correlate with some portion of the temperature record.

    Ironically, replication becomes crucial. It also highlights the stupidity of running with a small sample of trees at Yamal. Nobody should get away with such a methodology in a PhD thesis – how come this stuff gets published?

  138. Michel, I appreciate your detailed response to my posts.

    You see, I look at the issue of global warming in two ways — one on a personal level and the second as an academic or researcher who is trying to understand it as a social/political phenomenon. I can do the reading myself and probably get quite a bit of what’s what and come to my own fairly educated opinion on it and act accordingly. In doing so, I will likely decide based on the research I’ve read and the relative uncertainties in the science vs. the costs of acting/not acting. I have not come to that place yet, as I suspect that to really be able to make an educated opinion, one must understand a lot more about CO2, models, and the vagaries of the instrumental temperature records. The paleoclimate arena is interesting from the perspective of understanding past climate. I’m a firm believer in knowing history, lest one repeat it and all that.

    I do know this without a doubt — we’re pumping a whole lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. Ice cores suggest — uncertainties acknowleged — the amount is more than has been in it for a very long time. In burning fossil fuels, we are de-sequestering a whole lot of carbon that has been there for millions of years. Whether that matters and how much it matters to global climate are the salient questions.

    Now, from an academic interested in this as a social/political phenomenon, and how one develops public policy to address it, the politics and interests of the players are vital to understand what is going on. When you take the science questions out of the mix and are left with the players, you are left with politics and economics and society. Understanding how people will respond to the questions and decisions facing them regarding global climate demands that I look at politics and economics and society. Understanding the social movements associated with AGW/skepticism/denial demands that I look at politics and economics and society. Understanding the players themselves demands the same.

    So, I’m on two journeys — one of personal understanding requiring me to decide on the merits of the case by reading all perspectives and the other of a more academic understanding requiring me to examine the social/political/economic underpinnings of the phenomenon.

    Sometimes, the two cross over. I try to be aware of my own biases.

  139. 1) Dendrochronolgy because this helps us determine if current warming is “unprecedented”. If it’s not unprecedented, maybe it’s natural. If it is, then I’d tend to be concerned. It is not conclusive that CO2 causes warming. It may be that warming causes CO2.

    I seriously question people who shrug off the amount of CO2 we are putting in the atmosphere and oceans and flora. The warming today is not unprecedented — the science shows that once, the entire earth was ice free, the poles were tropical and sea levels were much higher. So let’s take that out of the mix. It has been established that the warming today, whatever the amount, is not “unprecedented’.

    To me the most important question raised by paleoclimate is not whether the temperatures today are unprecedented but instead, when in the past has CO2 acted as a climate forcer and what were the consequences? For what is unprecedented is the amount of CO2 produced by humanity and pumped into the atmosphere and oceans. Even if the MWP was global and warmer than today, in the MWP, which I presume would be “natural variation”, there was no (significant amount of) CO2 being pumped into the biosphere by humans.

    What paleoclimate tells us is that we know climate has seen long periods of relative stability vs. abrupt and rapid periods of destabilization until and new equilibrium was found.

    It appears that, MWP and LIA aside, we have experienced a long period of relative stability within a fairly narrow range of temperature. This has been good for civilization as we know it.

    Abrupt rapid climate shifts of more than a couple degrees globally?

    Not so good.

  140. Greenaway:
    You are simply defining a hypothetical problem and then attaching a catastrophic outcome. It is silly. You simply do not know whether something akin to catastophic warming will occur. That it might, but then lots of terrible things might happen. This is a gross misuse of the precautionary principle. A hundred years ago there were few cars, no air passenger traffic, no internet. Do you really think that we will not have a completely new set of technologies at our disposal in the next 50 years that would allow a dramatic mitigation of these contemplated outcomes.

  141. Greenaway, yes, agreed, there are two independent and interesting questions, how a belief spreads, and whether it is true. It is certainly worth examining how a belief in AGW has spread, and where it has spread. Its just that such enquiries are not a way of finding out whether the hypothesis is true.

    Now, what has happened to climate? It doesn’t seem we have had stability interrupted by the MWP and LIA. That is not a reasonable characterization of it. We started with the RWP, when vines grew as far north as Leeds in the UK. This would be the equivalent of further north today, given better breeding methods and more sophistication about varieties. Vines today are being grown as far north as Hadrian’s Wall. It was, within the limits of historical and archeological information, and within the limits of comparability of rootstocks, roughly the same latitude from where vines can be grown today, if we are using the practice as a measure of warmth.

    We then went into a decline, which was attended by plagues and migration and the fall of the Western Empire. This was succeeded by the MWP of several hundred years, and a Western revival. We then had a decline into the LIA and a rise out of it into the modern warming period each lasting several hundred years.

    A reasonable view of the history is not that we have had a period of stability interrupted by spikes of warming, but that we have lived since about 500BC in an era of moderately fluctuating climate, with alternating warming and cooling periods of several hundred years each. Who knows what will come next? But in view of the history, sketchy as it is, of the last 2500 years, it would not be unreasonable to expect another period of cooling to arrive and put a stop to the present warming.

    When? Its absurd to try to forecast this to any closer than a century, but sometime reasonably soon, if history is a guide. Probably within one or two hundred years.

    Is it wise to put more CO2 into the atmosphere? No, probably not, at least not without doing a proper risk assessment. We need to get on with this as soon as possible, and feedback is the thing we need to understand. It is unfortunate that the AGW movement generally has focussed on hysterical alarmism rather than research into the workings of the climate. They have been one of the main obstacles to assessment of the danger, if there is any.

    One would have to say that many of the things we are releasing into the environment do not have adequate risk assessments. The wholesale adoption of chemical and industrial agriculture for food production is an example, the widespread use of antibiotics is another. We need to be a lot more cautious about such things. I am not sure where CO2 ranks in this list – probably some ways down, as its effects are not immediate, not certain, and it is not positively poisonous, unlike the organophosphates which are being sprayed around the countryside by the ton. But its effects certainly merit research.

    Not however the level of hysteria, or the expense of the proposals currently being considered. I would rank the danger from CO2 well below the danger from nuclear proliferation combined with religious hysteria, which really does have the potential to exterminate the human race. After that would come the other leading causes of death, disease, the automobile, bad water. Then we’d have pesticides and herbicides. Well down the list would come the issue of whether CO2 will cause dangerous levels of warming. It is just not the main issue.

  142. “f CO2 does what is hypothesized, if the US reduces its emissions by 80%, that is, it takes its emissions per capita to the levels of the 1870s or earlier, the effect on global temperatures will be to reduce them by , count it:

    3 thousands of a degree C per year. ”

    That”s some rigorous analysis.

    So the US alone will have little effect? Perhaps we should try to come up with some global agreement on emissions? Hasn’t anybody thought of doing this?

  143. “It may be that warming causes CO2.”

    No. Fossil fuel burning has raised CO2 levels. Few things in science are more certain.

  144. “I am so depressed that you did not mention that Mann’s math (I refuse to call it stats) managed to create hockey sticks out of noise.”

    This is claim is thrown around a lot. When SteveM published a response to Mann in Nature he cited an article on this IN AN EXPLORATION GEOLOGIST NEWSLETTER–which is sweet irony considering his moaning about the lack of proper statistical sourcing in climate science. Of course, when you look at the graph from that NEWSLETTER (my caps lock key keeps getting stuck, dammit) you see a MWP nearly as warm as today. Bender and mosher will likely not comment on this embarrassment.

  145. Boris writes:

    “I am so depressed that you did not mention that Mann’s math (I refuse to call it stats) managed to create hockey sticks out of noise.”

    This is claim is thrown around a lot. When SteveM published a response to Mann in Nature he cited an article on this IN AN EXPLORATION GEOLOGIST NEWSLETTER–which is sweet irony considering his moaning about the lack of proper statistical sourcing in climate science. Of course, when you look at the graph from that NEWSLETTER (my caps lock key keeps getting stuck, dammit

    My father drove a 1951 Chevrolet. it was a very good car. It started in the winter; however cold it became. This is my comment on Steve McIntyre’s contributions. I take my lead for Boris who shows that the non sequitur is a fashionable form of argument.

  146. It is silly. You simply do not know whether something akin to catastophic warming will occur. That it might, but then lots of terrible things might happen.

    First, I did not say I am certain of anything as I have not done adequate research to have any degree of certainty. However, there are some pretty intriguing lines of research I have come across that I feel merit more analysis and perhaps attention from policy makers.

    1. Among other things, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, along with water vapor, methane, NO2, and ozone.
    2. Ice core and other evidence suggests that CO2 levels have fluctuated with glaciation cycles (i.e. temperature), on the order of +/- 100ppm over the course of the past 650K years, ranging between a low of 190ppm to a high of 290ppm or 300ppm. Since this cycle began, CO2 tends to be low during glaciations and higher during interglacials.
    3. Human activity, including burning of fossil fuels, has increased the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to a high of 380+ppm — about 100ppm higher than any time in previous 400K years, at least according to the Vostock ice core data.
    4. There is research that suggests rapid increases in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have caused significant global warming events in the past, such as the PETM and ETM2. So we know CO2 can act as a climate forcer as well as a feedback.
    5. During the PETM, the research suggests that the same rate of CO2 was being emitted as is emitted into the atmosphere during the current era. During these CO2 caused temperature “excursions” temps increased by up to ~ 6C, and the poles were tropical.
    6. Acknowledging the uncertainties in the research, and that CO2 primarily acts as a feedback during the past deglaciation / glaciation cycles, this does suggest that CO2 can act as an independent forcer of climate.

    Of course, it is possible to argue each of these points. I’ve seen deniers do so, arguing that CO2 isn’t a major greenhouse gas, that there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect or it is of little consequence, that CO2 it isn’t a forcer at all because it lags behind temperature by 800 years, that the data isn’t free so we can’t make sure its valid or a hoax, that the research and data on the PETM and ETM2 are highly unreliable as to timing, etc.

    I won’t belabor this any more by trying to address their criticisms, or respond to Steve Mosher’s claim that I’m rushing to the ice. Suffice to say that whole forests’ worth of pixels have been expended on this.

    Even given the uncertainties, the points on CO2 make me conclude that we should be cautious about the amount of CO2 we release through burning of fossil fuels, etc., let alone the effect it might have on the oceans. How much CO2 is safe? How much is unsafe? How fast or slow could any change in climate happen based on current rates of increase?

    I still think they are valid points that need further analysis. Answering these questions requires much more research on past “excursions” and also better more accurate proxies for CO2, and increased accuracy of models, but it bears consideration. Our species’ de-sequestering of all that CO2 is a real-time experiment and none of us knows for certain what the results will be, but we have some ideas.

    Do you really think that we will not have a completely new set of technologies at our disposal in the next 50 years that would allow a dramatic mitigation of these contemplated outcomes.

    We will have to, one way or the other, even if global warming is a bust, if some of the research and predictions about peak oil have any validity.

    Still, it’s rather like saying “I’ll smoke even though I know there’s a risk I will get lung or heart disease or cancer because surely there will be advances in technology down the road that will cure me.”

    Not so bright, that.

  147. …how a belief spreads, and whether it is true. It is certainly worth examining how a belief in AGW has spread, and where it has spread. Its just that such enquiries are not a way of finding out whether the hypothesis is true.

    Talk about reframing. 😀

    First, I would be hesitant — horrified actually — repelled to the max — to agree with the claim that AGW is a “belief”.

    Sure there is some AGW science out there with less than a stellar record for release of data and thus replicability but that is not a fault of the entire discipline(s). To call the theory and research “belief” is to misstate, either deliberately or out of ignorance.

    Now, “creationism” and “young earth creationism” are properly beliefs, but I wouldn’t want to linger on those issues, lest we get more CAPS and ???? from some members of the forum. 😀

  148. It doesn’t seem we have had stability interrupted by the MWP and LIA. That is not a reasonable characterization of it.

    YMMV, but I have to disagree. From what I have seen, and uncertainties acknowledged, the climate has been pretty stable since about oh, 10,000 BCE with a +/- 1-1.5C anomaly compared with 20th C average temperatures. While there may have been periods when it was warmer or cooler, the range is pretty narrow.

    I suspect, along with many others, that this relative stability in climate ensured our species was able to flourish. In other words, if global temperatures had varied during this period by up to 5-6 degrees, that would be considerably more difficult to establish any kind of stable civilization.

  149. “There is research that suggests rapid increases in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have caused significant global warming events in the past, such as the PETM and ETM2. So we know CO2 can act as a climate forcer as well as a feedback.”

    I am not sure we do know this. What we know is that, other things being unchanged, doubling CO2 will raise temperatures by 1C over time. What we do not know is how the rest of the climate will respond to this initial warming. It could amplify it, or it could damp it. I don’t think we have any well established idea which it does.

    The argument about the 800 year lag is often made and often ridiculed. I have never understood this ridicule. It is clear that if A happens after B, A cannot cause B. So in order to rescue the hypothesis, we suppose that there is a third event, C. This event is supposed to make for an initial warming. This warming does indeed occur before the CO2 rise. Why it happens, we do not know. What it is, we do not know. Then this warming is supposed to trigger the CO2 rise, and the CO2 rise is then supposed to trigger the rest of the warming.

    The alternative hypothesis, which seems more economical of entities, is to suppose that the warming occurs from some other cause, but promotes rises in the level of CO2.

    In any case, the difficulty is not really resolved by this epicycle. You still have to show that in the later stages of the warming, the warming from time t onwards was due to CO2, rather than to what caused the initial warming. How are you going to show that? Who has done it?

    You are offended by a reference to AGW as a belief. Well, it is a belief. People believe it. It is interesting to enquire how they came to believe it. It is also interesting to enquire how people came to believe in the germ theory of disease, as opposed to the miasma theory. How people come to believe various things has nothing to do with whether those things are true. You cannot get there from here.

    I do think that AGW has many cult like aspects, and that its adherents do often act like cult members, but it could still be true, and their behavior is not evidence one way or the other. After all, there is a cult surrounding Apple, but Macs could be superior nonetheless, even if you do have to wear a black turtleneck to the store when you go out to buy one….

  150. Unfortunately AGW or at least CAGW has become a belief system as well as a science. Back in the 50’s and 60’s any unusual weather event was blamed by some on either atom bomb testing or rocket launches. When any and every weather event is touted as due to AGW there is no relationship to the science, just dogma and fear mongering. The AGW science has moved from the realm of research to the political realm where belief trumps reality. Where researchers attempt to suppress opposing research because it will prevent political action that they endorse or may interfere with their gravy train that is not science.

  151. And, by the way, what kind of person would honestly believe that the world is in great danger and yet lie to people about the threat just because they stand to lose some money if the problem is addressed? If the choice is losing money or your life (or your grandchild’s) that an easy choice for anyone not named Jack Benny.

    I’m not saying that everyone with links to fossil fuel interests are lairs and charlatans, trying to profit at the expense of the planet. Not everyone. 😀 Some yes. There really are sociopaths out there who care only about their own well-being. Some in government, some in industry and some in science. Although I suspect that science requires too much concentration and years of slogging just to get anywhere for them to bother. 😀

    Others are inclined to reject something because accepting it might challenge the way they live. There’s ample evidence of that in the past, on all sides of most socially and politically and economically contentious issues.

    What’s the right thing to do in Afghanistan? Well, certainly it seems like you’ll probably want to ignore everyone else and just do whatever the generals recommend. Right?

    Need I remind you that generals are not all of one hive mind?

    This is completely OT, but when it comes to how to handle Afghanistan once we have made the decision to become involved? Pretty much, yeah. I would read what the various generals have to say and largely consider their advice as more valuable than say, your average Jo on the street. And maybe some military analysts and some analysts who have a bit of background in geopolitics. Who else am I going to trust?

    Politicians?

  152. Personally I think this whole fight against global warming is just rank speciesism. I’ve for Hot times and the cool species that survive in them, even if man isnt one of them. Like the stuff that lives by volcano vents.

  153. Greenaway.

    On the trust issue. around 40% of people who disbelieve in climate science do so because of a lack of trust in scientists.

    Question: where do you stand on the following:

    1. Access to all the data in papers cited by the IPCC
    2. Access to all the source code used to produce results cited by the IPCC
    3. Access to all reviewer comments and all correspondence of IPCC contributors, reveiwers etc

    4. Minority reports for the IPCC

  154. “I take my lead for Boris who shows that the non sequitur is a fashionable form of argument.”

    How is it a non-sequitor to point out the article that McIntyre cites as evidence that you get a hockey stick from red noise data was A) published in a exploration geologist’s newsletter and B) showed that such a manufactured hockey stick got an MWP as warm as 20th century temps?

  155. steven mosher:
    I’ll answer your 4 questions:
    1. Access to all the data in papers cited by the IPCC
    – fully support
    2. Access to all the source code used to produce results cited by the IPCC
    – fully support

    3. Access to all reviewer comments and all correspondence of IPCC contributors, reveiwers etc
    – I think I support reviewer comments, not sure about *all* correspondence from all contributors (there needs to be a line somewhere where frank conversations can be had without worrying about words being taken out of context)

    4. Minority reports for the IPCC
    – sounds good in theory, but how do you define “minority”?

  156. “How is it a non-sequitor to point out the article that McIntyre cites as evidence that you get a hockey stick from red noise data was A) published in a exploration geologist’s newsletter and B) showed that such a manufactured hockey stick got an MWP as warm as 20th century temps?”

    Which is exactly what Lucia did. Demonstrating that it is possible to do so, does not make on guilty of doing so. It’s like demonstrating someone is capable of murder, then accusing them of murder.

  157. Boris writes:

    How is it a non-sequitor to point out the article that McIntyre cites as evidence that you get a hockey stick from red noise data was A) published in a exploration geologist’s newsletter and B) showed that such a manufactured hockey stick got an MWP as warm as 20th century temps?

    Was McIntyre’s article printed in a sans serif font? I find them very hard on the eyes for the reading of a long article. More to the point the validity of McIntryre’s article is independent of the name of the journal in which it was printed or the typeface that was used to set it. Mendel’s article, which is the founding article of genetics and one of the most important papers in all of science, was printed in an obscure Austrian journal. It is a far more important article than any article printed in Nature or Science.

  158. JohnV (Comment#27782) December 12th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
    steven mosher:
    I’ll answer your 4 questions:
    1. Access to all the data in papers cited by the IPCC
    – fully support
    2. Access to all the source code used to produce results cited by the IPCC
    – fully support
    3. Access to all reviewer comments and all correspondence of IPCC contributors, reveiwers etc
    – I think I support reviewer comments, not sure about *all* correspondence from all contributors (there needs to be a line somewhere where frank conversations can be had without worrying about words being taken out of context)

    That’s a valid concern. What I see in the mails are some worrying conversations about preserving the appearence of Objectivity. Especially around the rule breaking to get Ammand & Wahl into chapter 6. Then later they clearly rule out other papers as being too late. Also, I think this whole page limit thing puts undue pressure on scientists. In Citing All correspondence I am in particular concerned about the actions of Mitchell head scientist of MET. He refused to turn over his comments and claimed they were personal communications. So, I guess How does one get at that issue.

    4. Minority reports for the IPCC
    – sounds good in theory, but how do you define “minority”?

    My first approach would be to compile a reviewers dissent.
    If you look at how reviewers comments are sometimes ignored
    that is probably the first place to look. But ya . Implementation is a problem. government work. sucks.

  159. Greenaway (Comment#27673) December 11th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
    Show that his motives make the math wrong.
    Show me that the math overturns all the other evidence and then we’ll talk.
    When both sides claim victory and point to the other side’s defeat, it’s hard to know who’s telling the truth. In the end, I must resort to looking at who is most trustworthy and who has inherent biases and what their motives might be.

    false in one; false in all. I got cliches too. You basically dont have to resort to picking one or the other. You can suspend judgement. Further,

    Show me you have any SKILL in divining motives and trustworthiness. My bet, PRIOR to Climategate, If I were to ask you about phil Jones and steve McIntyre you would have trusted jones.

    So, when jones told the FOIA office that the lost confidentiality agreements said “you cant release to non academics” You would have trusted jones. But, now that you’ve read the mails. Now that youve read the CRU FOIA letter of NOV 13th, which states that jones was “wrong”, Now that youve read all that, who do you trust?

    I dont trust your trustmeter. Your trustmeter is untested. Its largely untestable ( unless we have leaks) and in the case of climategate your trust meter would not have detected a a hidden decline.

    So now that youve had your trustmeter calibrated, who do you trust and why? How did you test your trustmeter. Isnt your trustmeter just your way of sneaking your bias into your decision?

  160. Boris, I don’t know anything about that citation, but M&M did do this analysis themselves (as did Jeff ID I believe, recently). Code is available, you can see if steve/ross did anything wrong in it.

  161. steven mosher (Comment#27788)
    “My bet, PRIOR to Climategate, If I were to ask you about phil Jones and steve McIntyre you would have trusted jones.”
    Being so even-handed and all, wouldn’t you want to see Steve’s emails too for the last 12 years before amending your judgment?


  162. Being so even-handed and all, wouldn’t you want to see Steve’s emails too for the last 12 years before amending your judgment?

    Me? I’m still waiting to hear Woodward and Bernstein’s WaPo office tapes before passing judgment on Richard Nixon.

  163. Nick Stokes (Comment#27718) December 12th, 2009 at 4:37 am
    oliver (Comment#27703)
    was the methodology of MBH98 correct in your assessment?
    As I said above, the non-centred normalization is irregular, and probably a mistake, although it may well make little difference. I think Mann should have acknowledged that. But otherwise I haven’t seen any error convincingly demonstrated in the mathematical processing of the proxies. More recently, people have moved on to criticising the proxies themselves, which is a separate issue. But still the refrain of the broken hockey stick lingers in the echo chamber.
    And as I said above, if Mann had really got it wrong, it would have been supplanted by a corrected version by now. But the later work pretty much agrees.

    Thanks for that honest appraisal of the de centering. Since IPCCs are likely to refer to this paper, isnt it a good idea to update it?
    Unforntuanely, the refrain to move on is loud, and no journal would publish such a correction. the idea that it would be supplanted by a corrected version is a bit naive.

    here is a question, when the SSTs are finally corrected for the dip in the post WWII era how much science will be recompiled to check if that “makes” a difference? No much I would guess.
    Anyways, I take back what I said about you never giving up a single point in debate no matter how trivial. The inventer of the method said mann was probably wrong and now you at least say it was irregular. whew. there is hope for comprimise.

  164. Nick Stoles writes:

    Being so even-handed and all, wouldn’t you want to see Steve’s emails too for the last 12 years before amending your judgment?

    Several of S.Mc’s Emails were in the collection. Those that I saw were courteous and to the point. This is not consistent with the general tone of the collection. So it would be interesting to see the Emails of SMc and other scientists and compare them to this collection. Several noted climate scientists have stated that contrary to the assertions of some these Emails do not reflect the usual way that science is done.

    The project of comparing Email corpuses would make an interesting research topic for historians and sociologists of science. One could determine how much the IPCC effort was hindered by the data hiding and backbiting found in these Emails. An accepted research result in sociology is that innovation is enable by synergy and synergy is enabled by transparency. Very little evidence of these factors is to be found in the Emails.

  165. As I said above, the non-centred normalization is irregular, and probably a mistake, although it may well make little difference.

    Jolliffe has indicated that he has no idea what the effect of this procedure would be. It has no basis for support in the statistical literature. Therefore it is a mistake . No one, and that includes authorities on PCAs, has any ida what the output of this procedure means.

  166. Nick Stokes (Comment#27794) December 12th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
    steven mosher (Comment#27788)
    “My bet, PRIOR to Climategate, If I were to ask you about phil Jones and steve McIntyre you would have trusted jones.”
    Being so even-handed and all, wouldn’t you want to see Steve’s emails too for the last 12 years before amending your judgment?

    If asked to judge between steves trustworthiness and jones PRIOR to climategate, really JUDGE, I’d say my opinion of their trustworthiness doesnt matter. What matters is this:

    Steve says he gets data from USHCN. I check, he did.
    Steve says he calculated an average. I run his R code, it does.

    I dont care if you have pictures of him with a baby goat. THATS MY POINT.

    Jones.. I try to verify but i cant. Why? Well I’m not going to motive hunt. Not here at least. But for those who do like to motive hunt, well bad news for jones.

  167. On the trust issue. around 40% of people who disbelieve in climate science do so because of a lack of trust in scientists.

    40% of which people?

    Question: where do you stand on the following:

    1. Access to all the data in papers cited by the IPCC

    All the research used to formulate policy should be subject to replication, whatever that requires. If it can’t be replicated, it shouldn’t be cited because that is a necessary part of the scientific method. If the data can’t be released because of patents and the like, use other research. The process has to be seen as being open and transparent and it has to be open and transparent for people to have any trust in its findings.

    2. Access to all the source code used to produce results cited by the IPCC

    Everything needed to replicate the research cited. I imagine it would depend on the research. If research can’t be replicated, it should be looked on as an oddity, or its conclusions seen as not strong enough to be used in a document that will be part of policy.

    3. Access to all reviewer comments and all correspondence of IPCC contributors, reveiwers etc

    I don’t know how what is important — all comments on the reports from scientists involved in reviewing the research and all the responses so that the reasons why the comments were or were not accepted or acted upon or research not included can be understood.

    4. Minority reports for the IPCC

    AFAIK, the assessment reports are supposed to include dissenting opinions. How would you determine the minority? I’m not against that, on principle. Just wonder how it would work.

  168. Show that his motives make the math wrong.
    Show me that the math overturns all the other evidence and then we’ll talk.

    His motives have nothing to do with whether his calculations are correct.

    His motives are important to understand his actions as a player in the larger historical event.

  169. false in one; false in all. I got cliches too. You basically dont have to resort to picking one or the other. You can suspend judgement.

    People have to vote on the issues. They will be asked to judge, irrespective of whether they have any reason to judge or basis for a judgment. Most people will not be able to judge the science and so when asked to do so, they will judge based on trust or “common sense” or “what my family always has done” or “because my Uncle Joe said so”, not on the merits of the case.

    Further,
    Show me you have any SKILL in divining motives and trustworthiness. My bet, PRIOR to Climategate, If I were to ask you about phil Jones and steve McIntyre you would have trusted jones.

    Of course. Who the hell is Steven McIntyre? I mean, before he got a name as the David casting stones against the climate Goliath?

    So, when jones told the FOIA office that the lost confidentiality agreements said “you cant release to non academics” You would have trusted jones. But, now that you’ve read the mails. Now that youve read the CRU FOIA letter of NOV 13th, which states that jones was “wrong”, Now that youve read all that, who do you trust?

    Who do I trust to do the science right? Scientists. I understand that some small percent of them are outright hoaxers and fudgers. I expect that in the normal course of things, such frauds are found out when people try to replicate their work and can’t.

    That is, until this whole arena became politicized. Now I plug my nose and look at the mess for as long as I can tolerate it. Once it has been politicized, it becomes difficult to trust anyone, scientist or skeptic alike.

    While it’s very interesting, and while I love a good bit of political intrigue involving dark secrets, conspiracies, code, threats to life and limb, money and reputation, that it’s happening in climate science and not in a Dan Brown thriller makes me grumpy. 🙁

  170. I am not sure we do know this.

    Who is “we”?

    The scientists doing the research seem to think they understand the evidence as showing this happened.

    What we know is that, other things being unchanged, doubling CO2 will raise temperatures by 1C over time. What we do not know is how the rest of the climate will respond to this initial warming. It could amplify it, or it could damp it. I don’t think we have any well established idea which it does.

    Not what I’ve read. I’ve read that it’s more like 1 – 3C, and with feedbacks like water vapor and albedo effects, between 3 – 6C.

    The argument about the 800 year lag is often made and often ridiculed. I have never understood this ridicule. It is clear that if A happens after B, A cannot cause B.

    I’m not a scientist but from what I have read it seems that your A and B cause and effect logic is missing a few steps.

    From what I have read (admittedly sketchy) is this:

    Orbital forcing -> warming of oceans
    Warming of oceans -> release of CO2
    Release of CO2 -> enhanced GHE
    Enhanced GHE -> more warming of oceans and more release of CO2, and enhanced GHE, eventually atmosphere and melting of ice and permafrost and loss of albedo and release of methane and more moisture and greater water vapor and enhanced GHE, etc. until a new equilibrium is reached based on the new orbital orientation.

    Reverse when orbital forcing re-emerges as a factor to upset the equilibrium.

    Extremely crude, but the A follows B and so can’t cause A isn’t necessarily so. CO2 can be both a feedback and a forcer from what I have read.

  171. RE:Carrick (Comment#27532) it is not that I’m trying to promote guilt but rather use a more accurate acounting method. We are not responsiblefor other countries poor manufacturing process but just as we might try to by Fairtrade goods or non-rainforest timber if we account CO2 output accurately then we can make personal decisions that truely effect CO2 output. IMO territorial CO2 calcs were used at Kyoto as a scam by the EU nations so they could look good but do nothing. However like all the climate stuff accurate data is needed not politically motivated accounting.

  172. Andrew23, the problem with your accounting system is that there is no direct linkage between the method used by China to manufacture a good for sale in the US and the amount of CO2 they produce in that manufacturing.

    It may be more accurate in one sense, but it is not a method is useful in any economic sense. It isn’t a very good idea to make the US responsible for Chinese inefficiencies in production. The people who act (in this case produce) need to be responsible for their own actions, and not the people on whose behalf they act.

  173. Carrick,
    There is an old greenie saying “think globally, act locally”. I suppose I feel that if we accept the idea (and I do to a large extent) that more developed nations (mdn) have less emitting production methods than the less developed nations (ldn) and we want the ldn to change to less emitting ways as if they don’t that is where the biggest amount of CO2 will be emitted in the future then we in the mdn need to send a market signal to the ldn. Sure we can try and bully them or buy them with aid but I’m not sure these tactics work too well. A proper accounting will allows us as consumers to “think globally, act locally”.

  174. Greenaway:

    Not what I’ve read. I’ve read that it’s more like 1 – 3C, and with feedbacks like water vapor and albedo effects, between 3 – 6C.

    What I see quoted is, if you don’t include the feedbacks, it’s 1-1.5C. With feedbacks, the range is 1.5 to 6 C (95% CL). These models don’t properly include albedo effects from clouds, and until they do, I don’t think the feedback numbers can be taken very seriously. And the most likely effect of the increased humidity assumed by the models (assumed because they don’t actually model the atmospheric boundary layer), is greater cloud formation. Water vapor isn’t well mixed, so in my opinion, the most likely effect is more low-level, higher albedo (and hence cooling) clouds, not high level warming ones.

    Increasing the albedo from clouds is on the same order as water vapor feedback from CO2, and including one term of a higher order without including all of them, doesn’t improve the order of accuracy of the result.

    The argument for e.g. 6 C/doubling (which probably btw is already well outside the range than can explain the observed warming from 1980-current) must be viewed strictly as a heuristic argument for why water vapor feedback is important. Models that are better represent the instrumental observations have climate sensitivities less than 3C/doubling. They get it wrong, in my opinion, because they aren’t modeling all of the relevant physics, but they are suggestive of what one would expect if one were to properly include all of the relevant feedbacks (water vapor, clouds, boundary layer physics, biosphere, have I missed any?).

  175. Andrew23, I see your point, but I think you need to think this through a bit more carefully

    Consumers are going to continue to act in their own best interests, that is a truism of a consumer based economy. They will continue to buy from Walmart as long as Walmart can sell for less, Walmart will continue to buy from China as long as China can provide them goods and services for less.

    If you want a government-side solution, you need to address how you modify this cycle without e.g. an international trade war. If you want a consumer side solution, you need to be realistic about the limits of “educating the populace” to act (as you see it, but not everybody) more morally.

    It’s simple when you declare war on another country. Everybody understands that buying the enemy’s goods and services is undercutting your own interests. This isn’t going to be a battle that gets won just by everybody agreeing that “CO2 is bad, ‘mkay!?”j

    Likely, by the time the case is clear enough (assuming again that the worst case fears ever get realized), we’re into mitigating effects of increased CO2 emissions rather than preventing that build up.

  176. Nick Stokes,

    “steven mosher (Comment#27788)
    “My bet, PRIOR to Climategate, If I were to ask you about phil Jones and steve McIntyre you would have trusted jones.”
    Being so even-handed and all, wouldn’t you want to see Steve’s emails too for the last 12 years before amending your judgment?”

    If his emails were filtered the same as the CRU ones, HELL YES I would like to see them published!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Unfortunately for you, even if there were any dirty laundry to be had in them, that still would not mean any of his analysis of the broken hockey sticks are invalid!!!

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

  177. Greenaway,

    The ‘we’ is the same in my reply as the ‘we’ in your original post. It means us, the general public. Its a colloquial way of saying what has been established. The exchange went:

    You: So we know CO2 can act as a climate forcer as well as a feedback.

    Me: I am not sure we do know this.

    The answer to your point about the 800 year lag is simple. Causes cannot follow effects. It really does not matter, for this purpose, what caused the rise in CO2. If you are going to show that CO2 caused rises in temperature, you are going to have to show that the CO2 rose, and then the temps rose afterwards. This is not what happened.

    If you want to show that falling CO2 causes temperature drops, you are also going to have to show that the CO2 levels fell, and the temps fell after that. You cannot show this either.

    The two by the way are independent. Even if you could show that the temp rises were caused by CO2, it would not logically follow that this means we know that dropping CO2 would lower them.

    On the question of how much effect CO2 doubling has, absent feedbacks, no, you are definitely mistaken about this. The generally accepted number in the AGW movement is 1.2C. This is, unlike much else in the hypothesis, simple physics, as is the logarithmic nature of the effect. Read Raypierre Humbert’s book for a very good account, where you will also find material comparing Earth and Venus. We are not going to turn into Venus.

  179. The answer to your point about the 800 year lag is simple. Causes cannot follow effects. It really does not matter, for this purpose, what caused the rise in CO2. If you are going to show that CO2 caused rises in temperature, you are going to have to show that the CO2 rose, and then the temps rose afterwards. This is not what happened.

    This is far too simplistic and I wonder if you simply refuse to accept that CO2 is a GHG or whether you don’t understand that it is – or whether you are taking cues from Steven Mosher and are baiting. 🙂

    But I’ll play either way.

    CO2 is a GHG, and a change in its concentration in the atmosphere affects temperature.

    CO2 is also absorbed and released by the oceans dependent on their temperature and saturation.

    Both of those can be true at the same time.

    What part of that very simplistic relationship do you dispute?

    I have seen debates about the degree to which CO2 acts to affect temperature, but these appear to me to be pretty well proven “facts” and the only people disputing them are recalcitrant deniers.

  180. then we in the mdn need to send a market signal to the ldn.

    A bit hypocritical, aren’t we?
    The market signal to the ldn has already been sent in that the producers originating from the mdn transferred their production to the ldn, because of relaxed standards of environmental protection and much cheaper workforce.
    I remember the beginning of nineties, when the clothes production and other jobs in need of accurate cheap hands were transferred to the countries of the former Eastern bloc.
    However, even these are apparently too expensive now, so the items do not bear “Made in Byelarus” tags anymore, but anything from Mauretania to Philippines.

  181. michel –

    I have enjoyed reading your comments on this post. Your general approach is very much the same as mine – so it must be right!

    May I just make a small point about cause and effect. Of course, it is repugnant to think that the future can affect the past and normally the production of the birth certificates would be sufficient to rule out one thing being the cause of another.

    However when feedback is involved the matter is not so clear. Inputs are modified by the presence of fed back outputs that in turn modify the output which then modifies the input. In this case, the chicken and egg problem is acute. The solution is to simply derive the equations that give the relationship between input and output and not ask questions about how much of the output is caused by the output.

    The classic case in electronics is when a sine wave oscillator is built by feeding the output of an amplifier back to the input with a suitable phase delay. It will drive you mad if you ask whether the sine wave at the output is caused by the sinewave at the input which would not be there if the output was not there to provide the input!

    Sometimes asking about cause and effect is to ask the wrong question. 🙂

  182. Greenaway, of course I think CO2 is a GHG! At least in this sense, that a doubling of it in the atmosphere will impart a warming forcing of about 1C. What I do not know is whether warming forcings of 1C from this or any other source will be amplified by the climate system to yield a final warming of several degrees more. Or whether maybe they will be damped to lead to a warming of nothing, or perhaps greater than zero but less than 1C. I do not think this has been established beyond reasonable doubt. Not even probable cause.

    Whereas the claim that CO2 doubling will deliver an intial warming forcing which would result in a 1C rise if nothing else happens, is indubitable and the evidence for it is the absorption spectrum of the gas. Other things do happen, that is the problem. Lots of them.

    Yes, Jorge is right, systems in feedback are more complicated than that. But I don’t see that, even given that, when you take account of the lack of real evidence about the nature and strength and even the direction of climate feedback, that there is any reason to say that CO2 played any important role in paleo warming episodes. What is certain is, it did not start them. Did it contribute later, and if so how much did it contribute? It remains to be proved.

  183. Michel,

    What physical mechanism would you propose to account for the variation in climate between glacial and interglacial without the involvement of positive feedbacks, including GHGs?

  184. Was McIntyre’s article printed in a sans serif font? I find them very hard on the eyes for the reading of a long article. More to the point the validity of McIntryre’s article is independent of the name of the journal in which it was printed or the typeface that was used to set it. Mendel’s article, which is the founding article of genetics and one of the most important papers in all of science, was printed in an obscure Austrian journal. It is a far more important article than any article printed in Nature or Science.

    You still misunderstand. The place of publication only shows that McIntyre is a hypocrite for demanding canonical stats publications in climate science whilst citing a NEWSLETTER in his own work.

    And even if the NEWSLETTER article is correct, it shows the method MAGNIFIES the MWP. In the newsletter article, all simulated temps before 1100 are above the 1961-1990 mean.

    Do you think that the original hockeystick magnified the MWP?

  185. At least in this sense, that a doubling of it in the atmosphere will impart a warming forcing of about 1C. What I do not know is whether warming forcings of 1C from this or any other source will be amplified by the climate system to yield a final warming of several degrees more. Or whether maybe they will be damped to lead to a warming of nothing, or perhaps greater than zero but less than 1C. I do not think this has been established beyond reasonable doubt. Not even probable cause.

    Why 1C? Is that just a number you are happy to accept or is there a greater scientific basis for it as opposed to the 2C-6C described in Pierrehumbert – your own source. (Not rhetorical, please answer) While feedbacks are not proven beyond a reasonable doubt, this is not a court of law. The range is 2-6C, and 2C is about as much variation globally as it appears we have seen in a long time, caveats about uncertainty in the paleoclimate record acknowledged. And since feedback issues are not settled beyond a reasonable doubt, I think this in itself should lead one to be cautious, but you are sanguine about doubling. I don’t understand this.

  186. What is certain is, it did not start them. Did it contribute later, and if so how much did it contribute? It remains to be proved.

    It did not start the glaciation cycles, yes, but it amplified them and from what I have read, we cannot explain the extent of glaciation/deglaciation without reference to the global carbon cycle and GHG and the GHE.

    And as the PETM and ETM2 show, the relationship between CO2 and temperature due to its status as a GHG and part in the GHE are necessary to explain them.

    Yes, there are still uncertainties, but I’m not so sure they can be “proved” in the sense you mean, but we can provide further evidence that supports the theory.

  187. Boris, I think that Steve’s point was that people would make far less statistical errors if they referred to statistical authorities rather than making up their own forms of principal components algebra, or other Team methods. Again, steve could cite the bible in his paper, but as long as what he actually did to produce his results is correct, it is only tangential. Did he make any mistakes in implementing his red-noise test of the MBH98 formulas? I don’t think he did, wouldn’t somebody have found it by now? If you don’t trust that appeal to others, you can look for a mistake yourself.

  188. WRT to Jones trustworthiness as a scientist.

    I think one thing that people may miss in all this is Jones personal interest in all of this. And personal interest can trump corporate interest. ( its called quitting and in some cases getting fired and also called whistleblowing). I wonder how long pons and flieschman hung onto the cold fusion thing? In fact an individual who “can’t be bought” is probably more dangerous than a shill. Pride ego powerful stuff. I’m not talking about something as obviously as “I’ve got 25 years invested in this work” I’m talkng about the 1960-90 reference period. There is a reason why he wont change it. That reason goes to one of the differences between his method and Hansens. It impacts uncertainty. Once I read it in the mails I was like “oh” this is a question one should debate in public and not hide merely because sceptics might get unhinged. And no it wont change the truth of radiative physics.
    So you C02 nuts can relax.

  189. Carl,
    Lety me turn those questions around on you. If it is clear thatr andom series of red noise produce a hockey stick like MBH, then why not publish those in a stats journal?

    Also, not please that the citation Steve MC used shows that the MBH method AMPLIFIES the MWP, which is clearly not visible in the MBH 98 recon.

  190. No, the 1C is not just something that I made up. And no, Ray Pierrehumbert definitely does not say that the forcing effect of CO2 is 2-6C for a doubling, without water vapor feedback. Think, think! Suppose it were? What would it be WITH watervapor feedback? We’d be heading for 20C from a doubling. We would be frying eggs in the Northern Hemisphere right now on the pavement. I wish! The number of 2-6C is WITH water vapor feedback. This is to use an expression, 100 year old physics, it goes back to Aarhenius, except he got the original number wrong and overstated. This has been known for 100 years.

    So why is it such a problem? What is supposed to happen is this. The air warms. Why it warms is not important. As it warms, it holds more water vapor. Water vapor is a serious wide spectrum GHG. I am a little surprised that so far, the EPA has not declared it a pollutant, but maybe they are just getting around to it. Anyway, the theory is that the warming, which could be from anything, it doesn’t have to be from CO2, it could be from enough of us jumping up and down, or wobbles in orbits, or whatever, this warming causes there to be more water vapor, and then this acts as a GHG, and this is what amplifies the original warming.

    So the essence of the argument is, CO2 by itself and with no feedbacks would produce a warming of 1, maybe 1.2C for a doubling. But there are feedbacks, from water vapor, and this doubles or quadruples or more that initial warming.

    The dangerous thing, according to this argument, is that the climate is unstable and near tipping points, and that any warming, from whatever cause, has the potential for getting amplified.

    If you think this is wrong, find some card carrying member of the AGW fraternity who says someplace that CO2 doubling absent feedbacks is different than what I say.

    Its a funny thing about dedicated warmers, they do not seem to understand their own theory! I have been excoriated many times for just stating, as here, what the theory actually is. i’m not even, at the moment, saying its wrong, just saying what it is.

  191. the essence of the argument is, CO2 by itself and with no feedbacks would produce a warming of 1, maybe 1.2C for a doubling. But there are feedbacks, from water vapor, and this doubles or quadruples or more that initial warming.

    The impact of WV feedback net of the attendant change in lapse rate is c.+50%. Thus the 1.2C CO2 only goes to c.1.9C including WV, lapse rate and surface albedo change. The higher estimates above that depend upon presumed positive cloud feedbacks.

  192. Michel, I stand corrected. I was referencing was what Pierrehumbert claimed for equilibrium from doubling CO2.

    Typical predictions of equilibrium global average warming for a doubling of CO2 range from a low of around 2C to a high of around 6C, with some potential for even greater warming with a low (but presently unquantifiable) probability.

    From Pierrehumbert’s text, page 66.

    Regardless, while I understand the importance of determining what the effect of doubling CO2 will be without feedbacks, it seems rather short sighted to shrug and say it’s of little concern, this mere 1C (0r 1.2)…

    Yes, I realize we can’t claim we know with 100% certainty how water vapor or albedo effects will act as feedbacks, but we do know that releasing additional CO2 into the atmosphere, whether due to changes in orbital forcing in deglaciation, or through some other mechanism such as that in the PETM, once increased, CO2 warming then results in further feedbacks kicking in. So to disregard or downplay the importance of these other sources of amplification seems rather ill-advised.

  193. Its a funny thing about dedicated warmers, they do not seem to understand their own theory! I have been excoriated many times for just stating, as here, what the theory actually is. i’m not even, at the moment, saying its wrong, just saying what it is.

    I never claimed to understand the theory. 😀

  194. Boris, your response is ignoring what I’ve said. To reiterate, regardless of what Steve cited, he did not do anything incorrectly in his test of MBH98. You are mocking the citation instead of conceding that Steve’s method was correct and showed that MBH was flawed.

  195. “Carl Gullans (Comment#27862) December 13th, 2009 at 4:17 pm

    Boris, your response is ignoring what I’ve said. To reiterate, regardless of what Steve cited, he did not do anything incorrectly in his test of MBH98. You are mocking the citation instead of conceding that Steve’s method was correct and showed that MBH was flawed”

    You are falling for Steve’s masterpiece of framing. All science is flawed, especially that at the bleeding edge of research. It never arrives at the complete answer, otherwise why are we doing research? Despite being flawed, it was substantially correct. Subesequent research not using trees confirms it. McIntyre turns a flaw into a disaster of unparalleled magnitude and indirect accusations of fraud. Read the NAS assesment of the paper and McIntyres input. Just one more beat up.

  196. “Its a funny thing about dedicated warmers, they do not seem to understand their own theory! I have been excoriated many times for just stating, as here, what the theory actually is. i’m not even, at the moment, saying its wrong, just saying what it is.”

    It is a highly complex area of science, crossing many skill sets. I don’t understand it all. That’s just the situation we are given to deal with. As interested lay people, there will always be much we don’t understand.

  197. WRT to Jones trustworthiness as a scientist.
    I think one thing that people may miss in all this is Jones personal interest in all of this… In fact an individual who “can’t be bought” is probably more dangerous than a shill. Pride ego powerful stuff. I’m not talking about something as obviously as “I’ve got 25 years invested in this work” I’m talkng about the 1960-90 reference period. There is a reason why he wont change it. That reason goes to one of the differences between his method and Hansens. It impacts uncertainty.

    Shills will only parrot the lines given them from their masters as long as the $$ or rewards flow to them. Once the spigot is turned off, they can turn on the master, and often do. Largely because another master might pay them more to spill. 😀 They’re aren’t trustworthy and are mercenary, offering their shill services to the highest bidder. Pretty straight-forward.

    Non-shills (or “self shills”, those who promote themselves and their causes for the benefits doing so provides them) come in two varieties (at least) – the first are those who are innocent of fraud but perhaps guilty of ivory-tower insularity — or keeping really bad records. 🙂 They might think the outsiders demanding access to their data / code are not fit to touch it, have no business trying, and will generally create more confusion than clarity.

    They might also be damn well embarrassed at the sorry state of their data / code. This type of self-shill will protect their reputation and life’s work with vigor. They are very strongly invested in it and won’t give up without a fight if they feel under attack and might reveal their shoddy — but correct — work.

    The other group — probably very small in number –may be actually consciously hiding something of significance. They will also likely defend their reputation or life’s work against revelations that their work may be overstating the data or just plain wrong. They may know it and fear being revealed as a bad scientist.

    I don’t know enough about the issue to draw any conclusions as to which Jones is. Reading through Harry, one gets the strong sense that were the data mine, I would be horrified to have someone on the outside with an agenda poking through it, looking for holes and errors. Even if those holes and errors amount to nothing significant in the long run, it would be embarrassing and damaging to have your work held up as a mess in public.

    However, if a scientist has such little faith in the integrity of the data and code that they are willing to subvert the FOI process or refuse to allow access to data that would allow others to replicate their work, they are in fact harming themselves and the field more than if a few minor errors or sloppy records were revealed.

    At first glance, Climategate and the emails make the scientists in question look worse than if they released the code and were found to be just plain sloppy bookkeepers or made a few errors. Unless and until we have a thorough accounting of the data and code and actions on the part of the principals in the saga, it is not possible to know for certain what is or isn’t significant.

    I do want to know the truth.

  198. bugs, you make the error of assuming that subsequent work which “confirms it” (MBH98) wasn’t equally flawed. It appears that pretty much all of the reconstructions after that point all contain fatal flaws, as McIntyre and others have made equally valid criticisms of them. E.g. MBH08 simply correlation screens proxies; anything that goes up in 20th century is selected, everything else discarded. Other studies use the same bristlecones, or they use Yamal which has recently come into question as being a valid proxy. There are no reconstructions I know of that do not use Yamal, Bristlecones, or which do not have statistical errors. So I reject your premise that anything else has confirmed MBH98.

  199. Steven Mosher,

    Can you believe this person Greenaway??

    “… CO2 can be both a feedback and a forcer from what I have read.”

    I guess you can lead a student to information, but, you CAN’T MAKE THEM UNDERSTAND!!!!

  200. Greenaway,

    “Shills will only parrot the lines given them from their masters as long as the $$ or rewards flow to them.”

    So what are you getting???

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

  201. kuhnkat (Comment#27874) December 13th, 2009 at 8:17 pm

    Steven Mosher,

    Can you believe this person Greenaway??

    “… CO2 can be both a feedback and a forcer from what I have read.”

    I guess you can lead a student to information, but, you CAN’T MAKE THEM UNDERSTAND!!!!”

    It can be, it’s not that hard to comprehend.

    Oceans absorb CO2, the warmer they are, the less they hold. If a cold ocean starts to warm due to the Milankovich cycles, it releases CO2. This CO2 is a GHG, which causes more warming. CO2 as a feedback.

    The level of CO2 is stable, the ocean temperatures are relatively stable. The amount of CO2 is doubled in the atmosphere. CO2 is a GHG, it causes warming. CO2 is acting as a forcing.

  203. … CO2 can be both a feedback and a forcer from what I have read.

    It would be a parametric forcing in this case, but, yeah this is basically correct.

    Don’t oversell the 800-year lag, from what I’ve read it’s a lot more variable than that, and then lag can even be negative in some cases (e.g., CO2 leads temperature).

  204. For you guys that wonder how to do block quotes, they look like this:

    <blockquote>quoted text</blockquote>

    Apologies if I’ve insulted anybody’s intelligence, just thought I’d throw this out.

  205. “Boris, your response is ignoring what I’ve said. To reiterate, regardless of what Steve cited, he did not do anything incorrectly in his test of MBH98. You are mocking the citation instead of conceding that Steve’s method was correct and showed that MBH was flawed.”

    I never claimed McIntyre did anything incorrectly. I’m commenting on his strange citation, which seems to claim that the MBH method should enhance the MWP. Why is he even making this claim if he has proved the hockey stick false? Are you saying he cited something that is irrelevant? I’m not talking abstractions here: I am discussing a claim that McIntyre makes and the “literature” that supports that claim.

    BTW, my car is flawed, but it got me home today.

  206. MBH08 simply correlation screens proxies; anything that goes up in 20th century is selected, everything else discarded.

    Am I missing something?

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but when looking for temperature proxies, isn’t the idea to look for those that do correlate with the instrumental temperature record? i.e. those that correlate with the 20th C rise in temperature?

    Wouldn’t you actively select those proxies that do correlate with the instrumental temperature record?

    If a proxy does not show a response to temperature, why would you use it to reconstruct temperature?

  207. Apologies if I’ve insulted anybody’s intelligence, just thought I’d throw this out.

    Thanks!

  208. Greenaway:

    I have read most of your comments, and have concluded that your investigations are proceeding with a healthy, scientific skeptical attitude. The fact that you are not ready to overturn the hypothesis, of CO2 Man induced warming, is healthy. Maintain a skeptic profile and I am sure you are on your way to many discoveries. My impression is you are getting close to overturning AGW, by yourself.

    Personally, I am skeptical of the catastrophic component of GW. It matters not to me if GW is natural or not. A slowly warming world, with increasing CO2 degassing from the oceans, with increasing bio-available moisture, is exactly what a growing population… must have. You need to start at the primary question. What is the optimum climate for the world’s biomass. GK

  210. steven mosher (Comment#27843)
    I’m talkng about the 1960-90 reference period. There is a reason why he wont change it.

    There’s only one reason, and it’s a good one. It would be a pointless nuisance. It’s like, should the US change from F to C. There’s nothing wrong with F, and the change would be a big nuisance. In that case, there is a reason – ROW uses C. But 1961-90 doesn’t have a widely used competitor yet.

  211. My impression is you are getting close to overturning AGW, by yourself.

    Overturning AGW by myself? Sounds like some form of Sisyphean torture…

    FYI, I have no interest in overturning AGW or proving it. Well, that’s a lie — I would love to find out it’s all a dream, a hoax, the imaginings of some scientists out for grant money. I have children and I don’t want to see them inherit a world with a future that is so threatening.

    I want to know whether AGW has merit or not in my own mind so that I am not doing what I have bemoaned — being forced to trust some group rather than my own mental process for my opinions. I’ve already said I feel that there are many lines of research and evidence that suggest AGW is valid, but enough doubts have been raised by some of the criticisms I’ve read that I feel compelled to examine the claims and counter-claims and do review the research myself.

    I’ve been reading at both warmer and skeptical blogs in order to let the “clash of ideas” stimulate my thinking and help clarify my thoughts.

  212. Greenaway (Comment#27888):9:42 pm

    Overturning depends on the evidence uncovered, not on what you want.

    Everything you have said is “valid”. Now you must find out if it is sound. GK

  213. Ok boris, like I said I have not looked at the citation, but he may well have cited something irrelevant or flawed. Or maybe not (again I didn’t look at it). I just fail to see why that is even being mentioned if Steve didn’t do anything wrong… not that you can’t mention the citation, but generally people have some kind of point they are trying to make when they argue about something. You started talking about this in response to a comment about Mann’s method creating hockey sticks, and the conversation appears to be irrelevant to that. Why is the claim “steve Mcintyre broke the hockey stick” always mocked when it is almost obviously true?

  214. “generally people have some kind of point they are trying to make when they argue about something.”

    Leet me break it down for you:

    Skeptic claim:

    Mann’s method creates hockey sticks out of random data.

    Skeptic’s conclusion:

    therefore Mann’s reconstruction is simply an artifact of the method used and does not represent temperatures.

    As I’ve stated, the hockey stick created from random red noise does not resemble the hockey stick in MBH. And, if the method had any effect on the final reconstruction it would be to overestimate the MWP and underestimate the LIA. That’s exactly the opposite of what skeptics claim Mann has done. So either the MWP was colder than today or this particular “flaw” in Mann’s analysis had no observable effect on the reconstruction.

    Mann’s gold plated jaguar is dragging its muffler, but still gets him home.

  215. Boris–

    As I’ve stated, the hockey stick created from random red noise does not resemble the hockey stick in MBH. And, if the method had any effect on the final reconstruction it would be to overestimate the MWP and underestimate the LIA.

    Why do you think this? The effect of filtering for correlation with the behavior in the thermometer record is mostly to flatten the pre-historical reconstruction and match the thermometer record.

    Specific things you will see:
    * make the period during the thermometer record match the thermometer record. For the earth’s recent theory, this created a “blade” out of noise. (This is because you forced with a correlation.)
    * a “revert to the mean” behavior just prior to the thermometer record. (This happens because the “noise” ending with sharp uptrends often rose from “cold” periods.)
    * warm periods prior to the thermometer record will appear cooler than they were. (This happens because they were averaged with noise.)
    * cool periods prior to the thermometer records will seem warmer than they were. (This happens because they were averaged with noise.)

    The extent to which this would happen is inversely proportional to the Signal to Noise. So, if tree-nometers are noisy but contain some signal, and you use enough of them, you will get a history that qualitatively resembles the the true history, but it will be much flatter and the “blade” will look dramatic compared to the reconstruction.

    So, if the LIA was cool and the MWP was warm, the method of picking proxies by correlation with the current thermometer record would do precisely the opposite of what you claim. This is math. You can’t get around it.

  216. Boris imagines:
    “Skeptic claim:
    Mann’s method creates hockey sticks out of random data.”
    .
    Wrong.
    Skeptic claim:
    Mann’s method exaggerates hockey sticks by drawing from red noisy (low signal) data.
    .
    But why the straw man? [Rhetorical Q.]

  217. bender,
    .
    “Boris imagines:
    “Skeptic claim:
    Mann’s method creates hockey sticks out of random data.”
    .
    Wrong.
    Skeptic claim:
    Mann’s method exaggerates hockey sticks by drawing from red noisy (low signal) data.”
    .
    Steven McIntyre says,
    .
    “We showed that the PCA method as used by Mann et al. effectively mines a data set for hockey stick patterns. Even from meaningless random data (red noise), it nearly always produces a hockey stick.”
    .
    This quote is from here:
    .
    http://climateaudit.org/2005/01/27/new-research-published-on-mbh98/
    .
    Please show me where Steve changed his mind or was wrong.
    .
    If you were trying to get across the idea that the actual Hockeystick that Mann published was ENHANCED rather than CREATED by the data mining technique, I would agree.
    .

  218. Greenaway
    You are missing the point. Lots of things correlate with temperature in the 20th century, some of them just by chance. I seem to recall McIntyre got quite a good correlation with stock prices. Unless you have some good physical reason, preferably independently demonstrated, for expecting correlation you have no guarantee that the relationship between temperature and your proxy will hold up in earlier centuries. Your correlation ,might be spurious in the technical sense used in the econometric literature – for example David Hendry in his inaugural lecture at LSE found that there was a higher correlation between cumulative rainfall and the UK price level than there was between cumulative money supply and the price level. Do you suggest we should use the UK price level as a proxy for rainfall?

  219. I noticed some whining about the Bristlecones also,
    .
    From the same link above:
    .
    “We survey specialist literature on bristlecone pines and show that the original authors of the sites that dominate the MBH98 PC1 stated clearly that the 20th century growth pulse was not due to temperature. Even Mann’s co-author, Hughes, has stated in print that the bristlecone pine growth pulse is a “mystery”.”
    .
    If you want the dirty details of the above statements use the search feature at CA or just YAHOO it.
    .
    It should be kept in mind that Steve M. was acting as the KEEPER OF THE FLAME for paleo studies when he embarked on this mission. He was protecting the decades if not centuries of accepted scientific work that MANN and Team with MBH98 was attempting to overturn.
    .
    It would appear at this point that he was, and is, doing the right thing regardless of ulterior motives he may or may not have!!
    .
    It would appear that many were willing to accept this gift horse without checking its teeth because it was a much needed support for a flimsy hypothesis!!!
    .

  220. “Why do you think this?”

    Look at the recon in question:

    http://landshape.org/enm/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/AIGNews_Mar06%2014.pdf

    Stockwell’s reconstruction, looks nothing like the MBH hockey stick. There is a huge LIA, then temperatures slowly climb until they are well above the average for the calibration period, and even above the average for 1961-1990 (the zero line on the plot) for the first 100 years of the reconstruction.

    This is the citation that McIntyre decided to use in his response to Mann in Nature. I’m not sure what he thinks it is supposed to show. It looks nothing like what Mann got. And if any of the effects of the method contributed to the recon, they would be pulling up MWP temps and pushing down LIA temps.

    In fact, if you read Stockwell’s conclusion, what he seems to say is that reconstructions showing an MWP and LIA can be created from random noise. He does not conclude that you can get a flat handle (like MBH). Perhaps his criticism is more valid for Moberg? Probably not the political spin that is wanted, however.

    This all assumes that Stockwell is right. I trust that McIntyre audited the paper before citing it.

  221. “But why the straw man? [Rhetorical Q.]”

    Don’t call kuhnkat a straw man!

    “I am so depressed that you did not mention that Mann’s math (I refuse to call it stats) managed to create hockey sticks out of noise.”

  222. Boris–
    Interesting clarification. So, it appears, you use “over estimate” to mean “make smaller in magnitude” and “underestimate” to mean “make larger in magnitude”? That’s not the dictionary definition . . . (But I know… you’ll complain this is just semantics. You get to be the Red Queen, right?)

  223. lucia:
    Boris’ comments are not entirely clear, but this is how I read them:

    According to Stockwell, Mann’s method leads to a warm MWP, cold LIA, and warm present-day. That is, the method over-estimates the temperature of the MWP and under-estimates the temperature of the LIA.

    His comments seem consistent to me. If they seem inconsistent to you, maybe you should ask for clarification rather than mocking.

  224. Boris, JOhn v

    From Stockwell’s conclusion “the ’hockey-stick’ pattern is easily produced by selecting those random series that correlate over the period of the calibration temperatures (producing the blade) and
    revert to randomness elsewhere (producing the handle).”

    Reverting to randomness means on average flat I think. You can also look at the extensive series of post of the Air Vent at

    http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/hockey-stick-posts/

  225. You are missing the point. Lots of things correlate with temperature in the 20th century, some of them just by chance. I seem to recall McIntyre got quite a good correlation with stock prices. Unless you have some good physical reason, preferably independently demonstrated, for expecting correlation you have no guarantee that the relationship between temperature and your proxy will hold up in earlier centuries.

    I thought there was a pretty well established relationship between environmental and climate variables like temperature, moisture and insolation with tree growth, including ring density and width. I thought it was more than just “correlation” but that there are actual physical relationships that can be quantified between these variables and growth patterns . Now, I did study botany ages ago and all that, so perhaps I am wrong in this.

    This is quite different than claiming that there is a correlation between the stock market and tree ring width. There is no theory nor any physical relationship that can be observed to account for any correlation. Just because you can find spurious correlations doesn’t negate actual ones with demonstrable physical relationships between variables.

  226. I should clarify that I’m not vouching for Stockwell or Boris or McIntyre or anybody else. I’m just trying to stop a game of semantics between Boris and lucia. I read Boris’ comments as saying the same thing. Whether they are right or wrong is a different question.

  227. Greeaway
    So we can predict which trees will only correlate with temperature? Because that’s what we need for reconstruction of temperatures. If tree ring growth is a complicated non-linear function of many variables the reconstruction equations have multiple solutions. Just take the simple case where tree ring growth is a non-linear function of temperature and only temperature e.g. a simple quadratic form. For any given tree ring growth there will be two temperatures it could indicate.

  228. JohnV–
    What Boris says is incorrect even if we interpret over or underestimate your way. Here are the two images:

    David's iage

    HockeyStick

    The “method” imposes the sort of false shape I described above. If you go back far enough in time, and use enough proxies, it will give a straight non-wiggly blade. To the extent that proxies contain noise, this is averaged in with the signal. That means: It straightens the pre-thermometer shape, except for the temperature dip that happens immediately prior to the upturned blade. That “dip” is not coincident with the bottom of the period we call the LIA. In fact, in that “filtered red noise proxie” , the LIA is warmer than the 1800s.

    If the real, true on earth, MWP was warmer than average, including the red noise reduces it’s temperature by averaging in values near zero. So, you can’t call it “over estimating” either in the sense of raising the temperatur or increasing the magnitude of the excursion.

    If the LIA was colder, than the 1800’s the method makes it appear warmer that the 1800 (though colder than the present.)

    So, no matter how Boris may have defined “over or under estimate”, what he said doesn’t seem to make any sense.

  229. Greenaway: Now you are getting to the crux of it. Besides the erroneous statistical processes used, various reconstructions were still wildly incorrect because of the tree ring data. It is physical theory, and common knowledge (amongst botanists anyway), that shows why the sampled bristlecone pines are not temperature proxies. Graybill, who collected most of these cores, was purposely sampling a large number of live trees that had their bark stripped off. When a tree has it’s bark stripped off, it experiences an enormous growth surge to repair the damage (or for other reasons, but the surge occurs). It is these trees, with six sigma growth pulses out of nowhere, that Mann and others have attempted to use in reconstructing past temperatures… with this surge correlating with upward temperature movements in the 20th century, and with the rest of the tree ring series going nowhere relative to the huge growth pulse, you get a hockey stick.

  230. So we can predict which trees will only correlate with temperature? Because that’s what we need for reconstruction of temperatures.

    From what I’ve read, which is admittedly only scratching the surface, you look for (or use) trees in locations where temperature is the limiting factor to their growth. Temperature may not be the only factor affecting growth, but it may be the major factor.

    I’m sure that there are quite vigorous debates within the science over methods and findings etc. as there are in all sciences. I take it that you pretty much reject the science of dendrochronology and dendroclimatology. Please outline the reasons why.

    To reject an entire discipline seems quite like — I don’t know — hubris.

  231. lucia:
    Excellent. We dodged a semantic bullet and got back to the actual point. Now you and Boris can fight it out without confusion. 🙂
    .
    The Stockwell article seems to start with the assumption that tree ring widths are basically random red noise. I say that because his first step was to “substitute the treering index with 1000 sequences of 2000 random numbers containing red noise generated with a multiple time scale fluctuation approach”.
    .
    If I understand correctly, he’s saying that if the correlation between tree-ring widths and instrumental temperatures is spurious, and if tree-ring widths are actually just random red noise, then Mann’s method will generate a graph like your first image above.
    .
    The devil is in the “ifs”.
    .
    I think the point Boris is trying to make is that Stockwell did not create the flat hockey stick handle from MBH98. He created a “tilted hockey stick” with warmth c1000 and a brief cold period c1850.

  232. JohnV–

    I think the point Boris is trying to make is that Stockwell did not create the flat hockey stick handle from MBH98. He created a �tilted hockey stick� with warmth c1000 and a brief cold period c1850.

    If so, boris was both a) unclear and b) wrong. So, to avoid insisting he is even more wrong than he already was, let’s assume he didn’t mean something he didn’t say.

    Stockwell shows what he shows. That is: a graph that only goes back to 1000. In fact, if you compare it to the Wikipedia graphs, it looks a lot like many of the reconstructions– provided you cover up the part before 1000!

    David's iage

    HockeyStick

    If I understand correctly, he�s saying that if the correlation between tree-ring widths and instrumental temperatures is spurious, and if tree-ring widths are actually just random red noise, then Mann�s method will generate a graph like your first image above.

    Yes.

    The devil is in the �ifs�.

    Yes. But the proxies do look like red noise. Of course, this could be because temperature itself looks “red”. But still….
    When doing uncertainty analyses and estimating uncertainty intervals, you do consider the possibility that the thing you are analyszing is noise with properties similar to those you are seeing. In some of Mann’s early papers, if his proxies were nothing but noise, the results would look similar to what he found.

    That is not encouraging.

    I think the point Boris is trying to make is that Stockwell did not create the flat hockey stick handle from MBH98. He created a �tilted hockey stick� with warmth c1000 and a brief cold period c1850.

    I’ve done these in excel. If you go back in time the average of red-noise proxies reverts to the mean of zero. If you have a lot of proxies, the wiggles vanish, and you get a very flat shaft. But David doesn’t go back to 0000 or -10000 etc. So, no, his graph doesn’t show the flat shaft. It looks like the hockey sticks in Wikipedia.

  233. No problem with dendrochronology, but I do have doubts about temperature reconstructions. If there were lots of site meta data establishing why particular series should be temperature sensitive and clear evidence that e.g tree lines had not changed then the tree ring data might be worth looking at. But the Mann technique is to throw everything into his algorithms without any obvious attempt to justify why they are temperature proxies – hence the idiocies like using the Tiljander series the wrong way round.

  234. Greenaway–
    Dendrochronolgy and dendroclimatology are different subjects. One could be useful and the other useless. One is pretty established. The other is… well not so old. As in— really not so old.

    Whether trees can be used to reliably determine historic temperature for the entire earth is an open question. I should also note that people who suggest that you can’t doubt Hockey stick reconstructions without coming up with the correct one are incorrect. If data were poor enough, it might be hypothetically possible that the right answer is “Given available treecores, it is not possible to create a reconstruction uncertainties better than ±2C”. If the uncertainty bounds were that bad these reconstructions would be useless. OTOH, if uncertainty intervals of ±0.1 are possible, they would be useful.

    So, the arguments really are about the level of uncertainty with particular proxies. It’s not hubris to suggest that claims of relatively small levels of uncertaity first advanced in the 90s might not hold up over time.

  236. There is an excellent discussion of errors at this link here

    http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11824

    But I can’t resist an extract

    “Prior to 1880 there are no real global temperature records, so scientists tried to find proxies. One good proxy is ice cores, which capture the chemical composition of the snow and ice going back thousands and thousands of years. Chemical signatures are very accurately tied to temperature since these are physical processes. No surprise but the ice cores show no significant warming today. Instead, these ice cores show many warmer periods in the history of humankind. Update: WUWT has more ice core perspective. – end update

    Therefore Mann and Jones and other alarmists went to a much less reliable measure of historic temperature – tree rings. Tree rings are effected by a lot of factors, the least of which is temperature (after a certain minimum has been attained to activate is growth processes). Tree growth depends on sunshine, nutrients, water and number days above the optimal temperature. A tree ring should show the same growth under 30 days of 40°F temps with plenty of moisture (afternoon showers) and nutrients as it would under 30 days of 55°F temps and the same conditions. Trees are not thermometers.

    Using a living organism to measure temperature is dodgy compared to the physics of chemistry used with ice cores. The error bars on a tree ring mapped to a temperature range (and it can only be mapped to a range, not a value) are huge. But the alarmists don’t do proper science, they run statistics until they get the answer they like, then throw out the error bars as if they are meaningless. There is no way for trees rings to define any historic temperature value. Therefore claims that the MPW or Roman Period were a degree or two warmer or colder using trees is all bunk.”

  237. Boris–
    I”m addressing your claim that filtering red noise has specific effects on the MWP and the LIA, not whether or not MBH looks like a red noise filtered signal.

    To answer MBH98 doesn’t lool like the red noise filted signal. But why should it? As discusesed MBH 98 criticized for a different set of analytical flaws:

    MM claim that the main features of the Mann et al (1998–henceforth MBH98) reconstruction, including the “hockey stick” shape of the reconstruction, are artifacts of a) the centering convention used by MBH98 in their Principal Components Analysis (PCA) of the North American International Tree Ring Data Bank (’ITRDB’) data, b) the use of 4 infilled missing annual values (AD 1400-1403) in one tree-ring series (the ‘St. Anne’ Northern Treeline series), and c) the infilling of missing values in some proxy data between 1972 and 1980. Each of these claims are demonstrated to be false below.

    In his paper, David Stockwell appears to link the “red noise” issue to a Briffa paper, and cites the MBH paper only as the provenance of the term “hockey stick”.

    No one has ever suggested that filtering for red noise is the only error that has ever been made when creating reconstructions. But your characterization of what filtering does is incorrect. Red filtering will a specific sort of shape which is one of the types of hockey sticks we have seen in some papers.

  239. Boris–
    I can’t answer that unless you tell me where he is making that claim. Then I’ll be able to see how the red noise claim applies to a particular paper. There is more than one claim related to red noise and Mann has more than one paper.

  240. So, the arguments really are about the level of uncertainty with particular proxies. It’s not hubris to suggest that claims of relatively small levels of uncertaity first advanced in the 90s might not hold up over time.

    I’m still working away at understanding the niceties of dendroclimatology and dendrochronology so I’m a long way from being able to judge how much uncertainty there is. I am reading a dendro statistics primer that goes step by step through the process of doing PCA, and I’m reading old papers and old threads, dissertations, etc. It might not be hubris for you, but it would be hubris for me to chuck it out at this point for I have no basis to do so. Others here may have done the work already and may feel justified in doing so. I don’t and I don’t really want to take anyone’s word on it yet.


  241. here is an excellent discussion of errors at this link here
    http://strata-sphere.com/blog/…..ives/11824
    But I can’t resist an extract

    Interesting video at that site. Lots to think about.

    I can’t help but be a bit hesitant whenever people show me a lot of graphs in rapid succession, as if everything one needs to know is present in an image and that the conclusions are self-evidence. That applies to Al Gore as much as anyone else.

    I think the meaning and significance of a graphic is far more complicated and that when used, there should be discussion of how the graph is created and what is being shown.

  242. Greenaway,
    I think dendrochronology is mostly concerned with dating the age of the wood. This can be useful for many things– including for example figuring out something that claims to be an ancient relic from Charlemange’s kingdom cannot be because the the wood is clearly too new. It can also help archeologists estimate the era for wood buildings found in digs.

    Dendro climatology tries to actually predict the temperature from the wood.

    There is some relationship between the two. After all, the tree ring widths are affected by the climate. But the dendro-chronologists don’t need to specifically know the average temperature during Charlemagne’s reign to come up with ways of identifying wood from that era. In the end, they just need to know the wood rings in species X looked a certain way around that time.

    So, the dendro-climatologists are pushing the trees to give lots more information than the dendro-chronologists need to do a good job when developing chronologies.

    At least… that’s my gradeschool student version. But the two are different and have different goals.

  243. “that’s my gradeschool student version”
    .
    And it’s correct. Now, about Schaffer …

  247. The flourishes come from the paper. Having the context makes them seem less flashy.
    .
    No chaos papers? But what about the adequacy of the noise structure of the GCMs? Here’s a teaser for you: “if climate is chaotic, so is climate sensitivity”. I’ll leave it at that.
    .
    I was advocating Tsonis back when we were in a warming trend. The alarmists are only interested in chaos when it is needed to rescue the AGW hypothesis from a lack of a warming trend. But I guess they’ll drop it when things start warming up again.

  248. bender,

    Love the last line in Schaffer’s letter:

    “The entire scientific community should be afraid. If ice, not fire, be in our future, all of us, not just the Climategate principals, their allies and apologists, will hang from lampposts, perhaps metaphorically, perhaps in fact. May yours be visible from mine.”

    Thanks!!

  249. I assume Boris is referring to the 2009 PNAS M&M comment on M08:

    Numerous other problems undermine their conclusions. Their CPS reconstruction screens proxies by calibration-period correlation, a procedure known to generate “hockey sticks” from red noise

    I don’t see how anything Boris has said undermines this assertion.

  250. “I don’t see how anything Boris has said undermines this assertion. ”

    I think it is correct if you define hockey stick as having a pronounced MWP and LIA. That’s not what Mann got, however.

  252. Well, on rereading Boris’ comment, I guess I have to confess I don’t know what the heck he means.

    What didn’t the CPS treatment in Mann 08 get, a hockey stick or a graph with a MWP and LIA?

    Oh hell, I’m confusing myself now.

    Let’s try this:

    Mann’s CPS curve in Mann 08 looks like a hockey stick to me.

    Now, who the hell am I arguing with?

  253. bender (Comment#27986) December 14th, 2009 at 5:39 pm

    The flourishes come from the paper. Having the context makes them seem less flashy.
    .
    No chaos papers? But what about the adequacy of the noise structure of the GCMs? Here’s a teaser for you: “if climate is chaotic, so is climate sensitivity”. I’ll leave it at that.
    .
    I was advocating Tsonis back when we were in a warming trend. The alarmists are only interested in chaos when it is needed to rescue the AGW hypothesis from a lack of a warming trend. But I guess they’ll drop it when things start warming up again.

    A lot of people misunderstand Tsonis. If you are polite, he may even reply if you write to him and say that his work has nothing to do with disproving global warming.

  254. I assure you bugs, I do not misunderstand Tsonis. Yes, he is careful to avoid the landmines because he knows how the game is played. So he genuflects wherever necessary, for example when on display at RC. I’m not obliged to do so. I can tell you straight up that a chaotic climate means discerning forcing signal from internal noise is much. much harder than Schmidt et al. are willing to publicly admit. Gavin is smart; he knows this. The GCMs are over-tuned junk. Watch them diverge from reality just as fast as they can be re-parameterized.

  255. And there’s nothing stopping Dr. Tsonis from posting an essay here, or hosting a debate with opponents of your choosing, bugs. Why should I email him in private when we can discuss things here, in the open?

  256. Greenaway (Comment#27871) December 13th, 2009 at 6:33 pm

    That’s a long detailed analysis of self shills versus shills. says nothing of substance about trust. The nice thing about a shill is that they will turn. Self shills can almost never admit they were wrong and when they hold the keys to data are even more dangerous than shills. You’ve said nothing of substance to alter my view that a self shill is far worst that a mere shill.

    WRT jones. Does it bother you in the least that in 2008 jones and his partner at MET discussed how they could use the refusal of data to get more budget?

  257. Lucia, in some of the recent work I’ve seen error bounds of +- .5C. Which seems unlikely. In one of the mails Obsborne objected to Mann work becuase his recon had smaller CIs than the instrument record at 1850.

  258. bender (Comment#28031) December 14th, 2009 at 10:10 pm

    I assure you bugs, I do not misunderstand Tsonis. Yes, he is careful to avoid the landmines because he knows how the game is played. So he genuflects wherever necessary, for example when on display at RC. I’m not obliged to do so.

    So to you list of impressive skills we can add mindreader.

  259. bender (Comment#28031) December 14th, 2009 at 10:10 pm

    here is a funny asymetetry of methodology.

    1. When doing “projections” use all the models regardless of Skill. You get a nice wide envelope for observations to fall into.

    2. When doing attribution, downselect to moedls that dont have problems like drift etc.

    Oh, did you know that CRU account for UHI by increasing the error bands? We know the signla is biased high by .05C/century, we will just handle that by increasing the error bands. Weird.
    That would be a fun experiement. What happens to a reconstruction if you bias the signal up by 10%? Well when Wilison and Rosie didnt like the GHCN adjustments in the Yukon they calculated their own temperature series.

  260. No chaos papers? But what about the adequacy of the noise structure of the GCMs? Here’s a teaser for you: “if climate is chaotic, so is climate sensitivity”. I’ll leave it at that.

    The Climate sensitivity exponent has substantial problems (not the least being its seemingly irreducibility, with all its random consequences)

    However as equations have an interesting property (an inverse relationship) eg Ghil

    http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh133/mataraka/rbequationfeedbackunity.png

    A peculiar property of (4) is that its right-hand side (rhs) diverges as f approaches unity, which is used to advocate the possibility of intrinsically large climate-system sensitivity and hence the irreducible uncertainty of future-climate projections. Roughly speaking, Roe and Baker (2007) use the following argument: If the derivative of R(T ) with respect to T is close to 0, then the derivative of T with respect to R is very large, and a small change in the radiation R corresponds to a large change in the temperature T

    …. This S-shaped curve carries
    nevertheless a troublesome message: If the parameter 𝜇
    were to slightly decrease— rather than increase, as it seems
    to have done since the mid-1970s, in the sense described in
    the last paragraph of Section 3.1 — then the climate system
    would be pushed past the bifurcation point at 𝜇 ≈ 0.9, and
    thus literally hover over an abyss. Indeed, the only way for
    the global temperature to go would be down, all the way to a
    deep-freeze Earth, with much lower temperatures than those
    of recent, Quaternary ice ages.

    Oh dear

  261. “What didn’t the CPS treatment in Mann 08 get, a hockey stick or a graph with a MWP and LIA?”

    Pretty clearly the shaft is flat. In the CPS recon the MWP was a full 1C below temps today. McIntyre makes no sense on this one.

  262. Steven-

    In one of the mails Obsborne objected to Mann work becuase his recon had smaller CIs than the instrument record at 1850.

    The tree-nometers can’t get better precision that the thermometers. Afterall, there is no “calibration” separate from the thermometers!

  263. Greenaway (Comment#27970) December 14th, 2009 at 4:46 pm

    greenaway, read the work on wahl and amman in CA from 2005 to 2009.

  264. Boris (Comment#28055)
    December 15th, 2009 at 6:07 am

    Pretty clearly the shaft is flat. In the CPS recon the MWP was a full 1C below temps today. McIntyre makes no sense on this one.

    I thought that was his whole point. CPS is the only recon that shows a hockey stick. Even at that, the blade of the CPS recon is not drastically above many parts of the shaft of the CPS recon itself, and below the MWP in the other recons. Go the extra step of taping the instrument record onto the end, et voilà!

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