Evidently, more climate related emails have been released. Jeff woke up this morning to find a link to a file called FOIA2011.zip. The host is .ru. I haven’t had a chance to look at them! Conversation about this is ongoing at The Air Vent.
Is this son of climategate? Whatever it is, it’s going to give us all something to discuss over Turkey on Thursday.
Update Nov. 26 Please continue discussion at the new post.
It will be interesting to see how the trained pups of journalism- the journalists like Revkin, for instance, rationalize a way to ignore this one like the first.
For the faithful, they will trot out the same arguments as before- ignore ’cause they are stolen, ignore because the science is sound, ignore because this is just boys being boys, etc.
But both groups know they are just fibbing to themselves.
Maybe this time an email will show a paper to be wrong. You can hope.
Bradley:
I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstructionâ€.
“Maybe this time an email will show a paper to be wrong.”
Boris,
This presumes you know what “wrong” (or “right”) looks like, which I’m sure you don’t.
Andrew
The excerpts posted on TaV are solidly ho hum, though I’m sure Steve McIntyre will devote reams of deaden prose to pointing how there’s some huge conspiracy as evidenced by climate scientists behaving exactly the way he does.
Really, I am not aware that Mr McIntyre has ever tried to get an editor removed, nor deleted e-mails to avoid a legally require FOI request, nor refused to divulge a computer code on which his work was based.
Son of Climategate – more pizazz than just Climategate II.
Clearly scientists are a quarrelsome lot! I’d argue this fact bodes well for climate science in general :-p
I doubt this will get much media play, unless something notably egregious emerges, since its not really a novel story anymore.
Does anyone know if the messages are all pre-November 2009, or if there are messages written after that date?
Looks like Boris has a very uphill battle to fight. What a trooper!
Zeke–
It will get some play. The question is the duration of the play.
SteveF– I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to look at them.
SteveF,
All pre-November 2009 as far as I can tell. Its our same anonymous Russian friends responsible for the first batch, but well timed for a Durbin-related impact.
Zeke,
People, not just climate scientists, are a quarrelsome lot. The few passages I read do suggest that honest, frank critiques (“the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published”) are exactly the kinds of things that people outside of climate science have been saying for a long time. One big issue seems to be that climate scientists have not been willing to publicly voice such opinions, or to publish comments/letters formally expressing those opinions, for fear of “damaging” climate science. IMO, nothing could be further from the truth; giving poor work a pass to avoid the appearance of uncertainty in climate science is what causes real damage.
SteveF–
I agree with you. It is the vigorous public defenses of papers that are obviously, clearly awful that has been creating a lot of public doubt.
200,000 messages behind a password? Maybe these are the email messages that say things like: “Tommy is feeling sick to his stomach, can you pick up some Pepto Bismol on your way home?”
SteveF, this might resonate with you:
Wondering how Zeke knows these AR5 related comments are pre Nov 2009?
Carrick,
I might be wrong, I just hadn’t seen anything post-2009 yet. That said, its still early in the morning and I can’t devote too much time to reading the emails till after I finish my day job.
Work started on the AR5 prior to 2009, so references to it don’t necessarily indicate a post-2009 date. Check the dates in the emails in question.
Kinda figured this was coming.
frank at swifthack knew
Foia contacted him
as best as I can tell.
Thanks Zeke. I’ll admit I haven’t bothered with downloading it.
SteveF and I are both among those who suspect some tuning of the models is involved, and if we are right in our suspicions, it would behoove the people involved to be more forthright about what they are really doing. Failure to disclose leads to a much greater erosion of credibility than the mythical “well funded contrarian disinformation campaign” could ever have done.
Carrick,
0850 is from 2007
5066 is from 2007
4085 is from 2004
So nope, mentions of AR5 don’t necessarily mean recent emails, just that the IPCC process takes awhile.
Also, I’d strongly suggest reading the original emails in full rather than single sentences pulled out (for maximum effect by the folks releasing the emails). Context is often useful to better evaluate the motives and substance of the conversation in question.
For example, the 20th century tuning email is more nuanced in context, and discusses the tradeoff between attribution work and model development:
Hi all,
I see this. On the other hand, when some republicans did a grilling
about attribution in some house subcommittee, I was very happy to be able to resort to Tim’s argument that the model
runs were older than the heat uptake data and therefore, there was no secret tuning in the 2001 ocean attribution results..
So using the 20th c for tuning is just doing what some people have long suspected us of doing… and what the nonpublished diagram from NCAR showing correlation between aerosol forcing and sensitivity also suggested.
Slippery slope… I suspect Karl is right and our clout is not enough to prevent the modellers from doing this if they can. We do loose the ability, though, to use the tuning variable for attribution studies.
Should we ask to admit in their submission what variables were
considered when tuning, and if any climate change data were considered and at what temporal and spatial representation (global mean trend?),and advise that we will not be able to use those models for any future attribution diagrams? That would at least lay it in the open…
Gabi
Karl Taylor wrote:
> Hi Peter and all,
>
> There will clearly be different perspectives on this. A model
> developer will want to make use of all available observational
> information to help decide whether his model is realistic or not.
>
> We can envision two candidate models that appear equivalent in most
> respects, but one fails to produce ENSO’s. The developer would choose
> the one that simulated ENSO.
>
> Likewise, suppose two candidate models were identical in most
> respects, but one could accurately simulate the climate of the 20th
> century (when all forcings were included), whereas the second had a
> very low global sensitivity and produced too little warming. The
> developer would again want to choose the model that reproduced the
> observed trends. In fact this model would probably produce a better
> estimate when forced by future emissions scenarios too (because,
> presumably, its sensitivity is closer to the truth).
>
> It would be hard to argue that information about 20th century trends
> shouldn’t be used in model development.
>
> I agree that this may rule out attribution studies (following the
> established approaches), but wouldn’t we have to argue that
> attribution studies are more important that model projections to
> convince the groups not to consider trends in the model development
> cycle?
>
> cheers,
> Karl
>
>
> peter.stott wrote:
>
>> Hello everybody,
>>
>> We’re having a lively debate in the Hadley Centre about whether climate
>> change experiments should be run as part of the model development
>> process, ie whether model developers should test their model against
>> climate change as they are developing their model. I think it might be
>> worthwhile us developing and expressing a view on this as we don’t want
>> to risk getting into a position where attribution results in AR5 are
>> undermined by the development and model tuning procedure adopted by
>> modelling centres.
>>
>> Also I don’t think you quite captured the point that another reason for
>> separating out the ghg response from the response to other forcings is
>> to aid understanding, as we are finding out in trying to understand the
>> precipitation response. I think that requesting ALL, GHG, and NAT
>> ensembles would be the basic set.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>> Peter
>>
>> On Fri, 2007-05-18 at 10:33 -0400, Gabi Hegerl wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all.
>>>
>>> From your comments, I assembled a word file with our suggestions on
>>> the 5AR run
>>> proposal, but I am not sure
>>> I caught it all completely. Also, I had a chat with Jerry yesterday,
>>> and he said getting
>>> suggestions of what should be stored will be useful at this point.
>>> My plan is to communicate this with Jerry when we are done with it,
>>> and then propose
>>> it at the WGCM meeting.
>>>
>>> I drew a strawman list of what I could think of in 3 minutes, and am
>>> asking you to
>>> add to it. Its all in track changes, so dont hesitate to go wild
>>> (but please keep in mind that
>>> we need to restrict data requests to something you think you will
>>> work with in the next
>>> years, since it is a fair amount of effort from the modelling
>>> centres to haul the data over
>>> etc, and the more we request, the more likely it is that only few
>>> ensemble members etc
>>> get sent…)
>>>
>>> Karl, I am cc;ing you since your perspective would be useful
>>>
>>> Gabi
>>>
>>
The sinwt.ru server seems to be overloaded.
Does anybody have a link to a copy on some other server ?
“Zeke,
People, not just climate scientists, are a quarrelsome lot. The few passages I read do suggest that honest, frank critiques (“the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been publishedâ€) are exactly the kinds of things that people outside of climate science have been saying for a long time. One big issue seems to be that climate scientists have not been willing to publicly voice such opinions, or to publish comments/letters formally expressing those opinions, for fear of “damaging†climate science. IMO, nothing could be further from the truth; giving poor work a pass to avoid the appearance of uncertainty in climate science is what causes real damage.”
SteveF, I wholeheartedly agree with this comment and think it strikes at the essence of the problems that these emails reveal. I do, however, think that skeptics are sometimes too bent on the negative aspects of climate science, as it is presented in publications, and fail to see the more obvious weaknesses in the evidence that these papers show. If one can divorce oneself from reacting to the conclusions these papers attempt to present (the conclusions tend to be advocacy inspired in my mind) and also assume, as you have noted, that the lack of criticism is advocacy driven, one can readily see for oneself that, for example, the conclusions from the Mann 2008 paper are deeply counter to the evidence presented.
What the Mann (2008) paper shows is that it required arbitrarily removing a proxy result from 1960 onward (Schweingruber MXD proxy) and replacing it with incompletely described other data, using a proxy upside down, using a proxy that contained data from instrumentally measured temperatures and selecting a model for the series that could be considered arbitrary and aimed at some average condition in order to get by the first requirement for a reconstruction – that the correlations with the instrumental record happened not by mere chance. It was all there in the Mann (08) in plain sight for all thinking readers to see and digest.
Furthermore, Mann (08) does something that I think was a real step forward and positive and that was showing the disentangled spaghetti graphs with the temperatures tacked onto the end so that it is easy to separate the instrumental record from that of the proxies and in so doing showing the divergence problem in the modern warming period (linked below) and also in mentioning that the divergence problem extends to the non dendro proxies.
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/983/mann08divergence001.jpg
Zeke,
And I plan to do so when the zip file becomes easier to download; the server capacity seems swamped. Still, it is hard to see how context changes the meaning of “the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published†by very much. If Bradley really believed that, he had lots of time to say so publicly (perhaps using different words 😉 ) or via formal publication. I do not understand why Bradley remains silent on an iconic paper that receives world-wide publicity…. which he believes is rubbish.
To me the part of the email excerpted by Zeke and shown below is very telling and makes the point rather directly without any nuance as I view it. In the end selecting a model by the method endorsed below is not very different than a direct tuning of the model. It is those models that get “thrown away” that we have to know and talk about.
“There will clearly be different perspectives on this. A model
> developer will want to make use of all available observational
> information to help decide whether his model is realistic or not.
>
> We can envision two candidate models that appear equivalent in most
> respects, but one fails to produce ENSO’s. The developer would choose
> the one that simulated ENSO.
>
> Likewise, suppose two candidate models were identical in most
> respects, but one could accurately simulate the climate of the 20th
> century (when all forcings were included), whereas the second had a
> very low global sensitivity and produced too little warming. The
> developer would again want to choose the model that reproduced the
> observed trends. In fact this model would probably produce a better
> estimate when forced by future emissions scenarios too (because,
> presumably, its sensitivity is closer to the truth).
>
> It would be hard to argue that information about 20th century trends
> shouldn’t be used in model development.”
SteveF,
Agreed, its hard to argue that Bradley was not highly critical of the Mann/Jones 2003 paper which (as far as I know) was the first attempt at a 2000 year reconstruction. That said, Bradley apparently resolved his disagreements with Mann and served as coauthor of a number of later 2000-year reconstructions.
This does add to our knowledge of just how uncertain and rife with issues some of the early attempts at paleo reconstructions were. More recent reconstructions have issues as well, but some of the more glaring ones have been addressed.
Kenneth Fritsch,
The passage in that email that goes to the heart of the modeling problem is: “Likewise, suppose two candidate models were identical in most respects, but one could accurately simulate the climate of the 20th century (when all forcings were included), whereas the second had a very low global sensitivity and produced too little warming. The developer would again want to choose the model that reproduced the observed trends.”
It is clear that ‘all forcings’ are unknown, mainly due to vast uncertainty in aerosol effects. The tuning process is therefore based on unknown forcings. The models are ‘tuned’ to assumed aerosol forcings…. or perhaps (more likely?) the other way around; their long term projections are meaningless.
SteveF,
Its important to distinguish between tuning and curve fitting. As long as the models rely on underlying physical parameters, and the tuning simply reflects various uncertainties in the forcing, you can’t argue that the projections are meaningless per se; rather, if 20th century temperatures are used to implicitly or explicitly choose between different forcing assumptions, it means that the model’s backcast fit to 20th century temperatures cannot be used for attribution (the discussion in the emails). There are still ways to test climate models by backcasting to prior periods (e.g. seeing if they can model ice ages and other dynamics) as well as post-2000 validation (which Lucia focuses on quite a bit).
1680.txt
date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:03:05 -0400
from: “Michael E. Mannâ€
subject: Re: Something not to pass on
to: Phil Jones
Phil,
I would not respond to this. They will misrepresent and take out of
context anything you give them. This is a set up. They will certainly publish this, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary that you provide. s They are going after Wei-Chyung because he’s U.S. and there is a higher threshold for establishing libel. Nonetheless, he should consider filing a defamation lawsuit, perhaps you too.
I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an
investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his
thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.
I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and discrediting them.
Do you mind if I send this on to Gavin Schmidt (w/ a request to respect the confidentiality with which you have provided it) for his additional advice/thoughts? He usually has thoughtful insights wiith respect to such matters,
mike
that’s going to play well with the Penn State FOI and/or the Ball libel case Judges 🙂
Passing along something I posted at CoS. I find it odd that these read so close with such an odd word.
These guys look like they write from the same play book. unusual word for both to use at the same time.
.
tranche : a portion of an investment issue or loan
.
Richard BlackEnvironment correspondent, BBC News: It was clear at the time that only a small portion of the total tranche downloaded had been released.
.
Leo Hickman, guardian.co.uk: A fresh tranche of private emails exchanged between leading climate scientists throughout the last decade was released online on Tuesday.
Re: Zeke (Nov 22 12:06),
One thing to avoid is the validation or backcasting of models to plainly invalid reconstructions, such as those produced in Mann08 (see Kenneth Fritsch comment 85958 above).
Yet the reasoning behind this simple suggestion seems to be beyond the ken of the climate science community. E.g. the PAGES-CLIVAR project continues.
Zeke,
“Its important to distinguish between tuning and curve fitting.”
.
Very close to a distinction without a difference. The problem is that when your physics based model projects a climate sensitivity value of X, you can adjust the aerosol forcing history so that your model matches the historical temperature trend. That process does not mean that your model has the physics correct. In fact, that other modeling groups generate physics based models which project very different sensitivity values is clear proof that at least most models don’t have the physics right… that means your model is probably wrong.
.
IMO, tests like ice age modeling are so fraught with uncertainty as to be meaningless. I mean, nobody was collecting data back then, so there is no real constraint on anything. Model validation requires tests against real data…. data unknown to modelers, especially future data.
.
What I find most disturbing in all this is not that the models are tuned, since the data needed to meaningfully constrain them is just not available; rather, it is disturbing that modelers go to incredible lengths to defend models against any and all measurement data (lower than expected tropospheric amplification, higher than expected rainfall increases, lack of cyclical patterns, lower than modeled ocean heat uptake, etc.) which suggests they are in error…. when it is obvious they are mostly (and maybe all) in error! Really, I find it bizarre.
.
Any attempt to test models with data (including Lucia’s efforts with statistical analysis of models versus temperature since 2000) are not well received. If climate scientists want more credibility, they can start by acknowledging that climate model projections to 2100 and beyond are so uncertain as to be meaningless.
Lucia,
Read 5056.txt. It contains a message you sent to Gavin. I grepped the files and that was the only mention of your name. I guess you’re not as popular as others ;(.
I do not think these emails can be dismissed so easily. Their PR impact will be worse than last time, and some of them make me think those who accept the science of AGW (as I do, and still do) are too easily overlooking what is in them, especially in terms of how the science is being presented.
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2011/11/sorting-through-stolen-uae-emails.html
Such as:
Bradley:
I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstructionâ€.
Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
Carter:
It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.
Zeke:
Pretty much agree here with SteveF. “Tuning” is basically nothing more than curve fitting, except it doesn’t imply anything about “optimal parameter choices.” When you tune a model, you are adjusting the parameters of the model “by hand” to improve its qualitative agreement with observation (kind of like turning the “tuning knob” on a radio).
Unlike curve fitting, it is an uncontrolled, and therefore subjective, manipulation of the model parameters, and moreover doesn’t allow for any objective assessment of the uncertainty associated with model predictions. In that sense, the famous spread of models shown in AR4, meant to characterize the uncertainty in the models, may be more of a measure of how much variability in model output is “socially acceptable” rather than how much is “physically realizable.”
Chad–
Yep. That was in the original climagegate emails. Someone at CA kept insisting that was a typo. I (and numerous others) kept insisting it was not.
What amazed me was that either a) Gavin didn’t know or b) He didn’t have sufficient confidence in his understanding of undergraduate statistics to say without consulting Santer.
Climategate: validating the good doctor and making Lucia look like a whack-a-mole since 2008.
Carrick,
That is suggesting that modelers don’t purposefully choose a sample distribution of parameter inputs that are physically reasonable in order to test the sensitivity to various defendable forcing assumptions. While the time and cost of GCM runs somewhat constrain the number of permutations, there has been a lot of work done on modeling various input sensitivities.
Its worth pointing out that, all things being equal (and the underlying physics being right), a choice of forcing parameters that results in a model that is close to 20th century temperatures within the range of uncertainty in estimates will be more accurate than one that does not; however, because the 20th century temperatures affected the choice of forcings used, the model match to 20th century temperatures cannot be used for validation.
Lucai,
Ouch. Maybe Gavin is a ‘belt and suspenders’ kind of guy. 🙂
SteveF–
May…. be…..
BTW: Someone sent me a useable link to the files:
dl.dropbox.com/u/336485/FOIA2011.zip
This is a big file.
This link might be a bit faster: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ROCGBR37
Lucia,
I got the file. Thanks. A quick look at a random 25 or so suggests to me that most are pretty mundane, though I get a bit of a sense of ‘sausage-making’ in the process of generating papers for publication.
.
Of course, the usual suspects (like Mike Mann and some others) seem to almost always write snarky, unpleasant messages. I suspect that these folks have an awful lot of enemies that they have accumulated over the years.
Zeke:
I think you’ve got it a little backwards there. What it suggests is that the space of parameters they pick are physically reasonable (“realizable”), but may not span the entire space of physically realizable values.
My point is, in that case, the variation in parameter space of tuned models may not be a true representation of the uncertainty in the parameter space (so the IPCC figure that attempts to estimate the uncertainty in the models may actually under-represent the true uncertainty in the parameter space).
SteveF,
I thought about sausage-making myself. Mann in particular seems to be a very polarizing figure. Given how much a lightning rod he’s become, I’m not surprised. At least skeptics can take comfort that they’re not the only ones who hate him.
What is most intriguing, although perhaps ultimately not surprising, is that the Warmist confidential discussions sound similar to the sorts of discussions that take place publicly on forums such as the Blackboard.
Carrick, Zeke, check out RayPierre’s post at RealClimate about the Keystone XL Pipeline. In the middle, he refers to a climate model that is tuned to yield a 3C output.
Tamino had a big rant about how the climate models were not curve fitting but represent everything we know about the physical world. I pointed out the number of input parameters available, and this was ignored.
Here’s Lucia’s scandalous appearance in Climategate II. With emails placed in chronological order, and formatting cleaned up for readability.
.
From: lucia liljegren
To: gschmidt-at-xxx.xxx
Subject: Typo in equation 12 Santer.
Date: 20 Oct 2008
Hi Gavin,
Someone commenting at ClimateAudit is suggesting that equation 12 contains a typo. They are under the impression the 1/nm does not belong in the circled term. Rather than going back and forth with “is not a typo”, “is so a typo”, I figured I’d just ask you. Is there a typo in equation 12 below.
[graphic]
BTW: I think Santer is pretty good paper.
Thanks, Lucia
– – – – – – – – –
[From: Gavin Schmidt]
[To: Ben Santer]
[Date: xx Oct 2008]
Ben, Just thought I’d check with you first. I don’t think there is a problem – but I think the question is really alluding to is our comment about Douglass et al ‘being wrong’ in using sigma_SE – since if we use it in the denominator in the d1* test, it can’t be wrong, see?
My response would be that we are testing a number of different things here: d1* tests whether the ensemble mean is consistent with the obs (given their uncertainty). Whereas our figure 6 and the error bars shown there are testing whether the real world obs are consistent with a distribution defined from the model ensemble members.
gavin
– – – – – – – – –
[From: Ben Santer]
To: Gavin Schmidt
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Typo in equation 12 Santer.]
[Date: xx Oct 2008]
Dear Gavin,
There is no typo in equation 12. The first term under the square root in equation 12 is a standard estimate of the variance of a sample mean (see, e.g., “Statistical Analysis in Climate Research”, Zwiers and Storch, their equation 5.24, page 86). The second term under the square root sign is a very different beast – an estimate of the variance of the observed trend. As we point out, our d1* test is very similar to a standard Student’s t-test of differences in means (which involves, in its denominator, the square root of two pooled sample variances).
In testing the statistical significance of differences between the model average trend and a single observed trend, Douglass et al. were wrong to use sigma_SE as the sole measure of trend uncertainty in their statistical test. Their test assumes that the model trend is uncertain, but that the observed trend is perfectly-known. The observed trend is not a “mean” quantity; it is NOT perfectly-known. Douglass et al. made a demonstrably false assumption.
Bottom line: sigma_SE is a standard estimate of the uncertainty in a sample mean – which is why we use it to characterize uncertainty in the estimate of the model average trend in equation 12. It is NOT appropriate to use sigma_SE as the basis for a statistical test between two uncertain quantities (see our comments in our point #3, immediately before equation 12). The uncertainty in the estimates of both modeled AND observed trend needs to be explicitly incorporated in the design of any statistical test comparing modeled and observed trends. Douglass et al. incorrectly ignored uncertainties in observed trends.
Our Figure 6A is not a statistical test. It does not show the standard errors in the observed trends at discrete pressure levels (which would have made for a very messy Figure, given that we show results from 7 different observational datasets). Had we attempted to show the observed standard errors in Figure 6A, I suspect that standard errors from the RICH, IUK, RAOBCORE-v1.3, and RAOBCORE 1.4 datasets would have overlapped with the multi-model average trend at most pressure levels. I can easily produce such a Figure if necessary.
With best regards,
Ben
– – – – – – – – –
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008
From: Ben Santer
Subject: [Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Typo in equation 12 Santer.]]
To: “Philip D. Jones”
Dear Phil,
I thought you’d be interested in my reply to Gavin (see forwarded email).
Cheers,
Ben
MikeN: You raised a point which I have wondered about for a while: How many parameters go into a typical climate model and how many of these are unobservable? Do you have a rough figure?
jack mosevich,
Here are the adjustable parameters for the BBC. ClimatePrediction.net model. More than 30 of them. They use a version of the Met Office climate model.
http://climateprediction.net/content/parameters
Will Nitschke
Yes. But evidently, these things are not supposed to be said in public. 🙂
Amac
Gavin is way over interpreting my reason for asking. For example he suggests “is really alluding to is our comment about Douglass et al ‘being wrong’ in using sigma_SE – since if we use it in the denominator in the d1* test, it can’t be wrong, see?”.
The question was not alluding to any comment about Douglas being wrong nor trying to get to “since he used it in …. it can’t be wrong… etc.)
As it happens: I thought Santer’s answer contained everything we kept trying to tell the bubble head in comments at CA. But Gavin didn’t forward me that answer. If he had, I could have presented Santer’s answer to the bubble head.
(McIntyre, several others and I kept trying to explain the meaning of Santer’s equation and why there is no typo, showing that the numerical values in the paper only match the equation if we assume it does not contain a typo. )
Bob Koss: Thanks. About as complicated as I expected. That site links to their data port which is quite interesting too.
🙂
There was a conspiracy flavoured thread at WUWT a few days ago in which the deniznes of WUWT thought Google might be down-ranking the site: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/06/1-us-for-googles-sake/
Part of the evidence was a ‘step’ pattern in the Alexa stats for visits to WUWT that had come via a search engine: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/wuwt_search_stats_steps.png
I’d suggested in the comments that the decline and the pattern was probably a lot more to do with the decline of ‘Climategate’ as a search term (a term for which WUWT ranks highly on Google). http://www.google.com/trends?q=climategate&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2010&sort=0
So this a neat situation to test my hypothesis! Climategate 2.0 should result in more people searching on that term and a subsequent boost in visits to WUWT from a search engine.
[No, I’m not suggesting WUWT engineered this new release 🙂 ]
Well…. I guess 5305 is not “in confidence” anymore!
I wonder whose paper Briffa was reviewing, whether reviewers ended up discussing it and during whether this eventually affected the review process.
Bradley’s comment about Mann & jones is precisely one for which context would be very useful. As Zeke points out, Bradley co-authored a more recent reconstruction using partly similar methods. What did he not like about the paper? More importantly, what was the reply?
But in the end I think the scientist who will be most embarrassed by this new release is Ed Cook. I mean, “drdendro” ? Seriously, how tacky can you get? 🙂
jack mosevich, I’ve seen one model where besides the internal parameters, the user would explicitly set 3 parameters for each run, as well as the emissions numbers, clouds, aerosols, and ocean. The available range of input could produce warming from <1C to very high. It's not so much the number of parameters that matters, but the sensitivity of the results to the choice of parameter, are you just doing curve fitting?
Anyone find anything that provides additional confidence in the science’s proposition of 3.0C per doubling?
I just see more of boys behaving badly and expressing less confidence in the work of other climate scientists.
It becomes an integrity issue. When someone (a boy behaving badly) has been less than forthcoming over and over again, at what point do you become sceptical of everything they say?
AMac (Comment #85988)
That exchange brings back memories of my confusion about the equation that Santer et al used with the SE. I attributed my confusion to the remarks that Gavin Schmidt was making about the correctness of using the standard deviation and not the SE in a case such as that for looking at model results for the ratio of trends for warming between the tropical surface and the troposphere. He was so adamant about this point – and also was a coauthor of the paper – that I thought there must be typo in the paper. Lucia followed through on her first reading which said it had to be SE and the issue was resolved – except for a mea culpa from Schmidt – I did mine in a post at CA.
much of the exchange that you’re discussing was in Climategate 1. It included an email from Wigley telling Gavin that he was wrong .
“My point is, in that case, the variation in parameter space of tuned models may not be a true representation of the uncertainty in the parameter space (so the IPCC figure that attempts to estimate the uncertainty in the models may actually under-represent the true uncertainty in the parameter space).”
In other words, to obtain a true picture of the statistics involved we have to see all the models and results not just the ones that “worked”. I am surprised this provision is not self evident -but I know many intelligent people do not get it.
I think it was likely Gavin did think the paper somehow also discussed how the data fell within the spread of the model. Look at the discussion of ‘figure 6’:
This reads as if Gavin thinks figure 6 shows whether the earth observations falls inside the spread of the models. I didn’t ask anything about figure 6. I don’t have the paper in front of me– but if I recollect correctly, the Santer paper (with Gavin as coauthor) doesn’t ever consider the concept of whether the data fall inside the model spread.
It is certainly true that Gavin has given the impression that he is quite adamant that testing whether the data falls inside the model spread is the “right” method– and yet, he is co-author of the Santer paper which does an entirely different test. One which Gavin has given the impression he abjures. (Of course, maybe that’s just an impression. 🙂 )
So, there was some reason to believe it amazing that Gavin was co-author of a paper where the method discussed by Santer was used to apply a test. Nevertheless, the numerical results, the equation, and the narrative in Santer were all consistent with that equation not being a typo. Whether on some occasions one (including Gavin) might not like that method, it’s pretty standard, Santer used it, it’s a t-test, it’s understood. It was unlikely to be a typo.
McIntyre is trying to get Mann fired/investigated/imprisoned. It’s his life’s work. Pay closer attention.
Boris:
Impugnation of character and motive.
Very classy, Boris, as usual.
Boris that’s Tim Ball doing that. He is currently being sued in court, and now has to prove that in fact Mann should be in jail, otherwise he loses his libel case.
David Appell #85974
Odd things to highlight, David.
Bradley didn’t like the M&J paper. So? Can’t please everyone. Oddly, I don’t think it was a GRL paper – I’m assuming he’s referring to a review paper “Climate over past millenia” which appeared in Rev Geophysics 2004.
Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
Well, a fuller quote is:
I note that my box on the lapse rates was completely and utterly ignored which may explain to some extent my reaction, but I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
There’s a lot of that pruning of quotes.
Carter Again a fuller quote:
It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.
For example, currently the WG I extremes Table has been completely (radically!) revised by WG I for their SPM, and I will now have to do the same to our WG II Table for consistency. The THC entries in the Table are anyway unique to WG II, because WG I did not tabulate this extreme.
The AR4 was a huge cooperative effort by a lot of people. Thousands of their emails are here. Of course they are going to get annoyed and grouch at times.
#86008 Oddly, I don’t think it was a GRL paper
I got that wrong – he is referring to this 2003 GRL paper.
I don’t think there is any big deal with the emails I’ve seen personally, at least not the animus seen in some of them.
I’ve had to deal with much stronger levels of personnel conflict at my lab (including a case involving intellectual theft of other people’s research!), and I suspect most people here have had more serious incidents at their workplace too.
If you can’t tell that Steve McIntyre has a personal vendetta against Mann and others, I don’t know what to say.
Boris – McIntyres’ treatment of Mann came in response to the surly, petulant and condescending treatment he received. I don’t see any evidence he is out to get anyone fired; what is your evidence for this? When I look at how these emails show the attempts to disparage and marginalize people like McIntyre I think any personal animosity McIntyre may have is justified. Mann discussed having an investigative reporter look into links to fossil fuel in order to discredit McIntyre. That seems to surpass the snarky comments made on Climate Audit by a long shot.
Carrick—
I ordered by size and clicked through a few at the top and bottom. I think I skimmed about 50. I haven’t seem anything all that terrible either. Its just interesting to come across certain ones given claims made in public. For example:
The criticism of the GRL paper. Bradley thought it was drek contrasts with some advocates who seem to never be able to find a single flaw in any AGW paper– many of which are just god awful. Briffa’s email about reviewing a paper and asking another guy if he was a reviewer contrasts with claims during L’Affaire Steig about just how uber-confidential the whole review process is. Well, really, it’s kinda sorta confidential in climate science– just as in all fields.
I think the discussions about the process of the AR4 contrasts with the claims that somehow the final document reflects what all the authors think etc. I worked on some “group” documents of that sort. That view never made any real sense. Unless individual chapters are written by a few (<6) named individuals, final documents with huge number of contributors always end up "distilled" by a few lead people. The contributors don't always fully endorse the distillation. That doesn't mean they all get up on their high horses in public to discuss their points of disagreement with the final. Doing so is not good for their careers and really.... they may not care that much.
Boris You are seriously exaggerating what McIntyre has done to Mann. What’s Steve has done is criticize Mann publicly. Big. Whip.
Nick
You seem to want to focus on feelings rather than substance. Sure he may be grouchy– which he admits. But he also makes this diagnosis
In fact, grumpy or not, he is making a substantive claim. The process seems to put a spin on the science. That’s not too clever in the long run.
Of course, we also see emails from others who are constantly thumping on the idea that they need to do something for the cause (or some such.) Overall, the emails do give the impression that Thorne’s diagnosis is correct. In the end, science seems to be spun. Throne suggests that’s not to clever.
Lots of people outside the AR4 think the science is spun. Even if no individual letter is a smoking gun, the emails collectively tend to support this view.
“It is certainly true that Gavin has given the impression that he is quite adamant that testing whether the data falls inside the model spread is the “right†method– and yet, he is co-author of the Santer paper which does an entirely different test. One which Gavin has given the impression he abjures. (Of course, maybe that’s just an impression.”
I had not read the paper thoroughly until you, Lucia, made the point that the equation was using SE – but then I was not a co-author of the paper. It is very obvious that Gavin Schmidt had either not read or read and not understood the paper. Schmidt had also made earlier remarks to the effect that SE should not be used generally because with sufficient/infinite samples SE would go to zero.
“This does add to our knowledge of just how uncertain and rife with issues some of the early attempts at paleo reconstructions were. More recent reconstructions have issues as well, but some of the more glaring ones have been addressed.”
Zeke, tell me you have read and analyzed Mann (2008) and can still make a comment about the more recent reconstructions addressing the more glaring issues – and with a straight face.
I agree that Mann et al don’t treat McIntyre nicely. And I don’t really care that McIntyre is out to get Mann. It kind of annoys me that McIntyre fan boys (and girls) tend to deny this pretty obvious fact.
Again, I don’t care about the petty grudges. I just enjoy pointing them out to people who whine about Mann being mean. Oh, noes, an investigative journalist! What evils would an investigative journalist do?!?!?!? He might, you know, read somebody’s stolen emails or something!
My real problem with McIntyre is that he is not particularly honest in his descriptions of climate science. He is the source of tons of misinformation on climate science and the hockey stick papers, e. g. the hockey stick is an artifact of the algorithm or that “hockey sticks” are a result of calibration. Oh, and his support of Anthony Watts pretty much pegs him as a biased entity. But if people can’t tell that from reading, say, 10 CA blog posts, they have their own biases to deal with.
Kenneth Fritsch,
“Some” being the operative phrase on my end; I was referring more to the overall method (e.g. moving away from PCA to EIV/CPS) rather than the numerous remaining problems with proxies in general. I don’t think Mann ’08 was a perfect paper, but I do think that it was quite a bit better than his early stuff.
Re: Kenneth Fritsch (Nov 23 09:07),
As L’Affaire Dreyfus dragged on into the 20th Century, the factual aspects of the Captain’s actions and circumstances became progressively less important to French public figures. One’s position on Dreyfus’ Guilt or Innocence became a placeholder for where one stood on the Big Issues of the day (e.g. faith in the Army’s institutions, the Jewish Question, the proper limits to Press freedom, church/state relations, how to deal with Germany).
Mann08 seems to have taken on a similar status in the Climate Wars.
The following by Willis Eschenbach seems to better describe McIntyre’s character and motives than what Boris seems to believe.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/23/mr-david-palmer-explains-the-problem/
“Finally, my particular thanks to Steve McIntyre for his part in all of this. Not that he advised me or told me to file the FOI in question, he didn’t do either. That was my own idea and choice. But his dogged persistence, his insistence on and demonstration of transparency of code and data, and his general Canadian generosity, honesty, and geniality have been an inspiration to me. His work is generally an example of the scientific method at its cleanest.”
Boris – Now you are saying something different. If McIntyre were on a vendetta against Mann and trying to get him fired he would not be using “misinformation on climate science” to do it. Although the statistical arguements are a bit past my experience with statistics (how about you?) my reading is that McIntyre’s problem with Mann’s papers is largely correct; a view that is shared by a statistics professor I know that works at a major university in Michigan.
Boris: …He is the source of tons of misinformation on climate science and the hockey stick papers, e. g. the hockey stick is an artifact of the algorithm or that “hockey sticks†are a result of calibration…
Dr. Rob Wilson, Research Fellow, School of GeoSciences, Grant Institute, Edinburgh University ( Peer Reviewed Climate Scientist© ) replicated Steve’s work/claim and disagrees with your assertion. Just not publicly.
4241.txt
1527.txt
Boris:
Actually you include 1960-now, they aren’t even hockey sticks, they’re broken hockey sticks (the divergence problem). They only become hockey sticks when you graft on the temperature data (Mann’s trick).
Not showing the entire range of your analysis result (Briffa’s trick) is another one.
So exactly who’s the misinformation perp here?
“My real problem with McIntyre is that he is not particularly honest in his descriptions of climate science. He is the source of tons of misinformation on climate science and the hockey stick papers, e. g. the hockey stick is an artifact of the algorithm or that “hockey sticks†are a result of calibration. Oh, and his support of Anthony Watts pretty much pegs him as a biased entity. But if people can’t tell that from reading, say, 10 CA blog posts, they have their own biases to deal with.”
The claim that the hockey stick is an atrifact of the algorithm is a charge made concerning Mann’s original hockey stick paper. This claim is collaborated by independent sources. Both the Wegman panel and the North NAS panel confirmed this result. I could provide you with a link if you need one, but I don’t have them immediately at my fingertips.
I am not sure exactly what you mean that the Hockey Sticks are the result of “calibration”. Mann’s algorithm had the effect of heavily weighting proxies that showed an uptick during the instrumental period, but that is a result of the algorithm, and not an independent calibration issue. Later papers from Mann did not suffer from this defect, but were criticized by SM on other grounds.
Furthermore, I am not sure what is meant by suggesting that SM is a supporter of Anthony Watts. I suspect that SM, like many of us, view Watts as a mixed bag. Has SM endorsed or commended Watt’s website? In what sense does he “support Anthony Watts”? Specific please.
Re: Carrick (Nov 23 11:17),
Email 1645 from Tim Osborn to Phil Jones was put up at CA by “amused.” I don’t know which paper it refers to, but the suggestion of how to handle 1961-on data (my bolding) strikes me as, er, notable. I doubt it was described this forthrightly in the Methods section of that paper.
– – – – – – – – – –
date: Tue Nov 16 08:57:47 1999
from: Tim Osborn (t.osborn -at- xxx.xxx)
subject: time series for WMO diagram
to: p.jones -at- xxx.xxx
The age-banded density Briffa et al. series can be got from: /cru/u2/f055/tree6/NHtemp_agebandbriffa.dat
It is [al]ready calibrated in deg C wrt. 1961-90, against the average Apr-Sep land temperature north of 20N. It goes from 1402 to 1994 – but you really ought to replace the values from 1961 onwards with observed temperatures due to the decline.
Rather than give you a new file of your reconstruction (Jones et al.) that is re-calibrated, I thought it was easier to just give you the coefficients. Your original normalised file should be multiplied by 0.3856, and then subtract 0.1112 to give the calibrated time series, i.e.: CAL = (X*0.3856) – 0.1112
Cheers
Tim
Boris,
Your claim about McIntyre being a source of misinformation means you have still learned nothing.
Good luck with that.
Ooops- I misread your sentance.
sorry. You are still a tool.
good luck with that.
Well, yeah, I’m saying two different things.
McI may be correct on PCA. I don’t have experience to say. But suppose he is correct. The next step is to ask–okay what difference does it make to what we know? The answer is not that much. The idea that Mann’s algorithm made the hockey stick or that it is some kind of statistical artifact is obviously wrong since the hockey stick is apparent in the data. Read the NRC report. It validates McIntyre’s criticisms, but shows they have a small effect.
Carrick said:
Maybe I should add to my list the misinformation that the Divergence Problem extends to all proxies, or all dendro proxies. 🙂
PaulD said:
The NAS report did indeed find that the algorithm can create “hockey sticks.” Small ones. Upside down ones. All kinds. (One of the ways SM keeps the misinformation going is by referring to just about anything as a “hockey stick.”) But none of that made much of a difference to the main conclusions. Once again, the HS is in the data and continuing to imply that there would be no hockey stick without Mann’s algorithm is incorrect.
Yes, Mann weighted the proxies that were most sensitive to temperature more than those that were less sensitive. I’m not sure why this is controversial. But it does illustrate my last point: The HS is in the data.
As for my ref. to calibration, see McIntyre’s PNAS response to Mann where he claims the HS comes from red noise or something. Read the newsletter he uses as a reference. If I have time to scare up the link I will.
Watts has posted articles a few times at CA and appeared to have editorial ability there at some point. This may have changed.
“You are still a tool.”
Some tools are pretty necessary.
AMac:I doubt it was described this forthrightly in the Methods section of that paper.
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If that is the famous WMO graph that has got so many people worked up, then the use of both proxy and instrumental data was explicitly mentioned in the caption of the figure.
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To connect with other conversations on this thread, that’s typically the kind of little “details” that are often missing from Steve’s discussions.
over at Bishop Hill, we see an exchange between Phil Jones and Bob Ward that includes this:
” From: Phil Jones
Sent: 20 December 2007 13:58
To: Bob Ward
Subject: Re: More nonsense on climate change
Bob,
…………………………………………………………………………………………………
I’m not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.
What you have to do is to take the numbers in column C (the years) and then those in D (the anomalies for each year), plot them and then work out the linear trend. The slope is upwards. I had someone do this in early 2006, and the trend was upwards then. It will be now. Trend won’t be statistically significant, but the trend is up.
This is a linear trend – least squares. This is how statisticians work out trends. They don’t just look at the series. The simpler way is to just look at the data. The warmest year is 1998 with 0.526. All years since 2001 have been above 0.4. The only year before 2001 that was above this level was 1998. So 2cnd to 8th warmest years are 2001-2007″
All that discussion on this site about which statistical model to use to calculate the trend was unnecessary. Just bang it straight into Excel, unless you are an IT illiterate such as Prof Jones.
“Climatology” is toast! This couldn’t have come at a more inopertune time. Economic pressure on new and continuing research will force this newly born field of computer based prognostication to reorganize, rename, and reelect mouthpieces. Maybe they’ll use a Russian root and try to confuse the public with the new name.
PS: I know I’m guessing, people love to guess, guessing is now a real science right?
Boris:
Pretending Mann’s work is a model of scientific and mathematical rigor is so pre-Climategate. Apparently, not even the high priests of AGW think that work is much good when they are being candid among themselves. It is also clear that more than a few think that it was a waste of credibility and good will to rush to the barricades to defend it.
Your comment that “Mann weighted the proxies that were most sensitive to temperature more than those that were less sensitive” was an especially touching. I think the Party should waive your dues this month for that alone or maybe even an awarding of the the Order of the Bristlecone Pine.
Boris an email for you 4191: Rob Wilson.
“…I thought I’d play around with some randomly generated time-series and see if I could ‘reconstruct’ northern hemisphere temperatures.
…
The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.”
Link here http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=4191
Boris (Comment #86037),
.
Mann’s multi-proxy methods have problems. They do create hock-sticks out of noise, especially pink noise, with the size of the blade depending on the pinkness of the data and the fraction of random noise series that are selected as “meaningful” against the instrument data. But the bigger problem is the rather vast overstatement of confidence in the hind cast. I suggest you see “A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF MULTIPLE TEMPERATURE PROXIES: ARE RECONSTRUCTIONS OF SURFACE TEMPERATURES OVER THE LAST 1000 YEARS RELIABLE?” McShane and Wyner, 2010
.
Finally, the whole reconstruction depends on a handful of questionable proxies. Remove those, and there is not much left. The truth is we don’t really know how warm the MWP was compared to the modern period, and Mann ‘s efforts don’t really shed much light on the question.
Toto wrote #86039 –
Thanks for the link. The only long-term recon in that PDF is on the front cover. Its caption reads (citations and attributions excepted):
The relevant text on page 4 is:
Assuming that this is what Osborn and Jones were discussing in Climategate II email 1645, you are narrowly correct — the use of both proxy and instrumental data was explicitly mentioned in the caption of the figure. More broadly, my guess was right — there’s no forthright explanation. Only a very careful reader would suspect that proxy and instrumental data series have been spliced in such a way that the divergence of proxy from instrument is obscured. “If proxies fail to match temperatures after 1960, how can you be so confident that they predict temperatures before 1850?” Hidden from view, the most important question doesn’t get asked.
Try the shoe-on-the-other-foot test: when a coolist uses a technique like this to hammer home a point, do you approve?
Climate science’s varsity team acts as though sharp practices are just fine when they employ them, in the service of Truth and Goodness, of course. They’ve earned the credibility that they currently enjoy.
SteveF: IIRC, McShane & Wyner show that proxies cannot beat red noise for short-period interpolation.
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Somehow they conclude that proxies don’t have any signal, ignoring all the previous work that showed that proxies really do beat red noise at the more difficult task of multi-decadal reconstruction.
.
I suppose you have a different interpretation?
.
They do create hock-sticks out of noise, especially pink noise
.
Hm. Has anybody shown that EIV or CPS routinely produce hockey-sticks out of data where there isn’t any?
toto:
Actually you can get any shape you want.
Correlation is not causation.
Boris:
We were talking about dendro proxy reconstructions, so I hope you aren’t getting confused about what the “divergence problem” relates to. It relates to reconstructions of global mean temperature using dendro proxies. Specifically to that.
Point us to a dendro reconstruction that doesn’t have a divergence problem in the late 20th century, and then we can talk about how it is McIntyre that is responsible for the disinformation in dendro reconstructions.
Interesting how Mann and his sidekicks were considered the elite of climate research between 1998-2003, even though some apparently had reservations even at that time. They served the AGW cause well but now latter day comers such as Nick Stokes and Zeke try to rewrite history.
Not particularly edifying for us who watch from the outside
Try the shoe-on-the-other-foot test: when a coolist uses a technique like this to hammer home a point, do you approve?
.
I suppose that would very much depend on whether the same guys have actually published and discussed the artifact in question at least three times in the peer-reviewed literature (including once in Nature) before deciding to cut it out from their data. And whether they give a citation to one of these papers on the the graph itself. Because then I would think “these guys have found an artifact and have been open about it, let me see if their reasoning is warranted”, as opposed to “these guys are up to no good”.
.
Again, this a vulgarization graph that shows their best-effort answer to the question, “what have temperatures looked like over the past millenium?” They think it looked like this. If you want to check on their reasoning, you’re supposed to look at the actual peer-reviewed papers which are helpfully cited in the graph.
.
.
IANADendrochronologist, but I suspect that recording past volcanic eruptions, matching independent markers of ENSO, being restricted to some trees in the upper North latitudes, and showing no obvious discrepancies with non-declining trees in the past has a lot to do with it.
.
.
I hear that their credibility is actually pretty high. Outside the CAsphere, that is.
toto (Comment #86047)
‘Somehow’ they conclude that the signal to noise ratio is so poor in the reconstruction that you can’t exclude a reasonable probability of almost any MWP temperature. It might help if you actually read the paper for its content. There are lots of reason to believe that the MWP was comparable in temperature to the current period. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greenland_Gisp2_Temperature.svg
That doesn’t mean we know for sure what the temperature was during the MWP, and we sure as heck don’t know how much warmer the modern period is compared to the MWP, if at all.
Carrick: sure you can. Then, when you match them against unseen data, they fail miserably. For some reason that step is not shown in JeffID’s post (seriously, re-read the bit where he tries to dodge this pretty obvious point with an awkward non-sequitur).
.
More seriously, I think SteveF was talking about really generating HS signals out of utterly trendless input data.
Pretty ironic, toto, in conjuncion with the email noting that the purpose of realclimate.org was to suppress anything but consensus thinking.
AGU looks pretty damn foolish, even to those outside the CAsphere.
======================
SteveF: The question about MS&W is whether the “poor” SNR of the proxies is real, or is due to their idiosyncratic validation methods.
.
As for that graph: did you just pull an Easterbrook? 🙂
Re: toto (Nov 23 16:33),
> Again, this a vulgarization graph… If you want to check on their reasoning, you’re supposed to look at the actual peer-reviewed papers which are helpfully cited in the graph.
Again? What again? Aside from that, OK. But now we’ve come to a pretty different neighborhood from where we started upthread in #86039. Back then, you said,
Again, I’ll see your explicitly-mentioned, and raise you one fast-and-loose.
> IANADendrochronologist
Me neither. But when these guys rally round the Tiljander-in-Mann08 flag, it’s more than enough to make me doubt their judgement when it comes to interpreting tree rings. Show me the dendrochronologists who understand the problems with post hoc analysis, and use this insight in their work. Then we can talk more.
#86058
“Pretty ironic, toto, in conjuncion with the email noting that the purpose of realclimate.org was to suppress anything but consensus thinking.”
This does get pathetically helpless. The purpose of RC was to provide information and promote a point of view. Just like most blogs. They’re not suppressing anyone.
Sure, if they succeed their viewoint will prevail. That’s what argument is about.
toto,
‘Easterbrook?’ Your snark has gone to waste, I have not a clue what you are talking about.
Nick,
“They’re not suppressing anyone.”
Surely you are joking.
#86063
Steve, Joking? No. Who do you think RC are suppressing, and how?
NIck,
Who? Whoever they don’t want have make a comment. How? Moderation policy, which may include long delays on comments, even if they are ultimately allowed…. along with allowing the local jackals broad liberty to attack the person and their motives, in direct violation of blog ‘rules’. Add to that the ex-post-facto ‘cleansing’ of comment threads to make sure the RC hosts never look bad or appear to make a mistake.
.
You comment frequently at Jeff’s blog… and he never blocks what you or anyone else says. Maybe you should ask him what he thinks about RC and how they handle dissenting voices.
Nick,
RC is well known for suppressing and censoring comments that do not agree with them. This is a common criticism of RC and the main reason most people, like me, go elsewhere for information. It’s shocking that you have never heard of this criticism before. It happened to me a few years ago.
Nick…stop defending real climate…it diminishes you. They SUPPRESS quite ruthlessly. You can be a scientist or you can go drink the real climate coolaid. It depends on how you want to be judged.
No. The DP refers to the divergence of some NH dendro proxy series. That’s what I’m talking about. Most skeptics think that all tree ring series diverge and that is not the case.
I can’t believe that we are still discussing tree-rings reflecting temperature.
Why is this even still on the table. It is done. Everyone (including every single pro-AGW and every sceptical person) should just move on and discuss other facets of the science.
I don’t think climate science (or the IPCC AR5) should even discuss this topic again. All the reconstructions using tree-rings should just be forgotten. One of the emails even suggests this. We can probably agree on that.
I used to think that Nick Stokes was honest.
ok Boris…which tree rings work for you?
Bill Illis (Comment #86069) ,
I completely agree, it is a useless effort. It may be possible to do a reasonable paleo reconstruction from other proxies (if those proxies are rationally connected via physical/chemical arguments to temperatures), but not using the stupid tree rings. A total waste of time.
Steve McIntyre deleted two of my comments on his thread trying to connect child molesters at Yale and PSU back to the PSU investigation (whilst ignoring the NSF investigation.) I have a feeling you will ignore this act of “suppression.”
Nick, do you think the email writers were acting in accordance with your vision of scientific ethics?
====================
Boris
in 86073, I do hope you are not trying to divert the question.
What question? I’m sure RC “suppresses” comments. Just like Watts. Just like McIntyre. Just like Word Climate Report. Just like Roger Pielke Sr. Who cares? They can run their blogs the way they want.
Boris (Comment #86073)
‘Steve McIntyre deleted two of my comments on his thread trying to connect child molesters at Yale and PSU back to the PSU investigation (whilst ignoring the NSF investigation.) I have a feeling you will ignore this act of “suppression.‒
.
Most certainly not. If you believe Steve has wrongly deleted your comments, then I suggest that you post those comments here (or at Jeff Id’s, or other ‘very lightly moderated’ blogs), so people can judge them on their merit. I think Steve is usually uniform in application of moderation rules, but he is human. If you can show that he has discriminated against your comments, then a I am certain you will find a lot of support… from me and others. I absolutely LOATH virtually all moderation, and think it is usually counterproductive.
Boris,
“They can run their blogs the way they want.”
Sure and the more they moderate to suppress other points of view the more their blog becomes a worthless echo chamber…. A la Tobis, Tamino, and lots of others.
Boris,
Do a google search on ‘Climate Audit’ and ‘zamboni’. It’s readily acknowledged that Steve McIntyre will purge comments from threads when those comments stray far from the topic or are against posted policy. Snips apply to pros and cons alike. He’s applied this process for years, probably shortly after starting the blog.
I wonder that you even feel this is worth mentioning. It’s feeble beyond comprehension. Do you really harbor that much of a grudge for McIntyre?
*sigh* Get thee a life.
Re: SteveF (Nov 23 18:38),
RC runs a blog. Whatever their comment policy is, they aren’t suppressing anyone. I like diverse blogs, but the existence of alternatives isn’t suppression.
RP Sr won’t allow comments at all. Is he suppressing you? Steve McI runs an incisive editorial policy – with good effect, IMO. But a lot gets cut.
And in fact, RC responds to a lot of hostile questioning. They won’t allow themselves to be overrun by it – reasonably, IMO. But it’s not an echo chamber.
Nick,
“RC responds to a lot of hostile questioning. They won’t allow themselves to be overrun by it – reasonably, IMO. But it’s not an echo chamber.”
They have improved a bit since November 2009 (comments do seem less likely to simply disappear) but they still use moderation, in addition to legitimate argument, to advance their agenda. And the local jackals are never curbed. Views different from those of RC are not fairly treated, which is why I have rarely bothered to comment there, even when a post is pure tripe. RC may not be a pure echo chamber, but it is a very long way from an open forum for discourse.
Boris, not sure if you saw my comment #86026.
1. Did you read either of the 2 e-mails referenced, where Wilson replicates both the algorithm artifact via random noise and the calibration/verification period issues using only RE and not running or ignoring other tests?
2. If you read them, do you still stand by your statement that McIntyre is the source of tons of misinformation on climate science and the hockey stick papers, e. g. the hockey stick is an artifact of the algorithm or that “hockey sticks†are a result of calibration… ?
3. If you still do, why?
4. If not, care to retract the statement, lest others assert that Boris is the source of tons of misinformation on McIntyre and the hockey stick papers…
Boris:
Individual dendro series have too much noise to be able to infer whether they are really divergent or not If they were noise free enough, you could just select them out for whether they diverge or not, and you wouldn’t have a divergence problem.
In any case, the issue is whether reconstructions diverge or not, rather than whether all individual series diverge. Somebody said something about non sequitor?
toto:
Really? They fail miserably? I assume you meant “fail miserably compared to a hockey stick shape?” [There isn’t a statistical test for “fail miserably”, or did I skip that lecture?]
You have proof of that assertion?
Nick:
They are in absolutely in no danger with their current moderation policy of being over-run with criticism of their blog, on that I think we can agree. It’s not an echo chamber, but their moderation policy and practice makes it not a very good blog either.
Boris (Comment #86037)
Many of your misunderstandings that cause you to believe that SM is spreading misinformation could be corrected by taking the time read his published articles.
Carrick,
“their moderation policy and practice makes it not a very good blog either”
No, but I don’t think a very good blog is what they are looking for. The blog exists to promote drastic reductions in fossil fuel use ASAP via techno-propaganda. That’s it; nothing else matters much.
All the more reason to avoid it.
Carrick
“but their moderation policy and practice makes it not a very good blog either”
That’s a matter of taste – I don’t comment there much, but I do read it. But I was responding to Kim’s comment
“Pretty ironic, toto, in conjuncion with the email noting that the purpose of realclimate.org was to suppress anything but consensus thinking.”
Steve says “The blog exists to promote drastic reductions in fossil fuel use ASAP via techno-propaganda.“. I don’t agree with his slant, but I agree that the blog exists to promote a viewpoint. My contention is simply that that is perfectly legitimate, and isn’t suppressing anyone. Others can promote their viewpoints too, however they like. RC isn’t stopping them.
Nick,
“My contention is simply that that is perfectly legitimate”
Agreed, and perfectly boring. A good place to avoid. I do read it (occasionally) but they are set up to discourage any dissenting view. It has about the same impact as Pielke Sr.
Nick:
If the post is technical in nature, I generally read it too.
To me, what makes a blog different than a bully pulpit is the ability of the readers to provide feedback to the author’s comments. (I see it as acting as kind of a form of peer review.)
When you know that there is a chance that comments critical to the post will get repressed, it just reduces my interest in reading the comment. I almost never read Tamino’s posts for that reason, possibly an example of “not liking his blog half as well as it deserves”.
My own RC suppression story.
after Hansen released the code I urged readers to show some class and thank gavin at RC.
My comment at RC was “thank you gavin for releasing the code”
Of course it was suppressed.
The point isn’t so much moderation or no moderation, clipping or snipping or not. Steve Mcintyre has snipped me, clipped me and outright refused to post some of my comments. I’ve had whole conversations zambonied. Judith has snipped me. Anthony has snipped me. ( Lucia? I dunno, she scares me so I behave ) In all those occasions I can say my comments deserved to be thrown in the trash bin. I’m a jerk sometimes
The RC one? I don’t think so. Now I’ve said stupid things on RC that I wish they would snip. But alas, They let me be a jerk for all the world to see. I know of no site that has snipped me for a nice comment, except RC. weird.
RC gets to act the way RC wants to act. I choose to read there less and less. It says nothing about my belief in the science. I just prefer places where my editorial judgment is in sync with the actual editors.
I think in order to speak about this with authority you have to have some experience being snipped at most sites.
Jerk lessons are cheap and class is open.
Nick, there’s another comment of mine requesting a response at 7:39 PM, or are you ‘pathetically helpless’ to do so?
==================
AGW belief requires that the Manniacs knows more about paleo dendro records than dendrologists.
That should be a tip that something is amiss, but AGW has the main effect of lowering the intelligence of its believers, so they keep the faith, baby.
“but their moderation policy and practice makes it not a very good blog either.”
Meh. Ever visited LanguageLog? http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
Excellent linguistic blog but frequently has posts with comments closed – and one contributor famously threatend (humourosly one hopes) to not only remove comments of a particular nature but to employee hitmen to have the commentators murdered.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2683
“I realize that it is unusual for a popular science blog to launch upon a policy of killing its own readers. That is why I thought an explicit warning should go up on the site first. This is that warning.”
Re: kim (Nov 23 22:56),
Kim, I haven’t read all the emails. But what I’ve seen is scientists conscientiously and carefully performing their jobs.
RealClimate censored and then blocked Steve McIntyre from posting IIRC because he did what previously had never been done; ask questions they didn’t like. As a result, he started his own blog.
In Nick Stokes parallel universe, RC was simply being conscientious and carefully performing their jobs as honest scientists only wishing to promote good science by communicating to public, sort of like a PSA. When SM came along, RC did to him what they’ve done using other smear campaigns and character assassinations of their peers they determine unworthy of their holiness.
Example? Nir Shaviv
http://www.sciencebits.com/RealClimateSlurs
Others can easily be found, including accusing Roy Spencer of “cooking the books”.
Wasn’t it Steve McIntyre that updated the tree ring proxies because the Team said it was too labor intensive or something of the sort?
It’s funny to read the Mann-iacs defend not one, but two Mann papers using upside down Tiljander sediment cores. The second time after it was shown conclusively to be UPSIDE DOWN. I recall Jean S or someone was “speechless”.
Bill Illis,
Yes it would be nice to not hear about treemometers and hockey sticks anymore, but the zombie lives on; http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/13/the-epa-and-upside-down-mann/
Now we have CG2 only confirming what reasonable people already knew, and it isn’t what Nick Stokes (jokingly I’m sure) stated.
McIntrye can be petty as in
http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/23/phil-stumped-at-calculating-a-trend/#comments
Pathetic, Nick. I’ve just had a chat with your distinguished antecedent on my ouija board, and he’s appalled.
===============
A minor nit to pick (toto & AMAC).
It’s dendroclimatology and thus dendroclimatologists but not dendrochronologists. The latter have a well deserved good reputation, the former less so.
/pedantic
bob
Boris writes “Yes, Mann weighted the proxies that were most sensitive to temperature more than those that were less sensitive. I’m not sure why this is controversial.”
Its not intuitive that using seemingly better data on the face of it is very wrong but ironically those who read sites like this one and CA with an open mind and are willing to learn soon see why.
I’m quite confident that there are far more skeptics with a better knowledge of the issues than diehard AGWers who dont get to see a proper discussion and instead are fed propoganda from the Team.
For Nick’s benefit “The purpose of RC was to provide information and promote a point of view. Just like most blogs. They’re not suppressing anyone.”
There have been many suggestions of censorship at RC and I for one have personal experience with it. They were civil posts questioning the science and pointing out inconsistencies.
Yes they do suppress dissenting points of view.
TT,
I think you, Diogenes and others have misunderstood what I’m saying. Kim said:
“Pretty ironic, toto, in conjuncion with the email noting that the purpose of realclimate.org was to suppress anything but consensus thinking.â€
and he was referring to Mann saying that RC was designed to win a PR battle.
That has nothing to do with comment policy. You don’t set up a blog with the purpose of suppressing comments. Kim is clearly interpreting Mann’s statement to say that the purpose of RC is to suppress other thinking by its advocacy, not merely to restrict expression on RC. And that is what I was objecting to. RC’s advocacy is no different to that of any other blog, and they are perfectly entitled to seek to win a PR battle.
Nick writes “You don’t set up a blog with the purpose of suppressing comments.”
And yet in practice thats whats happened at RC. Watching how they work is fascinating. There are threads there that are begging for skeptical comment and yet the total posts in the thread is maybe a few dozen and the one or two dissenting comments that are allowed through are swiftly dispatched by the regulars.
Skeptical science is worse and Open mind is worst of all. I’m not aware of any skeptical site that has such harsh moderation/propogandist policies.
Think of all the poor sods who thought they were getting real science there instead of real public relations. People like you, Nick, but not nearly as bright. What’s your excuse?
=================
Nick writes “RC’s advocacy is no different to that of any other blog, and they are perfectly entitled to seek to win a PR battle.”
Perhaps the following would be better on a less middle of the road blog than this one but to prove a point…
…originally I thought the Climategate 1.0 emails were almost certainly an inside job largely because the amount of time I thought would be required to produce the relatively consistent set of emails from a complete “stolen” set was greater than the time they had. ie it was less than a week from the date of the last email to the date of release
Now with this latest release I’m more inclined to believe that a backup tape was “obtained” and used and the perpetrator(s) may or may not have had inside information up front or they may have been part of a team of fast workers.
So this latest release adds support to the idea the data was actually stolen rather than as a result of the actions of a whistleblower.
Try putting that kind of dissenting view on RC and see how you go.
Boris, you also seem to neglect that Mann used two bristlecone trees to act by some unknown process to sense the temperature around the entire planet to get rid of the MWP. Take that data out and it all falls apart:
http://climateaudit.org/2010/08/07/mann-and-his-bristlecones/
Kim,
The science is fine. But RC’s purpose is to make a case – there’s no secret of that.
And TT, yet again, I’m not talking about comment policy, though everyone else seems to want to do so. There must be lots of hurt feelings around.
But OK, if you really must, I cited one example of a more extreme policy – RP Sr. No comments at all. And that’s fine. He gets to say what he wants, and if you don’t like not being able to comment, stay away.
There is actually a reason for RC’s policy. Sceptic commentary is extremely voluble. It has taken over Judith Curry’s site. RC does not want to be swamped. Seems reasonable to me.
I think that for the reasons you state, RP Sr.’s site isn’t really comparable and that doesn’t make it a more extreme policy IMHO.
Followup comments are important because they allow people to get a feel for the veracity of an article in areas they may not be terribly familiar with. For that reason I dont read many of RP Sr’s articles.
Excusing RC’s moderation policy because they dont want to be swamped is a cop out. RC is anything but swamped with posts with their current MO.
Some alleged emails — choice picks:
Wils:
What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably […]
Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary […]
Jones:
Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.
Jones:
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process
McGarvie/UEA Director of Faculty Administration:
As we are testing EIR with the other climate audit org request relating to communications with other academic colleagues, I think that we would weaken that case if we supplied the information in this case. So I would suggest that we decline this one (at the very end of the time period)
Jones:
[FOI, temperature data]
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.
Jones:
GKSS is just one model and it is a model, so there is no need for it to be correct.
Mann:
the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what the site [Real Climate] is about.
Bradley:
I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstructionâ€.
Cook:
I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead.
Barnett:
[IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer
Santer:
there is no individual model that does well in all of the SST and water vapor tests we’ve applied.
Pollack:
But it will be very difficult to make the MWP go away in Greenland.
Cook:
A growing body of evidence clearly shows [2008] that hydroclimatic variability
during the putative MWP (more appropriately and inclusively called the “Medieval Climate Anomaly†or MCA period) was more regionally extreme (mainly in terms of the frequency and duration of megadroughts) than anything we have seen in the 20th century, except perhaps for the Sahel. So in certain ways the MCA period may have been more climatically extreme than in modern times.
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/11/breaking-more-emails-released-climategate-ii/
Devastating insight into a corrupt and criminal group.
Nick Stokes, I offered Gavin a series of synthetic ‘temperature’ signals and offered him and the boys from the ‘Team’ a chance to find the underlying signal. Each of the data sets would have been deposited with the introduced noise algorithm stored.
This did cause some debate.
Then it all disappeared.
Carrick:
“Individual dendro series have too much noise to be able to infer whether they are really divergent or not”
This isn’t true at all. It doesn’t even make sense. Of course you can look at a dendro series and see if it diverges. This is how we know that the DP is not a problem at all sites.
“If they were noise free enough, you could just select them out for whether they diverge or not, and you wouldn’t have a divergence problem.”
Well, you could do that, and some people have suggested doing so, selecting trees that are “positive responders” and ignoring “negative responders.” Obviously that is not the best idea because you still have trees that were once temp sensitive and have suddenly become non-temperature sensitive in the late 20th. And you don’t know why. Also, You’d have less confidence because you would have less data.
RC is controlled by guys who are running the clock on the tax payer’s tab. They are explicitly pushing their increasingly tattered ‘official’ position. They enforce the orthodox dogma, giving a sciencey feel to the AGW faithful. They run a faux conversation, but it is really only an echo chamber.
TerryMN
“Boris, not sure if you saw my comment #86026.
1. Did you read either of the 2 e-mails referenced, where Wilson replicates both the algorithm artifact via random noise and the calibration/verification period issues using only RE and not running or ignoring other tests?”
Somebody quoted them upthread, right. I haven’t read the entire emails. Feel free to quote them for me, but it’s not necessary to my point.
“2. If you read them, do you still stand by your statement that McIntyre is the source of tons of misinformation on climate science and the hockey stick papers, e. g. the hockey stick is an artifact of the algorithm or that “hockey sticks†are a result of calibration… ?”
The key here is that the claim that the hockey stick arises from random data is true—sometimes, depending on your definition of “hockey stick”. Yes, if you calibrate from random data, you get a sort of “hockey stick shape.” Here is McIntyre’s ref that he used in his PNAS response:
http://landshape.org/images/script.pdf
Notice there is no validation step. Random noise would fail validation. Also, the calibration period is a lot longer than typical reconstructions, which would accentuate the “HS shape.” Then the “HS shape” is not really a hockey stick. The blade is rising, but the shaft is not flat and it shows an MWP higher than the 1961-1990 mean. In other words, if the calibration produces a bias, it produces a bias that would tend to inflate the MWP.
But even all of this is irrelevant because the hockey stick shape is in the data. It is not an artifact at all.
On RealClimate.org — Look, there are blogs about Twilight, intelligent design, how to pick up girls, Origami Yoda & Darth Paper, the Mommy Wars, smoothie recipes, colonoscopy reimbursement procedures, and much else. RC’s comment policies reflect the views of its authors, just as for each of the other blogs. I find it somewhat lacking as an embodiment of the spirit of scientific inquiry, but so what. It’s a site that does a great job of satisfying a large number of visitors.
The underlying gripe seems to be that RC is so popular. Well, deal. If its owners suddenly saw the light and changed policies to suit my whims rather than theirs, readers would switch to another site that remained true to the Mainstream vision.
I’ll instead Give Thanks for the often high level of conversation that Lucia often manages to attract to the comments to Blackboard posts. The occasional defenses of the indefensible and coolist rants are just reminders of the ways that many folks view the world, Out There.
Often inadvertently amusing.
Re: Boris #86114,
> Random noise would fail validation.
Of course, this isn’t strictly true.
Of course, the converse (signal would pass validation) isn’t implied by the failure of random noise, even if it was strictly true.
Of course, as Yule pointed out in 1926, one should think a little harder about the meaning of “signal” when performing exercises in correlation.
Of course, the post hoc nature of these analyses has a large effect on their interpretations that shouldn’t be ignored.
And of course, Mainstream reconstructionists have yet to wrap their arms around these concepts.
Anyway… Happy Thanksgiving, Boris.
Well some of the random data might pass validation. But Stockwell didn’t do it so we don’t know what the shape of that data would be.
As for your other stuff, if it’s so important , maybe people should talk about it in their PNAS responses instead of making up stuff about the calibration process creating “hockey sticks.”
And a happy Thanksgiving to you too. Go Dolphins!
> maybe people should talk about it in their PNAS responses
Heh.
It’s like WikiLeak style, dump it on the internet, stand back and see what happens. Interesting is the nucluar time bomb ticking for the next batch. I guess the suspense is killing the usual suspects…
“Hoi Polloi
I guess the suspense is killing the usual suspects…”
It must be one of the unknown unkowns; if one has purged ones in/out boxes then one will not remember exactly what was purged.
Then one finds that a world wide audience is separated from all the things one deleted, possibly including attachments, by a simple passphrase.
Not knowing exactly what the contents were and not knowing when Pandora’s box will be opened.
The sword of Damocles‎ is hanging over their heads.
I wonder, who now can best wear the mantle of denialist?
Boris:
I think this shows you don’t really understand the usage of “noise”, as it gets used in measurement theory because you go on to say this:
Simply because we find a tree whose growth is positively correlated with temperature, we cannot say with any certainty it is because the tree is temperature limited, rather than responding with a variable over that period that is positively correlated with temperature over that time period. (Back to correlation is not causation.)
So my point is exactly that simply because you are seeing a sample that is positively correlated temperature doesn’t mean you are even seeing temperature limited growth for that period.
In more general noise theory terms, “positive responder” doesn’t imply the absence of the same underlying noise source… it could simply be the noise source is large enough that you end up with say 50% “positive responders” and 50% “negative responders” over that period, and this could have do with response to other variables in climate such as change in precipitation, average amount of sunlight, or other parameters.
I haven’t done a trend analysis to see which percent have a positive trend from 1960-2009, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were as high as 50%/50%. But saying they have a positive trend doesn’t mean they are free from the problem that is creating the divergence series at the end of the 20th century.
In fact, if you could really say they were free of the divergence problem, that would imply the following:
1) We understand the source of underlying divergence problem (we don’t).
2) We have a selection criterion for selecting samples that don’t have this underlying problem.
Neither of these are true. If you want to claim you can find individual proxies that are “positive responders,” that’s kind of a “no duh”, but it means something very different than saying you can tell it doesn’t suffer from the same underlying noise source that is causing the divergence problem in the global reconstructions.
[For people who get confused or just want to start a p*ssing contest, when I say “noise source”, I mean in the sense of anything that causes an error between individual measurements and the “truth centered mean value” of the quantity that we are setting out to measure. So this can include things like nonlinear, even “double-sided”, response of a proxy to temperature. .]
Apparently Phil Jones cant plot a trendline. Lucia maybe you could help him? Dont you do these sort of things? Plot trendlines I mean
Actually Carrick, it is far worse than that. IF we were to assume that the BEST data is correct, it shows that about 30% of sites have a cooling tend in the presence of the greatest heating event the Earth has seen in the past 1,000 years. The plot of warming/cooling sites also indicates that these can be very close to each outer, 10’s of miles.
Thus the sampling size for trees would need to be very large, and one could not trust a temperature record more than 20 miles from a particular tree.
DocMartyn, unfortunately BEST didn’t hold the interval used in the trend estimation constant, nor did they apply any reasonable data quality criteria in generating it, so that figure is basically junk.
IMO, This is what the figure looks like, done properly.
DocMartyn, I gave an explanation here for how I generated that graph and more detail on my criticism of the BEST graph.
Carrick,
The point I’m trying to make is that there are plenty of areas that do not exhibit a divergence problem–in other words there are plenty of sites that do not show decreased temperature sensitivity in the late 20th century.
“it means something very different than saying you can tell it doesn’t suffer from the same underlying noise source that is causing the divergence problem in the global reconstructions.”
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. It sounds like you’re talking about the individual trees or individual trees within a geographical area. I’m talking about areas that do not suffer from the DP–which is pretty much everywhere outside of the circumpolar sites (and not all of those.)
A point Mann made was that the validation of the tree rings to temperature was better than random. However, the counter point by McIntyre was that a portion of the validated treerings were synthetic constructs containing spliced in temperature data, which obviously correlated very well to temperature, and therefore skewed the validation statistics in Mann’s favor.
.
I forget the details, but I’m sure the regulars here remember.
.
A few further observations. Just because a tree is a positive responder now, doesn’t mean it was a positive responder 100s of years ago ie the divergence problem/the amount of data that has to be thrown away as not “sensitive”. It is also worth noting that some chronologies contain rings from dead trees, and are therefore not calibrated to temperature at all, but to other trees. Finally, the idea that small groups of trees that are inconsistant across a small area, never mind across the world, can be used to measure global temperature to a tenth of a degree is simply insane. I commend McIntyre for steadfastly refusing to accept the challenge to produce a “better” reconstruction (Lipstick on a pig doesn’t come close) and his tact in refusing to explicitly call out such a dubious practice.
Boris is doing a good job of diverting this thread from the evidence of wrongdoing provided by Climategate 2 emails.
MarkR #86129
Well Mark, you’ve given a list of quotes. Try taking just one of them and explain how it is evidence of wrongdoing.
Boris,
“The point I’m trying to make is that there are plenty of areas that do not exhibit a divergence problem–in other words there are plenty of sites that do not show decreased temperature sensitivity in the late 20th century.”
I am very interested, do you have references?
Hi Nick. Well for those in the UK, I see evidence of misconduct in public office which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Obviously there is evidence of fraud, which is a a serious offence in all jurisdictions. In the US I expect some of the conspirators to go to prison for life. Lastly, for you there is aiding and abetting. Pucker up.
“RC does not want to be swamped. Seems reasonable to me.”
There stated purpose is this. They dont want to be a megaphone for skeptics.
Volume has nothing to do with it.
Pay attention.
Mann:
the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what the site [Real Climate] is about.
MarkR,
Be specific. Which of your quotes shows evidence of misconduct in public office?
And what’s wrong with Mann wanting to be sure that sceptics lose the PR battle? ie that RC wins? Isn’t this just competing in the marketplace of ideas? Don’t you want Mann to lose the PR battle?
Judges decide that Nick. Wait your turn.
MarkR, you have nothing except hot air.
See you in Court. Tell your near and dear.
have you got the lawyers booked yet, Nick?
“But RC’s purpose is to make a case – there’s no secret of that”
Nick Stokes just admitted that RC is a propaganda site.
Andrew
#86139
No, I’m waiting for John O’S to become available.
Mens rea nick. Can’t say you didn’t know.
Boris:
Yes, I was discussing individual trees.
Like phi, I’d be interested in a reference where it discusses evidence that there is a “regionalization” to the divergence problem.
Isn’t this about science, not some new brand of dog food?
RealClimate is the, self confessed, PR arm for the doom and gloom group.
It’s like the company webpage of a product you are interested in. You will visit it to get some information but you want an outside neutral source, like Freeman Dyson.
RealClimate is like a state run newspaper, sure some in the ruling party will say it’s has good stories but most see it for what it is and will prefer a more balanced approach. RealClimate is about image, not substance.
ok kevin..but RC, in common with most true-warmer sites such as open mind etc, also seems to employ a gang of intellect-deprived attack hounds – Dhogaza, j bowers, ladbury, mashey etc – who will just pile insults on the most innocent questioner. That was my first experience of climate science and why the orthodoxy really struggles to get my acceptance. Anf yet Nick claims that they do not shut down dissenting views. I presume he wears eyepatches.
The only reason that Phil J can claim that he isn’t literally a criminal is that the statute of limitations in the U.K. for destroying evidence subject to an FOI request is SIX MONTHS.
I’m not a lawyer, but is there any other criminal act that gives you a “get out of jail” card after six months?
#86146
No d, wearily, I did not say anything about their policy about which comments they will display. I was responding to a claim that RC exists to suppress dissenting views. It may decline to provide an unlimited forum for them, but it doesn’t and can’t suppress them. Say what you like – RC isn’t stopping you.
Science comes from the latin word for knowledge and those that control knowledge have power. If someone hides uncertainty, or does not share key data (which incidentally comes from stations from all over the world), and they put only their own interpretations on that knowledge then that gives them power to influence government policy. The emails show us that a few of the core made the final decisions and that the others fell in line to support them. They feel they have a sort of proprietary right to the key data but then use it to influence public policy. They use public money to achieve this, but are not accountable to the public and do not feel they have to share the data. This make them appear as if they are driven by power. They felt the IPCC was a way around FOI. This it wrong and is the real anti-science because if it turns out that there is doom ahead, then they have delayed and clouded the progress and the science needed to find out. How can closed process be defended for something they claim is so important?
@Zeke
Indeed, it is my understanding of the scientific method that rather than setting up a public pillory on the internet, the standard way of showing someone is wrong is to do it right yourself.
Nick “I was responding to a claim that RC exists to suppress dissenting views. It may decline to provide an unlimited forum for them, but it doesn’t and can’t suppress them.”
What kind of argument is that? Were you expecting them to come around to people’s houses and beat them up if they were found to be posting at WUWT?
TT #86151
It’s not my argument. It’s the one I was responding to.
Nick “It’s not my argument. It’s the one I was responding to.”
Well I’m pretty sure the implied context was within its own site and not more generally.
TimTheToolMan,
Aw, why do you have to go and pull the threads on Nick’s perfectly crafted strawman? I mean, putting things in context? Heaven forbid!
#86153 TT
which brings us back to here.
Always watch the pee (after SteveMc), Stokes ain’t saying: “….Say what you like – RC isn’t stopping you on the RC forum“. I’m sure even he is aware of the censorship on RC.
>If that is the famous WMO graph that has got so many people worked up, then the use of both proxy and instrumental data was explicitly mentioned in the caption of the figure.
Toto, Amac, I think you got it wrong. That caption you refer to that includes instrumental temperatures, just means that the individual reconstructions were created by using instrumental and long historical temperatures. The legend is right there with the chart, and it makes no mention of instrumental temperatures.
Nick Stokes,
I have thought a bit more about why the moderation policy at RC troubles me (and I think perhaps others). The problem is the philosophical disconnect between claims to be accurately representing ‘the science’ (certainly a laudable goal) and the use of moderation (and simultaneous lack of moderation of the local attack jackals), to restrict opposing technical comments that address ‘the science’… so as to more effectively advance their policy agenda.
.
If RC were openly acknowledged to be a political site (like Joe Romm’s for example) then their moderation policy would be fine… everyone understands that politically motivated commentary is mainly opinion/morals/priorities, and attempting to advance a political agenda by most any means is pretty much expected.
.
It is the dissonance between claims of advancing ‘the science’ and the advancing of an agenda via moderation that troubles me. I find it intellectually dishonest to attempt to gain credibility by cloaking oneself in ‘the science’ while restricting opposing technical argument. Restricting cogent technical arguments is not anything like science… for me, that falls under the heading of politics.
Nick–
date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:33:06 -0400
from: Michael Mann
subject: attacks against Keith
to: Phil Jones , Tim Osborn
Phil, Tim,
……
Meanwhile, I suspect you’ve both seen the latest attack against his Yamal work by McIntyre.
Gavin and I (having consulted also w/ Malcolm) are wondering what to make of this, and
what sort of response—if any—is necessary and appropriate. So far, we’ve simply deleted
all of the attempts by McIntyre and his minions to draw attention to this at RealClimate.
Nick-
Realclimate.org reason for existence:
http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/1485.txt
Thanks Phil,
I did the the BBC piece–at least it clearly marked as an op-ed, not a news story. Did
you check w/ BBC whether they would consider publishing an opposing op-ed by some Brits
(hint!).
I’ve personally stopped responding to these, they’re going to get a few of these op-ed
pieces out here and there, but the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the
PR battle. That’s what the site is about.
By the way, Gavin did come up w/ the name!
Will keep you posted of developments….
Talk to you later,
Mike
Well, that worked…..
This underlines what SteveF wrote. The RC method is to delete scientific criticism which they find difficult to respond to.
Steve F @ 7:10 AM. Yes. The irony here is that had they been engaged in science instead of PR they would not now be losing the PR battle.
BobB @ 7:17 AM. Thanks, I was waiting for that.
=============
That letter from Mann is dated 28 Sept. RC did in fact make a major response on Sep 30. They chose to put some thought into it before responding. It’s their choice, and they are entitled to do it that way. And then they took hostile comments, eg 1,6,8,9,14…
And Bob, that quote
“the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the
PR battle. That’s what the site is about.”
is exactly where we started in this thread. Kim said it was suppressing contrary views, and I said not so (and then people trotted out their complaints about comments, which is a different issue), It’s rather aggressively stated, but it’s content is unobjectionable. They are putting a case and they want it to prevail. So does everyone who puts a case.
“They are putting a case and they want it to prevail.”
That’s not science, Nick.
Andrew
Nick–give it up–you are trying to rationalize.
They deleted emails. They could have left the emails on their blog and simply stated that they would analyze the situation and respond.
Nick, I would add that I think you are in fact starting to look silly on this thread defending the indefensible with shades of Baghdad Bob—nothing to see here
Just for the record, this is the same Nick who doesn’t mind putting the word “stolen” in front of the emails (always an illegal act) but objects to the use of the word “redacted” to describe hiding part of a published graph, claiming the “data is still there” excuses the decision not to publish a portion of this data.
I was also admonished on that thread for using “redacted”
because I guess it makes people’s tummies hurtbecause it is too “loaded” even though in general the word is neutral, it does not imply an illegal act, and in 99% of the cases where the data are redacted, it would have been unethical to have published them instead.To make this clear, in Nick’s POV, “stolen” is OK…to make a charge of criminality without any grounds…but “redacted”, to exclude a portion of information from publication” and rarely if ever an illegal (but sometimes unethical) act is not.
[For context, I think describing Briffa’s publication as a “redaction of data” is a better and more neutral word choice than deletion of data used by McIntyre, and it was in the context of searching for a better word that “deletion” that I picked “redaction”. I still hold the main thing people didn’t like about it was it too clearly stated what Briffa actually did, so rather than defend an unethical act, they would rather the waters were kept muddy by speaking of everything in muddy terms.]
Re: SteveF (#86158),
Thanks for phrasing the issue in those terms. Perhaps it isn’t so much the dissonance of the RC bloggers as it is the respect that is accorded to the website by so many in the climate science Mainstream — a tacit endorsement of their methods.
.
Re: Nick Stokes (#86163),
> And then [RealClimate] took hostile comments [re: Yamal], eg 1,6,8,9,14…
One has to follow Nick’s links to evaluate his arguments.
#1 is a short, civil remark on tone.
#6, same.
#8 is a short, civil remark advocating release of data and code.
#9 is a short, civil criticism of Al Gore.
#14, same.
In other words, Nick’s examples don’t illustrate hostility as the term is commonly understood. More importantly and to SteveF’s point, these comments are devoid of any substantial technical criticisms of Yamal.
How do these five comments compare to numbers 1a, 6b, 8c, 9d, and 14e? These are among the submissions that failed RC’s aggressive moderation policy because they focused on the scientific issues raised by Yamal. Thus, they never saw the light of day.
(BTW, notice the oh-so-clever construction of that last paragraph. I’ve snuck in the assumption that five critical comments of scientific merit were submitted and then Memory-Holed by the Team. Though I have no way of knowing whether or not that is actually true.)
Nick, do you think Mann doesn’t know what he is talking about when he says that “So far, we’ve simply deleted all of the attempts by McIntyre and his minions to draw attention to this at RealClimate.” or?
In a very powerful way, #1683 is the worst one I’ve seen.
===========================
Nick Stokes,
Sure, but that utterly begs the issue. Our gentle (OK, sometimes not so gentle 🙂 ) hostess puts forward a technical case and usually defends it vigorously. She does not ever block someone from making a contrary technical argument. Could she? Sure, but she doesn’t. Of course everyone wants their argument to prevail; the question is how low they will stoop to ensure that it does. For me it is a simple question of intellectual honesty.
.
Nick, you can have the last word if you want, since it seems to me you will never acknowledge any failing, however small, on the part of climate scientists; I sometimes wonder if you can appreciate how very strange that is.
That… and he may well get the last word because it’s American Thanksgiving weekend. I’m surprised the Americans aren’t all sitting on couches recovering from Turkey overload!
I hosted T-Day. I also have heavy Black Friday obligations. Heck, I drank on Blackout Wednesday! I needed to recover from the cleaning frenzy which involved mopping, outside of the cabinet cleaning, carpet shampooing etc. Did I mention I did a lot of mopping last Friday after the cat-who-had-been skunked came in through the cat door? ( I have now learned that a mixture of 1/4 C baking soda, 1 qt 3% hydrogen peroxide and 1 tsp. dish detergent works magic on skunk odor. As good as 10 cat baths. Really works.
Wow!
The cupboard now permanently houses a full bottle of 3% hydrogen peroxide so that we don’t have to drive all around finding a 24 hour grocery store should this happen after midnight– which is when it happened.)
Unfortunately, if the skunked cat gets in the house, the house needs to be de-stinkified. I recommend lots of Febreeze. I emptied 2 cans. It actually works pretty well.)
I saw Steve Mc. and Jeff Id are doing a good job collecting together son-of-climategate emails. I’m afraid what with deskunking and Turkey fixin’s I’m just skiming during gaps.
Lucia,
.
The combination of slightly elevated pH and a strong oxidizing agent converts the smelly thiols and their precursors (thiol acetates) via bi-molecular coupling into di-sulfides, which are almost ordorless. Since the molecular weight of the thiols are essentially doubled when converted to the di-sulfide, they become several orders of magnitude less volatile (and so even less smelly).
.
Laundry bleach is actually much more effective, but you would have a platinum blond cat!
Lucia, the peroxy anion is the active species in thiol oxidation.
Don’t just use 3% peroxide, make sure you alkalinize it first by adding sodium bicarbonate. This has the advantage of of keeping the low weight thols in solution too.
Carrick.
I find the arguments over hide the decline bordering on insanity.
Lets take Briffa. Briffa had a choice: How the decline in the graphic and explain it in the text, as Mcintyre requested. OR “redact” the decline in the graphic and explain the redaction in the text.
It’s obvious what you do. You show the decline and explain it.
However, now we see all sorts of contorted arguments that attempt to justify Briffa’s action. It was shown in other graphics..
everybody knows about the decline.. blah blah blah.
My argument is that the graphic will be looked at more often than the text is read so Its best to put the decline in the graphic.
Yet, no one on the other side will agree to this. They think having it in the text is enough.
What is needed is a statement by a bonefide climate scientist about this question. What does one do? show data in the graphic or not. And best of all it would be good if this question were answered by the mails..
date: 18 Aug 2008 12:39:50 -0400
from: Gavin Schmidt
subject: Re: Revised version the Wengen paper
to: Phil Jones
a couple of quick points – more later.
– why does the CET line on figure A1 only go to 1950? Surely you have enough data to go to 1982 with no padding? I think that it is important to graphically show that even if you take IPCC90 at face value, it still shows that today is warmer. The graph will be looked at much more often than the text will be read.
Again Nick Stokes is avoiding the real issue here. He’s talking about hostile comments but does not adress the real issue:
There’s nowhere mention of hostile comments, unless the RC clan means that opposite opinions and critic is “hostile”.
Carrick, phi, here’s Rob Wilson’s paper on the DP:
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~liepert/pdf/DArrigo_GPC2007.pdf
I agree with you, Steven. The problem is, if someone disagrees with us they are not a criminal or a charlatan or whatever else they get called. The skeptic side is adept at point-scoring criticism and borderline incompetent at science-improving criticism.
Boris,
Thank you but there is nothing that you claim in this paper. Besides we find in the conclusions:
“However, the relative scarcity of ring width and density
records from the lower mid latitudes, tropics and
Southern Hemisphere precludes making definitive conclusions
about the spatial extent of this phenomenon, and
more research is needed to more fully evaluate the extent
of the divergence problem worldwide.”
Amazing paper Boris. It is clear that the authors do not know what trees are, why they have tree rings or indeed, any understanding of biological systems.
SteveF,
“Nick, you can have the last word if you want, since it seems to me you will never acknowledge any failing, however small, on the part of climate scientists”
Well, I never refuse such an invitation. I find that debates frequently go like this, that some large failing is alleged – I try to address it, and then comes a cascade of smaller allegations. So here – Kim alleges (and I’m sorry to go on about this, because I don’t think that original comment was a big deal) that RC was set up to suppress contrary viewpoints. Well, I suppose that is a large failing, so I respond. It wasn’t, and it couldn’t. That segues into a whole lot of grizzling about moderation, and while I wouldn’t do that quite at RC does, if there is a failing there it is a very small one. But that’s what we end up arguing about.
Boris, thank you.
Im bother by two kinds of behavior. On the skeptic side Im bothered by people who call hiding the decline a “fraud”. On the other hand Im bothered by people who see nothing wrong with hiding the decline.
Having productive conversations about those grey areas is very tough in this politically charged arena, where black and white rule the day
I suppose we will see how it is handled in Ar5.
Mosher,
“I suppose we will see how it is handled in Ar5.”
Since they really do not understand why there has been a divergence, the rational thing would be to back-pedal and say something like “We don’t know why, and we don’t know if it might have happened before, which casts vast doubt on almost the entire field… so never mind about the tree-ring reconstructions until we figure this out.”
.
OK, that is just a fantasy, but I can dream of not having to discuss the stupid tress any more, can’t I?
So, now that we have gavin arguing that graphics are more important than text, can I get a show of hands of people who disagree with gavin?
That is, Briffa had a choice. He could choose to show the decline in the graphics as the reviewer requested, or he could choose to not show the data in the graphic.
Given that gavin thinks showing data has more impact that having words about it, what would gavin do?
Forget the fact that in one case the graphic showed warming and in another case the graphic showed a decline in rings.
here is the point Sooner or later these arguments that it is ok to not have full disclosure will come back to bite people in the ass.
High ground. take the frickin high ground, skeptics arent going to
Boris,
“The skeptic side is adept at point-scoring criticism and borderline incompetent at science-improving criticism.”
As a skeptic of at least some of climate science’s dire prognostications, I take exception to that statement. Let me offer some very constructive science-improving criticism:
OK, it’s not really my constructive criticism… but it sure as heck applies to ‘hide the decline’.
SteveF
I agree with McIntyre. recons are not ready for prime time. It’s not science yet. Probably should not be in the report or should be heavily caveated.
Lets put this RC thing to an end.
RC was not set up to stifle contrary views.
However, they do practice stifling contrary veiw in the comments
Dont believe me?
Ask mike
guys, I see that Science has already gone online w/ the new issue, so we
put up the RC post. By now, you’ve probably read that nasty McIntyre
thing. Apparently, he violated the embargo on his website (I don’t go
there personally, but so I’m informed).
Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way
you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about
what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to answer any
questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you
might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold
comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think
they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d
like us to include.
You’re also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a
resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put
forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We’ll use our
best discretion to make sure the skeptics dont’get to use the RC
comments as a megaphone…
mike
######################
I am sure some will find a way to weasel out of this.
#86167
Well, Carrick, I don’t know why you want to revisit that controversy here. But OK, let’s think about another similar circumstance. There was a fuss recently about this plot from BEST data. It has a big dip in April 2010 which leads to a trumpeted downtrend.
But as Tamino noted the error for that month is huge. They have only 47 stations. The graph is deceptive.
So what to do? Most people have done the sensible thing and stopped the plot at March. Just like Briffa did in 1450. The data just isn’t enough to continue.
But in McIntyre’s terms, that’s “deleting” data. Or in your stranger term, “redacting”.
Now of course it’s none of those things. The data was SCAR data, and remains readily available. It’s just avoiding deceptive plotting.
So, Nick thinks gavin is wrong.
Then he must also think that Briffa is wrong because Briffa on other occasions has plotted the divergence.
Graphing suspect data is not an either or thing.
One can merely plot the suspect data using a different format– like dotted lines..
#86190
Steven, I think you’re talking about a different situation. This was the 15C in a nearly 600-year plot where data was just in very short supply,
But yes, different people might make different decisions about what to plot. That isn’t deleting data.
Further,
Nobody was deceived by the BEST plot. Everybody who looks at it realizes that something is amiss. They did not include text to explain the blip. Tamino does.
1.It is one thing to show a blip and explain it
2 It is another thing to show a blip and not explain it
3 It is another thing to hide a blip and not explain it
4 It is another thing to hide a blip and explain it
1 is the best practice. neither the eye nor the mind is fooled
we call this full disclosure
2. This is incompetence. BEST at its best
3. This is fraud
4. This is fooling the eye and hoping they dont read the textor understand how bad the blip is.
The point is Nick we dont have a ready word for the practice because it is unknown in the craft.
The divergence is an unsolved problem. Best practice is to show the blip. It is large and goes to the heart of the science.
Now,
Suppose that biffa did delete the data from the archive?
what would you say then?
remember that explaining the divergence depends up people having access to that divergent data..
what if briffa didnt archive that data? would you call that deleting data? and how can guys explain data that isnt archived?
Boris thanks for a pointer to D’Arrigo’s paper. See also this companion paper: Wilson JGR 2007.
From what I’m reading, this “non loss of divergence” appears to only be present in a few series, and then only with specific trees in those series (hence the D’Arrigio Cherry Pie that McIntyre talks of), which is the problem I alluded to above in being able to distinguish whether a “positive responder” is due to a lack of a divergence problem versus simply the spread in trends associated with internal variability of effect that is producing the divergence.
You may be aware of this study by McIntyre. He editorializes as is his wont about the team, then summarizes:
I can tell you how you can tell if a subsample belong to the same distribution as the rest of the distribution (e.g., t-test). It does not appear that Wilson or D’Arrigo have done their homework on this, and I would be very surprised at the face of it to find that statistically these represent anomalous series.
#86192
“This is incompetence. BEST at its best”
No, that graph came from Daily Mail via GWPF. The data is from BEST but AFAIK they did not create such a graph.
Suppose briffa did delete the data? IIRC it was published data. And there’s no reason to delete it – it isn’t suspect. There just isn’t enough of it in this period. More may be found.
Nick:
I think because it informs on what you and your compatriots consider “reasonable discourse”:
Accusing an anonymous person of an unlawful act, when in fact you have absolutely no possible way of knowing whether the act was unlawful or not, is “GOOD”, stating what is obviously the case in plain language that in no way implies an unlawful act is “BAD.”
Well I objected to McIntyre’s word choice too, but that is a minor transgression compared to what Briffa did that you so happily approve of.
Anyway, I think my word choice is only “stranger” to you because I didn’t pile BS on top of the truth to muddy the waters and make less transparent what actions Briffa took.
I actually think you reacted to it as negatively as you did because your attachment to an emotional truth that these are “good guys” is stronger than your attachment to the underlying objective truth here, which is that he did leave part of the results of his analysis off a graph, he did not note that he left this results of his analysis off, let alone explain why, and you not only failed to acknowledge this was a lapse in judgement on his part, you glowingly approved of it.
Again, complete nonsense. It was totally deceptive. He left out part of the series of his analysis and did not explain that he left it out, let alone why. This is totally unethical behavior on his part, he should have known better, and I think you just need to come to terms with this.
Nick Stokes (Comment #86182)
> I find that debates frequently go like this, that some large failing is alleged – I try to address it, and then comes a cascade of smaller allegations.
Nick, this looks like lazy thinking or lazy writing on your part.
You are free to address the substance of SteveF’s and others’ remarks, if you wish. Further, you are also free to stay on topic, if that is your desire.
You are even free to address responses to points you raise, e.g. your claim at #86163 that it somehow reflects positively on RC’s scientific integrity that they “took hostile comments, eg 1,6,8,9,14…” (My claim that your claim disintegrates upon inspection is at #86168).
This isn’t a trend of you diligently attempting to address allegations of a large failing in a forthright manner, only to wind up facing a cascade of smaller allegations. It’s you writing stuff, then moving on to write other stuff. That’s fine for what it is (and you show an admirably thick skin and/or level of detachment, while commenting). But it doesn’t lead to much in the way of fruitful conversation.
Nick writes “But as Tamino noted the error for that month is huge. They have only 47 stations. The graph is deceptive.”
Its all relative. Mann 08 only used 33 proxies. Not even thermometers… Is his graph even more defective as a result?
#86197
‘I actually think you reacted to it as negatively as you did because your attachment to an emotional truth that these are “good guys†is stronger than your attachment to the underlying objective truth here, ‘
Well, Carrick, that’s why I chose the BEST example, because we’re both probably more neutrally disposed to them. So should they (or GWPF) have shown the spike? It is also a point that has been calculated. Would it be “redacting” if they stopped the plot in March?
TT #86199
47 stations in 1450 would be wonderful data. You work with what you have.
Nick writes “47 stations in 1450 would be wonderful data. You work with what you have.”
…and report it with appropriate uncertainty.
ITT: people who can’t possibly understand why a non-temperature artifact should be taken out from a temperature reconstruction. And who insist that the decline is “hidden” when it is shown, explained and discussed in the original publications cited on “the graph” (it never seems to be the same graph, but the observation applies to those I know of).
Boris: thanks for the paper. I hope cherry chasers will notice the reference to Cook 2004, which showed that trees south of 50degN don’t diverge (pretty hard to call that a cherry pick) and that both divergent and non divergent trees seem to match each other reasonably well over the past millenium.
#86198 Amac
“My claim that your claim disintegrates upon inspection is at #86168”
Hostile, critical, whatever – they weren’t from the choir. And there were 759 comments, so there’s some critical discussion of the science.
As to 1A, 5b etc, yes, we don’t know if they were suppressed or never arrived. But I suspect the latter. The bench of people who do present scientific arguments from the sceptic side is not deep.
Anyway, the thread did turn up the following, which wasn’t from the latest FOIA tranche:
“you show an admirably thick skin”
Early training.
I had a second thought and checked again. Indeed it should be “55degN” rather than 50.
Nick
“Suppose briffa did delete the data? IIRC it was published data. And there’s no reason to delete it – it isn’t suspect. There just isn’t enough of it in this period. More may be found.”
You have avoided the question.
Briffa has a tree ring chronology. Those chronologies get archived.
In this particular chronology the values post 1960 look askance.
Someday, people hope to explain this.
Do you archive the WHOLE series or just the part that makes sense?
If you delete the part that doesnt make sense, then how will anyone ever explain it.
So. Your judgment. Do you keep the suspect data in the hopes that other people will someday explain it.. or do you delete it.
Simple question. No need to complicate it by avoidance.
Regardless of who made the mistake, you should address the 4 classes I laid out. I know you find it handy to focus on the meaningless detail that it was someone other than BEST who did the chart. The fact remains there are 4 ways to handle such a problem. Briffa did not take the best approach. Neither did he take the worst approach. he took the approach that served his purposes. That purpose was not a full communication of what we know AND the uncertainties.
Re: Steven Mosher (Nov 25 21:42),
Yes, of course you would archive the data. And they did. And wrote papers on it.
“Steven, I think you’re talking about a different situation. This was the 15C in a nearly 600-year plot where data was just in very short supply,”
This was not an issue of the data being in “short supply”
There is a chronology that runs to 1990.
The critical part of this chronology is the calibration region
without calibration you have 0 years.
Briffa failed to use the last 30 years or so .( oh you’ll point out it was 27.5 and think you have made a point )
These years were dropped because if you include them the MWP increases. Those are Briffa’s words from the first time he wrote about this problem. The years are DROPPED because of the effect they have on the MWP. not because they are in short supply.
Briffa 1998
“During the second half of the twentieth century, the decadal-scale trends in wood density and summer temperatures have increasingly diverged as wood density has progressively fallen. The cause of this increasing insensitivity of wood density to temperature changes is not known, but if it is not taken into account in dendroclimatic reconstructions, past temperatures could be overestimated… ”
Do you see the reason. The reason is NOT that the data is in short supply. The reason is if you include it the picture of the past changes. So data that would change our estimate of the past is “dropped” because.. it would change our view of things
Re: Steven Mosher (Nov 25 21:49),
Well, OK, I think in the BEST case the right thing is 3. Having 47 Antarctic stations representing April is so meaningless that it just means someone screwed up. And I believe that is what people will do. And it isn’t fraud. Graphs have to stop somewhere.
On Briffa we’re talking about different issues. The one Carrick referenced was at the starting end of the series, where they started in 1550. before that data was in short supply.
But OK, the post-1960 period – the issue here as you say isn’t lack of data, it’s divergence. It has been extensively written about, so there is no concealment. As to whether you show and explain on every occasion – that is a matter of practicality, and presentation. At some stage, enough is enough.
#86213
“Actually Briffa’s Science paper doesn’t even mention divergence. No concealment?”
No he doesn’t use the word. But his final para says:
Nicky, you have been badly mauled here. Perhaps you should retreat to RC for repair and re-programming.
Update Nov. 26 Please continue discussion at the new post.