I was sent the following note from Walter Starck:
“The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) debate is not about a paradigm shift or even about a basic theory. No one is arguing that CO2 does not absorb IR or that burning fossil fuel does not add CO2 to the atmosphere. In essence the AGW debate is about whether increasing CO2 by a few hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere will have catastrophic consequences on global climate. AGW proponents claim scientific certainty that it will and cite as proof a 0.6 degree C increase in average global temperature over the past century, a putative increase in extreme weather events and predictions of ongoing future warming based on computer models of global climate. Skeptics find significant uncertainty in the amount, causes and consequences of any warming and in the accuracy of the models. They point to major doubts regarding the amount and cause of recent warming, past extremes that equal or exceed recent ones, benefits of CO2 enrichment plus numerous simplifications, guesses and omissions in the models as well as wide discrepancies between them.
No amount or strength of argument seems likely to resolve this debate before reality irrefutably intrudes. Barring a major global recession anthropogenic CO2 emissions will continue to increase for at least the next few decades and the truth or fantasy of AGW will become increasingly apparent.
On the skeptic side a good case has been put forward for an important role in solar variability on climate via an effect on cloud cover. This theory fits well with past climatic fluctuations and most importantly, it predicts future ones. Of these, the most significant is the Landscheidt Minimum around 2030 which should be comparable to the LIA.
Whether anthropogenic CO2 is forcing global climate toward catastrophic warming or solar cycles are the dominant control should become strongly indicative in the next decade and near conclusive over the following one. For skeptics to win this debate by superior evidence and argumentation would probably take longer than letting reality settle it. The more important role for skeptics is to provide an opposing balance against hysteria and to define what is to be learned from the whole affair. This is unlikely to come from true believers no matter what the actual outcome.
AGW proponents on the whole seem to be afflicted with a desire for certainty and intolerance of any suggestion of doubt while skeptics seem more concerned about dogmatism and false claims of certainty than they are of the possible reality of AGW. This difference in perspective reflects a fundamental divergence in the very essence of the scientific enterprise. Is it primarily a belief , a sphere of activity and a career or is it a particular philosophical approach to understanding based on empirical evidence, logical consistency and verifiability? Is the higher aim to provide authority for belief or to keep it open to question and better understanding? Is there a deficiency in scientific training that produces highly trained technicians but not the doctors of philosophy their degrees proclaim?
Also inherent in this divergence of perspective is the attitude to risk. Is it something to avoided at all costs (as enshrined in the precautionary principle) or something to be accepted or rejected on the basis of evaluation?
In the case of AGW it increasingly seems that such underlying issues may well be more important than the actual debate itself.
Walter Starck“
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Spot on, Walter. But one should also mention the very distinct possibility that AGW abatement measures are little more than the latest variant of such age old palliative treatments for illdefined ailments. Bleeding to eliminate noxious “humours” come to mind and there is no shortage of suspected hair shirt enthusiasts seeking scientific purity through self flagellation and forced denial on the unknowing masses.
Hail Mary.
One slight problem – there is no contemporary solar variability case. “a good case” ??
Anyone quite sure of an imminent cooling trend can also place a bet here http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2005/09/betting-update.html
and here is the summary
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2005/06/betting-summary.html
Ian Mott, ditto!
Luke,
The slight problem you mention is only your own. If you do a Google Scholar search on Landscheidt minimum you will discover dozens of peer reviewed references. The subject index on the CO2 Science website also lists numerous peer reviewed studies on contemporary solar variability climatic influence. If this website is not accessible to you for reasons of climatic correctness that is your choice. However, it does present ready access to a voluminous literature that raises serious doubts about numerous aspects of the AGW scenario. If nothing else, better awareness of the opposing case can always be useful in avoiding dogmatic displays of ignorance.
Jennifer,
You’ve hit all the popular marks on the defense to the AGW debate, but you’ve missed the most obvious. If you will merely enlarge for a bit your focus, you will see that the fundamental notion behind AGW, “peak oil,” anti-globalization (which is actually “green globalization), campaigns against engineered crops, demands for “sustainable biodiversity,” and the list goes on, is the notion of “the planned environment.”
Since the environment belongs to everyone, it belongs to nobody. And since it belongs to nobody, governments beholden to the people can’t be trusted to deal with it.
Only non-governmental organizations (NGOs), beholden “only to the voiceless environment,” can plausibly be in charge of environmental planning.
Or so they would have us believe.
Democracy, as cumbersome as it may be, is still better than ceding a global elitocracy to the Greens–who have more blood on their hands than Stalin or Pol Pot.
Schiller.
Schiller, comment was from Walter.
Walter – re Landscheidt minimum – yes I am well aware ! My comments still stand. Integrate all the facts available and take a bet with James Annan
Schiller – “greens – who have more blood on their hands than Stalin or Pol Pot” – well mate that’s the end of any sensible conversation with you then – what utter utter drivel. Do greens have any legislative influence over any nation states environmental management. They lobby – the other side lobbies back, governments decide (or not).
I did a Google Scholar search on “Landscheidt minimum” (not Landscheidt + minimum) and got zero results.
John,
Try it without the quotation marks. I got back 58 links.
I tried it without quotation marks. I got 58 links.
Only 3 of them seemed to have Landscheidt as an author. The rest seem to have cited him.
Most publications were pre-1999.
It was not clear that ‘dozens’ of them were actually peer reviewed, though i could see that some of them were in journals that i knew of – i’m not expert.
It was not clear that the majority of people citing landscheidt were in agreement with him.
It is not clear that the number of people who both cite landscheidt in a peer-reviewed publication AND agree with him is at all significant, and whether any agreement is current as of 2006.
John Quiggin has made an important but subtle point.
Oh, and along the same lines as John and Luke, it was not clear that the papers citing landscheidt were about his work on a ‘landscheidt minimum’. the one that i looked cited landscheidts research on solar impacts on el nino and la nina.
Many references to Landscheidt refer to his methodology for predicting solar activity. Irrespective of any climatic implications he appears to have come up with a formula and an explanatory mechanism that fits the observed solar pattern and permits its ongoing prediction. Many other references (see: CO2 Science website) correlate solar activity to climatic patterns and provide a plausible mechanism involving the flux of high energy particles on cloud formation.
None of this “proves” anything. Like AGW it is neither proven or disproven but is certainly plausible.
John Quiggin’s point was indeed subtle.
Can someone explain it to me?
Cathy
John Quiggin has made no subtle point at all here.
Luke had better support his comment.
Louis – look it’s totally intuitively obvious, Quiggin is sending us a message about the transcendant brutality nature of the quotation marks in defining an actual fact vis a vis the shocking fecundity of the unconstrained method. The man is simply a genius.
I tried google “Landscheidt Minimum” and got 75 results.
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22Landscheidt+Minimum%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Two of the links were to Jennifer Marohasy blog and two were to John Quiggin blog.
Not only am I shocked I am apalled at such deference given to the indiscriminate brutality of the ”
Using a wikipedia link (I wiki therefore I am) on Landschedit led to this article where he is credited with predicting the last el nino and la nina 2-3 years prior to their formation and predicts the coming 2006 event.
http://www.john-daly.com/theodor/new-enso.htm
Cathy, if you search Google Scholar for “Landscheidt minimum” with quotes, you get academic articles referring to the concept of the Landscheidt minimum, or you would if there were any. If you don’t use the quotes, you get articles in which the words Landscheidt and minimum both occur.
BTW, is everyone here aware that the guy we are talking about was most notable as an astrologer and cycle crank? One lucky hit in a reputable journal doesn’t change the fact that he was a crank.
As regards John Daly, quoted by rog, you might like to check his prediction of a global cooling trend 2002-06 here. He appears to rely on Landscheidt-style arguments.
Link is
http://www.john-daly.com/press/press-03a.htm#whammy
Rog – you hav eto have a look at how often he gets it “right” and how often he gets it “wrong”. Protagonists usually put more emphasis on a right. The mathematics to prove you have “forecast skill” is rigorous – double cross validation process. A process of leaving out one at a time each of your years or events and seeing how well you do. (well as explained to me!).
Many have tried on solar prediction events and failed – i.e. predictions haven’t held up long term or to reasonable scrutiny. So why does it look like there is something there? well (a) maybe there is or (b) it’s a fool’s paradise loaded with stats traps such as quasi-periodic behaviours from El Nino, and various Atlantic and Pacific oscillations perhaps (c) it’s more comfortable to believe something else other than AGW
If you trawl through trhe various RC posts you will see the various arguments and evidence as to why many of these are discounted. And wouldn’t we be expecting a cooling on these behaviour by now?
It’s fair enough to advance and hypothesis as to “why isn’t it this” or “why not that”, but you need to not only argue a solar case up with physical evidence and good stats, but you need to also argue the CO2 radiative forcing work down (and there is lots of it!).
Just having a quick flight of fancy on preference doesn’t automatically dismiss an entire literature.
But anyway – this is a blog so keep arguing – keep on trucking !! And if anyone is dead sure there’s some easy money to be made over at James Annan’s blog – the protagonists will accept your wager. Interestingly most famous contrarians have declined to bet.
JQ, I am aware that Lanscheidt promoted astrology and believe that this is not a reasonable argument to dismiss any or all of his work much in much the same way as I dont believe Einstein should be viewed as a crank for his communist affiliations or Linus Pauling for his views that Vitamin C could cure cancer.
JQ, They are always cranks,right wingers or funded by the oil companies! Today you have even thrown in a hint of guilt by association.
A perfect 10 for argument technique
Luke,
Many of the best known “contrarians” are professional scientists who are agnostic rather than sceptical on global warming, i.e. they understand that at any given time, including now, there is every chance that temperatures will decrease as much as that they will increase.
Why would you expect scientists to bet on an eventuality that has odds of 50:50?
I realise that casinos make their living out of offering such odds, or worse, but – other than indulging occasionally just for the social fun of it – I doubt that you see many scientists in casinos.
Cathy
“They are always cranks,right wingers or funded by the oil companies! ”
Care to point to some counterexamples? To be more precise, care to name 10 currently working climate scientists who are agnostic/sceptical about anthropogenic global warming and aren’t either right wingers (that is, paid by or closely affiliated with right wing organisations) or funded by the oil companies?
Cathy – the bets are usually framed as a certain w % warming over x stations over y time period. So I guess you’d be betting against warming (not cooling) over reasonable time period in the way they are currently presenting the bet.
So it seems that you are suggesting that agnostic contrarians either think (a) that climate is chaotic (b) climate forcings change randomly (c) there is no inherent predictability or (d) climate science doesn’t have anything to offer except observation.
Scientists have flutters like everyone else – although for most of us it may simply be stupidly committing a very small amount of our income on a totally improbable event with little environmental or global consequence. Some of my colleagues have even tried in desperation to fund research submissions on 100:1 bets that they were sure of.
It’s called LOTTO or the Melbourne Cup (although the latter is more social than anything). Such exercises are also valuable for reminding one’s self that probability does work and that doing good science and being diligent might be required until retirement.
For those unsure as to whether they are right or left wing and are seeking to be more precise, try this quick quiz
http://www.politicalcompass.org/questionnaire
According to wiki anybody opposing left wing can be right wing, which is a blessed relief
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics
Luke, Melbourne Cup is not social it is an institution and therefore a Good Work.
OK agree the Cup is an Institution.
I did Rog’s compass test and found myself to be right wing economically (disturbingly) and equally balanced on the other axis. Cripes you guys must be extremists then.
JQ said “either right wingers (that is, paid by or closely affiliated with right wing organisations) or funded by the oil companies”?
So the other side is “either left wingers (that is, paid by or closely affiliated with left wing organisations) or funded by governments and NGO’s seeking to manufacture an on-going need for their services”?
Are you seriously suggesting spivs on the make are limited to one end of the spectrum, John?
I’m certainly suggesting there are thousands of ohonest scientists, with no axe to grind (in the case of the US at least, the government that ultimately funds them would welcome scepticism), whose research supports the AGW model.
No doubt there are some spivs and hacks too. But on the anti-AGW side that’s all there is. There aren’t any independent scientists – they’re all* either mercenaries, ideologues, amateurs or cranks.
* Maybe a handful of exceptions, but I’m confident that’s literally true. I’d say they can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Wow JQ You sure ask hard questions! I’ve got to find 10 currently working climate scientists(no old fogies) who are agnostic about AGW. AND i’ve got to find out who they vote for and who pays them! Righto I’m up for the challenge. I’ll wander over to Prometheus and ClimateAudit and ask your question for you.
And a question for you : How many working climate scientists ARE there?
Why are you disturbed to be “right wing” economically Luke? Very few people can say that they do not enjoy the benefits of capital, more resent the lack of it.
Some people think that opinions are bought with money but my experience has been that this is false, most lies are freely given. In fact some of the most honest and ideologically free people I have met are also very wealthy, its just that they dont ever forget the price of a loaf of bread.
Rog – just that I had presumed it wouldn’t have been as important to me as the test indicates.
I think we argue over AGW because there’s so many unanswered questions, such as
-where are the climatic catastrophes we’ve been hearing about?
-why are the AGW proponents using dodgy statistics to bolster their case? (Even though they’ve now “moved on”)
-why are they proposing ineffective “solutions” for climate change, such as Kyoto?
-why do they constantly say the debate is over, when it obviously is not?
-why do they attack their opponents, rather than their opponents arguments?
mmmm
possibly a few droughts, heatwaves, circulation systems and many more intense tropical storms out of bounds already – and we’ve only just started so who says you’d even be expecting to see that much just now??
if Mann had Wegman to do his stats the answer would be the same, and ROTFL given the porkies spread by the other side with dodgy stats – the ratio is about 100:1 and intentionally deceptive
Is Kyoto a solution or a serious attempt at a first step which has exposed our global collective unwillingness to do anything in terms of cutbacks. the USA and Australia haven’t adopted it – so get over it.
Well the debate is obviously over – there are no other hypotheses that stand up and the evidence keeps pouring in every day
I think you’ll find sites like RC patiently making the case every day, explaining in detail the science vis a vis the shrillness, urgency and total lack of discrimination of much of the AGW side i.e. you guys will use anything for a try-on while insisting on ultra levels of examination that are not applied to alternative ideas. Much are of contrarian sites are just a hodge podge of every alternative hypothesis and crank story under the Sun.
SO in answer to the last question – because we’re only human one gets sick of the rampant b/s that occupies much of the contrarian campaign.
SO – try something new – don’t come on with all the world conspiracy greenie bashing stuff – just make the science case why the the alternative explanations are ALL correct or pick which ones are if you have any powers of discrimination; and also make the case why the radiative forcing discussion and all the empircal evidence is wrong.
Luke, not sure what you’re getting at with the 100:1 dodgy stats comment. Do you mean there are 100;
-peer reviewed statistical papers
-showing the consensus view of the last 1000 years of paleoclimate data, ie, with a distinct MWP and LIA,
that have been;
-criticised by highly accredited statisticians
-who state that the statistics do not support the conclusions?
for every MBH98?
When you have finished rolling on the floor, will you
-stand by that comment, and provide the 100 papers?
-do a backflip and claim you meant something else altogether?
-stoop to hurling insults?
Please surprise me.
The 100 to 1 alludes to examples of such comments as “we’re in a cooling trend” and other drivel – take a poll of well known contrarian sites and tell me you support all the nonsense articles generally provided. It’s an indiscriminate hodge podge of everything you could think of including the kitchen sink.
e.g. note the lead in caveat at
http://www.climatescience.org.nz
Then Daly, Lavoisier etc etc
In terms of paleo data – the global nature of MWP is still most arguable. Which we have discussed before – i.e. Osborn & Briffa etc
You need to read Wegman’s report more carefully.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/07/the-missing-piece-at-the-wegman-hearing/
That was a very acrobatic backflip, Luke.
And well ducked Paul.
Luke tells Paul Williams to read Wegman’s report more carefully and then gives a link to a posting on the RealClimate website. But the Wegman report said “This committee does not believe that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue”!
In his testimont on 27 July (a week after the posting to which Luke directs us), Dr. Wegman said:
“The debate over Dr. Mann’s principal components methodology has been going on for nearly three years. When we got involved, there was no evidence that a single issue was resolve or even nearing resolution. Dr. Mann’s RealClimate.org website said that all of the Mr. McIntyre and Dr. McKitrick claims had been ‘discredited’. UCAR had issued a news release saying that all their claims were ‘unfounded’. Mr. McIntyre replied on the ClimateAudit.org website. The climate science community seemed unable to either refute McIntyre’s claims or accept them. The situation was ripe for a third-party review of the types that we and Dr. North’s NRC panel have done.
“[Where] the two studies overlap on the important topic of Mann’s principal components methodology … I believe our report and the NRC panel essential agree…
[Wegman then quoted the NRC panel’s conclusions about the error in the use of principal components methodology and concluded:
“We believe that our discussion together with the discussion from the NRC report should take the ‘centering’ issue off the table. The decentred methodology is simply incorrect mathematics as was illustrated in our Appendix A as well as with ample simulation evidence in both our report and the NRC report. I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn’t matter because the answer is correct anyway. Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.”
Wegman went on to note that the Bristlecone/Foxtail PC1 proxy is used not only in MBH, but also in virtually every subsequent reconstruction, and went on as follows:
“We do not claim to be experts in dendrology, but it seems to us as outsiders that there are sufficient confounding factors that proxies based on Bristlecones should be avoided. We should add that we were specifically asked to resolve the differences between MBH98/99 and MM03/05a/05b. There is a bewildering array of subsequent work that we were not asked to consider, but which probably deserves much more intense scrutiny. We would include sich refereed papers as Rutherford et al (2005) and Wahl and Ammann (2006), which are purported to be written by independent teams, but which are co-authored by Dr. Mann himself in Rutherford et al and by Dr. Mann’s student Dr. Ammann in Wahl and Ammann.”
Here’s another important point from Wegman’s testimony:
“We advocated in our report that if statistical methods are being used, then statisticians ought to be funded partners engaged in the research to insure as best we possibly can that the best quality science is being done. Drs. Nychca and Bloomfield, the statisticians involved with the NRC report, raise other issues on calibration, validation, and full quantification of uncertainty in these studies. Indeed there are a host of fundamental statistical questions that beg answers in understanding climate dynamics.”
Among these fundamental questions were:
“Given the apparent high correlation between CO2 and temperature in the model outputs, how direct is the link in the model itself?”
“What is the difference between a true forecast and a model run.”
“Do you believe your model runs have any statistical validity?”
In the concluding paragraph of his testimony, Dr. Wegman said:
“We note that the American Meteorological Society has a Committee on Probability and Statistics. I believe it is amazing for a committee whose focus is on statistics and probability that of the nine members only two are also members of the American Statistical Association, the premier statistical association in the United States, and one of those is a recent Ph. D. with an assistant professor appointment in a medical school. The American Meteorological Association recently held the 18th Conference on Probability and Statistics in the Atmospheric Sciences.. Of the 62 presenters at a conference with a focus on statistics and probability, only 8 … are members of the American Statistical Association. I believe that these two communities should be more engaged and if nothing else our report should highlight to both communities a need for additional cross-disciplinary ties.”
Finally, with respect to RealClimate’s claim about Hans von Storch’s views, based on a response given by Dr. von Storch in the Q and A session, this is from von Storch’s testimony on 19 July:
“The problem with MBH was that the result was presented by the IPCC and others in a manner so that one could believe a realistic description of historical temperature variations had successfully been achieved. The NRC report published in June 2006 has made clear that such a belief is incorrect.”
It is understandable, but unfortunate, that the RealClimate scientists continue to defend the indefensible.
“So what would have happened to the MBH results if Wegman and his colleagues had been consulted on PC centering conventions at the time? Absolutely nothing. ”
“Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.” A broken clock tells the right time twice every day, but why should anyone believe that MB&H have found the right time until they address questions such as these (from Wegman’s testimony of 27 July):
“How representative are these trees of the population of trees that grew from 1400 to 2000, in terms of geography, altitude and type?
“If these trees seemed ‘interesting’ to various individuals who took the core samples, do you believe those trees can/should be treated as a random sample?
“Presumably many trees could not be sampled because they had died or been harvested. What is the effect of this ‘censoring’ on your data (and your analysis)?
“Similar questions exist about ice cores and how representative such data might be. What are the effects of gas diffusion in the ice core layers?
“What is the correlation between temperature and tree ring growth?
“What calibration studies have been performed? …
“Why did you choose to use principal components (not appropriate for finding a nonstationary mean)?
“What weights do you use to combine different proxy types?
“Why?
“If the data are not a random sample, then what confidence can be given to any modelling and to any error bars?
It’s good to see these questions being asked at last, after the MBH findings had been accepted as valid by, inter alia, the reviewers for “Nature” and “Geophysical Research Letters”, the IPCC, and a raft of other institutions and individuals. It’s easy to see why it’s taken so long – here’s what Michael Mann wrote in response to questions addressed to him by Dutch journalist Marcel Crok in April 2005:
“I hope you are not fooled by any of the ‘myths’ about the hockey stick that are perpetuated by contrarians, right-wing think tanks, and fossil fuel industry disinformation… I must begin by emphasising that McIntyre and McKitrick are not taken seriously in the scientific community… ‘New Scientist’ considered running an article, concluding that their claims were suspicious and spurious after interviews with numerous experts and after it was revealed that they had suspiciously close ties with the fossil fuel/energy industry… I hope therefore that you will treat their claims with appropriate suspicion…”
Three months later Sir John Houghton told a US Senate Committee that M&M’s claims were “false”.
This kind of behaviour is not good for science.
And so the voluminous ink of protest flows and flows and flows – any progress been made except MBH could have done some better stats – and point now made. Meanwhile the place keeps warming up.
Interestingly using completely different methods
Osborn & Briffa reach similar conclusions..
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5762/841
As RC finished the Wegman article .. .. “Can we all get on with something more interesting now? ”
P.S. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Ian apply the same level of blowtorch to the main contrarian arguments and be even-handed in rigour. Perhaps one might end up believing in nothing.
Ian Castles, Interesting quote from Michael Mann regarding “Contrarians,right wing think tanks,and fossil fuel industry disinformation”
That sounds like a direct quote from JQ.
Is there a hymm book ?
Luke, you’ll have to make up your mind whether or not millennial temperature reconstructions matter.
I don’t know why you find it interesting that Osborn & Briffa reach similar conclusions to MBH using completely different methods: I don’t.
That paper was published in “Science” and, as von Storch explained in his testimony on 19 July, “the editorial decision to accept a scientist’s contribution to ‘Science’ or ‘Nature’ is also based on the newsworthiness of the research contribution. The presented results must not only be valid and innovative but must also be of interest for a wider community of readers. Such a criterion is reasonable from an economic point-of-view, but it clearly introduces a filter in [that] what is reaching the public is not solely based on the scientific merit of research. Research results with stronger media appeal fare better in this competition of scientific findings; results biased towards higher sensitivity to human interference are more interesting to a broad audience than findings that report low sensitivities.”
In the light of van Storch’s observations about “Science” and your citation of Osborn and Briffa (2006), the following comments by McIntyre are pertinent:
“I first encountered D’Arrigo et al, 2006 last fall in connection with the IPCC 4AR review. It was unpublished at the time. I asked IPCC to provide the supporting data. They refused… D’Arrigo et al 2006 was published almost concurrently with Osborn and Briffa 2006, which took much of the publicity away from it. It’s too bad. D’Arrigo et al 2006 is a vastly superior paper. I published some first comments on Feb 11 focussing on bristlecones. In response to that note, Rob wrote to say that he used Briffa’s (2000) Yamal series because he ‘could not develop an RCS chronology that had homoscedastic variance through time using the Polar Urals data.’ He said that BRIFFA WOULD NOT GIVE HIM his Yamal raw data but ‘said that the Yamal series was a robust RCS chronology’” (CAPITALS added).
Subsequently, McIntyre testified to the Whitfield Sub-Committee that “the first Briffa version of the Polar Urals series said that the early 11th century was among the coldest of the millennium: updated sampling in 1998 showed the opposite, but BRIFFA DID NOT REPORT IT. Instead he SUBSTITUTED ANOTHER SERIES from a site 70 miles away with a hockey stick shape. This substitution had a dramatic impact on the medieval-modern relationship in the Briffa (2000) reconstruction and nearly all other subsequent studies” (CAPITALS added).
It is beyond my comprehension that the mainstream science community can remain silent while one of their number refuses to share data, fails to report material information and substitutes one series for another without explanation. In the light of this sort of behaviour it is little wonder that Steve McIntyre testified to the Whitfield Sub-Committee on 19 July that “you can place little reliance on any existing multiproxy study”. It is a pity that so much of McIntyre’s time has had to be diverted to dealing with the apologetics of Rutherford et al, Ritson and Wahl & Ammann, when it could have been directed to improving our state of knowledge of millennial temperatures.
“Can we all get on with something more interesting now?” Well, there are some loose ends to be tidied up. Apart from the IPCC Report, the Mann. Bradley & Hughes representation of Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the pre-instrumental period has been accepted uncritically by a range of other bodies.
For example, the International Human Dimensions Programme, the Internatiional Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the World Climate Research Programme jointly issued a Prospectus (“The Carbon Challenge”) in 2001 which was billed as “the forerunner of a detailed scientific framework defining an integrated carbon-cycle research project.” The hockey stick record of temperature for the past millennium featured prominently in Figure 2 of that Prospectus.
Financial support for the program was acknowledged from the European Commission, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, the US Department of Energy, NASA, the US National Science Foundation, the US Department of the Interior and the US Department of Agriculture.
These bodies have their various agendas, and there is no reason to believe that getting to the truth of the matter ranks high among their priorities. So they’re probably not overly concerned about the fact that the IHDP, IGBP and WCRP issued a Prospectus without exercising “due diligence.” There could also be an attitude that if something’s good enough for the IPCC it’s good enough for them.
Within a month of the publication of MM03, the Australian Financial Review published “Global Warming: The Balance of Evidence”, by Kevin Hennessy of CSIRO, which included the statement:
“Unlike MBH in 1998, M&M also failed to use a standard statistical technique called cross-validation to verify the skill of their reconstructions.”
This article was appended to CSIRO’s submission to the Senate Environment, Communications, Information Technology and Arts Legislation Committee Inquiry the Kyoto Protocol Ratification Bill 2003. Now that it has been revealed that the MBH reconstruction lacked skill and failed cross-validation tests, it seems that the Parliamentary Committee was misled. But who cares?
In December 2003, Dr. Michael Manton, then Chief of Division of the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre, contributed a “Summary of Recent Reports on Climate Change” to the Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological Society (BAMOS), which said that “Perhaps the most significant finding of the TAR was the ‘hockey stick’ curve showing a 600-year time series of of annual surface temperature over the northern hemisphere … The analysis has now been extended back at least 1000 years as shown in Figure 1.” Dr. Manton cited the MM03 study, but argued that this was “accepted by only the greenhouse sceptics.”
Now that MM03 has been vindicated by the Wegman and NAS panel reports, the hockey team seem to have suddenly decided that the hockey stick wasn’t a significant finding after all.
Good to see we’ve moved on to the Hockey Stick. I find it interesting that while Enron’s auditor, Arthur Andersen, is virtually no more, because of its lack of oversight in “refereeing” (to borrow a scientific term to cover an accounting situation) the accounts of the company; and Enron’s highest executives were sent to jail, nothing much has happened to Mann et al, or their referees. Yet the Mann et al analysis has a lot in common with Enron.
While the original mathematical error was probably accidental, the perpetuation of it couldn’t have been, once the McIntyre and MacKittrick analysis had been released. Enron was a company that once made real profits, but got into modelling the future and counting the results of its models as profits, which it then reported as real, despite the evidence. In the real world, rather than the real climate world, that is called fraud.
Worse, Mann et al set up their blog to, amongst other things, essentially defame their critics. Likewise, Kenneth Lay et al did their level best to defame and discredit their critics.
The climate community seem to just regard this issue as just a bit of a dust-up (including many of the contributors to this blog’s comment box). In fact, it is far more serious than that, and the fact that reasonable people can have that attitude points to the serious crisis that there appears to be in some parts, at least, of the scientific community.
What has gone on here is criminal. Public monies have been directed in ways that they shouldn’t have been on the basis of this graph. The attempt to cover-up the problems is fraud. It’s about time that someone took legal action, assuming there is a law which makes this possible. If the law hasn’t envisaged this particular issue and neglected it, then one should be enacted to take accounts of these facts.
Of course, the irony is that the graph couldn’t have been correct in the first place as it didn’t take account of the medieval warm period, which we know from observation to have been much warmer than now. So why did so many otherwise intelligent people go along for the ride?
And don’t anyone tell me that the medieval warm period was a localised effect. If that was the case, where were the much colder counterbalancing areas in the reconstruction?
Ian – I couldn’t make it to the end of your post – too long and I lost the point.
McIntyre has just descended into the classic ongoing whinger and all consuming nihilism. I wonder if we will ever see any useful as a contribution emerge.
Anyway as I was saying it would be interesting for your critical mind to also evaluate the contrarians multitude of claims. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing that will we.
“So why did so many otherwise intelligent people go along for the ride”
Well most people have no clue about the mathematics and issues involved and still don’t. Most of us wouldn’t know a PC or an EOF if we fell over one.
As for criminal – get real. What bleating. The Hockey Stick is a few % of the global warming story at best.
“[M]ost people have no clue about the mathematics and issues involved and still don’t.”
Exactly. Michael Mann held himself out as an expert.
At the time of MBH98 he made a high profile presentation for the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program on Capitol Hill (20 July, 1998). The promotional blurb for this event said that Mann’s research “focuses on the application of time-series and statistical techniques to understanding climate variability and climate change from both empirical and climate model-based perspectives” and that “A specific area of current research is paleoclimate data synthesis and statistically-based climate pattern reconstruction during past centuries…”
The blurb noted that Dr. Mann’s ” work on global climate change has been widely described in the popular media, including ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN news programs, Time Magazine, US News and World Report, NPR, The Economist, BBC, USA Today, and has been featured in stories in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and numerous other U.S. and international news publications.” Significantly, it also said that he ” is frequently sought out by international scholarly journals as an expert in the area of statistical data analysis applied to the physical sciences.”
It is difficult to believe that Dr. Mann does not understand that there were serious errors in the MBH papers.
Luke, I think your comments show you up as an accessory. It’s a bit like saying that because your book-keeper only misappropriated 1% of your turnover that he or she hasn’t done anything wrong.
And if I can add my two-cents worth to Ian’s response on the maths – they were always obviously wrong as long as you didn’t try to follow them. When you tried to follow them you needed to be an expert to disentangle the good from the bad.
But that’s no excuse. If someone, for example, claims to be able to predict trajectory, but their missiles always fall in the wrong place, you don’t have to understand calculus to know that they must be getting their calculations wrong.
Likewise, any reconstruction that didn’t include both the medieval warm period and the little ice age had to be a priori suspect.
Graham – it simply becomes tedious – there are volumes written in pro-blogs that would put a totally different case to Ian’s. They are there to be read and you all know where they are. Ian will inevitably write 10X back in response. Interestingly most of you don’t have a clue about the issues of maths involved so I find it interesting the veracity of opinion. Many of the constructions do show some impact of medieval warm periods – it’s a question of extent and magnitude. We may never know for certain perhaps.
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