I have been remembering Russian historical temperature reconstructions based on tree ring data, as I have listened along to the Climate Change on Trial podcast series by investigative journalist Ann McElhinney.
Looking at the research papers* I have on file by Russians, and being reminded of the American temperature reconstruction from the Michael Mann versus Mark Steyn court case, well they are very different.
The Russian temperature reconstructions based on tree ring data generally show the cooling so evident in the instrumental record (unhomogenized/raw) for the Arctic region from 1940 through to 1975. Of course, the Russian reconstructions also include the Medieval Warm period (10th to 12th centuries).
The Americans flatten the early part of the 1,000 years long record, obliterating the Medieval Warm period, and then they use ‘Mike’s trick’ that is to graft some remodelled (homogenised) instrumental temperature data onto the end of the proxy temperature series to get a big uptick. Thus, creating what has become known as the ‘hockey stick’.
Mark Steyn has repeatedly suggested that all of this is rather fraudulent. I agree.
For his troubles, Steyn was awarded punitive damages of US$1 million in the Washington DC Superior Court just yesterday. To understand the context, consider listening along from the beginning, with the Climate Change on Trial podcast series by investigative journalist, and dear friend, Ann McElhinney.
What the Americans, including Mann, have done with the tree ring data, is much the same as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s homogenisation of the instrumental temperature. This mostly involves cooling the past, so the present appears warmer. I’ve written so much about this, and I will be writing some more. For context, consider my ‘Hyping Maximum Temperature’ series, that I could perhaps turn into a podcast series (Part 1 to Part 7).
Homogenisation of the Australian data that only begins in 1910, mostly obliterates the very warm decades at the beginning of the twentieth century and in the process does away with the cooling trend in the first half of the twentieth century, from about 1920 through to 1950. Considering the instrumental temperature series overall from 1910, and before they are remodelled , it is about as hot now as it was back in say 1914. Heatwaves were worse in 1896 (there are records back to 1850, unhomogenized), and summers were hotter in the late 1930s (considering the data before it is remodelled). Considering the annual averages, well, unhomogenized mean temperatures show cooling to about 1950 and then warming after this.
A problem with the last thirty years of temperature data is that it has been measured from automatic weather stations using platinum resistance probes that can be calibrated to show however many degrees hotter or cooler than a mercury thermometer might be considered convenient.
To be clear, that are at least three problems with the official Australian temperature series, 1. they are truncated (only beginning in 1910), 2. they are homogenised (cooling the data from mercury thermometers), and 3. they are unreliable at least from 1996 with the transition to a different method of measurement (platinum resistance probes in automatic weather stations).
It is the case that the Americans also remodelled (homogenize) their instrumental temperature data, as well as the proxy temperature data from tree rings, to also fit a particular and convenient narrative.
This is important to the West, or at least our financial institutions that are heavily invested in the energy transition. This energy transition, is, of course, prefaced on the assumption that temperatures continued to rise through most of the twentieth century and that they are now unprecedented. This is achieved for the official record through a combination of homogenisation (remodelling) and change of measurement system (from mercury thermometer to platinum resistance probes).
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* The chart featured at the top of this post is from a paper by O.V. Sidorova et al. from the V.N. Sukachev Institute of Forestry in Russia. It was presented at the Dendro symposium in Switzerland from April 21st to 23rd in 2005.
The chart shows key features of the American hockey stick (without complete shaft) and contrasts this with a Russian proxy temperature reconstruction.
It is the case that the Russians have longer historical reconstructions based on tree ring data and continue to collect and analyse tree ring data.
The Americans have more-or-less stopped this work with tree rings, and so their reconstructions based on proxy data end in about 1965, after which they conveniently graft instrumental temperature series measured using platinum resistant probes.
I must say, at the moment, it is quite apparent that the Russians, and also the Chinese, are going much better science than anyone much in the West, at least in the areas of interest to me including rainfall forecasting and historical temperature reconstructions. It is perhaps also worth noting that reliable rainfall forecasts need accurate historical temperature reconstructions.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
A brave post Jennifer. Thank you.
There are zero benefits to these so-called “Net Zero” plans because CO2 cannot be sequestered from the atmosphere, except very temporarily. The environment will rapidly restore the CO2 equilibrium concentration at any temperature.
Removing CO2 from the environment (or preventing CO2 emission by humans) is a perturbance to the Henry’s Law equilibrium at the location and temperature where the perturbation occurred. That is a phase-state equilibrium between the unreacted CO2 dissolved gas in liquids, dominantly water in ocean surface, versus CO2 gas in air exposed to that surface.
An amount of CO2 gas will be removed from the atmosphere by the environment which is equal to any human-produced CO2 gas emitted to the atmosphere. Thus human-produced CO2 cannot warm the earth. There is no climate emergency. Climate-alarmists are the emergency.
Le Chatelier’s principle and the Law of Mass Action assure us that any perturbance to the Henry’s Law equilibrium will be followed by a rapid response from the environment to restore that equilibrium, the speed and size of that response will be proportionate to the speed and size of the perturbation. In other words, sequestration or removal of CO2 from the atmosphere or suppression of CO2 emissions, whether by humans, biological activity or inorganic chemical reactions will result in replacement of that CO2 by the environment and restoration of the equilibrium partition for the given temperature.
Removing CO2 or preventing emissions of CO2 is a futile waste of money, time and resources. Humans can neither increase atmospheric CO2 nor decrease it by controlling emissions.
Ocean and water everywhere will emit an equal or temporarily higher amount of CO2 gas to replace any CO2 gas that has been removed from the environment until the Henry’s Law partition ratio is restored. The Henry’s Law constant for CO2 and water is a ratio of the molar concentration of CO2 gas in water versus the molar concentration of CO2 gas in air above the water. The Henry Law constant changes with temperature at the liquid/gas interface, which is dominantly the surface of the ocean.
Any increase in CO2 concentration in air (due to any CO2 source, natural and human) will be offset by a proportionate increase in solubility of CO2 in ocean and water everywhere that is in contact with the increase in CO2 partial pressure. This law applies for all gas and liquid combinations, but the ratio is different for each combination and temperature.
CO2 gas is not increasing ocean surface temperature. Instead, increases in ocean surface temperature cause increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Keep up the good work Jennifer!
Interesting how the Russians have put the Soviet Union and Lysenko behind them while the USA has gone the opposite. They’re effectively saying windmills and solar farms will stop the oceans rising
It is true that suddenly removing all the excess CO2 from the atmosphere wouldn’t fix anything, because as you say it would be replaced by CO2 which “undissolved” from the ocean, this being where the vast majority of burned fossil fuel goes. However, the immediate goal is stop atmospheric CO2 rising any further than the already very dangerous 420ppm. It will be a massive task to get back to 280ppm, equivalent to sequestering all our CO2 and converting it back to coal or equivalent, then burying it deep underground.
I find it hard to believe that Jenn doesn’t understand, or chooses to ignore, the importance of scientific standards, ie the Stevenson Screen.
I’m sure the airports in Toronto Canada use the most up-to date technology. However both feed into the global temperature stew. On the same sunny summer day they can be 10 degrees ‘C’ apart because one handles 200 international jet flight and has 100s of acres of concrete whereas the other airport 10 km away has only 100 turbojet takeofffs and landings and has a far smaller footprint.
In reply to Rob above, let me say to you that CO2 increase from 280 to 420 ppm is not worth troubling yourself about. And I sincerely hope that you are not losing too much sleep over this matter. Remember 280ppm is such a small amount anyway.
and PS, and please forget about ‘sequestering’ – it will never work . .
Thank you Geoffrey. Dear Rob, please ask yourself who told you that 420 ppm was dangerous and why?
CO2 is plant food. Our exhaled breath is about 40,000 ppm. CO2 is estimated to have been around 4,000 ppm for a duration of more than 200 million years and plants and animals were developing and abundant. During the Cambrian period, CO2 is estimated (Berner & Kothavala, 2001 Geocarb III) to have approached 8000 ppm; “it was a time when most of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record. This event is sometimes called the “Cambrian Explosion,””
Almost all studies show trends in CO2 concentration trends increase AFTER increasing trends in temperatures, closely correlated with sea surface temperatures. Also, decreasing trends in CO2 concentration FOLLOW decreasing trends in surface temperature. Temperature change is causing CO2 change, not the reverse.
So, Rob, since almost all life benefits from higher CO2 concentration, what exactly worries you about CO2? You may find the following short video enlightening: https://youtu.be/YYsjhz7DT1s?si=A3OMzF-AzYN815zW
Dear dr. Marohasy,
I always find your posts interesting and some time I use your data in order to repeat analysis and integrate it with my spectra (the last one has been the post referred to Kuranda’s rain. You can read it at my site https://www.zafzaf.it/post/pp36/pp36.html).
Referring to actual post on Russian vs American temperature reconstruction, it seems to me you have mistaken the (red) labels: in fact the above plot is the Russian one, as can be read from the article caption (Comparison of Eurasian (1) and large-scale temperature (2) reconstructions ) and from the two rows just above the figure (We compared our Eurasian average chronology…).
In the hope that my comment can contribute to a better understanding of your post,
my best regards.
Franco Zavatti
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Comment from Jennifer.
Thanks Franco.
The detail of the analysis would suggest there was a mislabelling.
If you begin from the beginning with the data as shown and collected … they have simply got the labels the wrong way around for this figure. The Russian data does show the cooling from 1920, in this and other papers.
The Mann et al. reconstruction is always as per the top chart.
Hi Franco
I have become quite familiar with the different reconstructions, including as part of the GeoResJ (Vol. 14, pages 36-46) paper I published with John Abbot, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214242817300426?via%3Dihub
And more recently I’ve noticed that Russian authors tend to attempt some explanation of the cooling from 1920, that can be found even in less than perfect American datasets, eg. even the Berkley dataset. See also Figure 1, Bokuchava, DD and Semenov, VA in Earth-Science Reviews vol 222 published in 2021.
Cheers, Jennifer
Hi, pls. read: V.V., Matskovsky, V.V., Dalmann, D. (2013): Comprehensive reconstruction of the temperature of the Russian Arctic over the last two millenia, Arctic 4(12) 2013, pp. 84-95.
PDF: http://eng.arctica-ac.ru/docs/journals/12/kompleksnaya-rekonstrukciya-temperatury-rossiyskoy-arktiki-za-poslednie-dva-tysy.pdf
Especially p. 91.
Best from Austria.
The atmospheric CO2 concentration was 2,500 parts per million (ppm) 150 million years ago. It declined on an almost-straight trajectory to 350 ppm in 1750, with small ice age wiggles due to orbital dynamics as explained by Milutin Milankovich.
Where is it going?
Sea creatures and plants combine CO2 with calcium to make their calcium carbonate armor and bones and the breathtakingly beautiful tiny coccoliths in diatoms. When they die, they sink to the bottoms of the oceans and become essentially permanent limestone. The only way that CO2 returns to the atmosphere is by volcanism, which is declining, and will continue to decline.
Plants start to die when CO2 is below 180 ppm. The Earth comes perilously close to that during every ice age. When would the ultimate and complete death occur? Starting from 350 ppm and continuing at the same rate, in about six million years. Fortunately, humanity has intervened, in the form of the Industrial Age, and increased concentration to 415 ppm, increasing the Earth’s lease on life to eighteen million years.
The Earth is gradually committing suicide, or maybe more precisely, the oceans are gradually murdering us. Maybe that’s the answer to Fermi’s question “Where are they?” Few other planets stay alive long enough to develop intelligence, and then idiots and ideologues ensure the gradual suicide continues.
Instead of reducing CO2 emissions, or sequestering it, we should be burning coal and making cement as fast as we can.
Dr. Patrick Moore, cofounder and ex-member of Greenpeace, has written extensively about this.
Mankind had litle to do with it. The oceans warmed and CO2 was expelled by the rule of inverse solubility. Al Gore showed us but he never knew how wrong he was. First came warming and then came CO2 out of the oceans as if by magic. Older charts don’y show this because the poor dating resolution.
Hi Jennifer,
thank you for the reply. After a better sight, I can agree with you: the Russian series must be the bottom one.
I tried to find out the temperature numerical values of Jevrejeva et al., 2008 paper, without
any success (I can read Russian but with too much difficulties), so decided to digitize the very long series at 1-pixel step.
I did find very interesting the reference posted by thruthseeker39 and, given my interests, the final plot of the power spectrum.
My best regards. Franco
Sorry, the correct reference is Sidorova et al., 2005 not Jevrejeva et al., 2998 …