Media reactions to Yamal
September 30, 2009 Climate Media reaction to the Yamal story has been rather limited so far. I'm not sure whether this is because people are trying to digest what it means or whether it's "too hot to handle". Here's some of the stories I've come across:
James Delingpole (Daily Telegraph blog) How the global warming industry is based on one massive lie.
Chris Horner (National Review online) Mann-made warming confirmed
Andrew Orlowski (The Register) Treemometers: a new scientific scandal.
Tom Fuller (San Francisco Examiner) New data questions claims of accelerated warming
None of the global warming supporters in the mainstream media have gone near it. The reaction of the Guardian - to delete any mention of the affair from their comment threads - has been extraordinary. Even bloggers from the other side of the argument won't go near it. The only exception seems to be the legendary Jo Abbess. James Delingpole is most definitely misguided.
bishophill.squarespace.com
How the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: September 29th, 2009
175 Comments Comment on this article
For the growing band of AGW “Sceptics” the following story is dynamite. And for those who do believe in Al Gore’s highly profitable myth about “Man-Made Global Warming”, it will no doubt feel as comfortable as the rectally inserted suicide bomb that put paid to an Al Qaeda operative earlier this week.
Now read on.
Those of you who saw An Inconvenient Truth may remember, if you weren’t asleep by that stage, the key scene where big green Al deploys his terrifying graph to show how totally screwed we all are by man-made global warming. This graph – known as the Hockey Stick Curve – purports to show rising global temperatures through the ages. In the part representing the late twentieth century it shoots up almost vertically. To emphasise his point that this is serious and that if we don’t act NOW we’re doomed, Al Gore – wearing a wry smile which says: “Sure folks, this is kinda funny. But don’t forget how serious it is too” – climbs on to a mini-lift in order to be able to reach the top of the chart. Cue consensual gasps from his parti pris audience.
Except that the graph – devised in 1998 by a US climatologist called Dr Michael Mann - is based on a huge lie, as Sceptics have been saying for quite some time. The first thing they noticed is that this “Hockey Stick” (based on tree ring data, one of the most accurate ways of recording how climate changes over the centuries) is that it seemed completely to omit the Medieval Warming Period.
According to Mann’s graph, the hottest period in modern history was NOT the generally balmy era between 900 and 1300 but the late 20th century. This led many sceptics, among them a Canadian mathematician named Steve McIntyre to smell a rat. He tried to replicate Mann’s tree ring work but was stymied by lack of data: ie the global community of climate-fear-promotion scientists closed ranks and refused to provide him with any information that might contradict their cause.
This is the point where British climate change scientists appear – and in a most unedifying light. As Christopher Booker has reported the Met Office, its Hadley Centre in Exeter and the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia are among the primary drivers of global climate change alarmism. Their data has formed the basis for the IPCC’s “we’re all doomed” reports; their scientists – among them Professor Phil Jones and tree ring expert Professor Keith Briffa – have been doughty supporters of Mann’s Hockey Stick theory and of the computer models showing inexorably rising temperatures.
Hence their misleading predictions of that “barbecue summer” we never had. As Booker says: “Part of the reason why the Met Office has made such a mess of its forecasts for Britain is that they are based on the same models which failed to predict the declining trend in world temperatures since 2001.
When McIntyre approached the Met Office and the CRU for more information they refused, claiming implausibly that it would damage Britain’s “international relations” with all the countries that supplied it. Later they went a step further and claimed the data had been mislaid.
And there McIntyre’s efforts to uncover the mystery of the Hockey Stick might have ended, had he not had a stroke of luck, as Chris Horner explains at Planet Gore.
“Years go by. McIntyre is still stymied trying to get access to the original source data so that he can replicate the Mann 1998 conclusion. In 2008 Mann publishes another paper in bolstering his tree ring claim due to all of the controversy surrounding it. A Mann co-author and source of tree ring data (Professor Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit) used one of the tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008, which has a strict data archiving policy. Thanks to that policy, Steve McIntyre fought and won access to that data just last week.”
This sounds esoteric, but here’s the important bit: what McIntyre discovered was that Professor Briffa had cherry picked his “tree data sets” in order to reach the conclusion he wanted to reach. When, however, McIntyre plotted in a much larger and more representative range of samples from exactly the same area, the results he got were startlingly different.
Have a look at the graph at Climate Audit (which broke the story and has been so inundated with hits that its server was almost overwhelmed) and see for yourself.
climateaudit.org
The scary red line shooting upwards is the one Al Gore, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa and their climate-fear-promotion chums would like you to believe in. The black one, heading downwards, represents scientific reality.
We “Global Warming Deniers” are often accused of ignoring the weight of scientific opinion. Well if the “science” on which they base their theories is as shoddy as Mann’s Hockey Stick, is it any wonder we think they’re talking cobblers?
blogs.telegraph.co.uk
Mann-made Warming Confirmed [Chris Horner]
It turns out that trees can scream.
A colleague in the climate-realist blogosphere sends along the following narrative which all Planet Gore readers, even the muttering monitors over at Team Soros, should find very interesting. The inescapable and powerful conclusion is that Mann-made warming is real, while man-made warming remains at best a theory, more likely a hypothesis. Really.
This story deserves to be told.
1: In 1998, a paper is published by Dr. Michael Mann, then at the University of Virginia, now a Penn State climatologist, and co-authors Bradley and Hughes. The paper is named: Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations. The paper becomes known as MBH98.
The conclusion of tree ring reconstruction of climate for the past 1,000 years is that we are now in the hottest period in modern history, ever.
See the graph ncdc.noaa.gov
Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician in Toronto, suspects tree rings aren't telling a valid story with that giant uptick at the right side of the graph, implicating the 20th century as the "hottest period in 1000 years," which alarmists latch onto as proof of AGW. The graph is dubbed the "Hockey Stick" and becomes famous worldwide. Al Gore uses it in his movie An Inconvenient Truth in the famous "elevator scene."
2: Steve attempts to replicate Michael Mann's tree ring work in the paper MBH98, but is stymied by lack of data archiving. He sends dozens of letters over the years trying to get access to data but access is denied. McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, of the University of Guelph publish a paper in 2004 criticizing the work. A new website is formed in 2004 called Real Climate, by the people who put together the tree ring data and they denounce the scientific criticism:
realclimate.org
3: Years go by.McIntyre is still stymied trying to get access to the original source data so that he can replicate the Mann 1998 conclusion. In 2008 Mann publishes another paper in bolstering his tree ring claim due to all of the controversy surrounding it. A Mann co-author and source of tree ring data (Professor Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit) used one of the tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008, which has a strict data archiving policy. Thanks to that policy, Steve McIntyre fought and won access to that data just last week.
4: Having the Yamal data in complete form, McIntyre replicates it, and discovers that one of Mann's co-authors, Briffa, had cherry picked 10 tree data sets out of a much larger set of trees sampled in Yamal.
5: When all of the tree ring data from Yamal is plotted, the famous hockey stick disappears. Not only does it disappear, but goes negative. The conclusion is inescapable. The tree ring data was hand-picked to get the desired result.
These are the relevant graphs from McIntyre showing what the newly available data demonstrates.
climateaudit.org
climateaudit.org”
So now the question is, if tree rings scream and their message is one that few want to hear, does their message get heard?
planetgore.nationalreview.com
......they'll have to explain why they didn't give their reasons in their publications--which is standard procedure. And they'll also have to explain something which strikes me as very odd. If you are selecting trees because they agree with recent records, how can you use them as evidence of recent temperatures--that's why you picked them.
The mere fact that they refused to release this data for years will make any explanation look made up post facto. Their total silence on Real Climate--the scientists in question are principal contributors to that weblog--and the silence of other climate activists may mean nothing for the moment. It would be wise not to be precipitate on this matter. But if it persists, it will be damning.
This group of scientists were excoriated for poor use of statistical analysis, and this criticism caused many to quit using Mann's Hockey Stick chart. The chart and the methods used to produce it were actually investigated by a Congressional Committee, which found that Mann et al had made serious errors and that their conclusions were not warranted. This is a separate, if related issue. It is, however, serious. If governments the world over have been making economic, social and political decisions based on data that does not stand up, the ramifications are huge.
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examiner.com |
