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To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (10089)	2/22/2012 11:47:45 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Respond to of 85487

You disregard Dr. Chu.... Do you also disregard Sarah Palin or Santorum......? I don't disregard anyone. They can go ahead and present their arguments, or someone else can find them and present them here. What I do largely disregard, esp. on issues of serious controversy, is the idea that something is right or wrong because of the person who claims its right or wrong. Saying its right, or should be considered right, because of the person claiming it is an argument from authority, a very weak argument at best. Saying its wrong because of the person claiming its wrong, is the flip-side of that, an ad-hominem argument.

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (10089)	2/23/2012 8:20:42 AM
From: Brumar89	4 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

It's NOT a plot of actual data. There aren't temperature records going back a thousand years. They "recreated" past temps using proxies, mostly tree rings. Problems with the hockey stick Statistical errors: Canadian bloggers (Climate Audit) showed the hockey stick was produced using flawed statistical methods that would create hockey stick shapes even from random data. This was confirmed by a committee of statisticians for a House committee (Wegman report). Trees aren't thermometers: Tree growth is affected by things other than temperature. Rainfall, shade from other trees, competition for nutrients from other trees, etc. Hide the decline: Quoting the NYT, "Since around 1960, for mysterious reasons, trees have stopped responding to temperature increases in the same way they apparently did in previous centuries. If plotted on a chart, tree rings from 1960 forward appear to show declining temperatures, something that scientists know from thermometer readings is not accurate. Most scientific papers have dealt with this problem by ending their charts in 1960 or by grafting modern thermometer measurements onto the historical reconstructions. In the 1999 chart, the C.R.U. researchers chose the latter course for one especially significant line on their graph. This technique was what Dr. Jones characterized as a “trick.”" This problem ought to have shown the hockey stick creators there was a major problem with their methodology and caused them to start over. How can we believe the proxies show temperature changes a thousand years ago, but can't show present temperature changes? Even fellow warmists privately think so - see this Climategate email: Email 19 1. There are few tree-core series that extend beyond the early 1980s. This is because many of the sites we're using were cored before the early 1980s. So most tree-ring records just don't exist post 1980. [Phil Jones] ... If you look at the figure in the attached article in Science by Briffa and Osborn, you will note that tree-ring temperature reconstructions are flat from 1950 onward. I asked Mike Mann about this discrepancy at a meeting recently, and he said he didn't have an explanation. It sounded like it is an embarrassment to the tree ring community that their indicator does not seem to be responding to the pronounced warming of the past 50 years. Ed Cook of the Lamont Tree-Ring Lab tells me that there is some speculation that stratospheric ozone depletion may have affected the trees, in which case the pre-1950 record is OK. But alternatively, he says it is possible that the trees have exceeded the linear part of their temperature-sensitive range, and they no longer are stimulated by temperature. In this case there is trouble for the paleo record. Kieth Briffa first documented this late 20th century loss of response. Personally, I think that the tree ring records should be able to reproduce the instrumental record, as a first test of the validity of this proxy. To me it casts doubt on the integrity of this proxy that it fails this test. Sincerely, Jeff [Severinghaus] http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-did-trees-allegedly-stop.html Agenda-driven "science" to make the Medieval Warming Period disappear: It's hard to sell the idea we're facing an imminent catastrophe now if it was warmer than today a thousand years ago. Even fellow alarmists acknowledged this biased motive in the Climategate emails: 2003 ClimateGate email Can I just say that I am not in the MBH camp - if that be characterized by an unshakable "belief" one way or the other , regarding the absolute magnitude of the global MWP. I certainly believe the " medieval" period was warmer than the 18th century - the equivalence of the warmth in the post 1900 period, and the post 1980s ,compared to the circa Medieval times is very much still an area for much better resolution. [Briffa] ... It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or even Bradley after I warned him about small sample size problems) to realize that some of the chronologies are down to only 1 series in their earliest parts....Bradley still regards the MWP as "mysterious" and "very incoherent" (his latest pronouncement to me) based on the available data. Of course he and other members of the MBH camp have a fundamental dislike for the very concept of the MWP, so I tend to view their evaluations as starting out from a somewhat biased perspective, i.e. the cup is not only "half-empty"; it is demonstrably "broken". I come more from the "cup half-full" camp when it comes to the MWP, maybe yes, maybe no, but it is too early to say what it is. Being a natural skeptic, I guess you might lean more towards the MBH camp, which is fine as long as one is honest and open about evaluating the evidence (I have my doubts about the MBH camp). We can always politely(?) disagree given the same admittedly equivocal evidence. I should say that Jan should at least be made aware of this reanalysis of his data. Admittedly, all of the Schweingruber data are in the public domain I believe, so that should not be an issue with those data. I just don't want to get into an open critique of the Esper data because it would just add fuel to the MBH attack squad. They tend to work in their own somewhat agenda-filled ways. [Ed Cook] http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/ed-cook-mbh-camp-has-fundamental.html