Wolf Howling: Climategate Update 14: A Tale Of 4 Graphs & An Influential Tree, Hide The Decline Explained; Corrupt Measurements, Goebbelswarming at Copenhagen

Monday, December 7, 2009

Climategate Update 14: A Tale Of 4 Graphs & An Influential Tree, Hide The Decline Explained; Corrupt Measurements, Goebbelswarming at Copenhagen

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) Enemy No. 1 - The Medieval Warm Period:

The Medieval Warm Period from a 1990 IPCC Graph:

A 2005 reconstruction of 2000 years of climate, showing the MWP

Borehole Graph

Summary of Studies Showing MWP Temps above current day:

The MWP After being "hidden" by the AGW crowd

And the basis for the AGW's rewrite:

It is only once the MWP is written out of the historical record that our modern day snake oil salesman can claim that climate change - something which occurs naturally - is actually now being driven by humans and that we have to transfer unprecedented power to the left and vast amounts of wealth in order to prevent it.

Chris Booker, writing at the Telegraph, discusses the "most influential tree in the world" in his column at The Telegraph - it happens to be the tree ring the AGW crowd relied upon to erase the MWP. This from Mr. Booker:

. . . Although McIntyre's exposure of the "hockey stick" was upheld in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and Briffa. These appeared to confirm the rewriting of climate history in the "hockey stick", by using quite different tree ring data from Siberia. Briffa was put in charge of the key chapter of the IPCC's fourth report, in 2007, which dismissed all McIntyre's criticisms.

At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.

This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a "hockey stick" pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU's studies, which led McIntyre to dub it "the most influential tree in the world".

But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU's leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real temps" to "Keith's" graph, in order to "hide the decline". Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann's procedure for the "hockey stick" (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.

A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre's Climate Audit, known only as "Lucy Skywalker". She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.)

In other words, what has become arguably the most influential set of evidence used to support the case that the world faces unprecedented global warming, developed, copied and promoted hundreds of times, has now been as definitively kicked into touch as was Mann's "hockey stick" before it. Yet it is on a blind acceptance of this kind of evidence that 16,500 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists will be gathering in Copenhagen . . .

Read the entire article. You can also see the Yamal Tree Ring scam with better visuals at No Minister. And see this post on the MWP at Watts Up With That.

Touching on the same topic, though in the larger context of "proxy data," is an exceptional article by Marc Shephard at The American Thinker that discusses a variety of critical topics relating to AGW and, in particular, gets to the heart of the "hide the decline" comment in the hacked CRU e-mails. Among the things explained:

- How the IPCC went from acknowldging the Medieval Warming Period - and that it was hotter than today - to writing it out of the historic record. This is the origin of "Mikes Nature Trick," using "proxy temperatures" until it began to decline, then grafting measured temperatures into the graph to show a steep incline in termperatures.

- The data derived from the Ymal tree rings was based on tree rings that were cherry picked. That said, even the tree rings as interpreted by AGW diverge from reality about 1960, thus calling into question its use as a whole as accurately providing "proxy" data for the earth's pre-1850 temperature. That said, if in fact, as indicated in another of the posts above, it really has not warmed in the Ymal region of Siberia for the past fifty years, then it would in fact be accurate, sans the cherry picking. Using a much larger number of trees from the Ymal region does in fact show the MWP.

- As to the validity of modern temperature records, Anthony Watts has visited 75% of the 1,200 U.S. nodes from which weather data is tracked. What he has found is that the majority are not giving accurate measurements because, over the years, their surrounds have changed, with artificial heat sources now within sufficient proximity to effect their measurements. Indeed, less than 10% of these nodes "met strict placement guidelines set forth by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration." Rather than resettle these nodes to gather accurate data, "NOAA claims it has methods to “adjust” for such bias, including the use of “smoothing” adjustments to “homogenize” station data to that of surrounding stations. Unpublished computer programs artificially adjusting the data -- what could possibly go wrong with that?"

In another post at American Thinker, Anthony Walden examines how the AGW crowd measures carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His findings are jaw dropping. This from Mr. Walden:

Problems in the collection of atmospheric CO2 data parallel other absurdities in the global warming fraud. The Climategate scandal is exposing the massive and systematic fraud behind the fabrication of the worldwide temperature record necessary to make the case for global warming. But what about the record of atmospheric CO2?

The U.S. NOAA openly admits to producing a CO2 record which "contains no actual data." NOAA temperature stations sited in ways that artificially inflate temperatures have been exposed over the past two years. CO2 observatories have similar flaws. Two of the five NOAA "baseline" stations are downwind from erupting volcanoes. All five are subject to localized or regional CO2 sources. . . .

Read the entire article for the detailed explanation.

The BBC takes the CRU programming and gives it to a computer programer for evaluation. The assessment - the programming is "shockingingly" substandard.

The unbelievable hubris of climate scientists is on display yet again. You would think they would at least tone down their attempts to control the media and blacklist dissenting scientists during the middle of Climategate. You would be wrong. A recent e-mail from AGW scientist Michael Schlesinger of the University of Illinois to NYT science reporter Andy Revkin takes Revkin to task for reporting on the work of the Pielkes - two scientists, father and son, whose work challenges aspects of the AGW dogma - along with other things Herr Schlesinger apparently did not want reported. Herr Schlesinger then added, " I sense that you are about to experience the 'Big Cutoff' from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you . . ." Obviously there is going to have to be a lot more fallout from Climategate before any of these individuals realize that silencing dissenting voices is antithetical to "science." When individuals making these kinds of threats begin losing their jobs for moral turpitude, tenure or no, then perhaps the rest will begin to understand.

It would seem Gore's use of Kilimanjaro as evidence of AGW doesn't hold up. This from PJM, discussing a study Professor Sinninghe Damste establishing that "the melting and freezing of moisture on top of Kilimanjaro appears to be part of 'a natural process of dry and wet periods.' The present melting is not the result of 'environmental damage caused by man.'"

The IPCC's Copenhagen Conference began today. Instead of a discussion of any of the issues of Climategate that go to the core of AGW theory, and without any acknowledgment that the issues are so serious that even the IPCC chief has called for an investigation of those issues, the delegates were treated to a movie:

Opening ceremonies began with a short film featuring children of the future facing an apocalypse of tempests and desert landscapes if world leaders failed to act today.

"There will be hundreds of millions of refugees," Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN's panel of climate scientists, said in the film.

"Please help save the world," said a little girl, plaintively.