More Briffa vs Ridley

There has been another exchange between Keith Briffa and Matt Ridley in the pages of the Times. Briffa's new letter was as follows:

Sir, Matt Ridley’s response (Jan 17) to my letter further confuses and misrepresents the issues.

He says that I said I reprocessed a tree-ring data set “rather than ignoring it because it gave less of an uptick in temperatures in later decades than the small sample of Siberian larch trees” that I published.

What I in fact said was that I reprocessed the same data set used by different researchers in their version of this chronology. This was in order to improve the representation of long-timescale information in these data. Ridley persists in the repeated claim that a “larger tree-ring chronology from the same region did not have a hockey stick shape”, implying that a chronology based on more tree-ring data would invalidate our conclusions and insinuating that just such an “adverse” chronology had been concealed by us and would not have come to light without a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. He is wrong on both counts. An FOI request was made to the University of East Anglia for a chronology whose existence was revealed as a result of the theft of emails from the Climatic Research Unit. The Information Commissioner’s Office and the Information Tribunal rejected this request, accepting our explanation that the chronology in question was produced as part of ongoing research intended for publication. This chronology was subsequently published, but as a demonstration of how a failure to recognise and account for inhomogeneities in the underlying measurement sets can produce an unreliable indication of tree growth and inferred summer temperature changes.

Ridley quotes me as saying my “research was validated by the inquiry chaired by Sir Muir Russell.” I said no such thing. The Independent Climate Change Email Review had no remit to “validate” any research. What I actually said was that I had not “cherry-picked” my data to produce a desired result, which was the specific accusation levelled at me in Ridley’s piece (Opinion, Jan 6). Sir Muir Russell’s team examined this specific accusation and found that I had not.

Professor Keith R. Briffa

Matt has sent  me a copy of his response which is as follows:

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Yamal no more

Steve McIntyre has released a sudden flurry of blog posts on the subject of the Briffa et al 2013 paper. Today's offering contains the eye-opening news that CRU have finally backtracked from the Yamal hockey stick of "most important tree in the world" fame. The new version of the series is no longer hockey stick shaped and the modern portions resemble closely the versions of Yamal posted at Climate Audit as long ago as 2009, for which McIntyre was resoundingly condemned by mainstream climatologists.

Update on Jun 30, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Rob Wilson sends this sensitivity analysis for the D'Arrigo et al 2006 paper, so that people can see the effect of excluding Yamal. Rob writes:

Below compared are mean NH composites (z=scores w.r.t. 1750-1950). Show[n] for period with at least 2 chronologies per continent (American and Eurasia).

Red line is DWJ06 without Wrangells or Yamal - little change.

Green line is an extended version of the Wilson et al. 07 study. Completely independent data-set to DWJ06

D'Arrigo et al was discussed in the Hockey Stick Illusion, where I noted that it includes some other dubious series, including Tornetrask. So while a lack of sensitivity to Yamal is interesting, I'm not sure I'm convinced yet. It would be interesting to know which series are driving the hockey stick shape, or whether it's a function of the methodology or something.

Acton's blind eye

Readers may recall that at the Science and Technology Committee hearings into Climategate, Professor Acton told MPs that when he had discovered that the Russell inquiry had failed to investigate the question of breaches of FOI legislation, he had instituted his own inquiry which had determined that Jones and Briffa had not in fact deleted emails subject to FOI.

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Fighting mad

Another interesting set of emails from the University of Arizona release. These ones date back to 2001, eight or nine months after the publication of the Third Assessment Report. The thread starts on 7 September, just days before 9/11, and reference is made to those attacks in the thread.

The emails show how the Hockey Team came together to attempt to thwart criticism of their field from a German geological institute. The message is from Stefan Rahmstorf to Overpeck:

Subject: Sceptics attack! [Title inferred from later emails in thread]

Hi Jonathan,

I thought the subject line might capture your attention ... but seriously, we're facing a concerted action here at the moment, a German geological institute has launched a well-orchestrated challenge to IPCC including a book launch, cover articles in major newspapers, a simultaneous official request in the Bundestag, etc. They have the coal industry on their side. Not surprising to you in the US I'm sure but a novelty for germany, where so far the sceptics had no ground to stand on.

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Tim Osborn responds to the Yamal furore

I've just noticed that UEA has posted a response to the recent flurry of postings about Yamal, both at Climate Audit and here.

It's authored by Tim Osborn and can be seen here.

RealClimate on Yamal

Gavin Schmidt has issued the official response to the recent excitement over Yamal. I have to say, even on a brief glance through it is a wild piece of writing.

Briffa, as we know, reprocessed data from Hantemirov and Shiyatov in his 2000 paper on Yamal. He used the same data again in his 2008 paper on regional chronologies. Schmidt says:

McIntyre is accusing Briffa of ‘deception’ in stating that he did not ‘consider’ doing a larger more regional reconstruction at that time. However, it is clear from the 2000 paper that the point was to show hemispheric coherence across multiple tree ring records, not to create regional chronologies. Nothing was being ‘deceptively’ hidden and the Yamal curve is only a small part of the paper in any case.

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The Yamal deception

As many readers are probably aware, there has been an important new posting at Climate Audit about the Yamal affair. This posting is an attempt to set out the whole story of Yamal. It reworks an article I did in 2009 and incorporates new developments since that time. I hope readers find it useful. I have also prepared a Kindle version of the post, for which there is a small charge - click here:

Please also consider hitting the tip jar.

The story of Michael Mann's Hockey Stick reconstruction, its statistical bias and the influence of the bristlecone pines is well known. Steve McIntyre's research into the other reconstructions of the temperatures of the last millennium has received less publicity, however. The story of the Yamal chronology may change that.

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Quote of the day

A propos of my earlier piece about the Hockey Stick, here's Keith Briffa's take on the "NAS defence", from Climategate email no 1140039406.

...you have to consider that since the [Third Assessment Report], there has been a lot of argument re [the] `hockey stick' and the real independence of the inputs to most subsequent analyses is minimal. True, there have been many different techniques used... but the efficacy of these is still far from established.

Still tricking people

I was sent this presentation given by Australian scientist, Professor Will Steffen. This was apparently presented to the Multi-party Climate Change Committee (MCCC) in Canberra.

Interestingly Professor Steffen has chosen to present a copy of the spaghetti graph from Mann et al (2003). The full complement of authors is: Mann, Ammann, Bradley, Briffa, Jones, Osborn, Crowley,  Hughes, Oppenheimer, Overpeck, Rutherford, Trenberth and Wigley. In other words, the author team includes just about every scientist implicated in wrongdoing in the Climategate emails.

Here's the spaghetti graph - with a blowup of the interesting part. It's the orange line (Briffa 2001) you are interested in:

It does rather look to me as if Professor Steffen has chosen to present a spaghetti graph which truncates the divergence in Briffa's famous tree ring series.

"Hide the decline" still being used to "trick" people over a year after it was exposed.

More Mother Jones

I missed the video embedded in the Mother Jones article. This is hugely funny. The author seems to think that hide the decline was something to do with assessing twentieth century temperatures:

...all the fuss over the decline came from one obscure dataset showing tree ring densities in some high latitude regions. When that data was computed in one specific way, that formula gave scientists the wrong idea about the Earth's climate over multiple centuries, and when they realised this they stopped using that formula on tree ring data to look at temperatures after 1960 and relied more on things like, say, actual recorded temperatures...case closed.

Ye gods, even the Hockey Team guys aren't arguing anything so daft. Mother Jones, if you're listening, the point is that the Briffa series doesn't track temperature - it declines while instrumental temperatures are going up. If tree rings (at least some of them) don't track temperature nowadays, it is not possible to use them to recreate temperatures of the past. The point about hide the decline is what it tells about what is knowable about medieval times, not about modern temperatures.

Hilariously, this video came to you via one of Mother Jones' factcheckers!

RS Publishing responds

In the wake of my posting about the changes in the Royal Society Publishing's policy on data openness, I wrote to the man in charge, Dr Stuart Taylor asking for his comments and specifically what prompted the change. I'm grateful to Dr Taylor for a full and thorough response, which I am posting here with permission.

There is certainly no intention on our part to "weaken our policy," nor have we received any representations from anyone asking us to modify it. What you read on our website simply provides more information that the earlier instruction and the intention was, in fact, to tighten the policy from the rather briefer earlier wording by asking our authors to state, at the time of submission any conditions of data sharing that might apply. The change was approved by our Publishing Board in October 2008 in the light of Briffa et al and Matthews et al.

The proof of any policy is in its implementation, as I am sure you will agree. The fact that there exist discipline-specific conventions does not mean that we are any less strict in obtaining data when requested. In fact, I notice that you qualified your initial post later:

"I've edited the main post shortly after posting it as I'd missed the fact that they were still saying that requests had to be complied with..."

I disagree that it is contradictory - as there has been no "watering down." Our policy on data sharing has been widely praised and is something that most of the commercial publishers do not have in their publishing policies. As the UK's national academy, I believe we should be setting an example in this area and I would not accept an article from authors who sought to keep their data private without a very strong case indeed. So your question about how we would flag such articles is somewhat hypothetical.

Please be assured that this policy "has teeth" and we take its implementation seriously. A good case in point was the Matthews article in 2008.

But if I have not managed to persuade you, please don't hesitate to contact me again by phone or email and I shall be happy to discuss the issue further.

I have replied to Dr Taylor that the policy still reads as though it has weakened, but that I am happy to take him at his word that I am mistaken and that the policy still has teeth.

Josh 94

The wind from Hawaii

Science has obtained statements from Eugene Wahl and Michael Mann regarding recent reports about the "delete all emails" episode. The major point of interest is that, Mann says that, contrary to some reports, he said nothing to Wahl, merely forwarding Jones' request to the AR4 delete emails:

Mann, reached on vacation in Hawaii, said the stories yesterday were "libelous" and false. "They're spreading a lie about me," he said of the Web sites. "This has been known for a year and a half that all I did was forward Phil's e-mail to Eugene." Asked why he sent the e-mail to his colleague, Mann said, "I felt Eugene Wahl had to be aware of this e-mail … it could be used against him. I didn't delete any e-mails and nor did I tell Wahl to delete any e-mails." Why didn't Mann call Wahl to discuss the odd request? "I was so busy. It's much easier to e-mail somebody. No where did I approve of the instruction to destroy e-mails."

Wahl confirms Mann's story in a separate statement.

I must say, I wasn't aware that Mann had added nothing. Does anyone know where this was revealed?

Update on Mar 9, 2011 by Bishop Hill

As I look at the Daily Caller story again, I can't actually see anything inaccurate in it. The author, Chris Horner, is quite clear that he is accusing Mann of being involved in the deletion of emails - which, by his own admission, he was, having forwarded the request to delete to Wahl.

Something of a smokescreen going on here I would say (or am I missing something?).

Update on Mar 9, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Mann's explanation for why he forwarded the message is rather bizarre, isn't it?

I felt Eugene Wahl had to be aware of this e-mail … it could be used against him. 

Now, if he wanted Wahl to be careful in case the email was used against him, surely he would actually have said so in the email: something along the lines of "Gee whizz Gene, if somebody gets hold of Jones' crazy request all hell is going to break loose. Better call him up and tell him not to be so silly".

Surely forwarding the email without comment could be misconstrued as, you know, actually wanting him to delete stuff?

Update on Mar 9, 2011 by Bishop Hill

H/T to Woodentop in the comments. If Mann thought that deleting the emails was a bad thing to do, something that might be used against Wahl, why would he have responded to Jones request by saying:

I'll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

talk to you later

Why, why, why?

The Beddington challenge

Judith Curry has taken up Sir John Beddington's challenge to scientists to stand up and be counted in the battle against pseudoscience, with a long post on the subject of the Trick to Hide the Decline.

It is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data in figures shown IPCC AR3 and AR4, and the 1999 WMO document.  Not only is this misleading, but it is dishonest (I agree with Muller on this one).  The authors defend themselves by stating that there has been no attempt to hide the divergence problem in the literature, and that the relevant paper was referenced.  I infer then that there is something in the IPCC process or the authors’ interpretation of the IPCC process  (i.e. don’t dilute the message) that corrupted the scientists into deleting the adverse data in these diagrams.

McIntyre’s analysis is sufficiently well documented that it is difficult to imagine that his analysis is incorrect in any significant way.  If his analysis is incorrect, it should be refuted.  I would like to know what the heck Mann, Briffa, Jones et al. were thinking when they did this and why they did this, and how they can defend this, although the emails provide pretty strong clues. Does the IPCC regard this as acceptable?  I sure don’t.

It's pretty interesting to see Sir John Beddington, Sir Paul Nurse and rest of the scientific establishment, as well as most of the sci-bloggers in the UK, all lining themselves up on the side of pseudoscience on the Climategate issue and Hide the Decline in particular. I wonder how long they can sustain the charade that everything is well in UK climatology?

Holland - what was redacted

David H has posted his take on the importance of the redactions here. I was in the meantime working on my own version of the same story. I'll post it here anyway, in case people want a different take on the same facts.

In David's post yesterday, he described how a new release of data from UEA shows how his submission to the Russell review had been heavily edited before Geoffrey Boulton sent it to UEA for a response. He also outlined the evidence that suggests strongly that the full unedited version was supplied to Osborn and Briffa, possibly from another source, in spite of UEA's claims to the contrary.

Some of the most important omissions concerned the IPCC’s retrospective change of the deadline for submissions to the Fourth Assessment Report, a change that was apparently made in order to allow the Wahl and Ammann paper to be used against McIntyre and McKitrick’s refutation of the Hockey Stick.

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