The Hockey Stick lives!

At least according to John Collins Rudolf at the New York Times Green Blog. Mr Rudolf seeks to defend the Hockey Stick, a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures, by reference to a handful of local and regional proxies. This doesn't strike me as very clever.

Update on Sep 23, 2010 by Bishop Hill

I tried to post a comment at the NYT. I said that the NRC defence of the hockey stick - that Mann used a biased methodology and inappropriate data but had still reached the right answer - was an embarrassment to science. 

They have not allowed it to be posted.

Responses to McShane and Wyner

Readers will remember McShane and Wyner's critique of the way paleoclimatologists handle statistics, which was widely reported some weeks back. The journal in question has invited responses to the paper and these are now online.

There is one from Schmidt, Mann and Rutherford and another from Tingley.

Budiansky on Cuccinelli

One of my favourite science writers, Stephen Budiansky, has recently joined the blogosphere and is today discussing the Cuccinelli investigation and its similarity to the attacks on Bjorn Lomborg in the wake of the publication of the Skeptical Environmentalist.

Qui Tam

Readers who are interested in Virginia A-G Cuccinelli's ongoing battle with Michael Mann and the University of Virginia will want to take a look at the Virginia Qui Tam Law blog, which is posting regularly on the legal ins and outs of the case. I found the following quote instructive.

...most lawyers representing targets of a [civil investigative demand (CID)] take advantage of the opportunity to try to convince the government that there has been no wrongdoing, and that the client has nothing to hide.  

There are very good reasons for this, because this epic battle over this CID is much ado about nothing.  Even if a target "wins" and the CID gets set aside, they haven't really won anything at all, because a CID is just a preliminary investigative tool...

...even if a party fighting a CID wins and successfully quashes the CID, guess what?  They may not have to respond to the CID, but they have spent thousands and thousands of dollars, and the winning prize is normally a freshly-filed lawsuit by the OAG.  And then, as soon as discovery begins in the case, the OAG will ask for exactly the same materials they requested in the CID.  At that point, the defendant will have no choice but to produce the material.

Judge blocks Cuccinelli

A judge has blocked Virginia attorney-general Ken Cuccinelli's attempt to subpoena Michael Mann's emails. Cuccinelli is probing Mann's grant applications on the grounds that they may have been fraudulent. However, Judge Paul M. Peatross has now ruled that Cuccinelli has not made the case for his investigation - in other words that there appears to have been insufficient evidence to justify the investigation.

Cuccinelli, however, seems to think that the judge has given him enough to launch a new application.

Cuccinelli said in a statement Monday that the glass is half full, noting the judge found that the university could be subjected to civil investigative demands. The ruling “has given us a framework for issuing a new civil investigative demand to get the information necessary to continue our investigation into whether or not fraud has been committed against the commonwealth,” the AG said.

Source: The Hill.

Zorita on McShane and Wyner

Eduardo Zorita has an interesting review of McShane & Wyner's paper on the statistics of paleoclimate reconstructions. He takes them to task for not understanding the actual methods used by paleo people and in particular those used by Mann et al in the Hockey Stick papers. Although one can point to the foggy writing in MBH98 in defence of M and W, Eduardo's point that they should have worked more closely with paleo people is fair enough. That said, Eduardo does spend quite a lot of his review criticising the preamble to the paper rather than the guts of the thing.

When he does get onto the paper, he is less critical, but not convinced. He describes M&W's comparison of reconstructions based on proxies to those from various forms of noise as "interesting and probably correct" but doubts its usefulness because they have used a method that is not used by paleo people. I'm not sure about this - surely if there is a real temperature signal in the proxies, they should outperform noise regardless of the method?

There is a modicum of agreement on the last part of the paper though, with Zorita agreeing with M&W's conclusion that the uncertainties in paleo reconstructions have been underestimated. However, he says that this observation is...

...hardly revolutionary. Already the NRC assessment on millennial reconstructions and other later papers indicate that the uncertainties are much larger than those included in the hockey stick and that the underestimation of past variability is ubiquitous.

I guess the IPCC missed that memo.

Mann vents

Michael Mann has a letter in the Star-Tribune mainly discussing his conduct over the Soon and Baliunas affair and the use of the word "denier".

Read it here.

A brick wall

Scott Ott from the Daily Caller tries and fails to get meaningful comment out of Michael Mann.

Zorita on Smerdon

Eduardo Zorita has a must-read post up at Klimazwiebel, discussing a new paper by Smerdon et al. Michael Mann fans will be amused to read of geographical problems uncovered in some of Mann's papers, which will instantly bring to mind favourite episodes from the Hockey Stick story, like the Rain in Maine (falls mainly in the Seine) and the documentary records of East African climate from the medieval period (Mann et al 2008). Here's a sample:

In one case, when interpolating the climate model data onto a different grid, the data were rotated around the Earth 180 degrees, so that model data that should be located on the Greenwich Meridian were erroneously placed at 180 degrees longitude; in another case the data in the Western Hemisphere were spatially smoothed, while the data in the Eastern Hemisphere were not.

Ouch.

As Eduardo points out the implications are rather interesting, since Smerdon's findings imply that Mann's stress-testing must have been too weak to actually demonstrate what they purported to do. Fascinating stuff.

Revkin on the Hockey Stick

Andy Revkin is interviewed on America's NPR on the subject of the aftermath of Climategate. A transcript can be seen here. During the course of the interview, a member of the public asks AR about the Hockey Stick.

The original paper was riddled with caveats, all these could, would, might, to be sure, kind of phrases. And it - but then it quickly got spun, including by the IPCC in 2001. In the illustration they derived from it, they removed the gray bands that showed you the error, the possible up and down error. And as you go farther back in time, the range of possible error in these estimates is much, much higher. So that was where the problem was. The National Academy of Sciences did a study that assessed this. And largely, there were some problems that they raised with the way it had been done. But since then also, the main thrust of that work has been repeatedly replicated by other groups of scientists.

So the idea that we're in a period of unusual warming in the last 50 years has not been erased. The - what's been returned is - for the original paper - the sense that it's important to be sure you talk about the things we don't know, even when you talk about what's been learned in climate science. And if you don't do that, then you can be accused of, kind of, oversimplifying things.

All very strange. Can Andy really be unaware that Mann was a lead author on the paleoclimate chapter of the Third Assessment Report? Does he also not know that the "repeated replications" mostly rely on the same faulty data as the Hockey Stick itself? And I can't say I was aware that the IPCC had removed the error bars from the graph either (perhaps he means in the spaghetti graphs?).

Mann cleared

No surprise there then! The report is at the end of this post.

Night all.

Penn state clears Mann

Fiona Fox on the Hockey Stick

Fiona Fox, who runs the (big-oil funded!) Science Media Centre has an article up at the BBC College of Journalism website. The thrust of the piece is that sceptics should be ignored. Nothing new there, I hear you say. However, her argument includes this take on the Hockey Stick.

Click to read more ...

Fred on Foster and deFreitas

Fred Pearce in New Scientist looks at some recent developments in the ongoing battle between Tamino and the Hockey Team on the one side and sceptics deFreitas and McLean on the other. Judy Curry gets quoted.

Watch and read

The BBC's Panorama piece (the one featuring Michael Mann) is on tonight. The Panorama home page features a clip in which presenter Tom Heap visits the Rowe family "to find out what effect they think their lifestyle is having on warming the planet", which rather suggests that the programme is going to be toe-curlingly awful.

Meanwhile, Skeptic magazine has an article called "Climate Skeptics - the good the bad and the ugly", which looks interesting. If anyone can get me a copy of the text I'd be grateful.

Also there is this piece by PZ Myers proclaiming the deflating of Climategate. The basis for Myers' claim is the Sunday Times retraction of the Amazongate story, which seems a little odd since this was nothing to do with Climategate at all and the principal claims of Leake's article still seem to stand.

Bad boys exaggerated my graph and ran away!

The BBC Editors' blog gives us a glimpse of their forthcoming Panorama documentary about global warming in the wake of Climategate.

They interview Bob Watson, John Christy, Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Mann, the latter quoted as 'regretting the way his so-called "hockey-stick graph" was put in the spotlight by politicians' (!)

Read the whole thing here.