The special contribution of Vaclav Klaus

David Henderson writes:

Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic, recently passed his  70th birthday. To mark the occasion a Festschrift volume has been put  together, with a wide range of contributors. I understand that the main  topics in the book are: capitalism and the free market; European  integration; the euro; climate change issues; and the Czech  transformation after 1989.

 The English version of the volume has been sent for publication. Meanwhile I have been given clearance to circulate my own contribution,  which is herewith attached. It is entitled ‘Climate Change Issues: The  Special Contribution of Vaclav Klaus’.

Climate Change Issues: The Special Contribution of Vaclav Klaus

David Henderson

1 An established policy consensus

In relation to climate change issues, there is an official policy consensus. That consensus has been firmly in place for over twenty years, and virtually all governments subscribe to it. By way of recent example, paragraph 66 of last year’s G20 Summit Document year, begins as follows:

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Glikson on the MWP

Updated on Sep 23, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Sep 23, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Australian scientist Andrew Glikson has a very strange article in the Conversation. He appears to believe that we sceptics are like something out of 1984.

Ideologically dominated or totalitarian societies – such as George Orwell’s famous “1984” Ingsoc – are marked by:

• attempts to alter reality (“2 + 2 = 5 if the party says so”)
• elimination of history (“He who controls the past, controls the future”)
• rewriting collective memory (“Oceania is at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia”)
• The corruption of logic through aleration and elimination of language “Newspeak”
• mind control (“thought crime”).

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Yup

In the past I've told people that I reckon much will be made of the Salzer et al. paper in the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. The paper purported to find that bristlecones were in fact reliable proxies, despite everyone previously having agreed that they were contaminated with a non-climatic signal.

I'm therefore not very surprised to see this report in the New York Times today.

A study published in 2009 — with Matthew Salzer of the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona as the lead author — found bristlecone ring-growth rates in the second half of the 20th century to be higher than in any other 50-year period in the last 3,700 years.

“The accelerated growth is suggestive of an environmental change unprecedented in millennia,” the report states. As a result, the bristlecone pine is considered by many dendrochronologists to be an “indicator species” for climate change.

With this, and the fact that CRU's own Tim Osborn has been lined up as a lead author, my prediction is that the Fifth Assessment Report will major on the millennial temperature reconstructions like its predecessors.

Bradley on the Hockey Stick

I'm currently reading Raymond Bradley's new book Global Warming and Political Intimidation, which is very interesting. The sense I get from the book is of a minor civil servant trying to justify some almighty great shambles over which he has presided, which in a way is what the Hockey Stick story is about.

It's a very political work, with Bradley apparently seeing pretty much everything through a political lens: in several places in the book we are presented with stories of valiant Democrats defending honest scientists from wicked Republicans. We have, in essence, a minor civil servant who thinks he's living in a fairy tale and trying to justify himself to the world.

Because of this political focus, there is remarkably little discussion of the science and although there is a chapter on the Hockey Stick, there is no mention of bristlecones or principal components analysis. (And before you ask, no, he doesn't mention the Hockey Stick Illusion either). However, he does make an attempt to defend the science of the Hockey Stick, and my attention is going to be focused there. There's quite a lot to say on this subject, however, so I'm going to break the analysis down into separate posts.

Proxies

I was thinking about all those proxies indicating medieval warmth that were reported in the NIPCC report. I found myself worrying that they might suffer from the same problem as the tree rings - namely that their proxy nature might be justified post-hoc, by showing that they correlate to temperature in the instrumental period. This of course leaves you with the possibility that the correlation is spurious.

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Leaf lines

Nature News has a report of a possible new way of reconstructing past climates - measuring the density of veins in fossil leaves.

Benjamin Blonder, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson working with Brian Enquist, assumed that were many factors affecting vein density, but he set out to make a model that would capture as much of the variation as possible. He collected leaves from about 65 species from temperate North America. His preliminary models suggest that vein density can predict with a surprising degree of accuracy climatic factors temperature and precipitation.

Another confounding factor?

This is a week or so old now, but this Mother Jones article looks at a new paper which reports the effect of livestock on tree rings. The study is focused on birch, so it's not directly relevant to the paleo studies, but the McIntyre and McKitrick paper in E&E in 2005 discussed the possibility of the introduction of livestock having brought about the twentieth century spike in bristlecone growth that underpins the hockey-stick shape of so many of the millennial temperature reconstructions.

Interestingly, the new paper's conclusion is that livestock can reduce tree ring widths by a factor of three or so, but according to the press release, "past densities of herbivores can be estimated from historic records, and from the fossilised remains of spores from fungi that live on dung". In other words, you can control for the effect. As the paper's authors say in their press release:

This study does not mean that using tree rings to infer past climate is flawed as we can still see the effect of temperatures on the rings, and in lowland regions tree rings are less likely to have been affected by herbivores because they can grow out of reach faster.

Somebody needs to repeat this study on the bristlecones.

Shrinking trees

Anthony Watts has a must-read story about the discovery of yet another confounding factor in the science of dendroclimatology.

Warm climates of the past

An interesting looking conference at the Royal Society in October:

Warm climates of the past - a lesson for the future?

In several periods in Earth's history, climate has been significantly warmer than present.  What lessons about the future can be learnt from past warm periods?  The answer depends on the quality of reconstructions of past climates, our understanding of their causes, and the validity of climate models which aim to reproduce them.  This meeting will address these exciting and challenging issues.

Hockey Sticks in the wild

Donna Laframboise is looking for sightings of the Hockey Stick in the wild. There is a category on Climate Audit for this kind of thing which has some early examples, but if anyone has any other suggestions, do drop Donna a line.

Abraham on the MWP

John Abraham, the US academic who keeps falling out with Lord Monckton, has written an article about the MWP. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but there is much of interest.

For example, there's this rather naughty bit of quoting out of context:

the National Academy of Sciences thoroughly investigated [the MWP] and concluded, “the late 20th century warmth in the northern hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years."

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A tree ring blog

Kevin Anchukaitis is a tree ring guy who is currently on an expedition to Alaska to sample treeline spruce trees. There's an article here and a related blog diary of the expedition here.

Who left out the Hockey Stick caveats?

Via Richard Klein's Twitter feed comes this interview with Raymond Bradley in which he discusses his new book. Fascinating stuff, particularly this bit:

In 1998, a post-doc, Mike Mann, Malcolm Hughes and I published an article in Nature on climate in the last 600 years (Mann et al. 1998). Then, in 1999, we published another article in Geophysical Research Letters on temperature over the last 1000 years (Mann et al. 1999). The title was “Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties, and limitations.” We were emphasising the uncertain nature of the problem. But nevertheless, when it got picked up by the summary for policymakers of the third Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, important caveats were left out.

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Political science

One academic who is untroubled by yesterday's call for adherents to the AGW hypothesis to stop calling their opponents "deniers" is Stephan Lewandowsky, an Australian academic who has a somewhat offensive piece in The Conversation, the chat site for university people.

At a time when Greenland is losing around 9,000 tonnes of ice every second — all of which contributes to sea level rises – it is time to hold accountable those who invert common standards of science, decency, and ethics in pursuit of their agenda to delay action on climate change.

It's an interesting piece, covering a range of areas of interest to readers here, including the Hockey Stick (without mentioning McIntyre and McKitrick!), the travails of Prof Wegman, and the peer review of the Soon and Baliunas paper.

Onset of the LIA

This looks interesting: a new paper from D’Andrea et al describes some climate fluctuations in Greenland at the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the beginning of the Little Ice Age.

Greenland's early Viking settlers were subjected to rapidly changing climate. Temperatures plunged several degrees in a span of decades, according to research from Brown University. A reconstruction of 5,600 years of climate history from lakes near the Norse settlement in western Greenland also shows how climate affected the Dorset and Saqqaq cultures.

H/T Messenger