Books
Click images for more details
Bishop Hill Nov 23, 2009 Climate Is this the moment when reputable climatologists start to distance themselves from the Hockey Team? Judy Curry's piece at Climate Audit was the start of it, but now Hans von Storch has called for Mann and Jones to be barred from taking part in future IPCC reviews.
Who else is brave enough? Now's the moment ladies and gentlemen.
Bishop Hill Nov 23, 2009 Climate Yes, a miracle has happened. Roger Harrabin did a piece on the CRU hack that was not a complete whitewash. It did manage to avoid most of the issues though.
UK listeners can hear it here, starting at 19 mins, 15sec.
It includes calls for a public inquiry from both sides of the debate.
Bishop Hill Nov 23, 2009 Climate It there nobody honest working at the Guardian? Nobody at all?
They have a post up there at the moment saying that there was no evidence of a conspiracy in the CRU emails, this based on the word of several of the perpetrators. I posted a response as follows:
Ah, so if Real Climate says there was no conspiracy, there was no conspiracy. The fact is, this is the same bunch of people implicated in the emails. Why should we accept their word?
There is clear evidence of conspiracy to remove from post journal editors who allowed publication of papers that questioned the "consensus". See http://www.anelegantchaos.org/cru/emails.php?eid=484&filename=1106322460.txt
I'm sorry, but this article is blatant disinformation. Truly shameful.
And now it's gone. Dissent is Deleted.
Bishop Hill Nov 23, 2009 Climate I'm still adding new email summaries to the bottom of my earlier post. If you haven't done so, you might like to check it out again.
Bishop Hill Nov 22, 2009 Climate This email was written by Michael Mann shortly after the publication of McIntyre and McKitrick's 2003 paper in Energy and Environment. The various members of the Hockey Team were trying to formulate a response. Mann first thanks Osborn:
Thanks very much Tim,
I was hoping that the revisions would ally concerns people had. I'll look forward to your comments on this latest draft. I agree w/ Malcolm on the need to be careful w/ the wording in the first paragraph. The first paragraph is a bit of relic of a much earlier draft, and maybe we need to rethink it a bit. Takinig the high road is probably very important here. If *others* want to say that their actions represent scientific fraud, intellectual dishonesty, etc. (as I think we all suspect they do), lets let *them* make these charges for us!
Lets let our supporters in higher places use our scientific response to push the broader case against MM. So I look forward to peoples attempts to revise the first par. particular.
I took the liberty of forwarding the previous draft to a handfull of our closet colleagues, just so they would have a sense of approximately what we'll be releasing later today--i.e., a heads up as to how MM achieved their result...
look forward to us finalizing something a bit later--I still think we need to get this out
ASAP...
mike
So who are the supporters in higher places. And who are the "closet colleagues" (or does he mean "closest"?)
Bishop Hill Nov 21, 2009 Climate After the successes of Caspar and the Jesus Paper and The Yamal Implosion, the two postings on this site that have garnered significant levels of attention, a number of readers suggested to me that I write a book about the Hockey Stick. Being an amenable sort, I have done just that and the results of a year's worth of early mornings and late nights are going to become available to the public in the near future.
The Hockey Stick Illusion is a critical history of the affair, tracing the story from its very beginnings in the notorious Deming email, right up to the most recent developments - the release of the Yamal data and the wave of uproar that followed.
I should point out that the cover shown here is a placeholder and that something a bit snazzier is being lined up.
The Hockey Stick Illusion will be published by Stacey International some time in January. Given the events of the last couple of days it looks as though I may have to try to stick in an appendix though, as many of the emails speak directly to events in the book. I hope there's still time. While I'm doing that you can preorder a copy here.
Stacey have the UK rights and will sell into overseas markets too, but will allow me to accept offers of contracts from US and Australian publishers. If anyone wants to speak about rights outside the UK, including translation rights, please feel free to drop me a line.
Bishop Hill Nov 20, 2009 Climate A commenter has just pointed out to me that the hackers who left the file link at the Air Vent described what they had made available as "a random selection" of what there was. So there could be more to come.
Everyone enjoying themselves?
Bishop Hill Nov 20, 2009 Climate Welcome Instapundit readers! Hope this is useful for you. If you are interested in more on global warming material, check out Caspar and the Jesus Paper and The Yamal Implosion, or check out the forthcoming book.
General reaction seems to be that the CRUgate emails are genuine, but with the caveat that there could be some less reliable stuff slipped in.
In the circumstances, here are some summaries of the CRUgate files. I'll update these as and when I can. The refs are the email number.
Bishop Hill
Updated to add links to the online database of the emails at Elegant Chaos.
Bishop Hill
)Here's more:
Bishop Hill Nov 20, 2009 Climate See here
Bishop Hill
An associate of mine has contacted CRU direct and they have confirmed the story. It seems clear then that the story is true. I suppose there remains a possibility that what is doing the rounds of the internet is not all genuine, but this seems fairly unlikely.
Bishop Hill
Climate Audit has been swamped by traffic, but has apparently reported that CRU has cancelled all existing passwords.
Bishop Hill
The BBC are going to try to sweep it under the carpet.
Bishop Hill Nov 19, 2009 Climate It is claimed that the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has been hacked and there is a massive file of emails and code up on a server in Russia. If what has been posted is real then the balloon is about to go up.
Excerpts of the emails have been posted here. They include a CRU scientist welcoming the death of a prominent sceptic, discussion of how to fiddle results and so on.
Amazing. If true.
As someone says, if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.
Bishop Hill Oct 28, 2009 Climate Here's a bit of fun. Inspired by the Political Compass, your humble Bishop brings you what I think is a slightly different way of looking at the various groups in the climate debate. I've analysed people's perception of the debate along two axes - one covering how much one thinks that global warming is a problem, the other looking at how people perceive the integrity of climate science. I've added some likely groupings in the space I define, which I think you'll agree are quite interesting.
There are a growing band of Lukewarmers on the web, of course; people who believe in AGW but don't think it's a big issue. I also identify a group who I've called the Doubters. This group intrigues me. The idea was inspired by Atte Korhola's comments of a couple of weeks back. Korhola believes in AGW, there seems no doubt of that, but he is clearly concerned over the integrity of climate science. I don't think it is reading too much into his position to describe him as a doubter, therefore. He may still believe, but if he doubts the integrity of the science his faith must at least be subject to occasional pangs of doubt.
Here's some questions that occur to me on the groupings:
And lastly, for fun, suggest coordinates for your favourite global warming debate personalities. There are some people out there who really intrigue me. Of course, if you are a global warming debate personality or a climate specialist of some sort, you could just tell us. Over to you Mr President.
Bishop Hill Oct 22, 2009 Climate David Appell reports on his blog that he has a new article in this month's Scientific American, reporting on a new method for creating temperature reconstructions by Tingley and Huybers. It goes without saying that their results are hockey stick shaped.
I don't have access to the article, but the theory doing the rounds at Climate Audit is that David is referring to this manuscript. The link is to an unpublished version of the paper, but it's not clear from David's article if it has now gone to print or not, and it is of couse possible that it's a different paper entirely. I hope so, because within about half an hour of my posting a link to Appell's story up at CA, when reader JeanS pointed to the linked manuscript, he also observed that the dataset used in that paper included Mann's Hockey Stick itself (the PC1 for the technically minded among you) and the now legendary Yamal series.
It's too funny.
And besides, if the reconstruction includes Mann's PC1, then it is not, as Appell puts it "a completely different method". Tingley and Huybers's results are biased by Mannian short centring just as much as the Hockey Stick itself.
Bishop Hill
McIntyre is reporting that there is in fact another unpublished paper by the same authors. This looks interesting because he has been able to get something of a fix on the data which, rather than having 20th century upticks, has downticks instead. This being the case, it's something of a mystery as to how Tingley and Huybers' methodology manages to generate a hockey stick.
Watch this space.
Share Article Bishop Hill Oct 2, 2009 Climate David Appell has picked up my comments on his comments on peer review. To recap somewhat, David suggested that McIntyre's findings on Yamal should not be taken seriously because they are not peer reviewed. I pointed out that Einstein and Watson and Crick were not peer reviewed either, to which David has now responded
Steve McIntyre isn't Einstein. Enough said.
In technical terms, this is what is known as a "straw man". The point at issue was whether Steve McIntyre should be taken seriously, not whether he is Einstein.
Given that David has not disputed that Einstein, Watson and Crick were not peer reviewed, I think we can probably now agree that peer review is not a suitable criterion for deciding if an idea should be taken seriously.
David then goes on to say that Einstein, Watson and Crick were published in the best journals of their day. This is a better point, but I think it's hardly persuasive. If the papers passed the review of an editor instead of a pair of peer reviewers, what does that amount to other than another kind of peer review?
Lucia makes some pertinent comments on the need for peer review today too:
...these communications about published papers happen in both formal and informal settings. Historically, no one has said, “Oh. But who cares about Prof. X’s opinion about paper B. He only said it in a conversation at a conference. Until he writes a journal article, I’m not going to pay attention to that opinion."
And besides, if we should ignore McIntyre's comments because they are not published in a journal, hasn't David shot himself in the foot by quoting, in his very next post, the responses of Briffa and the Real Climate team, none of which were (a) peer reviewed or (b) published in a journal?
Bishop Hill Oct 2, 2009 Climate Ross McKitrick has an article on Yamal in Canada's National Post.
Bishop Hill Oct 1, 2009 Climate So, Briffa has responded to McIntyre and there's another riposte up at Real Climate. I'll try to explain what is going on.
Let's first remind ourselves of the guts of McIntyre's argument. This is that Briffa had an very small set of tree ring cores in the latter years of his Yamal series and that when you removed this and replaced it with a somewhat larger set of data from the same region, the uptick in the hockey stick shape disappeared. Therefore Briffa's results weren't robust.
Now we'll look at Briffa's response.
Cherrypicking
Firstly he says McIntyre is implying that he, Briffa, cherrypicked uptrending series so as to get a hockey stick. In reply, McIntyre quotes what he said in his early post:
It is highly possible and even probable that [Briffa's] selection is derived from a prior selection of old trees described in Hantemirov and Shiyatov 2002...
and also a comment he made on another of the Yamal posts
It is not my belief that Briffa crudely cherry picked.
This seems to refute Briffa's accusation that McIntyre was implying malfeasance.
Standardisation
From a scientific perspective, this part of the debate has moved us forward slightly, in that Briffa has now confirmed that the selection of the 12 cores from the much larger population available was due to the Russians. What the reason was for their only using 12 cores remains a mystery. Briffa's response has, however, opened up a new part of the debate that I've not touched on before - this concerns standardisation of the raw tree ring data.
During its lifetime, a tree does not grow at a uniform pace. Tree rings are generally wider when a tree is young than when it is older. If you are using a set of tree rings in climatology, therefore, unless you do something about it, your "treemometer" would always show declining temperatures, regardless of what is going on in the outside world. Standardisation is the process by which this fix is applied, and it involves removing a kind of "average growth curve" from the record to adjust for these changes in growth rate. There are various ways of doing this, the details of which are beyond my ken, but as I understand it, the Russians used the "corridor" method. This works well when you have small numbers of tree cores so it was presumably a suitable choice.
The problem with the corridor method is that it tends to obscure long-term trends in the data, which is precisely what you're interested in when you are doing paleoclimate work. Because of this, when Briffa picked up the seventeen cores for use in his version of Yamal, he applied a different standardisation procedure called RCS, which is better suited to the retention of long-term information.
My application of [RCS] to these same data was intended to better represent the [long-term] growth variations ... to provide a direct comparison with the chronology produced by Hantemirov and Shiyatov.
This is problematic. RCS is not suited to dealing with small numbers of cores (I recall reading somewhere that it is not considered suitable with less than 50, but I'm not swearing to that). I also wonder about the nature of Briffa's paper. It strikes me that if the purpose was to "provide a direct comparison with the chronology produced by Hantemirov and Shiyatov", then there can be no arguing with the use of the same data. However, review of Briffa's original paper from 2000 suggests that intercomparison of standardisation methods was not part of his purpose at the time. The paper is a review of developments in paleoclimate and the calculation of a new temperature reconstruction using some of the new data. This being the case, the logical thing to do would surely to have used as much data as possible.
Robustness
Briffa's other concerns are with McIntyre's sensitivity test - replacing the 12 Briffa cores with the Schweingruber 34 - different cores taken from the same area. This is how he puts it:
The basis for McIntyre's selection of which of our ... data to exclude and which to use in replacement is not clear... He offers no justification for excluding the original data.
McIntyre's comeback on this is that he was very clear about the reasons for excluding the Briffa 12, namely that the number of cores was small. He wanted to test the robustness of the answer by swapping in a larger dataset that had not been used by Briffa.
As well as seeing what happened when the Briffa 12 were swapped for the Schweingruber 34, McIntyre also did a slightly different calculation to see what would happen when both were put in the mix. Briffa says that when McIntyre did this, he underweighted the 12 (i.e. making the loss of hockey stick shape more marked than it should have been). McIntyre has pointed out that Briffa has equally underweighted the Schweingruber 34 by not using them at all, and that debate about the weights doesn't affect the main point, which is that using the Schweingruber 34 makes the hockey stick shape disappear.
Briffa continues
Whether the McIntyre version is any more robust a representation of regional tree growth in Yamal than my original, remains to be established.
This one has been doing the rounds for years. McIntyre has been clear from the start that he is not creating an alternative reconstruction. He is testing "official" studies for robustness.
