Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Briffa Ascendant

Recently, Steve McIntyre achieved another 15 minutes of fame by challenging the results of several of dendochronologist Keith Briffa's papers. Briffa rseponded here, and among the points he made was that the origonal data came from

...sub-fossil and living-tree ring-width measurements provided to me by Rashit Hantemirov and Stepan Shiyatov.

Now, Rashit Hatenirov himself has provided an update on his more recent work, 1) justifying original Briffa's selection criteria and 2) arguing that an update to his data using many more trees has essentially corroborated Briffa:

As to reliability of recent increase in tree growth - we have updated our data using many additional subfossil and living trees and using RCS-method. I.e. we used not only long series. Therefore many (120) living trees have been used. Finally, we have got almost the Briffa’s result. These results not published yet. I’m going to prepare paper at the end of this / beginning next year.

A preliminary report can be found (in Russian) here.

We are still waiting for McIntyre's apology.

A more in depth account here.

7 comments:

Ti-Guy said...

When we end up so far down the rabbit hole of scientific minutia, claims and counter-claims, I have to go running back to critiques of reason and the perils of hyper-rationality.

This week's podcast of CBC's Ideas (Highlights), "Walking on the Edge of Reason and Awe" was timely in that respect.

Just throwing that out, since this endless drama has become boring. It might get interesting again when we find out that Lord Monckton indeed wears silk panties and lace camisoles under his Savile Row suits.

Frank said...

Warmers and their tree rings. Meanwhile it's snowing in Calgary.

Ti-Guy said...

OMG! Snow in Calgary!

Anonymous said...

Steve has an excellent track record - he busted the Mann et al Hockey Stick from IPCC TAR SPC . . it is gone.

Lust last week he got the UNEP scarfing a grapic from some dude named "Hanno" that they found on wikipedia.


The UNEP has now removed that falsification as well.

2 out of 2 so far and he'll make it 3 for 3 when he Briffa fades away and Steve puts that scalp on his belt.

John Cross said...

"Lust last week "

That is an oddly appropriate comment.

John

Jesús R. said...

[quote]
Hatenirov himself has provided an update [...] 1) justifying original Briffa's selection criteria [...]
[/quote]

But Briffa didn't selected anything, did he? He just took the data from Hantemirov, isn't it?
(*And that's why McI moves on to suggest that the selection criteria might be different for corridor standarization than for RCS)

Hank Roberts said...

Good grief, it's kerfluffle-of-the-week. They're going to be busy working up to December.

Of course you can look this stuff up and find out they're puffing and huffing over nothing again.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_talk:CO2-Temp.png
----excerpt follows------

"Is this graph the work of an anonymous wikimedia user?
Answer: This graph has been drawn and uploaded by me (User:Hanno). On the file description page I have indicated the sources I have used. These sources are publicly available and have undergone peer-review. The graph displays the underlying data without any additions or omissions from my part. That means that the data underlying the graph are not my responsibility. My responsibility is, among other things, the choice of colour, size and resolution. As regards my alleged anonymity, I may note that the intimidating and threatening e-mails I have received after the publication of the UNEP compendium do not seem to indicate that I am especially anonymous...."