Who Will Be Mark Steyn's Witnesses?

Just noticed another piece on Steyn's website re the defamation case climatologist Mike Mann has brought against him.  Its largely the same old same old, but then there is this bit towards the end:

I have a great legal team headed by Dan Kornstein, the man behind the most consequential piece of free-speech legislation enacted this century, and we've been interviewing prominent scientific witnesses tired of the climate of fear that Mann and his Clime Syndicate have imposed on their field.

Be interesting to see who he finds who can pass muster as an expert witness.  We are talking a very, very short list of possibles.  Also, Steyn references a recent post by Steve McI at Climate Audit.

Steve quotes par 2 of Mann's statement of claim:

And comments thusly:

But, needless to say, Mann had nothing to do with the development of the instrumental temperature data showing 20th century temperature increases.... 

And thusly:

Mann’s (false) claim to have been “one of the first” to document 20th century temperature increase was apparently based on MBH98 and MBH99, which he described later in the pleadings (paragraph 15) as “two research papers showing a steady rise in surface temperature during the 20th Century and a steep increase in measured temperatures since the 1950s”. Needless to say, these papers showed 20th century temperature data in key graphics, but the papers themselves were obviously about the proxy reconstructions, not the instrumental record.

Well, note the qualifier "apparently".  Maybe the claim is not based on these two papers.  Maybe its based on this 1994 publication, for example, in which Mann and his co-author write thusly:

 ...and conclude thusly:

Or maybe not, but its clear that Mann's work from the early 1990s (pre hockey-stick graph) dealt with the instrumental record.   At least so says his wiki entry:

Mann then joined the Yale Department of Geology and Geophysics, obtaining an MPhil in geology and geophysics in 1993. His research focused on natural variability and climate oscillations. He worked with the seismologist Jeffrey Park, and their joint research adapted a statistical method developed for identifying seismological oscillations to find various periodicities in the instrumental temperature record, the longest being about 60 to 80 years.

So his claim seems sound.  Steyn is flailing.  And McI....god his stuff is boring these days.  He needs to find another hobby.

Mann Vs. Steyn: Steve McIntyre Weighs In

I've written fairly extensively on the topic of Michael Mann's defamation case against Mark Steyn. Earlier this month, having fired, or been fired by, his lawyers, Mark Steyn appealed to the Internet to help build a case for claiming that, when he described Michael Mann's work as "fraudulent", he was not accusing him of scientific misconduct.  

Canadian climate change denier Steve McIntyre has now stepped up to make that case.  It's not going to help.

As usual, reading through McI's writing at Climate Audit is a joyless experience.  There's veiled accusations, insinuations, quote-mining, tortured semantics ...the works.  It's a hard job to boil it down to some at-bottom essence.  I am going to focus on this post, mostly because it's been reproduced uncritically at The Volokh Conspiracy blog, a right-wing legal blog which the Washington Post has, for some reason, decided to carry, and where it may therefore be seen by a larger audience.  The end-point of McI's argument  is that Michael Mann was not exonerated by the many, many panels, boards, and etc. which investigated him.  Therefore Steyn's claim, that Mann's results were "fraudulent", can somehow be supported.  That's what I gather, at least, having read through his original piece and its regurgitation at the VC site twice now.

McI's analysis of the Oxburgh Panel's report lean quite heavily on a few tossed-off comments made by statistician David Hand at a press-conference announcing the panel's findings.  These remarks were widely reported at the time.  McI quotes three or four press outlets, but I will reference just The Daily Telegraph, which seems to have reproduced them most extensively:

Professor David Hand said that the research – led by US scientist Michael Mann – would have shown less dramatic results if more reliable techniques had been used to analyse the data… But the reviewers found that the scientists could have used better statistical methods in analysing some of their data, although it was unlikely to have made much difference to their results.
That was not the case with some previous climate change reports, where “inappropriate methods” had exaggerated the global warming phenomenon. Prof Hand singled out a 1998 paper by Prof Mann of Pennsylvania State University, a constant target for climate change sceptics, as an example of this. He said the graph, that showed global temperature records going back 1,000 years, was exaggerated – although any reproduction using improved techniques is likely to also show a sharp rise in global warming. He agreed the graph would be more like a field hockey stick than the ice hockey blade it was originally compared to. “The particular technique they used exaggerated the size of the blade at the end of the hockey stick. Had they used an appropriate technique the size of the blade of the hockey stick would have been smaller,” he said. “The change in temperature is not as great over the 20th century compared to the past as suggested by the Mann paper.”

So, to begin with, let's assume that David Hand is strictly speaking correct here.  Mann's research team could have used more appropriate statistical techniques, and these would have given less "exaggerated" results.  Although the results obtained were not greatly exaggerated, because as Hand notes better techniques would also have shown "a sharp rise in global warming".  The work might have been done more carefully, in other words, but the fact it wasn't doesn't matter much.

This a long, long way from an accusation of scientific misconduct.  And remember, previous judges have already concluded that in this particular setting Steyn's use of "fraudulent" = "scientific misconduct. There is no colloquial sense of the term where it means something less serious.  So how this is suppose to help Steyn's case is a little bit mysterious.

But, of course, it's pretty clear that Hand has got his facts bungled.  Mann's team was interested in a paleoclimatic reconstruction--in an attempt to determine temperature changes before the instrumental record.  This work took the 20th century instrumental record, which shows rapid increases in temperature,  as a given, and did nothing to transform it in either an exaggerated or any other manner.  Therefore Hand's criticism seems to have little merit.

And it is significant that shortly after the Panel published its findings, it added the following addendum to them:

Addendum to report, 19 April 2010

For the avoidance of misunderstanding in the light of various press stories, it is important to be clear that the neither the panel report nor the press briefing intended to imply that any research group in the field of climate change had been deliberately misleading in any of their analyses or intentionally exaggerated their findings. Rather, the aim was to draw attention to the complexity of statistics in this field, and the need to use the best possible methods. 

As I argued at the time, this sounds pretty close to a grovelling apology.  Oddly enough, McI and the folks at the VC blog interpret it differently:

Note that this statement doesn’t actually offer an opinion on whether the (criticized) findings were “deliberately misleading” or “intentionally exaggerated,” merely stating that their comments were not intended to imply this accusation.

This strikes me as semantic noodling, but if we are going to engage in such things, note that the addendum references not just Mann's team but "any research group in the field of climate change".  So if it is refusing to offer an opinion of Mann's work, it is also refusing to offer one on the work of the CRU scientists who were the subject of its investigation in the first place.  And such a stance would be ridiculous given the reason for the panel's existence.

Finally, McI seems to be claiming that, since the panel was not investigating Mann directly, it cannot "exonerate" him.  Indeed, the Oxburgh Panel had other concerns, and if I remember events correctly, it was only when a small group of deniers within the  U.K. Institute of Physics hijacked a sub-committee and used it to spread the accusations of misconduct more broadly, that Mann and his team were dragged into this mess.  But insofar as the panel touched on Mann's work, it cleared him of wrong-doing.  Other investigations, more directly focused, cleared him in a more decisive fashion.  And it's more than a little silly that McI would lean on a non-existent colloquial sense of "fraudulent" while insisting on a legalistic reading of "exonerate".

McIntyre To Retire

...Climate Audit, that is?

The quiet man said he thought that the work of his climate-statistical website was probably done....

Cops Question Canadian Denier Steve McIntyre

Steve McIntyre owns Climate Audit, one of the most popular Climate Change Denialist websites. He's been at the center of the warming wars for years, and no more so than in the past six or so months after the CRU hack. Given this, it isn't surprising that the RCMP and U.K. police have been after him to answer questions re the stolen emails.

Here's a statement from McI-- straight out of the horses' mouth:

Last week, I was contacted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the Canadian federal police) who had been asked by UK police to locate a Stephen McIntyre. The Canadian policeman, who didn't seem to know much about the case, said that the UK police wanted to talk to me about whether there had been any misrepresentations of my articles. !!!! They also wanted to locate Andrew Weaver. I confirmed that I was the Stephen McIntyre in question and that I was prepared to talk to the UK authorities - expressing very clearly to the Canadian policeman my total disdain for the idea that this was police business. The inquiry in question presumably did not come from the Norfolk anti-terrorism detachment, as I'd already talked to them at considerable length and they knew how to contact me. I haven't heard anything further yet.

IMHO, FWIW, it's not Steve that's purloined 1,000s of personal emails from Phil Jones and Co. But it's almost certainly one (or more) of his readers; the the stolen documents all relate to issues McI has been obsessing over the years (Mann's work, Briffa's work, and etc.).

And I see from the above that McI is still hinting that this was the act of a whistle-blower from within CRU. Its worth noting (especially when you realize that U.K anti-terrorism people are involved in the investigation) that the cops don't buy it.

ClimateHackerGate! CRU First Hacked In October????

An interesting development:

E-mails alleged to undermine climate change science were held back for weeks after being stolen so that their release would cause maximum damage to the Copenhagen climate conference, according to a source close to the investigation of the theft.

[...]

The first hack was in October or earlier, the source said. The e-mails were not leaked until mid-November.

Interesting because, back on the 25th, I theorized that the hackers might have first shown a selection of illegally obtained emails to the BBC's Paul Hudson back in October and then--perhaps because he didn't write on them--hit the CRU server again for more of the good stuff. This new development would be consistent with that theory, which would be uncomfortable for Mr. Hudson, as it would mean he sat on illegally obtained emails without reporting them for a whole month.

Also--since the private CRU emails discuss Briffa's tree-ring proxies and Tijander and etc.--did the hackers delay their release in the hopes of harvesting more embarrassing material on this particular topic? That might put them in rather close proximity to Steve M's gang at CA, since he was the guy stirring the pot on these issues. In any case, it is clear that the emails were held back for weeks after being stolen so that their release would cause maximum damage to the Copenhagen climate conference. That's the takeaway message.

RealClimate On CRU Hack

...more particularly, on Phil Jones' "trick":

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

CRU Hacked

...secret lives of climate scientists spilled! And they really are as boring as you thought!

The story so far: Russian hackers have recently broken into the computers at University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) and posted files containing private emails between any number of well-known climate researchers. The usual suspects are claiming that the emails show massive malfeasance! the scientific fraud of the millennium! a Marxist conspiracy! and so on and so forth. I have looked a some of the material (from a honking big 62 meg .zip file) but won't link to it here because it has been obtained illegally and I'm not quite sure what the legality of a link would be. From the random sample I've read (there are literally thousands of emails and hundreds of .doc and other files), you find climate scientists to-ing and fro-ing over various issues, being a bit bitchy, and saying mean things about folks like McIntyre. Very thin gruel for a massive conspiracy theory, just because there's so much good stuff they've missed. For example, there is no .txt file of the daily prayer to Gore the Fat, no emails re the meeting I personally arranged between prominent alarmists and the leaders of the Homo Sexual Agenda (now that was a weird night!), and none of the interminable discussions that have taken place concerning the difficulty these days of finding a virgin to sacrifice to Gaia.

Probably the worst bit, from an optics point of view (certainly its the thing being waved around by the denialist crowd) is a 10 year old email from Phil Jones:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray xbxxxey ,mann@[snipped], mxxes@[snipped]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.bxxxfa@[snipped],t.xxxrn@[snipped]

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers, Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit

The denialists are keying on the term "trick" and the phrase "to hide the decline". It turns out that in the email Jones is discussing methods of "splicing" (if thats the correct term) instrumental data to proxy records. He explains as follows:

"No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years."

Jones told TGIF he had no idea what me meant by using the words "hide the decline".

"That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?"

So there you have it.

Briffa, Mark II: McIntyre Used Biased Sample

I think Steve has backed away from most of his accusations re the Yamal tree-ring chronology here, or had them convincingly refuted. Nevertheless, Briffa and several co-authors have decided to make a more thorough response to his various blog posts on the matter. From their abstract:

McIntyre's use of the data from a single, more spatially restricted site, to represent recent tree growth over the wider region, and his exclusion of the data from the other available sites, likely represents a biased reconstruction of tree growth. McIntyre's sensitivity analysis has little implication, either for the interpretation of the Yamal chronology or for other proxy studies that make use of it.

From their conclusion:

So what can we conclude on the basis of this and McIntyre's sensitivity tests? Does either version of the Yamal chronology as presented in Briffa (2000) and Briffa et al. (2008) present a misleading indication of the likely history of tree-growth changes near the tree line in the Yamal region over the last two millennia, or can McIntyre's 'sensitivity analysis' be taken as evidence that tree growth has not increased in this region in the second half of the 20th century as is clearly implied by the 'extreme' version of the Yamal chronology he produced? On the basis of the evidence we report here, the answer is very likely 'NO' on both counts."

McIntyre states "If the non-robustness observed here prove out .. this will have an important impact on many multiproxy studies ...". We have shown here that the "KHAD only" example constructed by McIntyre itself represents a biased chronology, contradicted by the evidence of other chronologies constructed using additional and more representative site data. The evidence does not support a conclusion that our previous work was in any way seriously flawed. The last 8 years of our chronology ARE based on data from a decreasing number of sites and trees and this smaller available sample does emphasise the faster growing trees, so this section of the chronology should be used cautiously. The reworked chronology, based on all of the currently available data is similar to our previously published versions of the Yamal chronology demonstrating that our earlier work presents a defensible and reasonable indication of tree growth changes during the 20th century, and in the context of long-term changes reconstructed over the last two millennia in the vicinity of the larch treeline in southern Yamal.

All that is really left now is for McIntyre, and Pielke Jr., to apologize.

A Staggering Display Of Incompetence

Shorter Deltoid: McIntyre was asking the wrong guy for data he already had.

Yes, we are descending into scientific minutia here, but realize that Steve McIntyre has been hailed as a scientific hero for a process of reasoning that would embarrass a retarded chipmunk.

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.

Walls Starting To Fall In Alta.?

Just two weeks after writing that:

The PC party will only be in real trouble, and MLAs could leave more readily, if riding workers themselves start sliding over to the Wildrose Alliance.

...Peter Braid finds a couple of riding workers sliding over to the Wildrose Alliance:

...now the mayor of Bonnyville, Ernie Isley, has joined the Wildrose Alliance, along with an outspoken town councillor named Gene Sobolewski. For good measure, so has a former Tory MLA named Doug Cherry, who used to represent Lloydminster and now lives in Calgary.

"Too many things have happened with the leader," says Cherry, MLA from 1986 to 1993. "I just can't support him any longer.

My opinion: Alberta politics is sick and needs some kind of shaking up. Whether a party further to the right of the Alta. Tories is the answer, I don't know. I note that, back in her Global T.V. days, Danielle M. Smith, the WAP's likely new leader, was one of Steve McIntyre's biggest media pimps.

So that's obviously not good.

Steve McIntyre: I Didn't Say What I Just Said, Anyone Who Says I Did Is Lying

On Sept 26, Steve McIntyre accuses Keith Briffa of deliberate data selection/exclusion:

Unfortunately, to date, people in the field have not honored this responsibility and, to an outside observer, seem to have done no more than pick the version (Yamal) that suits their bias.

McIntyre's method: smear and run.

Keith Briffa Strikes Back

The Yamal ring-width chronology of Briffa (2000)

My attention has been drawn to a comment by Steve McIntyre on the Climate Audit website relating to the pattern of radial tree growth displayed in the ring-width chronology "Yamal" that I first published in Briffa (2000). The substantive implication of McIntyre's comment (made explicitly in subsequent postings by others) is that the recent data that make up this chronology (i.e. the ring-width measurements from living trees) were purposely selected by me from among a larger available data set, specifically because they exhibited recent growth increases.

This is not the case. The Yamal tree-ring chronology (see also Briffa and Osborn 2002, Briffa et al. 2008) was based on the application of a tree-ring processing method applied to the same set of composite sub-fossil and living-tree ring-width measurements provided to me by Rashit Hantemirov and Stepan Shiyatov which forms the basis of a chronology they published (Hantemirov and Shiyatov 2002). In their work they traditionally applied a data processing method (corridor standardisation) that does not preserve evidence of long timescale growth changes. My application of the Regional Curve Standardisation method to these same data was intended to better represent the multi-decadal to centennial growth variations necessary to infer the longer-term variability in average summer temperatures in the Yamal region: to provide a direct comparison with the chronology produced by Hantemirov and Shiyatov.

These authors state that their data (derived mainly from measurements of relic wood dating back over more than 2,000 years) included 17 ring-width series derived from living trees that were between 200-400 years old. These recent data included measurements from at least 3 different locations in the Yamal region. In his piece, McIntyre replaces a number (12) of these original measurement series with more data (34 series) from a single location (not one of the above) within the Yamal region, at which the trees apparently do not show the same overall growth increase registered in our data.

The basis for McIntyre's selection of which of our (i.e. Hantemirov and Shiyatov's) data to exclude and which to use in replacement is not clear but his version of the chronology shows lower relative growth in recent decades than is displayed in my original chronology. He offers no justification for excluding the original data; and in one version of the chronology where he retains them, he appears to give them inappropriate low weights. I note that McIntyre qualifies the presentation of his version(s) of the chronology by reference to a number of valid points that require further investigation. Subsequent postings appear to pay no heed to these caveats. Whether the McIntyre version is any more robust a representation of regional tree growth in Yamal than my original, remains to be established.

My colleagues and I are working to develop methods that are capable of expressing robust evidence of climate changes using tree-ring data. We do not select tree-core samples based on comparison with climate data. Chronologies are constructed independently and are subsequently compared with climate data to measure the association and quantify the reliability of using the tree-ring data as a proxy for temperature variations.

We have not yet had a chance to explore the details of McIntyre's analysis or its implication for temperature reconstruction at Yamal but we have done considerably more analyses exploring chronology production and temperature calibration that have relevance to this issue but they are not yet published. I do not believe that McIntyre's preliminary post provides sufficient evidence to doubt the reality of unusually high summer temperatures in the last decades of the 20th century.

We will expand on this initial comment on the McIntyre posting when we have had a chance to review the details of his work.
K.R. Briffa 30 Sept 2009

Briffa, K. R. 2000. Annual climate variability in the Holocene: interpreting the message of ancient trees. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:87-105.
Briffa, K. R., and T. J. Osborn. 2002. Paleoclimate - Blowing hot and cold. Science 295:2227-2228.
Briffa, K. R., V. V. Shishov, T. M. Melvin, E. A. Vaganov, H. Grudd, R. M. Hantemirov, M. Eronen, and M. M. Naurzbaev. 2008. Trends in recent temperature and radial tree growth spanning 2000 years across northwest Eurasia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 363:2271-2284.
Hantemirov, R. M., and S. G. Shiyatov. 2002. A continuous multimillennial ring-width chronology in Yamal, northwestern Siberia. Holocene 12:717-726.

Origonal here.

PS. All Steve's data froma single location? His accusation of cherry-picking is supported by cherry-picked data? The irony abounds.

PPS. All accusations of deliberate scientific misconduct on Mr. Briffa's part will be deleted from the comments. Keep that stuff for the birthers with slide-rulers and spreadsheets over at CA.

RealClimate Strikes back here.

97 Stations To Go

...before Anthony Watts starts analysing his data from Surface Stations.

He's got 819 done now (67% of network), and will begin work when he hits 916 or 75% of the total. Not that we don't know what an honest assessment of the station data will reveal. An analysis has already been done on the 1st 1/4 or so of the stations back in 2007, and it basically validated the GISSTEMP data. Its significant that Steve McIntyre seems to have given up on the project:

surfacestations.org has made a concerted effort to identify high-quality stations within the USHCN network (CRN1-2 stations) and preliminary indications are that the GISS U.S. estimate will not differ greatly from results from the "best" stations (though there will probably be a little bias.)

Climate Anomaly Caused By Buckets Of Water!

Just a quicky on what will probably become a fairly large story:

A difference in the way British and American ships measured the temperature of the ocean during the 1940s may explain why the world appeared to undergo a period of sudden cooling immediately after the Second World War.
[...]
The scientists point out that the British measurements were taken by throwing canvas buckets over the side and hauling water up to the deck for temperatures to be measured by immersing a thermometer for several minutes, which would result in a slightly cooler record because of evaporation from the bucket.

This finding actually makes the AGW story go more smoothly:


Professor Jones said that the study lends support to the idea that a period of global cooling occurred later during the mid-twentieth century as a result of sulphate aerosols being released during the 1950s with the rise of industrial output. These sulphates tended to cut sunlight, counteracting global warming caused by rising carbon dioxide.

"This finding supports the sulphates argument, because it was bit hard to explain how they could cause the period of cooling from 1945, when industrial production was still relatively low," Professor Jones said.

Although its perhaps a bit of an embarrassment.

And the weird thing is, Steve McIntyre seems to have got to this one first. Too bad Steve grinds out blog posts rather than writing up a real paper now and again.

Go through the links for details. The James Annan post ( through "a bit of...") is especially good.

Steve McIntyre Awarded Nobel Peace Prize!

...for his work as part of the IPCC's team of "expert reviewers". Congratulations, Steve! One day your work confirming the basic accuracy of GISSTEMP data will cop you a prize that you don't have to share with anyone.

Kudos are also in order for:

Richard Courtney of British Coal, who also served as an expert reviewer on the IPCC team, and who has some startling views on carbon sequestration.

Dr. Vincent Gray who in the same role functioned as a one man army of dissent.

David Wojick, another representative of Big Coal.

Once again, congratulations! Al Gore couldn't have saved the planet without you!

Climate Auditors Discover Global Warming Worse Than Suspected!

According to the lads at CA, Hansen's methodology, when applied to the Russian weather stations, actually introduces an artificial cooling to records before 1987. Apparently, warming there is even worse than people thought!


Oh my! They'll be planting palm trees in Moscow. For Steve and co., this must feel like their paradigm is shifting without a clutch.

Update:

Just because S. Mosher and some of the climate accountancy boyz have tried to call me on this. The cool bias:

1) causes the warming trend during the first part of the century to be understated.
2) causes the cooling trend mid-century to be overstated.
3) causes the warming trend between 1975 and 1987 or so (when the bias comes to an end) to be understated.

It is only when you look from the beginning of the series to the warming from 1987 or so on that the bias seems to cause the warming to appear overstated.

So Nyah nyah freaking nyah.

Nielson-Gammon Has Some Advice For Watts And McIntyre

Roger Pielke Sr. is no longer blogging, and has been travelling in Europe lately, so when I reached him by e-mail he was unaware of the latest twists and turns in Watts/McIntyre saga, in which they attempt to refute the AGW thesis by re-cutting GISSTEMP data in light of Watts survey of U.S. Surface Stations. Mr. Pielke declined to respond directly, explaining that this was "not his specialty", but was kind of enough to refer me to frequent co-authors Xiaomao Lin, Ken Hubbard, and John Nielsen-Gammon. Of these, Mr. Lin has promised to look at the CA work and attempt a response over the course of the next couple of weeks, and Mr. Nielson-Gammon has responded below with some concrete advice as to how Steve's squad of auditors ought to be proceeding.

Here is Mr. Nielson-Gammon's original e-mail:

I appreciate the attempt by Watts to classify stations on the basis of siting quality.

The impact of poorly-sited stations on the trends is not known ahead of time, despite people's expectations, and should be much more sensitive to changes in siting than to poor siting itself.

Given a sufficient number of stations, I would trust the trends from well-sited stations much more than from poorly-sited stations.

I am eager to see the results of screening the stations by siting quality. I do not know whether the well-sited stations will show more of a trend, or less of a trend.

Until the results are properly adjusted for variations in the geographical distribution of stations, it is not possible to draw any conclusions. I haven't seen anything posted online yet that does this.

- John

In response to this, I asked:

Well,

the first and second passes at the data after classifying about a third of the network (340 or so stations) into "good" and "bad" stations are here [links to CA].

In most cases the good and bad stations are pretty much in sync. Do you think 300 plus is still not enough?

To which Mr. Nielson Gammon responded:

The number is sufficient. At least, the error bars probably won't overwhelm any important difference in trends.

So there is no need, as McIntyre et al have done, to stop the analysis. In fact, a brief run through of CA comments here and here suggests that this work has been stopped in panic because it has not yielded the correct conclusion: the "good" and "bad" stations refuse to go out of sync. As Anthony Watts writes:

I do have the feeling though that comparing USHCN/GHCN data to GISS will yield similar curves no matter what, since the data has already been adjusted at the USHCN level, and that adjustment persists in the data through to GISS data.

Anyway, I wrote further to Mr. Nielson-Gammon:

They've been working on [adjusting for variations in the geographical distribution of stations]. Surfacestations has been slowly working its way into the U.S. Midwest. There's a map here.

And in response Mr. Nielson-Gammon suggested some concrete procedures for the CA crowd:

You don't need uniform coverage of quality estimates, you can do this with the data that's already available. You just need to bin the data by location, for example by computing the difference between good and bad stations within every 5 degree by 5 degree square over the US and average the results. Even better, if you're interested in the century-long trend impacts, compute the difference between the station trends and the smooth map of linear trends. Either approach would eliminate the confounding effect of spatial variations in the trends. Maybe someone will have this done within two weeks or so, it's not that hard, and it's fairly standard scientifically.

So get at it, lads (and you too KB the Denying Munchkin). There's no need to wait for more stations to be classified. You should be able to give a solid answer one way or another within the month.

Hopefully Mr. Lin will respond in the next little while. If so I will post his remarks. I have also e-mailed Mr. Hubbard and perhaps he shall reply as well.

Sorry for the long post, especially to my more politically inclined readers who probably don't give a shit..

Deniers Rediscover The Hockey Stick!

Ultra deniers Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre have been hard at work. Anthony Watts has ranked about one third of U.S. surface stations according to the new CRN siting guidelines. Meanwhile, Steve McIntyre and several of his commenters have graphed the resulting temperature trends from the "good" (CRN class 1 and 2) stations as well as the "bad" (CRN5) stations. It would be fair to say that both expected the warming trend apparent in the GISSTEMP (Goddard Institute For Space Studies) data set to disappear once this had been done. As Anthony has written, "you have to wonder if the whole house of cards isn't about to start falling down". It would be fair to say, however, that they have both been disappointed. Their preliminary results are given in the above graph, provided by one John V (a frequent poster on Climate Audit), who writes:

The first plot shows the 5yr average temperature for the lower 48:- red line is for stations with CRN=1 and CRN=2 (CRN12, the good stations).- green line is for stations with CRN=5 (CRN5, the bad stations).- blue line was downloaded from GISS on Sept 14, 2007 (GISS).
The agreement between the results is very good for all sets.

And concludes (emphasis mine):

I think these plots speak for themselves, but here are my conclusions:- There is good agreement between GISS and CRN12 (the good stations)- There is good agreement between GISS and CRN5 (the bad stations)- On the 20yr trend, CRN12 shows a larger warming trend CRN5 in recent years.

To be honest, this is starting to look like a great validation of GISTEMP.

If the Deniers can't deny it, then I think we're on pretty solid ground. But McIntyre's not giving up yet. He's standing on his head and looking at the data all squinty eyed, to see if he can't make the numbers go in another direction. So far, however, the resemblance is astonishing.

Ouch! That's gotta hurt! No more appearances on Rush Limbaugh for these two.

Will The Real Climate Change Denier Please Adjust His Toupée ?

There's much gnashing of teeth over at Climate Audit re James Hansen's recent e-mails on the adjustment to GISSSTEMP's U.S. temperature estimates. McIntyre's readers are especially upset at Hansen's remark to the effect that the episode was a "tempest inside somebody's teapot dome, and that perhaps a light was not on upstairs". There is much speculation as to the meaning of the phrase "teapot dome". For example:

I find Hansen’s choice of words interesting. “tempest in a teapot dome”.

As most students of American History are aware, the “teapot dome” is a reference to a major political scandal early in the last century.It involved bribes and kickbacks and went pretty high up into the executive branch. I believe “teapot dome” itself was a geological formation that held oil.

And:

Teapot Dome was an oil scandal in a Republican administration (Harding) in 1921.

Well, perhaps because my ears are more attuned to purely political discourse, this strikes me as being pretty obviously a bald joke. A teapot's surface is rounded and smooth. Hansen is describing someone within the Denier community as being balding and stupid. The question is, who?

And the problem is, it could probably be anyone! There are more crazy bald-heads in the skeptics camp than there are at a convention of Kojak impersonators. For example, Timothy Francis "Cue" Ball. But for my money I'm betting it refers to Mr. McIntyre himself. Witness the sketch left, the only pictorial representation of Steve I've ever found on the Net.

Now, I'm not entirely sure where this came from before it appeared L. Motl's blog (which I won't link to because it keeps crashing my browser), but it looks like a pic from the Wall Street Journal from around the time of the original McIntyre/Mann clash--lets say from the late 1990s.

I imagine it isn't just the glaciers that have receded since that time.

And to forestall the obvious response: yes, it true, but at least Hansen has enough to attempt a comb-over.

And as a rhetorical flourish, Hansen's choice of words is inspired. A bald man can never become President; they naturally inspire distrust and suspicion: "hide your women... the bald-headed men of Rome have come" and all that.