Posted on 06/27/2006 7:04:23 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
"We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" -- Phil Jones in a reply to climate skeptic Warwick Hughes in February 2005 as confirmed and reported by climatologist Hans Vans Storch at a National Academy of Sciences hearing March 2 on "Scientific Efforts to reconstruct surface temperature records over the last 1,000 to 2,000 years."
"Getting caught is the mother of invention." -- Robert Byrne
"People say that in politics, it's not the crime, it's the cover-up. What that saying ignores is that most of the time, the cover-up works just fine." -- George Carlin
The most gratifying thing about the National Academy of Science panel report last week into the science behind Michael Mann's past temperature reconstructions - the iconic "hockey stick" isn't what the mainstream media have been reporting -- the panel's declaration that the last 25 years of the 20th Century were the warmest in 400 years. After all, 400 years ago was 1600, and as the panel noted that was in the midst of a 350 year period from 1500 to 1850 where "a wide variety of evidence" supports the finding of a "Little Ice Age." So wouldn't you expect some period coming out of an ice to be warmer than any period during the Ice Age?
The important thing the panel did was to take a much-needed slap at the attitude expressed by Jones quoted above, which had become dangerously prevalent in some of the climate science community.
The panel told scientists that they should strive to provide data and "that a clear explanation of analytical methods is mandatory" and that "paleoclimate research would benefit if individual researchers, professional societies, journal editors, and funding agencies continued to improve their efforts to ensure that ... existing open access practices are followed."
Karl Popper described the scientific method as "proposing bold hypotheses, and exposing them to the severest criticism, in order to detect where we have erred." A recent problem with some areas of climate science has been that much of the data and methodology for arriving at conclusions have been hidden, making that "severest criticism" difficult. That was clearly the case with Michael Mann's past temperature reconstructions.
Mann's published reconstruction in Nature in 1998 went back 600 years; in 1999 he extended the reconstruction back 1,000 years. The studies dismissed the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age as regional phenomena, and became regarded by some as the "smoking gun" proving that human influence was responsible for the bulk of the warming in the 20th Century.
In 2001, the graphical representation of Mann's work became a key feature in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Third Assessment. The IPCC report asserted that "the 1990s has been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the millennium."
While Mann is doing much now saying that his caveats about temperature were ignored by the media and the IPCC -- an excuse the NAS panel accepted -- he and his crew certainly did much to discredit those who raised questions about his work.
In 2003, Steven McIntyre, a former mining executive in Toronto, decided to test Mann's claim, made to a Senate committee, that the IPCC's assessment deserved respect because "[t]he IPCC carries out a process for developing its summarization of the understanding of science that leads to one of the most rigorously peer reviewed scientific documents in existence."
McIntyre contacted Mann to get the data for his graph, thinking that they would be appropriately archived and readily available for replication and review. It quickly became more complicated than that, and he ended up having to enlist the University of Guelph economics professor Ross McKitrick in a three-year quest to get basic information. As McKitrick summarized their findings:
"Nature never verified that data were correctly listed: as it happens they weren't. Nature never verified that data archiving rules were followed: they weren't. Nature never verified that methods were accurately stated: they weren't. Nature never verified that stated methods yield the stated results: they don't. Nature undertook only minimal corrections to its publication record after notification of these things, and even allowed authors to falsely claim that their omissions on these things didn't affect their published results. The IPCC's use of the hockey stick was not incidental: it is prominent throughout the 2001 report. Yet they did not subject it to any independent checking. ... They allowed chapter authors to heavily promote their own work with little or no oversight. They published false claims about the hockey stick's statistical robustness and have never made any effort to retract them."
What McIntyre and McKitrick got for bringing this to light, as well as exposing numerous statistical and methodological flaws in the studies including that the studies, was mostly brickbats and scorn by the paleoclimatology community. This until Hans Van Storch, director of the Institute of Coastal Research at GKSS Research Center in Germany, wrote in a letter to Science and Anders Moberg of Stockholm University in Sweden in a letter to Nature, announced they had found more natural variation than Mann over the last 1,000 years, raising again questions about the level of human contribution to 20th Century warmth.
After an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal about their problems, McIntyre and McKitrick gained an ally in a powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton, R-Texas. Barton last summer issued letters to Michael Mann and his co-authors Malcolm Hughes and Raymond Bradley, regarding their studies, along with IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri and National Science Foundation's Arden Bement. In the letters, Barton noted that "sharing data and research results is a basic tenet of open scientific inquiry" and asked whether federal access guidelines for information from taxpayer-funded research were being followed.
That woke up the scientific community and mainstream media. But it wasn't to praise Barton, but to pummel him. How dare he ask for taxpayer funded information from a scientist. Seeking such amounted to a witch hunt and an attempt to intimidate honest scientists, his critics argued. Let the scientific process work. The IPCC will again review the science in 2007, etc.
In the heat of the exchange, a ray of light did shine. NAS chairman Ralph Cicerone wrote Barton that "the House Commerce Committee is probably not the best way to resolve a scientific issue, and a focus on individual scientists can be intimidating." He offered that if the committee wanted additional information regarding the state of the scientific knowledge" in Mann's area that the NAS "would be willing to create an expert panel."
That was arranged through the House Science Committee. The panel concluded we know a lot about the last 400 years, but have far less confidence in the period 900 to 1600, and not much confidence at all about prior to 900. The panel indicated it is "plausible" that the last 25 years of the 20th Century were warmer than any period in the last 1,000. But Mann's and the IPCC's claims about the last 1990s "likely" being the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year had no plausibility. And Mann's attacks on McIntyre and McKitrick for pointing out flaws in his statistical techniques received a comeuppance by the panel on page 107 of the report, when the panel diplomatically stated:
"Some of these criticisms (by McIntyre and McKitrick) are more relevant than others, but taken together, they are an important aspect of a more general finding of this committee, which is that uncertainties of the published reconstructions have been underestimated."
The hockey stick, in short, is 600 years shorter than it was before and the uncertainties for previous centuries are larger than Mann gave credence. And when the uncertainty of the paleoclimatogical record increases with time, the uncertainty about human contribution is likewise increased. Why? For a reason noted on page 103 of the report: climate model simulations for future climates are tuned to the paleoclimatogical proxy evidence of past climate change.
"Some of these models have been compared against data for past time periods that encompass major changes in forcings and climate responses. ... That these models' simulated climates for those epochs are consistent with proxy evidence lends credibility to their use for attribution of 20th century climate change and projections of future climate change."
With the "hockey stick" now shortened, what is needed is for another McKitrick and McIntyre to inspect the climate models, which form the basis for most of the scary scenarios of future global warming.
Wow! What an inconvenient truth!
Um, because that's how this thing called science is done? Breathtaking. What a jackass. You know a scientific field is screwed up when people build careers of "25 years or so" on data they are afraid to share.
I guess they can keep that data secret long enough to earn a fully vested pension.
reference bump
You beat me to it.
>>>>I have to put it in quotes because Mann didn't divulge all the raw data, just some raw data and his interpreted results.
How do you seperate the Level 0 data from what's been cleaned, dressed and cooked?
Great Post!
Whenever I run into someone who invokes CO2 as the exclusive cause of global warming, I ask them how they have come to rule out both natural climate change and solar activity as possible contributors. Not one of them thus far has even attempted to answer. If they were to provide evidence, then I would follow up with...."then how is it that 3/4 of the just-shy-of one degree temperature increase during the 20th century, happens to have occurred PRIOR TO 1940?"
Bump that.
Blame for the unscientific conduct of Phil Jones must be shared by the journal Nature, which should require - as a precondition for publication - that authors submit (and make available to others) all of the data used in the study.
The descriptions of the data usually say how it was gathered and cooked. Some descriptions don't say much or obfuscate. It's hard to verify in any case.
Agreed! I'm stunned Nature doesn't.
" == I guess they can keep that data secret long enough to earn a fully vested pension. == "
DING! DING! DING! DING! DING!
WOW! Just like EMBRYONIC stem cell research....
In other words, it is totally unreliable and a load of cr@p!
Snake oil, by any other name, still ain't worth a darn!
Just another case of lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Global warming exists and is easily provable. It's generally hotter in the afternoon that it is in the morning.
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