Lucy Skywalker’s Work Get’s Published

The saga continues with a temperature presentation showing (amazingly) no hockey stick temperatures for Yamal. Check out the post on WUWT, it looks oddly similar to Lucy Skywalkers recent post on tAV criticized by Tamino and his brown shirt attack dogs.

The presentation is” Cumulative effects of rapid climate and land-use changes on the
Yamal Peninsula, Russia by D.A. Walker, M.O. Leibman, B.C. Forbes, H.E. Epstein. (click link for PDF)

Here’s what Tamino has to say:

As for Steve McIntyre’s latest: I’m really not that interested. He just doesn’t have the credibility to merit attention. I have way better things to do.

I’ll just do him the favor of a translation for those who don’t grasp Tammie’s angry leftist advocacy.

McIntyre is right again, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to publicly admit it.

hehehe

Bishop

Don’t know about you but I enjoy good story tellers.

Audit of an Audit of an Auditor

Just a short post tonight I hope. Tom P, an apparent believer in the hockey stick methods posted an entertaining reply to Steve McIntyre’s recent discoveries on Yamal. He used R code to demonstrate a flaw in SteveM’s method. His post was on WUWT, brought to my attention by Charles the moderator and is copied here where he declares victory over Steve.

Steve McIntryre’s reconstructions above are based on adding an established dataset, the Schweingruber Yamal sample instead of the “12 trees used in the CRU archive”. Steve has given no justification for removing these 12 trees. In fact they probably predate Briffa’s CRU analysis, being in the original Russian dataset established by Hantemirov and Shiyatov in 2002.

One of Steve’s major complaint about the CRU dataset was that it used few recent trees, hence the need to add the Schweingruber series. It was therefore rather strange that towards the end of the reconstruction the 12 living trees were excluded only to be replaced by 9 trees with earlier end dates.

I asked Steve what the chronology would look like if these twelve trees were merged back in, but no plot was forthcoming. So I downloaded R, his favoured statistical package, and tweaked Steve’s published code to include the twelve trees back in myself. Below is the chronology I posted on ClimateAudit a few hours ago.

http://img80.yfrog.com/i/schweingruberandcrud.png/

My version of TomP's graph - Click to expand

The red line is the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive; black is the chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample and the complete CRU archive. Both plots are smoothed with 21-year gaussian, as before. The y-axis is in dimensionless chronology units centered on 1.

It looks like the Yamal reconstruction published by Briffa is rather insensitive to the inclusion of the additional data. There is no broken hockeystick.

He did a fantastic job in reworking R code to create an improved hockey stick graph. To see his code the link is here.

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I spent some time tonight looking at his results. Time planned for analyzing Antarctic sea ice. I found that essentially the only difference in the operating functions of the code is the following line.

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Steve M —- tree=rbind(yamal[!temp,],russ035)

Tom P —– tree=rbind(yamal,russ035)

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The Siberian Tree-Ring Circus

This is a guest post by Francis Turner.  I requested it after seeing his link at CA actually.  He does a good job explaining for laymen some of the detail in the manufacture of the mysterious thermal hockey stick.  He also has a touch of a conservative viewpoint which doesn’t hurt him in my eyes one bit. 😉

The only thing I would add is that carbon dating is definitely used in some tree ring reconstructions.

Link to original post.

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[Note this article is an attempt at a non-staistical explanation of work done by Steve McIntyre (especially here, here and here) and Ross McKitrick, all credit belongs there not here – Update (29 Sept) The key final graph has been updated by Steve since I wrote this piece originally, in changing the graph I have also taken the time to fix a few typos and made a few other minor changes]
Introduction
As I write this a selection of terribly self-important folks are partaking of coffee amongst the dreaming spires of Oxford and preparing to discuss what might will happen when the earth heats up by 4°c. This includes a couple of folk from the Hadley Center who are getting a certain amount of coverage in the press for their sky is falling predictions.

Roman on How Hockey Sticks are Made

There is a small discussion hidden in the latest massive thread at CA. TomP made the suggestion that correlation and elimination of non-temperature correlating tree ring data was perfectly ok with him. For those that are a little math savvy and are interested in the problem that creates read my hockey stick temperature distorition posts above. These posts reiterate the conclusioins of VonStorch04 and IMO are much more plainly worded and provide turnkey software code which anyone can run to replicate my results. However, sometimes I read things from other bloggers that just hit the point a heck of a lot better than I’ve written it. This comment by Roman is an excellent example.

If you ever wanted to know how so many papers make hockey sticks, the sorting operation described below is the reason.

The first point quoted is made by TomP.

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Rejecting the Schweingruber series [as originally presented] as a good proxy seems reasonable, unless there are doubts about the instrument record. Why it is not a good recent proxy is an important but separate point.

I don’t believe that you have considered the full implication of your argument on the entire reconstruction.

Let’s suppose that you are right and that there are real treemometers which you can identify by comparison to an observed record. Your statement above indicates that there also trees that are not good proxies. Unless, false proxies are a recent phenomenon, the logical conclusion is that there must be a collection of these distributed throughout the entire time period prior to the start of the temperature record since there is no way to identify and exclude those proxies that are not good (unless you know that of course there was no MWP).

So what effect will this have on the reconstruction? Having only good ones in the modern era, we will see that the temperatures have been warming, but we already knew that. The effect the good proxies will have on the early part of the reconstruction will be merely to center it at a particular level of dimensionless chronology units. It will have little or no effect on the quality of the results prior to the actual time at which these known to be good proxies existed.

When we reconstruct the early portion, we will have a mix of good and bad proxies at most time periods. Steve’s sensitivity test shows that the result of including “bad” proxies is to flatten the reconstruction – even in the merged case, the difference is as large as a full unit, of the same order of magnitude as the range of the entire original reconstruction prior to 1800.

The amount of flattening will depend on the relative proportions of good and bad proxies, but the net result will tend towards a hockey stick shape. Any error bars constructed from the fit will seriously underestimate the bias created by the false proxies. Without knowing how prevalent bad proxies are, there is no way to adjust for this bias.

What if the choice of modern proxies is just opportunistic matching to the temperature record? Well, then you get a … hockey stick. But that’s another thread.

My bold.

Santer Update – Another Dead Paper

Some of you may have noticed that I added Treesfortheforest tothe blogroll this past weekend.  I’m incredibly lazy about these things but I had to add this due to some very impressive and important results by blogger Chad.

There are two blog posts which need to be read on the issue of whether the climate models are accurate, as Santer claims.  There are only four pieces of evidence you need to review in understanding this paper.

Trash Bin

If you read climate blogs regularly, you must have seen the latest post at CA Yamal: A “Divergence” Problem if not you need to. As Steve points out, it’s one of the most significant posts ever at CA. The reason is more than a bit confusing though for those who don’t actually follow proxy temperature reconstructions. The hockey stick temp records are often promoted by advocate global warming blogs like Tamino and Romms to show the unprecedented whatever the authors want in recent times. Proxy temp papers are often comprised of a set of sites which are published in previous papers. In Mann 08, individual tree records were combined with other types of proxies and even complete studies to find the best possible hockey stick.

The Arctic Temperatures and Multidecadal Oscillation in recent research

A guest post by Dr. Arnd Bernaerts on the subject of Arctic warming.  Dr. Bernaerts was one of a couple of people who responded to my offer to put up work by those who are not skeptics or who don’t share my viewpoint.  Of course nobody knows what I think, so any good post has to have a shot.  He’s done a short referenced piece here on warming in the Arctic.

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The West Spitsbergen Current (WSC) is getting more attention, but only with regard to recent years. For modern science the Arctic warming 90 years ago is still a non issue, although one could learn so much from it. For example: Piechura et al.(2009)[1] discuss the influence of a warmer WSC on the sea ice conditions north of Svalbard with the main conclusion, that it is primarily the heat transport to the Arctic Ocean (AO) by ocean currents, the West Spitsbergen Current (WSC) in particular, that is playing a significant role in the process of Arctic warming. Actually their investigation focused on the short warming period from 2004-2006.

>>NOTE: The graphic “Svalbard Luft”  indicates a warming from 1980 until 2006, and decreasing annual temperature mean since 2007<<

Circling Yamal – delinquent treering records?

An interesting post from Lucy Skywalker who is exploring the depths of the Kaufman Antarctic proxy reconstruction.  Partially in response to some of the ridiculous criticisms from Tamino, this post explores a little further into the Yamal series.

The original Yamal study is here and shows no trend.  The data is here and the spreadsheet containing the data with the new Yamal in series 22 for the obviously flawed Arctic temperature reconstruction paper is here. (My sincerest thanks to Bill Illis for providing the links on WUWT)  Yamal is plotted in this post by myself here and the post demonstrating that the unprecedentednosityness vanishes when Yamal is removed is here. or replaced with equally reasonable proxies here.  You can do your own reconstructions by simply averaging the rows of the spreadsheet linked above so you can see yourself what removals or additions of Raman noodles do to the graphs.  I would be remiss not to mention the Erice presentation by Steve McIntyre, who is the layman’s portal into the spider caves of proxy science.  It’s towards the end of the presentation in the link.

Lucy’s original post is linked here.

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Treering proxy temperature measurements from Yamal have a pronounced upturn that helps to create a hockey stick shape with the blade rising in the 20th Century. These were used in Kaufman 2009 to show the Arctic apparently warming fast after 2000 years of steady cooling. This warming starts after thermometer records started. The pattern should therefore show in the thermometer records, especially around Yamal. But it does not.

Click to link to Lucy's original post and interactive graph.

This is more work in progress, following Circling the Arctic, in particular I was inspired by Bill Illis (05:42:38 on WUWT, 9/9/09) who provided links to the Yamal material and Kaufman’s data. I am still learning a lot, and am open to being corrected / improved (email preferred). My motivation for doing this was my certainty that Briffa’s Yamal data should never have been used in Kaufman 2009, and that visual comparison to thermometer data can help people see this easily. John Daly collected records, apparently from NASA GISS, that were reliable, longstanding, not-moved rural stations: the Vardo group, the Kanin Nos group, and the Salehard group. Today the NASA records all start at 1880, thereby losing a vital cornerstone of information I find trustworthy. For the early Arctic records were kept by those who had a big reason to get them correct: the life of their community.

GISSmometers

This is a translation of some newspaper articles by AV reader Mike left as a comment on the previous sea ice thread Unique Arctic Sea Ice Plots. The newspapers are reporting on yet another temperature station so poorly sighted that it measured a half degree warmer in recent years than the actual temp. I don’t have a way to get access to the two stations data mentioned so if a reader can plot them I’ll put it up.

Update: Climate Audit put a lot of time into this station before at:

De Bilt Adjustments

There are some excellent pictures and descriptions of adjustments from a previous large move.

Also Steve links to Hans Erren’s page which does a fantastic job reporting the homoginization attempts by ‘scientists’. That’s a must read.

Unique Arctic Sea Ice Plots

I’ve done some improvement on my Sea Ice plots. I’ve included several graphs I haven’t seen before one of which was the ratio of extent and area suggested by Crashex on the last thread. The plots reveal some interesting and unique aspects of sea ice, and the last two graphs seem to be in opposition to the conclusion that sea ice is melting due to global warming and supportive of a weather pattern change.

This version used some smart filtering to remove points with jumps greater than 100,000km^2 in one day, an improved filtering with a wider window and some other minor improvements. I’ve plotted the data several different ways but I want to start with the improved area and extent value and anomaly plots. I’ve corrected the area plots by adding the satellite hole area in at 100% using only the larger hole from the first satellites so as to not bias the data.

You can see my plot is a near exact match for the Cryosphere version HERE.

Chu’s Lies

Chairman Stephen Chu a one time scientist has made the full transition to politician.  He’s been caught in a widely non-published quote comparing us to teenage kids and the administration to parents.   I hope you realize that this is exactly the kind of statement which the Chinese government would release.

The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” Dr. Chu said. “The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.”

Chairman Chu’s views on economics are hidden behind the administrations dogma on green energy improving the economy.

Sea Ice Update

Arctic sea ice crossed over and exceeded the 2005 level on Sept 20.

Sea ice extent is plotted using AMSR-E data at the IJIS website with the following values.

2009 5383594 km^2 and 2005 was 5345156.

Sea ice has officially reached its minimum in the Arctic continuing its recovery from the 2007 minimum. In the Antarctic the ice levels continue to grow. I’ve calculated the ice area anomalies (not extent) from the raw NSIDC data myself here. This data is slightly different from my previous work as the NSIDC has updated 2008 to use the NOAA17 data instead of the failed 15 and 13 satellites.

Climatology School

This is what I imagine climatology school is like.

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Today as paleoclimatology is becoming a sophisticated and mature science we have thousands of young students scouring the earth looking for other proxies for which to measure temperature. It’s important that these students have the best education and understanding possible such that the mistakes of the past don’t get repeated. In this post we’ll review a few items which at first glance may contain temperature signals, however on careful examination are not ‘actual’ thermometers. The purpose of this study is to prevent otherwise potentially embarrassing mistakes.

#1 – A garden hose. Like Venus flytraps for the unwary climatologist, these things are laying around everywhere, tempting and teasing. However, no matter which way they are coiled their shape should not be construed as or mistaken for temperature. Don’t be embarrassed,you’re not the first to look longingly at its twists and turns. It’s an easy mistake for certain which can only be avoided through proper education.

2 – Bowl of noodles.  Noodles are visually intriguing. They make all kinds of interesting patterns and can even lie side by side apparently in agreement with each other. Despite a veritable bowlful of potential correlations, beware of this hornets nest young paleo’s, noodles are not temperature.

Arctic Deconstruction

At CA Steve McIntyre has put together a simple script which basically reconstructs the Kaufman Arctic paper from the proxy data. The paper uses CPS methods to rescale 23 proxies before averaging. In my post Kaufman Arctic Proxies you can see the proxies after rescaling by CPS so the weighting of each is reasonably understood. CPS is scaling to standard deviation and a mean of 0 over the calibration range. In Kaufman, the data used was often pre-processed before it reached the paper. For instance in the infamous Yamal hockey stick maker series, the data already has gone through a process similar to Mann08 before incorporation into this paper. Since the data for the process has not been disclosed it cannot be criticized except for the fact that they admit to sorting the tree rings throwing away data which didn’t match temp. How much data was thrown out? We don’t know exactly but by the loss in variance prior to the temp record of the Yamal proxy, it was probably one hell of a lot.
Since we have the already scaled proxies, we can make a curve very similar to the Kaufman one simply by averaging the scaled series.

Which I think you’ll admit looks fairly similar to this before scaling to DegC and pasting on the dishonest bright red temp curve so common in climatology. A temperature curve which is difficult to replicate so far from the data BTW.

I wonder what happens to Figure 1 when we delete the Yamal hockey stick series.