Circling Yamal 2 – meet the delinquents

A guest post from Lucy Skywalker.  Lucy has taken the time to locate and collect information on a variety of sites related to the Yamal debacle including a useful interactive Google map.

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Dive into the Google map of the proxy sites. View trees in different situations in Yamal and Siberia. Meet the Dirty Dozen close-up. Check them against the thermometers at Salehard and Turuhansk.

Marking the spots was the work of Francis Turner. It is well worth looking at this map live and zooming in

All Governments are Created Equal?

Now as I’m sick of the politics as I can be.  So tired that I don’t want to think about  it but our misunderstood leader is about to sign a treaty which will create global communist wealth redistribution from ‘developed’ countries to ‘undeveloped’.  Please read the proposal before you comment.

The proposed treaty as of September 15 -

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/un-fccc-copenhagen-2009.pdf

Climate Chains

Climate chains is a 25 minute professionally produced show which counters the doom and gloom global warming scenarios presented in so many many outlets.  This video is refreshingly limited in its approach to reporting scientific claims which are so often misrepresented in media.  Instead the producers chose to focus on the known drivers behind the global warming movement along with some of the consequences.

Check it out.

Fox News is Not News – CNN is.

It’s just not funny anymore.  I don’t know if you followed this when it happened but the David Axelrod from the White House called a meeting with the president of Fox News – they sure as hell were not discussing the budget deficit.  There is no question this meeting was designed to attempt to limit coverage of Fox news on one issue or another HERE.   The current liberals in office are stalinesque anti-free speech types who would rather squelch dissent than allow different opinions.  If you don’t believe me, it’s your right to be wrong.

Now they have come out and claimed that CNN is real news but Fox is not following several attacks on Glen Beck’s editorial show – which I don’t recommend.  I don’t get my news from FOX but I can’t even watch CNN (Clinton news network) or ABC, or NBC or BBC, or CBS or MSNBC, it’s impossible to listen to the leftist spin from organizations seemingly incapable of criticising the messiah but I’ve already vented enough on politics in my previous post.  Instead I’ll just link the articles.

White House Escalates War of Words With Fox News

“What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party,” said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

Significance in Global Trend Metrics

This is something I’ve wanted to mess around with for some time. Everywhere I’ve looked the difference between HadCRUT and GISS is described as insignificant and rarely discussed beyond that. However the significance of trend is described in comparison to the short term variance in the data which is discounted as ‘weather noise’. However, weather noise uncertainty in this case is not instrument or methodological uncertainty. Therefore the confidence interval of the slope is the probability that the trend is created by the deviations from a perfectly linear trend. These deviations are of course primarily weather related shifts in global temp. In this post the point is to look a little deeper and examine only the instrument errors to determine if the difference in Giss and HadCrut is statistically significant.

This post plots data since 1950 and provides autocorrelation corrections based on the non-linear residuals in Degrees C/Decade. I’ve done this for only this time period and encourage readers to download R and try their own time windows. Confidence intervals and plots are calculated using code from RyanO’s Antarctic work.

Interesting Post

E.M.Smith is making some trouble with GISS.  Check it out.

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/gistemp-quartiles-of-age-bolus-of-heat/

H/T Steve Mosher on CA unthreaded.

The Climate of Climate

Warning, this is a vent about truth.  Don’t read it if you don’t like the truth.  Don’t read it if you’re an RC fan.  Don’t read it if you’re a liberal.  Don’t read it if you like your world to be conflict free.  Don’t read it if you don’t like people being described as liars.  I let my evil yet correct opinions out of their shell, this whole post is my opinion – only.  Hell, I recommend nobody read this blog post – ever! -Jeff Id.

Climate science is so politicized it’s hard for good work to come through to the top.  Still there is good work being done, but the stuff which catches the attention of the press and probably grant funding is the most extreme and sensational versions.  i.e. Unprecedented warming, unprecedented ice melt, unprecedented ice shelf collapse, unprecedented temperatures.  The headlines have to keep coming in order for the funding and attention to flow.  There is clear incentive for papers with subtly bad math and data.  Why is HadCRUT the preferred global temperature metric in publication when everyone who is open minded knows it’s the highest trend metric?  They won’t even disclose the data it’s made from, you would think science would reject it.  Why does science accept the corrections of GissTemp with little concern?  Everyone knows that they don’t really make sense in terms of magnitude.  Certainly some correction is in order for some stations but GISS corrects the data based on bulk properties that result in very inaccurate results station by station and a heavy correction to trend. The magnitude of the upslope in the correction is almost equal to the amount of claimed warming.  It’s F…ing huge.  I know that real scientists have to question that curve, yet Giss has slightly reduced warming trend from HadCRUT is less popular in publication.

Now the worst part about all of this is that climate science is dominated by leftists.  Leftists support government solutions to every problem and economic limitation.  These are people who are so confused that they don’t cringe at the thought of world governance over the ignorant population. They believe in the superiority of their intellect and the ability of government to control you in a non-selfish manner.  Health care, climate, corporate limits, self defense, even what foods you should eat.

Grant Foster is one, Gavin Schmidt claims to be apolitical but in my reasoned opinion he is also one, Michael Mann has probably never had a conservative thought in his life and James Hansen isn’t even a question.  The Real Climate website was started and is maintained by Fenton Communications.  They claim they are uncompensated by Fenton and I believe them but Fenton is a 501C tax free corporation.  These corporations are part of a network for illegal funding to be distributed for political goals.  That IS THEIR PURPOSE and they are clearly poltical and therefore illegal.  If you’re a billionare and you want to change politics, start some “non-political” 501C’s.   It is the left that has the market cornered on these because conservatism and the success of the US economy has far less international support.  Currenlty funds are being transferred from all kinds of interests including foreign and directed towards innocuos things like green energy, and better health but we know the real purpose.  They are corrupt and they are CRIMINAL in my opinion and RC somehow is associated with one of the worst. Where do you think most of Obama’s half billion dollars came from – Detroit?! Hell no, the money came from 501C’s in my opinion and probably from places like Russia, Venesuela or Iran.  Individuals didn’t take the time to make up fake names for contributions without being compensated for their work – do you think Acorn runs for free or did the 5 million dollar government check I read about somewhere after the election have any meaning?  People were paid to do this.

The point of a network of 501′s is to distribute the money in a  non-transparent way.  The fact that Fenton didn’t even take RC to lunch as claimed on RC’s site doesn’t mean that another arm of the 501 network didn’t receive 200,000 and distribute that to compensate some project for Mann.  Non transparent tax free distribution of funds is their purpose.  Hell, they wouldn’t even even need to tell anyone where the money came from.  Green progress (or something else) partially funds some study or other is all that it would say.  Progress is code for communism by the way.  I’m not saying that they did receive even a penny, just that WE WOULD NEVER KNOW!  Now just how did RC make contact with an extremist group like Fenton??

Lucky Number 0.07

We’re getting closer to publication on the Antarctic trends. There are still a few details being worked out so this is not the final result, however thousands of people read here so it’s important to provide an update of the results and a comparison of the similarities and difference from Steig 08.

From the abstract of Steig et al.

Here we show that significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1 6C per decade over the past 50 years, and is strongest in winter and spring.

and

West Antarctica warmed between 1957 and 2006 at a rate of 0.1760 +/-.06 C per decade (95% confidence interval). Thus, the area of warming is much larger than the region of the Antarctic Peninsula. The peninsula warming averages 0.1160 C per decade. We also find significant warming in East Antarctica at 0.1060 C per decade (1957–2006).

Confidence intervals were edited out.

The main revelation in the paper was reported to be an increased warming of the West Antarctic as compared to other results. However, most of us skeptics are more interested in the continental trend. From the area weighted reconstruction which is based on surface stations within the Antarctic continent the trend we find is 0.064 C/Decade. The trend distribution looks like this:

Figure 1 – Area weighted reconstruciton using knitted (offset) surface station information to splice short stations into the complete record.

The method is simple and is a target pattern for the trend magnitude and distribution. The deep red of the peninsula section at the left is colored in the + 0.3 to 0.7 C/Decade range and is populated by over a dozen surface stations. In Steig et al only 3 pc’s were used to describe the continent, the low pc count necessarily results in the blending of surface station information around the continent. It doesn’t necessarily result in an incorrect average trend however. In this case though, there is a high concentration of surface stations in the peninsula region who’s information is blended across the continenet. I believe I’ve shown that reasonably well in a few posts including this post here. I need to mention that NicL did an excellent post which contradicts that conclusion. While I found Nic’s results accurate, I don’t interpret his method the same way. His post is here.

H. Leighton Steward – Ten Myths About CO2

While I’ve been careful not to say several of these things as several are unproven but they are reasonable and  I can’t disagree with any of them either.

From an Article HERE in Washington Whispers.

Steward’s Myth 1: The planet Earth will be healthier with lower CO₂ levels.
He says: More CO₂ is needed to bolster plant life, which turns the gas into oxygen while also providing food.

Steward’s Myth 2: Rising CO₂ levels cause temperatures to rise.
He says: Temperatures over time have fluctuated while CO₂ levels have remained steady. What’s more, temperature increases have historically led increases in CO₂ levels.

Steward’s Myth 3: Sea levels will rise 20 feet by the end of the century.
He says: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts only a 17-inch rise, and “most climatologists predict a rise of only 7 or 8 inches.”

Steward’s Myth 4: Scientists unanimously say that CO₂ caused by humans is the dominant cause of global warming.
He says: Not so. “Many, many reputable scientists believe that natural factors overpower the current influence of CO₂ on global warming.”

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Greenthink gone too far or too fast?

I just love the idiocy of the greenies.  Saving the world one racecar at a time.

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World-first Sustainable Racing Car Runs On Chocolate, To Take On Formula 3

ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2009) — Can the idea of ‘green motorsport’ actually work? Yes, according to EPSRC funded researcher, Dr Kerry Kirwan at the University of Warwick, who led the research team which designed and built the worldfirst fully sustainable Formula 3 racing car.

A Different Yamal – Corrections and Signals

This post investigates the effects of RCS on the Yamal proxy data. It started out with a thought that it might be possible to create a simple method for creating series from tree ring widths that would act as a sanity check for the other methods. However, it turned into a learning experience with the tree ring data. Here’s what I found.

Figure 1

Figure 1 is an average of the entire Yamal dataset. The change in variance from the zero age to the 400 age is due entirely to the number of trees available in the series. The far left is from 252 trees while the far right is from one. This data is fit to a function of Corrected= a + b * e^-(c*age). However, all the individual trees are fit which of course weights the fit very heavily toward the younger trees. So the question becomes what do the 252 Yamal trees look like when plotted. The red curve is the mean overlaid.

RC Real Censors

I’ve left a couple of comments at RC lately asking them the following scientific questions regarding their apparent criticism of CA. Lately I’ve noticed that even the trolls aren’t bashing Jeff Id while TomP’s goofiness is being recognized over there. I left this reasonable yet difficult to discount question on their thread:

“Do you have any specific criticisms of the tree ring data used by Steve McIntyre or do you have any criticisms of the methods he used?”

It was snipped and never saw daylight. This quote is from Gavin on moderation policies on a previous thread.

[Response: Our comment moderation has nothing to do with any economic or social policy (indeed, look at the tragedy of the commons post which was the most policy-related one in a while). Instead, it is enabled to improve the signal to noise ratio, and cutting out repetitive continuous cut-and-pasted talking points from people with whom there is no point in having rational discussion. By and large that works. - gavin]

Comment by Carrick — 8 June 2009 @ 10:07 AM

and this:

I have several times before considered making comments on your blog, but have not taken the time to do so, since I have seen the text of several comments “snipped” from you blog that appear to me neither offensive nor nonsensical. Can you offer any guidelines on what types of comments are allowed and what are not?

[Response: Think of it like a dinner party. Discussion is good, disagreement is ok, but throwing food and insulting the hosts or other guests is not appreciated. - gavin]

Comment by Steve Fitzpatrick — 9 June 2009 @ 6:29 AM

On the request of a colleague by email I sent it again and took a screenshot.

Yamal- The Dirty Dozen

We’ve all been looking at the Yamal (Steve Mosher named)treemometer ring width data. Yamal is a tree ring series with a huge hockey stick blade used in and likely to be highly influential in a lot of serious studies which demonstrate the unprecedentedness of recent temperatures. When Steve McIntyre replaced 12 of the hockey stick creating proxies (the dirty dozen) with equally valid schweingruber proxies the blade of the hockey stick disappears along with the unprecedentedness. Of course the boys at “Real” Climate made a big stink about it but notably missed any specific criticism of the methods or data chosen. However, in this post I looked at the methods of RCS standardization and the effects it has on the series.

RCS is a method for correcting the ring widths of trees based on the age. For instance, we would expect that a young tree would have thicker rings at its core. As it grew thinner rings would form with diameter and eventually the diameter would become basically a non-factor. So dendro guys figure that they should fit an exponential decay function to tree rings and that will give a basic correction factor for total width.

The function is of the form

correction = A + B * e ^ -(C * age)

Don’t worry too much if that’s not a familiar equation to you, you’ll figure it out either way. I’m sure it is to many of my readers though. This equation is fit to 100% of the data simultaneously in Yamal. The assumption is:

1 – All the trees in the same conditions grow at the same rates.

2 – Fitting the equation to all trees together will average out over all the variable climates and despite different conditions, we can achieve a similar result to #1.

There is a problem with these assumptions which occurs at the endpoints of dendroclimatology reconstructions in that the most recent trees are still alive and therefore on average going to have a skewed age – either younger because they are equal and haven’t died or older (as is the case here) because trees that are long lived are easier to find than partially fossilized mud bound trees.

What it means is that the assumption fails for trees existing in vastly different conditions.

Now what I wanted to see was first, what is the correction factor per year used and second how different is the correction factor when fit to the dirty dozen. After all, tree age, location, group and other conditions affect trees dramatically. So my question was – If we had only the 12 Yamal trees, how would the correction factor look.

Figure 1 - Correction factors

The dozen trees fit to the same function have a very different result when run alone – these trees are different! Now climatology in general may be tempted to call this plot bunk because these trees are chosen in a timeframe where we should see hockey stick temperatures and we have too few samples. However, I would remind climatology that these were the same 12 trees used to create the MASSIVE blade on a 200 plus core study.

Hmm

Guest post by Gavin Schmidt.

E) There does appear to be data collection and transparency issues in the AGW research area.

[Response: Give me all the data you have used to publish a paper from in the last 10 years. What? It'll take time? Your graduate student has it? You aren't sure where you put it? There is only 90% online - I want the last 10%! I claim conspiracy! Appears to me like there's a transparency issue there, and you haven't even responded. (See how easy that is?). - gavin]

Comment by Tkearney — 5 October 2009 @ 7:52 AM

On a Yamal hockey stick thread where Steve McIntyre had been waiting for Briffa to release data he had in his possession for 10 years! One of the most influential series in hockey stick lore worldwide. Hell, he didn’t even send the code for RCS standardization.

Hmmmmm.

Stand in front of bull, waive flag wildly and step to the side.