Sesame Street Science

In a never ending effort to help the media think, we must point out the detail of everything. Aren’t writers supposed to be the wordsmiths and reporters supposed to be detectives? If nothing else is hidden in plain sight, Steve McIntyre’s posts are. A reader asked if DOCTOR KIETH BRIFFA had a reasonable explanation for the DECLINE in temperatures in recent years as predicted by his scientifically perfect proxy’s. Well we do nothing at tAV if it’s not full service. I’m talking all the bells and whistles too.

Here is a link to a post Steve McIntyre did ….. way back in 2006.

Post number 529 at CA, that’s an old one.

In it DOCTOR Briffa ratinoalizes why these tree rings are still temperature despite ‘divergence’ problems.

It is salient to note that relative tree-ring width, and basal area increment, also show a relative decline and divergence from the temperature curve(s), arguing against the decline in density being a compensation reaction to increasing ring growth (as is seen in forestry soil fertilizing experiments). I would imagine that higher temperatures, and possibly some increasing sensitivity to lower summer soil moisture are involved, but some additional growth-limiting factor must also be implicated. Higher CO2 would be expected to increase basal area growth, so I consider it unlikely that this is the factor.

I’m starting to understand Briffa’s writing style. It seems to be -make absolute paper killing statements, an arm wave and ignore the previous. He’s got no clue what the tree ring data means!! None at all!!

Briffa et al. (1998b) discuss various causes for this decline in tree growth parameters, and Vaganov et al. (1999) suggest a role for increasing winter snowfall. We have considered the latter mechanism in the earlier section on chronology climate signals, but it appears likely to be limited to a small part of northern Siberia. In the absence of a substantiated explanation for the decline, we make the assumption that it is likely to be a response to some kind of recent anthropogenic forcing. On the basis of this assumption, the pre-twentieth century part of the reconstructions can be considered to be free from similar events and thus accurately represent past temperature variability.

What kind of jackalope ignorant science is this when you can simply make an assumption of WHAT YOUR DATA IS and then make a conlcusion that IT IS TEMPERATURE. It doesn’t even look like temperature so they chop the data off. My god this is not reasonable. How the hell and in what universe is this science??

The network was built over many years from trees selected to maximise their sensitivity to changing temperature…. However, in many tree-ring chronologies, we do not observe the expected rate of ring density increases that would be compatible with observed late 20th century warming. This changing climate sensitivity may be the result of other environmental factors that have, since the 1950s, increasingly acted to reduce tree-ring density below the level expected on the basis of summer temperature changes. This prevents us from claiming unprecedented hemispheric warming during recent decades on the basis of these tree-ring density data alone. Here we show very preliminary results of an investigation of the links between recent changes in MXD and ozone (the latter assumed to be associated with the incidence of UV radiation at the ground). For the time being, we circumvent this problem by restricting the calibration of the density data to the period before 1960.

Does this seem even slightly reasonable to anyone reading. Is there any one in the thousands of readers here who might think that this could in SOME REALM OF THE UNIVERSE make sense???

Insanity or lies–your choice.

Hide the decline!!