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Last updated on June 10th, 2017 at 06:54 am
“I was in Japan when they had the Kyoto conference,” writes Blueberry Girl. “They cut down a forest preserve to create the venue and it was all downhill from there.” Issues have since moved from forests to sticks:
[Global warming proponent Michael] Mann still won’t show the source code used to generate the “Hockey Stick”.
Well, a Mann’s stick is very personal I guess.
Go McIntyre & McKirk!
McIntyre and McKirk are hockey players, I think. Click them links for clarification.
- Does Photoshop count as source code?Posted by richard mcenroe on 03/23 at 09:35 AM • permalink
- bc — Well, we do have the reports of the Viking entrepreneurs who ran river rafting expeditions down the melting glaciers…Posted by richard mcenroe on 03/23 at 09:43 AM • permalink
- McKitrick and McIntyre are NOT hockey players. The hockey team are the ones who banished the medieval warm period with a combination of some bristle cone pine tree ring data, some poorly digested multivariate statistical analysis and a large grant. M and M are exposing the incompetence of the hockey team whose global proxy temperature record has been enthusiastically adopted by the IPCC because it looks so much more dramatic, and so much better correlated with carbon emissions.
- Actually, climate conditions can be estimated by measuring tree rings. It’s a pretty accurate technique. Problem is, you might have to cut it down to do that. Taking core samples is another possibility, but you can see the dilema…..they might have to cut trees down to save them.
Historical records won’t have accurate measurements (I recall that the thermometer wasn’t invented until around 1400, and wasn’t in common use for a while), but they are good corrobation.
But the analysis is what’s in question here, as that is what all of the global crisis gurus are working off of. Since Mann is selectively publishing his background data (so far, please note), that is another suspicious item on the agenda. It’s like Kerry publishing his military records, but refusing to sign SF 180.
Blueberry Girl got it right, Mann’s stick is very personal….LOL!
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 03/23 at 11:26 AM • permalink
- The width of tree rings is only indicative of local mean annual temperature. It also depends on pests, rainfall, forest fires, frosts, what time of year the exceptionally warm and cool weather occurs, and so on. This is why “multi”-proxy studies are used (with different kinds of tree from different areas) and statistical techniques have to be used to infer global temperatures.
If tree rings are such a good indication then you would expect them to show that temperatures since 1990 were exceptionally high (as the global surface record of temperature shows). I do not know that they do show this, but I do note that there is some reluctance to bring the proxy records up to date.
- Rexie, I said “estimated”, not “measured”. Granted, I didn’t go into ALL of the factors that affect tree growth. None the less, tree rings remain a good climatical summary for historical purposes.
Let’s not be pedantic, shall we? My point (poorly expressed) is that there are ways to estimate regional and global temperatures. Perhaps not to a high degree of accuracy, but you work with what you have.
As an example, read about the Little Ice Age.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 03/23 at 12:11 PM • permalink
- JeffS
I don’t disagree that tree rings are a reasonable way of getting an indication of what temperatures were like before thermometers, but they hardly tell an unambiguous story.
The hockey stick itself was the result of applying a flawed pre-processing step to the extraction of principal components. In brief, deviations in proxy temperature were calculated from the mean of the 1900-1980 data rather than the from the mean of the whole set from 1400 (I think).
M and M have shown that this makes a hockey stick a near certainty one way up or the other. They also have shown that if North American bristlecone pines are excluded from the analysis, then, EVEN WITH THE FLAWED METHOD, Mann could not have produced a hockey stick.
I wonder if there would be so much support for Kyoto if more people understood that the idea that the 1990s was the warmest decade in the last thousand years depended on the growth spurt in the 19th and 20th centuries of the bristlecone pine.
- Try this David and they could put you on the IPCC panel at least:
Let T(n) be the proxy temperature in year n.
Let Mean_T = average of T(n) for n = 1900 to 1980.
Let SD = standard deviation over same period.Replace T(n) for n = 1400 to 1980 with
z(n) = (T(n) – Mean_T)/SD.Hey presto a hockey stick more than 90 times out of 100 even when the underlying proxy temperature record is entirely random!
- You’re using math! I should have you banned!
Rolls 8-sided dice.
Can someone add these dots up for me?
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 03/23 at 06:14 PM • permalink
- One, two, many, lots!Posted by richard mcenroe on 03/23 at 08:03 PM • permalink
- So will it ever become widely known among the general public that global warming isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be? When the next looming catastrophe that can only be solved by massive restrictions on global capitalism is predicted, will we ever be able to say “hey, what about global warming? Remember that, swampy?” or will global warming have vanished down the memory hole?
- Agreed, rexie. ALthough I wasn’t aware of the bristlecone pine issues—I hadn’t read that far into the subject. I was just aware that general temperature trends are available from climatology studies that use many different approaches.
My opinion (strictly from a layman’s perspective) is that the use of general temperature data for a trend analysis will produce, at best, an even more general trend prediction. The margin of error (which can’t be avoided) from the original data provides for a wide range of temperature projection. If they in fact used a 1900-1980 data set for their trend analysis (first I heard about it), the analysis is garbage. This excludes the use of a flawed analysis methodology. Add that in, and these boffins have a problem.
Time to come clean, folks! Pseudo-science ain’t your sugar baby.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 03/24 at 12:49 AM • permalink
- Tom,
Vanished down the memory hole. Back in the 1970s the crisis du jour was Global cooling. We were on the verge of a new Ice Age, the computer models proved it, proved it I say! Curiously we needed the same anti-capitalist measures to meet Global Cooling as have been advocated to address Global Warming. Some of the same people who are pushing Warming now, such as Stephen Schneider and Tjeerd van Andel, were convinced that the new Ice Age was upon us.Plus ca change and all that.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 03/24 at 11:28 PM • permalink
