The Most Influential Tree in the World?

The fall out from the disclosure about how tree ring proxy data has been misused in certain high profile palaeo-climate reconstuctions continues.

I've said before, if people knew just how poor the evidence is for the argument that something unusual is happening to the climate, there'd be an uproar!

Now we find out how one climate researcher carefully cherry-picked which trees to use out of a larger sample so as to get the "right" result - ie, that global temperatures began to increase sharply towards the end of the 19th Century after a relatively stable period of a thousand years or more.

His total data set comprised only ten trees.

Indeed, his results are largely based on one tree!

But if you look at the larger sample, guess what? The supposed spike in temperature disappears.

And of course, as is typical in this area of climate research, he did everything possible for years to hide his data from independent examination.

Now we know why.

MIRROR POSTING: YAD06 – the Most Influential Tree in the World

1 10 2009

Climate Audit is getting hit with traffic again, so this is a mirror post for interested parties. – Anthony

YAD06 – the Most Influential Tree in the World

by Steve McIntyre on September 30th, 2009

Obviously there’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days about the difference between the CRU 12 and the Schweingruber 34. In making such comparisons, it’s always a good idea to look at the data in detail – something that obviously should have been done by Briffa and the Team before the widespread use of the Yamal proxy in so many reconstructions, rather than this late date, over 9 years since its original use in Briffa 2000.

In a previous thread, I showed a plot of the actual ring widths of the 10 CRU trees ending in 1990. Today I’m going to show a similar plot of the “dimensionless index” for the same 10 trees. It is the “dimensionless index” that is averaged to make the “chronology”.

Click on the heading above for the full post.

Plus, Briffa returns fire and is then blown out of the water.

People are wondering if this is part of the reason that that price of carbon has collapsed to only 10 cents a tonne, down from a high of $7?

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Suggestions of “strong negative cloud feedbacks” in a warmer climate

Plus, a really cool photo, taken from the International Space Station!

 

Natural heat engine - the cumulonimbus cloud, transports heat from the lower to upper levels of the atmosphere. Source International Space Station NASA - click for large image

 

I thought this post on clouds and climate modeling below from Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit was interesting, because it highlights the dreaded “negative feedbacks” that many climate modelers say don’t exist. Dr. Richard Lindzen highlighted the importance of negative feedback in a recent WUWT post.

 

One of the comments to the CA article shows the simplicity and obviousness of the existence of negative feedback in one of our most common weather events. Willis Eschenbach writes:

Cloud positive feedback is one of the most foolish and anti-common sense claims of the models.

 

This is particularly true of cumulus and cumulonimbus, which increase with the temperature during the day, move huge amounts of energy from the surface aloft, reflect huge amounts of energy to space, and fade away and disappear at night.

Spot on Willis, I couldn’t agree more. This is especially well demonstrated in the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) The ITCZ has been in the news recently because early analysis of the flight path of Air France 447 suggests flying through an intense thunderstorm cell in the ITCZ may have been the fatal mistake. There is a huge amount of energy being transported into the upper atmosphere by these storms.

 

Full post at Watts Up With That?

 

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