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?

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

Sniff the Zeitgeist

The wind has shifted.

 

George Negus' pathetically soft interview about climate change with Lord Nicholas Stern on SBS has produced an interesting reaction even from SBS's own viewers.

 

Most are outraged about Negus' fawning over Stern and his inability to ask a single hard question.

 

He finishes the interview with this typically trite and shallow observation: Why do I get the idea that Lord Stern just might have been trying to tell us to grow up - politically, that is.

 

Here's a question that Negus could have asked, if he had been arsed enough to do some research:

 

Why did Stern use a social discount rate of only around 2% in finding that the costs of doing nothing now would be greater than acting now, when he knows full well that the accepted figure should have been around 4%?

 

Why, despite devoting not a few words in his review to the importance of the social discount rate, did he not mention in the review the rate he used? (People had to badger Her Majesty's Treasury to get the figure - so much for a supposedly "independent" review!)

 

What is is about climate change boosters and hiding stuff? Whether it's Stern or the Hockey Stick's Michael Mann, is the reason they act like they have something to hide the fact that they do have something to hide?

 

(Well, in the case of Michael Mann it turned out he did definitely have something hide.)

 

Now, Back to Senator Steve Fielding.

 

He's recently returned from a conference of sceptics in Washington and he's got some questions for Senator Penny Wong.

 

He hasn't made up his mind yet, but at least, unlike George Negus, he does appear to have an open mind.

 

Posted via email from Garth's posterous