ClimateGate: A Narrative Emerges

There is a narrative emerging from the CRUtape letters, as some refer to them, that will at some point gel into a complete history of the bizarre internal affairs at the EAUCRU zoo. Stephen F. Hayward offers a preliminary sort of the known capers, at Weekly Standard, an excellent presentation that includes several things that had not caught my attention. The following excerpts are examples, but I highly recommend reading the whole article:

“McIntyre and McKitrick may have made mistakes in their critique of the hockey stick--the charges and countercharges are difficult for nonspecialists to sort out--but they were sufficiently persuasive that the National Academy of Sciences appointed an expert review panel to look into the dispute. The NAS reported its findings in 2006, and the language was sufficiently hedged in diplomatic equivocations that Mann and the media claimed the hockey stick had been vindicated. But a close reading shows that the NAS report devastated the hockey stick. While the NAS said the hockey stick reconstruction was a "plausible" depiction of 20th-century warming, the report went on to state clearly that

‘substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that "the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium." [Emphasis added.]

“One of the NAS committee members, physicist Kurt Cuffey of the University of California, was more direct in remarks to Science magazine: "The IPCC used [the hockey stick] as a visual prominently in the [2001] report. I think that sent a very misleading message about how resolved this part of the scientific research was." Mann's hockey stick, a centerpiece of the 2001 IPCC report, did not appear in the 2007 IPCC report.

“The NAS report, it should be added, included an implicit rebuke of Mann and his colleagues for their reluctance to share their data with other researchers:

'The committee recognizes that access to research data is a complicated, discipline-dependent issue, and that access to computer models and methods is especially challenging because intellectual property rights must be considered. Our view is that all research benefits from full and open access to published datasets and that a clear explanation of analytical methods is mandatory. Peers should have access to the information needed to reproduce published results, so that increased confidence in the outcome of the study can be generated inside and outside the scientific community.'

“Despite this criticism and rebuke from the NAS, the Climate Research Unit hockey team continued refusing right up to this month to share its raw data and computer codes with McIntyre and McKitrick or anyone else. Mann continued to insist that the medieval warm period was overestimated, and he keeps on producing more new hockey sticks than the NHL (he has another one out this week in Science magazine).

****

“Perhaps the most damning email from the CRU circle is this July 2005 message from Phil Jones to climatologist John Christy of the University of Alabama:

"As you know, I'm not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn't being political, it is being selfish."

Jones's attitude may not be exactly political, but it is certainly unscientific. The denial of political bent is also hard to square with the emails revealing that several of these scientists worked closely behind the scenes with alarmist advocacy groups such as Greenpeace, which really deserves to be shunned by serious scientists.”

The report does send mixed signals; it publishes reputed curves from mixed proxies that appear to converge on higher temperatures, while simultaneously slapping Mann fairly hard. If one has an agenda, one might take away any conclusion he wishes, yet it is fairly clear in its rebuke to Mann. Again, when basic data and calibrations are missing, who can tell what the story really is?

I was unaware of the NAS decision against the hockey stick. The report is located here, and even though it references suspicious “original research by Smith and Reynolds (2005), Jones et al. (2001), and Hansen et al. (2001) in its conclusion, it also reduces the confidence in Mann’s curve to 3rd level confidence, behind lowered…

“…confidence in substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600”,

thus rendering the confidence in the Little Ice Age more highly than confidence in Mann's hockey stick, and second,

“Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium” because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales.”

Despite this blatant reduction of confidence in Mann's hockey stick data, all the true believers declared a victory for Mann, including the paleo-media, demonstrating the importance of relying on original source information rather than waterboarded stories from the media.

Again read the whole article, it's fascinating.