Software Development

In conclusion, I see no malfeasance here.

An upward trend is also seen by instruments placed in growing cities.

1) The general public is too stupid to understand it, which leaves them vulnerable to…
2) The infotainment corporations, which will use a simple anomaly to discredit *all* climate data ever produced
3) Original data is a rich source of papers; a scientist giving it away is akin to music industry giving away copyright

The general public is too stupid to understand it

CRU climate data already ‘over 95%’ available

Phil Jones comments further: “One of the three temperature reconstructions was based entirely on a particular set of tree-ring data that shows a strong correlation with temperature from the 19th century through to the mid-20th century, but does not show a realistic trend of temperature after 1960. This is well known and is called the ‘decline’ or ‘divergence’. The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste. CRU has not sought to hide the decline. Indeed, CRU has published a number of articles that both illustrate, and discuss the implications of, this recent tree-ring decline, including the article that is listed in the legend of the WMO Statement figure. It is because of this trend in these tree-ring data that we know does not represent temperature change that I only show this series up to 1960 in the WMO Statement.”

The ‘decline’ in this set of tree-ring data should not be taken to mean that there is any problem with the instrumental temperature data. As for the tree-ring decline, various manifestations of this phenomenon have been discussed by numerous authors, and its implications are clearly signposted in Chapter 6 of the IPCC AR4 report.

(c) Climate variance explained by the proxy variable--close to zero for
ice core isotopes, up to 50% for tree rings, somewhere in between for
most other indicators. How valuable are such partially explained records
in helping explain the past?

(e) Frequency dependence of explained variance---the classic example
here is tree rings, where it is exceedingly difficult to get out a
credible low frequency (50+ year time scale) message. Work in this area
could reap useful rewards.

For climatologists, the search for an irrefutable "sign" of anthropogenic warming has assumed an almost Biblical intensity. The leading figures of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), claim that, in all probability, they have seen it. Last summer [ed: 1996], the IPCC's scientific working group, chaired by former UK Meteorological Office boss Sir John Houghton, concluded that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate". But it is like the "balance of evidence" suggesting BSE causes CJD. The judgment is far from "beyond reasonable doubt". The case remains "not proven".

By analysing those rings, Briffa and his colleagues at the Climatic Research Unit in the University of East Anglia have charted these sudden and dramatic shocks to the climate system, from Changbai to Pinatubo in 1991. Larches in the forests of the northern Urals, for instance, have revealed that 1032 was the coldest summer there in a thousand years, more than 6 degrees cooler than the long-term average. Four of the five coldest summers in Europe and North America during the past four centuries (1601, 1641, 1669, and 1912) coincided with known major volcanic events. "We are pretty certain the fifth one, in 1699, did too," says Briffa. "But the geologists haven't found the volcano yet."

It is clever work. But the science of tree-ring analysis, dendrochronology, is more than just a party piece for botanists. Every ring in every tree round the world contains a memory of the climate the year it was formed. Reading these rings holds the potential, Briffa believes, to answer one of the most vital questions of our time: has human activity started to warm the planet?

Few investigators doubt that the world has warmed recently. Nor that the enhanced "greenhouse effect" of pollution from gases such as carbon dioxide, will warm the planet. But in the past five years, climate researchers have growing increasingly aware of how little they really know about the natural variability from which they must pick out the "signal" of human influence.

One prominent IPCC researcher concerned about this gap in knowledge is Simon Tett from the Hadley Centre for climate modelling at the Meteorological Office, home to one of the world's five leading global circulation models, capable of recreating a mathematical version of how the atmosphere works and of running simulations of climatic changes over decades or even centuries. He says that "in the past, our estimates of natural variability have been based on climate models." But this autumn [date?], he says, those estimates have been thrown into turmoil by a paper published in the journal The Holocene. In it, Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California at San Diego, compared model estimates of natural temperature fluctuations over the past 400 years with the best evidence from the real world -- from instruments in the past century and "proxy data", such as Briffa's tree rings, from before that.

The result was bad news for the modellers. The two models examined -- one German, the other American -- generated a natural variability of around 0.1 degree C per century. This was less than half that revealed in the proxy data. "Of course we don't have to believe the proxy data. They certainly have problems attached to them. But my belief is that they both models, and proxy data too, underestimate real variability," says Barnett

The models' error was not, perhaps, too surprising. As Barnett points out, they do not include vital "forcing" mechanisms that alter temperature, such as solar cycles and volcanic eruptions. Nor can they yet mimic the strength of the largest year-on-year variability in the natural system, the El Nino oscillation in the Pacific Ocean, which has a global impact on climate.

Nonetheless, the findings should serve as a warning, Barnett says, that "the current models cannot be used in rigorous tests for anthropogenic signals in the real world". If they are they "might lead us to believe that an anthropogenic signal had been found when, in fact, that may not be the case."

"We wrote a long list of caveats in that chapter," says Barnett. "We got a lot of static from within IPCC, from people who wanted to water down and delete some of those caveats. We had to work very hard to keep them all in." Even so, when the findings were first leaked to the New York Times, it was under the headline "Scientists finally confirm human role in global warming".

The relationships between ring growth and summer temperature are not a precise. But comparisons between the recent rings and known climatic data show that the rings can capture at least half of the summer temperature variability.

There were also long warm spells between 900 and 1100, known as the medieval warm period, and 1360 to 1560. [ed: show graph from NERC paper].

Briffa grins at the prospect. "The trend seems to be accelerating. We are getting reports back from Stepan, our man in the Urals, that it was warmer this spring on the Yamal peninsula there than ever before, and tree growth has been absolutely fantastic. It is a major warming, like nothing seen there for a thousand years -- and it is what the climate models predict." Caution prevails, but the elusive pattern of man-made global warming may just be emerging amid the larch groves on the sunny hills of northern Siberia.

Dear Chick & all

> the first is Keith Briffa's rather comprehensive treatment of getting
> climate variations from tree rings: Annual climate variability in
> the Holocene: "interpreting the message of ancient trees", Quaternary
> Science Reviews, 19 (2000) 87-105. It should deal with many of the
> questions people raise about using them to determine temperatures.

Take this from first principles.

A tree only grows on land. That excludes 70% of the earth covered by
water. A tree does no grow on ice. A tree does not grow in a desert. A
tree does not grow on grassland-savannahs. A tree does not grow in
alpine areas. A tree does not grow in the tundra

We are left with perhaps 15% of the planet upon which forests
grow/grew. That does not make any studies from tree rings global, or
even hemispheric.

The width and density of tree rings is dependent upon the following
variables which cannot be reliably separated from each other.

sunlight - if the sun varies, the ring will vary. But not at night of
course.
cloudiness - more clouds, less sun, less ring.
pests/disease - a caterpillar or locust plague will reduce
photosynthesis
access to sunlight - competition within a forest can disadvantage or
advantage some trees.
moisture/rainfall - a key variable. Trees do not prosper in a drought
even if there's a heat wave.
snow packing in spring around the base of the trees retards growth
temperature - finally!

The tree ring is a composite of all these variables, not merely of
temperature. Therefore on the 15% of the planet covered by trees, their
rings do not and cannot accurately record temperature in isolation from
the other environmental variables.

In my article on Greening Earth Society on the Hockey Stick, I point to
other evidence which contradicts Mann's theory. The Idso's have produced
more of that evidence, and a new article on Greening Earth has
`unearthed' even more.

Mann's theory simply does not stack up. But that was not the key issue.
Anyone can put up a dud theory from time to time. What is at issue is
the uncritical zeal with which the industry siezed on the theory before
its scientific value had been properly tested. In one go, they tossed
aside dozens of studies which confirmed the existence of the MWE and LIA
as global events, and all on the basis of tree rings - a proxy which has
all the deficiencies I have stated above.

The worst thing I can say about any paper such as his is that it is `bad
science'. Legal restraint prevents me going further. But in his case,
only those restraints prevent me going *much* further.

Cheers

John Daly

>>Whatever is shown, just keep it in context. There is no way a clear >>scientific point with all the caveats and uncertainties can come across >>in such venues. However, I do agree with Stossel's premise (though I >>don't know what the piece will actually look like so I may be >>disappointed) that the dose of climate change disasters that have been >>dumped on the average citizen is designed to be overly alarmist and
>>could lead us to make some bad policy decisions. (I've got a good story >>about the writers of the TIME cover piece a couple of months ago that >>proves they were not out to discuss the issue but to ignore science and
>>influence government.)

I just don't think tree rings, if
>>averaged over a century, can tell us which century was warmest. We've
>>never had two complete, independent centuries of global instrumental
>>data (separated by more than one century) to even test this idea.

> > Natural Cycles. The main propaganda device of the TAR is the
> >"hockey
> > stick graph." The graph is a temperature record derived from
> >tree rings
> > dating back to 1000 AD and running through 1900, with the
> >20th century
> > thermometer-based temperature data attached at the end.[9]
> >It claims to
> > show that global temperatures have remained steady or even
> >decreased
> > during the last millennium until the industrial age, when
> >there was an
> > anomalous warming represented by the blade of the hockey
> >stick. The
> > hockey stick is largely bogus, however. The margin of error
> >is so large
> > that nearly any temperature trend could be drawn to fit
> >within it.
> >
> >
> >
> > The hockey stick features prominently in all of IPCC Chairman
> >Robert
> > Watson's speeches, and to the uninitiated it is very
> >persuasive. Senator
> > John McCain (R-AZ), for example, expressed alarm when he saw
> >the
> > graph at Commerce Committee hearings last May.

You are right: this is a disinformation campaign.

> > >I was rather horrified by the inaccurate statements about tree-ring
> > >dating that you allowed to slip into print in the interview with Thomas
> > >Pakenham today. Tree-ring science is an exact science -- none of the
> > >data obtained from tree rings would be useful if the dates were
> > >inaccurate.

Tree-ring science is an exact science

John,
There has been some email traffic in the last few days to a week - quite
a bit really, only a small part about MSU. The main part has been one of
your House subcommittees wanting Mike Mann and others and IPCC
to respond on how they produced their reconstructions and how IPCC
produced their report.
In case you want to look at this see later in the email !

Also this load of rubbish !