Global Warming Deception Unveiled UPDATED

A very disturbing report makes you wonder whether any Global Warming scientist can be trusted. The vaunted Mann Hockey Stock is at the heart of the GW case, and now it turns out the core data was cherry-picked to show warming. Use of the whole sample would have shown cooling! The red line is the Mann Hockey Stick. See it shoot up in recent years. The black line is the whole data set. See it shoot down. A completely contrary conclusion.

The tale is well-told here. And even better is to start here. Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit debunked the original hockey stick, but until just now was not able to get a hold of the core data.

Also below the fold I include a good summary of the history of the Mann Hickey Stick and its debunking, with links. 

Why Mann would resist revealing his source data was always a point of concern - real science would not work this way. What Steve found when he saw the data was that the tree ring data was cherry-picked - one of Mann's co-authors had selected a mere 10 rings out of a larger sample, specifically chosen to create the hockey stick. When the whole sample is used, the black line above results. Instead of warming, we have cooling.

The Mann Hockey Stick was a reconstruction from tree ring data of historic temperature that was then tied to recent surface temperature data. An explanation of tree ring data is here. The sharp spike up is an artifact of tying two disparate data sets together.

The hockey stick has been hugely influential on the GW debate; it caused the IPCC to completely reformulate the historical record.The second chart shows how the IPCC used to view the historical record, with a Medieval Warm Period and a Little Ice Age.

The whole point of the Mann Hockey Stick was to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period - it is warmer than now without SUVs. Also the rise off the Little Ice Age can explain all the anecdotal data (like glaciers melting) as natural, without blaming man-made CO2.

This broken hockey stick fiasco follows a whole series of questionable political acts by the British climate center (CRU). They had been refusing to open their data to scrutiny. They also either lost or purged core data. Another British center had been withholding tree ring data. And so it goes.

Something is very wrong when scientists hide data and refuse to allow their work to be reviewed. Peer Review is not a review of the data and conclusions themselves, but of the approach - process not substance.

Something is very rotten when the data *finally* gets reviewed and found to be deceptive or plain wrong. This is not the only example; the Steig Antarctic study has been shown to be laughably false. Steig smeared data from the only warmish spot, the Peninsula, across most of the  Continent. A mere 4% of the area led to 75% of the temperature weighting. See chart.

The pro GW crowd must be absolutely sure they are right, regardless of the data, to engage in such shenanigans. Politics corrupts science. Absolute politics corrupts absolutely.

UPDATE 9/30: a lot more coming in on this topic. A detailed chronology of the events leading to this expose shows how fortuitous it was, and how hard the climate scientists resisted subjecting their analysis to scrutiny.  They resisted because they knew the importance of the cherry-picked tree rings to resurrect the debunked Mann analysis. Consider the author's conclusion:

But I think it is pretty obvious that pretty much all the relevant authors of the article must know that without any fabrication of the data, they don't get any hockey stick from the trees. It means that it can't be an innocent mistake and all of them, and not just Keith Briffa, are fraudsters who know very well what they're doing and why they're doing it. The next question is whether the society knows what it should be doing with such people.

The impact of this fraud includes having to revisit a number of peer-reviewed papers that used the cherry-picked data rather than the broader data set precisely because the cherry-picked set supported their conclusion, if not their science. Now, tree-ring data is fraught with difficulties - a discussion of the problems with tree-ring analysis here - but cherry-picking tree-rings is fraught with fraud. Maybe peer-review itself in the GW world needs to be revisited, not just the data sets.

Here is a good summary of the history of the Mann Hockey Stock:

The record of climate most often used by the IPCC is maintained by the Hadley Center in England. Scientists there have been publishing fraudulent studies for the better part of a decade now.

Here is a chronology of the fraud behind Al Gore's infamous 'hockey stick graph' from An Inconvenient Truth.

1- In 1998 a paper is published by Dr. Michael Mann. Then at the University of Virginia, now a Penn State climatologist, and co-authors Bradley and Hughes. The paper is named: Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations. The paper becomes known as MBH98.

The conclusion of tree ring reconstruction of climate for the past 1000 years is that we are now in the hottest period in modern history, ever.

See the graph http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/image/mann/manna_99 ...

Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician in Toronto, suspects tree rings aren’t telling a valid story with that giant uptick at the right side of the graph, implicating the 20th century as the “hottest period in 1000 years”, which alarmists latch onto as proof of AGW. The graph is dubbed as the “Hockey Stick” and becomes famous worldwide. Al Gore uses it in his movie An Inconvenient Truth in the famous “elevator scene”.

2- Steve attempts to replicate Michael Mann’s tree ring work in the paper MBH98, but is stymied by lack of data archiving. He sends dozens of letters over the years trying to get access to data but access is denied. McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, of the University of Guelph publish a paper in 2004 criticizing the work. A new website is formed in 2004 called Real Climate, by the people who put together the tree ring data and they denounce the scientific criticism:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004 ...

3- Years go by. McIntyre is still stymied trying to get access to the original source data so that he can replicate the Mann 1998 conclusion. In 2008 Mann publishes another paper in bolstering his tree ring claim due to all of the controversy surrounding it. A Mann co-author and source of tree ring data (Professor Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit) used one of the tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008, which has a strict data archiving policy. Thanks to that policy, Steve McIntyre fought and won access to that data just last week.

4- Having the Yamal data in complete form, McIntyre replicates it, and discovers that one of Mann’s co-authors, Briffa, had cherry picked 10 trees data sets out of a much larger set of trees sampled in Yamal.

5- When all of the tree ring data from Yamal is plotted, the famous hockey stick disappears. Not only does it disappear, but goes negative. The conclusion is inescapable. The tree ring data was hand picked to get the desired result.

These are the relevant graphs from McIntyre showing what the newly available data demonstrates.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09 ...
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09 ...

Comments

[cloudslicer]

To add insult to injury, now anybody who questions global warming is labeled a Holocaust denier!

As soon as I started hearing "scientists" claiming that anyone that denies GW is a Holocaust denier I realized that what I was dealing with was a religious cult.

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The record of climate most often used by the IPCC is maintained by the Hadley Center in England. Scientists there have been publishing fraudulent studies for the better part of a decade now.