Articles Tagged "TreeGate"

Tree rings were thought to prove global warming – now climate-change deniers say they show the reverse. Both views are flawed

As every amateur naturalist knows, trees provide a record of their own history, in the pattern of rings seen in a horizontal cross-section. Trees growing at the same time will show similar patterns, and each year is distinctive enough to allow those who study tree rings – dendrochronologists – to date the rings, establishing chronologies stretching back thousands of years.

But trees tell us more than just when they were growing – they also reveal what the climate was like. Rings are formed as the tree grows, adding layers of new wood beneath its bark. How thick that layer – and how wide the resultant ring – depends on various factors, but most importantly the climate. A warm, wet summer will result in a wide ring; a cold summer or drought will produce a narrow ring.

Trees can therefore function as archives, invaluable sources of information for climatologists – and for those attempting to prove or disprove climate change.

And that's where it gets controversial. It turns out not all trees hold a reliable record of temperature. But as temperature-related data is hot property in the climate change debate, scientists who suggest that some tree data may not be helpful risk being accused of hiding important findings.

Last month, Queen's University Belfast was ordered by the UK Information Commissioner's Office to hand over data from 40 years of research into Irish tree rings to Doug Keenan. A City banker turned climate analyst – and climate change denier – Keenan believes the Irish tree-rings could provide evidence that there was a "medieval warm period" 1,000 years ago. If this were true, it would disrupt the notion that warming during the 20th century is unique and man-made.

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The magical faraway tree: a larch in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, sampled by Dr Keith Briffa, has been called 'the most influential tree in the world' Photo: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit show how the world's weightiest climate data has been distorted.

Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed "the most influential tree in the world". On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of "Climategate" – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest. If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see.

Phil Jones tried to hush my paper. SUNY Albany won't discuss the investigation my paper initiated. And QUB ignored my three FOI requests for their data.

Some of the emails leaked in Climategate discuss my work. Following is a comment on that, and on something more important.

In 2007, I published a peer-reviewed paper alleging that some important research relied upon by the IPCC (for the treatment of urbanization effects) was fraudulent. The emails show that Tom Wigley — one of the most oft-cited climatologists and an extreme warming advocate — thought my paper was valid. They also show that Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit, tried to convince the journal editor not to publish my paper.

After my paper was published, the State University of New York — where the research discussed in my paper was conducted — carried out an investigation. During the investigation, I was not interviewed — contrary to the university’s policies, federal regulations, and natural justice. I was allowed to comment on the report of the investigation, before the report’s release.

A folder containing documents, data and emails purportedly "hacked" from Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) may be smoking gun proof of a worldwide conspiracy to exaggerate the existence, causation and threat of global warming. And the list of apparent conspirators includes many of the world's leading climate alarmists -- the very scientists on whose work the entire anthropogenic global warming theory is based.

In a Friday interview with Investigative Magazine's TGIF edition, CRU director Phillip Jones confirmed [PDF] that the incriminating documents, which have been widely disseminated online, are in fact genuine. Accordingly, whether indeed the labor of hackers, or instead that of a CRU whistleblower, the contents of the FOI2009 folder are now public record -- and that's nothing short of dynamite.

After all, the names of the email exchangers represent a who's who of the world's leading climate alarmism scientists, including Stephen Schneider, Gavin Schmidt and James Hansen. And the words within seemingly betray an organized apparatus of deception.

In one particularly odious email dated November 1999, Jones writes to Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes:

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Only by playing with data can scientists come up with the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph of global warming

Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann, it was a statistical compilation of tree ring data supposedly proving that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Prior to the publication of the Hockey Stick, scientists had held that the medieval-era was warmer than the present, making the scale of 20th century global warming seem relatively unimportant. The dramatic revision to this view occasioned by the Hockey Stick’s publication made it the poster child of the global warming movement. It was featured prominently in a 2001 report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as government websites and countless review reports.

Steve and I showed that the mathematics behind the Mann Hockey Stick were badly flawed, such that its shape was determined by suspect bristlecone tree ring data. Controversies quickly piled up: Two expert panels involving the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were asked to investigate, the U.S. Congress held a hearing, and the media followed the story around the world.

Yet another scientific scandal has come to light which knocks another whopping crater in the already shattered theory of anthropogenic global warming. Eight peer-reviewed studies, which for years have played a significant supporting role behind the IPPC’s claims of AGW, have been shown to be fraudulent.

As Andrew Orlowski reports in The Register, the issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy in order to ‘reconstruct’ past temperatures. The papers in question incorporated data from trees at the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia:

This dataset gained favour, curiously superseding a newer and larger data set from nearby. The older Yamal trees indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures.

How could this be? Scientists have ensured much of the measurement data used in the reconstructions remains a secret -- failing to fulfill procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious peer reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to demand the data from contributors. Until now, that is.

If a peer review fails in the woods...

A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent peer-reviewed climate papers.

At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.

At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a "reconstruction" of historical temperature anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors.

Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is problematic, and a dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In dendro jargon, this disparity is called "divergence". The process of creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples - a choice open to a scientist's biases.