Cuccinelli-Denied !

[Qaanaaq]

Talk among yourselves: http://www.washingto...og.html?hpid=z3

[Vergent]

I would like to see similar information from the heartland institute. But I know you need probable cause, and standing to search, I have no right to it.

[donsutherland1]

Talk among yourselves: http://www.washingto...og.html?hpid=z3

IMO, this is a good decision.

In general, I believe both law enforcement and individual rights are better served if an Attorney General or Prosecutor or others in Law Enforcement have reasonable basis to suspect wrongdoing and then seek documents/evidence relevant to that matter. I don't believe Law Enforcement or protection of individual rights is served well in cases where blanket requests for documents/evidence are made without a reasonable basis that some wrongdoing has occurred. Indeed, in the latter case, resources are needlessly consumed and protection of individual rights can be eroded.

Mr. Cuchinelli had no concrete evidence that Dr. Mann falsified his research nor evidence related to specific aspects of Dr. Mann's conduct. His undertaking was wholly speculative and purely political in nature.

Yet, he requested access to the University of Virginia's records. As he lacked reasonable basis for his "investigation," his request for the University's records was nothing more than a "fishing expedition." In the end, Mr. Cuchinelli's fishing expedition wasted Virginia taxpayers' money at a time when Virginia still faces fiscal challenges. And, because all choices have alternatives and trade-offs, Cuchinelli's fishing expedition consumed resources that might well have better served the interests of Virginia's residents.

FWIW, the ruling can be found at: http://www2.timesdispatch.com/mgmedia/file/595/va-supreme-court-ruling-against-cuccinelli-uva-cli/

[PhillipS]

I would like to see similar information from the heartland institute. But I know you need probable cause, and standing to search, I have no right to it.

Well, the whole (overt) rationale for Cooch's witchhunt was that if the taxpayers paid for it, then the taxpayers have a right to see it.

Heartland receives taxpayer support in the form of tax-exempt non-profit status, and the Heartland donors reduce their tax payments for their 'charitable' donations. As a taxpayer, perhaps I have a right to read what I've helped pay for at Heartland.

[Qaanaaq]

I agree with you, Don. What a waste of taxpayer's money. This wasn't the first time and I doubt it will be the last-unfortunately-

[blue sky]

Science should be transparent. Mann's work is not. The law is on his side.

The Hocky Stick still stands as a horrible bit of science.

Tree rings as yearly temperature proxies?

Mann's cut and paste of tree ring data.

Mann used tree rings for centuries as proxies and than abandon them the last fifty years since the proxies did not match real data!

His statistical method guaranteed a hocky stick even if random data was used.

I don't know why posters are happy here. Should he not be required to release all his data and the way he used his data? Others can check it? Is not the way science should work?

[PhillipS]

Science should be transparent. Mann's work is not. The law is on his side.

The Hocky Stick still stands as a horrible bit of science.

Tree rings as yearly temperature proxies?

Mann's cut and paste of tree ring data.

Mann used tree rings for centuries as proxies and than abandon them the last fifty years since the proxies did not match real data!

His statistical method guaranteed a hocky stick even if random data was used.

I don't know why posters are happy here. Should he not be required to release all his data and the way he used his data? Others can check it? Is not the way science should work?

What an amazing post - every last statement is untrue, and not just untrue sut so clumsily done it's easy to check and refute.

Do you ever let a ray of knowledge into your gloomy morass of delusion and paranoa?

[blue sky]

What an amazing post - every last statement is untrue, and not just untrue sut so clumsily done it's easy to check and refute.

Do you ever let a ray of knowledge into your gloomy morass of delusion and paranoa?

Since its so easy to check and refute. Lets see it.

I would especially love to see your support of hiding data and work.

[dabize]

Science should be transparent. Mann's work is not. The law is on his side.

The Hocky Stick still stands as a horrible bit of science.

Tree rings as yearly temperature proxies?

Mann's cut and paste of tree ring data.

Mann used tree rings for centuries as proxies and than abandon them the last fifty years since the proxies did not match real data!

His statistical method guaranteed a hocky stick even if random data was used.

I don't know why posters are happy here. Should he not be required to release all his data and the way he used his data? Others can check it? Is not the way science should work?

So Rupert told you guys to double down, did he?

[TerryM]

Science should be transparent. Mann's work is not. The law is on his side.

The Hocky Stick still stands as a horrible bit of science.

Tree rings as yearly temperature proxies?

Mann's cut and paste of tree ring data.

Mann used tree rings for centuries as proxies and than abandon them the last fifty years since the proxies did not match real data!

His statistical method guaranteed a hocky stick even if random data was used.

I don't know why posters are happy here. Should he not be required to release all his data and the way he used his data? Others can check it? Is not the way science should work?

I've seldom seen a post with which I've disagreed so completely.

You ask that Mann subject all his e-mails to public display - but have argued that Heartland has a right to privacy as they plot to undermine our education system?

The hockey stick has been through more scientific reviews than any other recent scientific paper that I can remember, and has been validated repeatedly.

Mann's statistical method did not guarantee a hockey stick when random data was used, it produced a hockey stick when fed random data at a random rate - these were then cherry picked by the mis-informers in order to discredit Mann's work.

Science does not work when results are arbitrarily scoffed at by deniers, often paid to lie about their findings.

The nice thing about it is that the court ruling was WITH prejudice. It can never be brought up again.

[WeatherRusty]

The proper way to dispel a scientific finding (such as the hockey stick) is to do peer-reviewed research which brings about a change in consensus understanding. So far, all peer-reviewed research supports the general idea of the hockey stick. Political witch-hunts carried out by those with a superfluous desire to defame a scientist and destroy a scientific discipline and it's conclusions, deserve no standing in the pursuit of knowledge....or doing science.

[blue sky]

I've seldom seen a post with which I've disagreed so completely.

You ask that Mann subject all his e-mails to public display - but have argued that Heartland has a right to privacy as they plot to undermine our education system?

The hockey stick has been through more scientific reviews than any other recent scientific paper that I can remember, and has been validated repeatedly.

Mann's statistical method did not guarantee a hockey stick when random data was used, it produced a hockey stick when fed random data at a random rate - these were then cherry picked by the mis-informers in order to discredit Mann's work.

Science does not work when results are arbitrarily scoffed at by deniers, often paid to lie about their findings.

The nice thing about it is that the court ruling was WITH prejudice. It can never be brought up again.

The IPCC has stopped using the hocky stick it is so stupid. There are no valid reviews, because nobody knows what data he used or how he used it.. You never addressed why he used a thousand years of tree proxies and than abandend the proxies the last fifty years. Mann says this is what he did..in his latest book. Read It!

I read the books of people I do not agree with. Why don't you read the books of people you agree with?

Heartland has every right to suggest a different view on AGW. They are not hiding that.

[TerryM]

The IPCC has stopped using the hocky stick it is so stupid. There are no valid reviews, because nobody knows what data he used or how he used it.. You never addressed why he used a thousand years of tree proxies and than abandend the proxies the last fifty years. Mann says this is what he did..in his latest book. Read It!

I read the books of people I do not agree with. Why don't you read the books of people you agree with?

Heartland has every right to suggest a different view on AGW. They are not hiding that.

What they have been attempting to hide is the names of those that they pay to lie about things as divergent as the lung cancer - cigarette smoke connection, the need to keep internet prices high while keeping bandwidth minimal and the dangers of global warming. They also attempt to hide the names of those who pay them to locate and make the payoffs to these paid propagandists.

I really feel that this subject should be continued on the 'Now We Know Who Pays our Tolls' thread.

[PhillipS]

The IPCC has stopped using the hocky stick it is so stupid. There are no valid reviews, because nobody knows what data he used or how he used it.. You never addressed why he used a thousand years of tree proxies and than abandend the proxies the last fifty years. Mann says this is what he did..in his latest book. Read It!

I read the books of people I do not agree with. Why don't you read the books of people you agree with?

Heartland has every right to suggest a different view on AGW. They are not hiding that.

As usual, you troll a thread and post nothing but empty nonsense.

The most recent IPCC report, AR4, had Mann paleoclimate reconstruction, i.e. the "Hockey Stick", in section 6.6 The Last 2,000 Years. The next edition of the IPCC report, AR5, is not due to be released until 2013 and I am sure it will discuss paleoclimate reconstructions, too. Strike 1!

Of course people know what data and methodology Mann used - how on Earth do you think McIntyre & McKitrick did their botched review, or how other independent teams have validated Mann's reconstruction? Here's what the IPCC wrote about that:

McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) reported that they were unable to replicate the results of Mann et al. (1998). Wahl and Ammann (2007) showed that this was a consequence of differences in the way McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) had implemented the method of Mann et al. (1998) and that the original reconstruction could be closely duplicated using the original proxy data. McIntyre and McKitrick (2005a, raised further concerns about the details of the Mann et al. (1998) method, principally relating to the independent verification of the reconstruction against 19th-century instrumental temperature data and to the extraction of the dominant modes of variability present in a network of western North American tree ring chronologies, using Principal Components Analysis. The latter may have some theoretical foundation, but Wahl and Amman (2006) also show that the impact on the amplitude of the final reconstruction is very small (~0.05°C; for further discussion of these issues see also Huybers, 2005; McIntyre and McKitrick, 2005c,d; von Storch and Zorita, 2005).

So your second sentence is completely bogus too. Strike 2!

The divergence problem with one tree ring proxy series out the the large number of proxies used in Mann's climate reconstruction was pointed out by - wait for it - Mann himself. Nobody hid anything, all of the details were published in the methodology. All data falls short of perfection - and proxy data sometimes is questionable quality - so Mann used what was reliable, excluded what was unreliable, and annotated the record to explain what was done. That's how good science works. And you seem determined to ignore the fact that other researchers have reproduced Mann's results by using other sets of proxies. Your third assertion is simply totally wrong. Strike 3, you're OUT!

[dabize]

As usual, you troll a thread and post nothing but empty nonsense.

The most recent IPCC report, AR4, had Mann paleoclimate reconstruction, i.e. the "Hockey Stick", in section 6.6 The Last 2,000 Years. The next edition of the IPCC report, AR5, is not due to be released until 2013 and I am sure it will discuss paleoclimate reconstructions, too. Strike 1!

Of course people know what data and methodology Mann used - how on Earth do you think McIntyre & McKitrick did their botched review, or how other independent teams have validated Mann's reconstruction? Here's what the IPCC wrote about that:

McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) reported that they were unable to replicate the results of Mann et al. (1998). Wahl and Ammann (2007) showed that this was a consequence of differences in the way McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) had implemented the method of Mann et al. (1998) and that the original reconstruction could be closely duplicated using the original proxy data. McIntyre and McKitrick (2005a, raised further concerns about the details of the Mann et al. (1998) method, principally relating to the independent verification of the reconstruction against 19th-century instrumental temperature data and to the extraction of the dominant modes of variability present in a network of western North American tree ring chronologies, using Principal Components Analysis. The latter may have some theoretical foundation, but Wahl and Amman (2006) also show that the impact on the amplitude of the final reconstruction is very small (~0.05°C; for further discussion of these issues see also Huybers, 2005; McIntyre and McKitrick, 2005c,d; von Storch and Zorita, 2005).

So your second sentence is completely bogus too. Strike 2!

The divergence problem with one tree ring proxy series out the the large number of proxies used in Mann's climate reconstruction was pointed out by - wait for it - Mann himself. Nobody hid anything, all of the details were published in the methodology. All data falls short of perfection - and proxy data sometimes is questionable quality - so Mann used what was reliable, excluded what was unreliable, and annotated the record to explain what was done. That's how good science works. And you seem determined to ignore the fact that other researchers have reproduced Mann's results by using other sets of proxies. Your third assertion is simply totally wrong. Strike 3, you're OUT!

Nice comprehensive rebuttal.

It is so comprehensive that it even raises questions as to whether Heartland could be open to civil lawsuits on behalf of Mann and other scientists being harassed by the Heartland funded campaign on the grounds of malicious mischief and/or libel.

I don't suppose that Cuccinelli would have exposure here, nor would the actual trolls funded to do the harassing (although in Britain this might be different). But Heartland? Maybe it would depend on what the actual marching orders to the "troops" were.

I will cross post this in the Heartland thread, as Terry suggests

[blue sky]

As usual, you troll a thread and post nothing but empty nonsense.

The most recent IPCC report, AR4, had Mann paleoclimate reconstruction, i.e. the "Hockey Stick", in section 6.6 The Last 2,000 Years. The next edition of the IPCC report, AR5, is not due to be released until 2013 and I am sure it will discuss paleoclimate reconstructions, too. Strike 1!

Of course people know what data and methodology Mann used - how on Earth do you think McIntyre & McKitrick did their botched review, or how other independent teams have validated Mann's reconstruction? Here's what the IPCC wrote about that:

McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) reported that they were unable to replicate the results of Mann et al. (1998). Wahl and Ammann (2007) showed that this was a consequence of differences in the way McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) had implemented the method of Mann et al. (1998) and that the original reconstruction could be closely duplicated using the original proxy data. McIntyre and McKitrick (2005a, raised further concerns about the details of the Mann et al. (1998) method, principally relating to the independent verification of the reconstruction against 19th-century instrumental temperature data and to the extraction of the dominant modes of variability present in a network of western North American tree ring chronologies, using Principal Components Analysis. The latter may have some theoretical foundation, but Wahl and Amman (2006) also show that the impact on the amplitude of the final reconstruction is very small (~0.05°C; for further discussion of these issues see also Huybers, 2005; McIntyre and McKitrick, 2005c,d; von Storch and Zorita, 2005).

So your second sentence is completely bogus too. Strike 2!

The divergence problem with one tree ring proxy series out the the large number of proxies used in Mann's climate reconstruction was pointed out by - wait for it - Mann himself. Nobody hid anything, all of the details were published in the methodology. All data falls short of perfection - and proxy data sometimes is questionable quality - so Mann used what was reliable, excluded what was unreliable, and annotated the record to explain what was done. That's how good science works. And you seem determined to ignore the fact that other researchers have reproduced Mann's results by using other sets of proxies. Your third assertion is simply totally wrong. Strike 3, you're OUT!

Ipcc highlighted the stick in 2001. Buried it in 2007.

United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that human activities are responsible for nearly all earth's recorded warming during the past two centuries. A widely circulated image used by the IPCC dramatically depicting these temperature trends resembles a hockey stick with three distinct parts: a flat "shaft" extending from A.D. 1000 to 1900, a "blade" shooting up from A.D. 1900 to 2000, and a range of uncertainty in temperature estimates that envelops the shaft like a "sheath." [see the figure.] This image was produced by Michael Mann, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes (Nature, 1998; Geophysical Research Letters, 1999). Last year, Mann and Phil Jones claimed to have extended estimates back to A.D. 200 (Geophysical Research Letters, 2003). However, five independent research groups have uncovered problems with the underlying reconstructions by Mann and his colleagues in their 1998 and 1999 work that have persisted through his most recent collaborative efforts, calling into question all three components of the "hockey stick."

Fractures in the Shaft. Mann and Jones indicate that globally- and hemispherically-averaged air temperatures from A.D. 200 to 1900 were nearly constant. Missing from their timeline, however, are the widely recognized Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850). Most proxy records from around the globe show these climatic events, as Willie Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas and I concluded in a 2003 paper published in Energy and the Environment. For instance:

• In such widely disparate regions as Argentina, Chile, southern Peru, southern Africa and northern China, records indicate a marked warming at the beginning of the last millennium followed by extreme cold during the middle centuries.
  
• Historical proxies for temperature - such as tree rings, ice cores and bore holes - in New Zealand, Australia and California also confirm widespread, significant warming and cooling trends.
  

Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick also pinpointed methodological problems (Energy and the Environment, 2003) that plagued the version of the "hockey stick" used by the IPCC. McIntyre and McKitrick found errors in the collection and use of varying data from multiple sources. They contend that Mann and his colleagues in their 1998 and 1999 papers unjustifiably truncated or extrapolated trends from source data, used obsolete data, made incorrect calculations, and associated data sets with incorrect geographical locations. More recently, David Chapman, Marshall Bartlett and Robert Harris (Geophysical Research Letters, 2004) identified methodological problems in a 2003 Geophysical Research Letters study by Mann and G. Schmidt. Specifically, Mann and Schmidt eliminated specific proxy records (data from bore holes) they thought were inaccurate. Chapman et al. showed that Mann and Schmidt had unjustifiably excluded the bore-hole data and concluded that their methods were "just bad science" and that they presented a "selective and inappropriate presentation" of results. Jan Esper, David Frank and Robert Wilson (EOS Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 2004) further argued that the fatal flaw with Mann, Bradley and Hughes' temperature reconstruction is its incorrect representation of longer-term trends. They observed that the statistical methods used inappropriately remove trends over long time periods. Basically, to construct their climate trend data, Mann and his colleagues used proxies with very limited data sets based on only one or two trees for the early part of the record and a methodology that removed long-term cooling trends by erroneously correlating temperature trends with the age of the tree.

This flaw in methodology was also highlighted by Henry Pollack and Jason Smerdon (Journal of Geophysical Research, 2004) and led to a retraction by Mann (and Scott Rutherford) in the Journal of Geophysical Research (June 2004). In this article they admit to underestimating the temperature variations indicated by the proxy data since 1400 by more than one-third, which explains why their previous work failed to track the Little Ice Age. While admitting this error, Mann and Rutherford fail to recognize the extent to which it undermines their historical reconstruction and its relation to present temperature trends.

Broken Blade, Bad Climate History. Recently, my colleagues and I closely examined the "blade" of Mann's latest temperature reconstruction (Geophysical Research Letters, February 2004). According to the IPCC (2001) and many other published sources, the earth warmed only 0.6°C (1°F) during the 20th century. However, that contrasts sharply with the most recent reconstruction by Mann and Jones, which shows warming over the last century of 0.95°C (1.5°F) - a temperature rise more than 50 percent larger than the IPCC claims. Mann's warming estimate has grown substantially over the last couple of years, apparently to accommodate his continuing claim that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the last two millennia, but we found that the blade of the hockey stick could not be reproduced using either the same techniques as Mann and Jones or other common statistical techniques. Since reproducibility is a hallmark of scientific inquiry and the blade does not represent the observed climate record, it is unreliable.

Tearing Holes in the Uncertainty Sheath. Mann and Jones' uncertainty assessment - the estimate of how much warmer or cooler than their reconstruction the temperature could actually have been - is based solely on how well the proxy records match the observed data. However, their assessment fails to account for several significant forms of error, including:

• Biases in hemispheric air temperatures estimates resulting from sparse and irregularly distributed instrumental records that under-represent the oceans, high latitude regions, mountainous areas (i.e., high altitudes), and non-populated landscapes;
  
• Reconstructions based on a small number of trees - including some proxy records limited to a single tree; and a spatially-limited set of proxy records - some reconstructions used less than five distinct geographic locations;
  
• The inability of a proxy record to represent regional air temperatures - because some proxy samples are contaminated by drought-sensitive species;
  
• The observed variability in both the proxy record and the instrumental record.
  

At the very least Mann and Jones should have noted these factors as potential sources of error in their results, meriting further research. My preliminary analysis indicates that the uncertainty is probably twice as large as Mann and Jones' indicate, meaning that recent temperature trends do not show unprecedented warming.

The Hockey Stick is Broken. Mann wrote the part of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001) that proclaims that nearly all of the climate change seen during the last two millennia occurred during the 20th century and that it is due to human activities. The report contends that industrialization put carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, leading to increasing global air temperatures. Furthermore, based on Mann's work, the IPCC claimed that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the last millennium and 1998 was the warmest year. But a review of the data shows that these claims are untenable. Mann's research is clearly the outlier.

Consider that if 1) the amount of uncertainty is doubled (an appropriate representation of the "sheath"), 2) appropriate 20th century increases in observed air temperature are applied (a correct representation of the "blade"), or 3) the period from A.D. 200 to 1900 correctly reproduces millennial-scale variability (a reliable representation of the "shaft"), then one can have no confidence in the claim that the 1990s are the warmest decade of the last two millennia. The assertions of Mann and his colleagues - and, consequently, the IPCC - are open to question if even one component of their temperature reconstruction is in error, let alone all three!

David R. Legates is Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware and an NCPA adjunct scholar

United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that human activities are responsible for nearly all earth's recorded warming during the past two centuries. A widely circulated image used by the IPCC dramatically depicting these temperature trends resembles a hockey stick with three distinct parts: a flat "shaft" extending from A.D. 1000 to 1900, a "blade" shooting up from A.D. 1900 to 2000, and a range of uncertainty in temperature estimates that envelops the shaft like a "sheath." [see the figure.] This image was produced by Michael Mann, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes (Nature, 1998; Geophysical Research Letters, 1999). Last year, Mann and Phil Jones claimed to have extended estimates back to A.D. 200 (Geophysical Research Letters, 2003). However, five independent research groups have uncovered problems with the underlying reconstructions by Mann and his colleagues in their 1998 and 1999 work that have persisted through his most recent collaborative efforts, calling into question all three components of the "hockey stick."

Fractures in the Shaft. Mann and Jones indicate that globally- and hemispherically-averaged air temperatures from A.D. 200 to 1900 were nearly constant. Missing from their timeline, however, are the widely recognized Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850). Most proxy records from around the globe show these climatic events, as Willie Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas and I concluded in a 2003 paper published in Energy and the Environment. For instance:

• In such widely disparate regions as Argentina, Chile, southern Peru, southern Africa and northern China, records indicate a marked warming at the beginning of the last millennium followed by extreme cold during the middle centuries.
  
• Historical proxies for temperature - such as tree rings, ice cores and bore holes - in New Zealand, Australia and California also confirm widespread, significant warming and cooling trends.
  

Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick also pinpointed methodological problems (Energy and the Environment, 2003) that plagued the version of the "hockey stick" used by the IPCC. McIntyre and McKitrick found errors in the collection and use of varying data from multiple sources. They contend that Mann and his colleagues in their 1998 and 1999 papers unjustifiably truncated or extrapolated trends from source data, used obsolete data, made incorrect calculations, and associated data sets with incorrect geographical locations. More recently, David Chapman, Marshall Bartlett and Robert Harris (Geophysical Research Letters, 2004) identified methodological problems in a 2003 Geophysical Research Letters study by Mann and G. Schmidt. Specifically, Mann and Schmidt eliminated specific proxy records (data from bore holes) they thought were inaccurate. Chapman et al. showed that Mann and Schmidt had unjustifiably excluded the bore-hole data and concluded that their methods were "just bad science" and that they presented a "selective and inappropriate presentation" of results. Jan Esper, David Frank and Robert Wilson (EOS Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 2004) further argued that the fatal flaw with Mann, Bradley and Hughes' temperature reconstruction is its incorrect representation of longer-term trends. They observed that the statistical methods used inappropriately remove trends over long time periods. Basically, to construct their climate trend data, Mann and his colleagues used proxies with very limited data sets based on only one or two trees for the early part of the record and a methodology that removed long-term cooling trends by erroneously correlating temperature trends with the age of the tree.

This flaw in methodology was also highlighted by Henry Pollack and Jason Smerdon (Journal of Geophysical Research, 2004) and led to a retraction by Mann (and Scott Rutherford) in the Journal of Geophysical Research (June 2004). In this article they admit to underestimating the temperature variations indicated by the proxy data since 1400 by more than one-third, which explains why their previous work failed to track the Little Ice Age. While admitting this error, Mann and Rutherford fail to recognize the extent to which it undermines their historical reconstruction and its relation to present temperature trends.

Broken Blade, Bad Climate History. Recently, my colleagues and I closely examined the "blade" of Mann's latest temperature reconstruction (Geophysical Research Letters, February 2004). According to the IPCC (2001) and many other published sources, the earth warmed only 0.6°C (1°F) during the 20th century. However, that contrasts sharply with the most recent reconstruction by Mann and Jones, which shows warming over the last century of 0.95°C (1.5°F) - a temperature rise more than 50 percent larger than the IPCC claims. Mann's warming estimate has grown substantially over the last couple of years, apparently to accommodate his continuing claim that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the last two millennia, but we found that the blade of the hockey stick could not be reproduced using either the same techniques as Mann and Jones or other common statistical techniques. Since reproducibility is a hallmark of scientific inquiry and the blade does not represent the observed climate record, it is unreliable.

Tearing Holes in the Uncertainty Sheath. Mann and Jones' uncertainty assessment - the estimate of how much warmer or cooler than their reconstruction the temperature could actually have been - is based solely on how well the proxy records match the observed data. However, their assessment fails to account for several significant forms of error, including:

• Biases in hemispheric air temperatures estimates resulting from sparse and irregularly distributed instrumental records that under-represent the oceans, high latitude regions, mountainous areas (i.e., high altitudes), and non-populated landscapes;
  
• Reconstructions based on a small number of trees - including some proxy records limited to a single tree; and a spatially-limited set of proxy records - some reconstructions used less than five distinct geographic locations;
  
• The inability of a proxy record to represent regional air temperatures - because some proxy samples are contaminated by drought-sensitive species;
  
• The observed variability in both the proxy record and the instrumental record.
  

At the very least Mann and Jones should have noted these factors as potential sources of error in their results, meriting further research. My preliminary analysis indicates that the uncertainty is probably twice as large as Mann and Jones' indicate, meaning that recent temperature trends do not show unprecedented warming.

The Hockey Stick is Broken. Mann wrote the part of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001) that proclaims that nearly all of the climate change seen during the last two millennia occurred during the 20th century and that it is due to human activities. The report contends that industrialization put carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, leading to increasing global air temperatures. Furthermore, based on Mann's work, the IPCC claimed that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the last millennium and 1998 was the warmest year. But a review of the data shows that these claims are untenable. Mann's research is clearly the outlier.

Consider that if 1) the amount of uncertainty is doubled (an appropriate representation of the "sheath"), 2) appropriate 20th century increases in observed air temperature are applied (a correct representation of the "blade"), or 3) the period from A.D. 200 to 1900 correctly reproduces millennial-scale variability (a reliable representation of the "shaft"), then one can have no confidence in the claim that the 1990s are the warmest decade of the last two millennia. The assertions of Mann and his colleagues - and, consequently, the IPCC - are open to question if even one component of their temperature reconstruction is in error, let alone all three!

David R. Legates is Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware and an NCPA adjunct scholar

http://www.americanwx.com/bb/index.php?app=forums&module=post&section=post&do=reply_post&f=18&t=33077&qpid=1429857

[TerryM]

David R. Legates is Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware and an NCPA adjunct scholar

David is a born again believer in "Intelligent Design" and signed "An Evangelical Response to Global Warming"

NCPA has "received over $465,900 from Exon-Mobile and was referred to as a group that "will write op-eds" by Phillip Morris

David is not allowed to refer to himself as "Delaware State Climatologist"

David is a poster child for why we should never believe anyone who is paid to lie by the Heartland Institute, the Marshall Institute or other Institutes or think tanks specifically established to propagandize scientific endeavors.

Davids ramblings might better be examined in the thread "Now We Know Who Pays our Trolls"

[dabize]

Ipcc highlighted the stick in 2001. Buried it in 2007.

United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that human activities are responsible for nearly all earth's recorded warming during the past two centuries. A widely circulated image used by the IPCC dramatically depicting these temperature trends resembles a hockey stick with three distinct parts: a flat "shaft" extending from A.D. 1000 to 1900, a "blade" shooting up from A.D. 1900 to 2000, and a range of uncertainty in temperature estimates that envelops the shaft like a "sheath." [see the figure.] This image was produced by Michael Mann, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes (Nature, 1998; Geophysical Research Letters, 1999). Last year, Mann and Phil Jones claimed to have extended estimates back to A.D. 200 (Geophysical Research Letters, 2003). However, five independent research groups have uncovered problems with the underlying reconstructions by Mann and his colleagues in their 1998 and 1999 work that have persisted through his most recent collaborative efforts, calling into question all three components of the "hockey stick."

Fractures in the Shaft. Mann and Jones indicate that globally- and hemispherically-averaged air temperatures from A.D. 200 to 1900 were nearly constant. Missing from their timeline, however, are the widely recognized Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850). Most proxy records from around the globe show these climatic events, as Willie Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas and I concluded in a 2003 paper published in Energy and the Environment. For instance:

• In such widely disparate regions as Argentina, Chile, southern Peru, southern Africa and northern China, records indicate a marked warming at the beginning of the last millennium followed by extreme cold during the middle centuries.
  
• Historical proxies for temperature - such as tree rings, ice cores and bore holes - in New Zealand, Australia and California also confirm widespread, significant warming and cooling trends.
  

Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick also pinpointed methodological problems (Energy and the Environment, 2003) that plagued the version of the "hockey stick" used by the IPCC. McIntyre and McKitrick found errors in the collection and use of varying data from multiple sources. They contend that Mann and his colleagues in their 1998 and 1999 papers unjustifiably truncated or extrapolated trends from source data, used obsolete data, made incorrect calculations, and associated data sets with incorrect geographical locations. More recently, David Chapman, Marshall Bartlett and Robert Harris (Geophysical Research Letters, 2004) identified methodological problems in a 2003 Geophysical Research Letters study by Mann and G. Schmidt. Specifically, Mann and Schmidt eliminated specific proxy records (data from bore holes) they thought were inaccurate. Chapman et al. showed that Mann and Schmidt had unjustifiably excluded the bore-hole data and concluded that their methods were "just bad science" and that they presented a "selective and inappropriate presentation" of results. Jan Esper, David Frank and Robert Wilson (EOS Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 2004) further argued that the fatal flaw with Mann, Bradley and Hughes' temperature reconstruction is its incorrect representation of longer-term trends. They observed that the statistical methods used inappropriately remove trends over long time periods. Basically, to construct their climate trend data, Mann and his colleagues used proxies with very limited data sets based on only one or two trees for the early part of the record and a methodology that removed long-term cooling trends by erroneously correlating temperature trends with the age of the tree.

This flaw in methodology was also highlighted by Henry Pollack and Jason Smerdon (Journal of Geophysical Research, 2004) and led to a retraction by Mann (and Scott Rutherford) in the Journal of Geophysical Research (June 2004). In this article they admit to underestimating the temperature variations indicated by the proxy data since 1400 by more than one-third, which explains why their previous work failed to track the Little Ice Age. While admitting this error, Mann and Rutherford fail to recognize the extent to which it undermines their historical reconstruction and its relation to present temperature trends.

Broken Blade, Bad Climate History. Recently, my colleagues and I closely examined the "blade" of Mann's latest temperature reconstruction (Geophysical Research Letters, February 2004). According to the IPCC (2001) and many other published sources, the earth warmed only 0.6°C (1°F) during the 20th century. However, that contrasts sharply with the most recent reconstruction by Mann and Jones, which shows warming over the last century of 0.95°C (1.5°F) - a temperature rise more than 50 percent larger than the IPCC claims. Mann's warming estimate has grown substantially over the last couple of years, apparently to accommodate his continuing claim that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the last two millennia, but we found that the blade of the hockey stick could not be reproduced using either the same techniques as Mann and Jones or other common statistical techniques. Since reproducibility is a hallmark of scientific inquiry and the blade does not represent the observed climate record, it is unreliable.

Tearing Holes in the Uncertainty Sheath. Mann and Jones' uncertainty assessment - the estimate of how much warmer or cooler than their reconstruction the temperature could actually have been - is based solely on how well the proxy records match the observed data. However, their assessment fails to account for several significant forms of error, including:

• Biases in hemispheric air temperatures estimates resulting from sparse and irregularly distributed instrumental records that under-represent the oceans, high latitude regions, mountainous areas (i.e., high altitudes), and non-populated landscapes;
  
• Reconstructions based on a small number of trees - including some proxy records limited to a single tree; and a spatially-limited set of proxy records - some reconstructions used less than five distinct geographic locations;
  
• The inability of a proxy record to represent regional air temperatures - because some proxy samples are contaminated by drought-sensitive species;
  
• The observed variability in both the proxy record and the instrumental record.
  

At the very least Mann and Jones should have noted these factors as potential sources of error in their results, meriting further research. My preliminary analysis indicates that the uncertainty is probably twice as large as Mann and Jones' indicate, meaning that recent temperature trends do not show unprecedented warming.

The Hockey Stick is Broken. Mann wrote the part of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001) that proclaims that nearly all of the climate change seen during the last two millennia occurred during the 20th century and that it is due to human activities. The report contends that industrialization put carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, leading to increasing global air temperatures. Furthermore, based on Mann's work, the IPCC claimed that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the last millennium and 1998 was the warmest year. But a review of the data shows that these claims are untenable. Mann's research is clearly the outlier.

Consider that if 1) the amount of uncertainty is doubled (an appropriate representation of the "sheath"), 2) appropriate 20th century increases in observed air temperature are applied (a correct representation of the "blade"), or 3) the period from A.D. 200 to 1900 correctly reproduces millennial-scale variability (a reliable representation of the "shaft"), then one can have no confidence in the claim that the 1990s are the warmest decade of the last two millennia. The assertions of Mann and his colleagues - and, consequently, the IPCC - are open to question if even one component of their temperature reconstruction is in error, let alone all three!

David R. Legates is Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware and an NCPA adjunct scholar

United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that human activities are responsible for nearly all earth's recorded warming during the past two centuries. A widely circulated image used by the IPCC dramatically depicting these temperature trends resembles a hockey stick with three distinct parts: a flat "shaft" extending from A.D. 1000 to 1900, a "blade" shooting up from A.D. 1900 to 2000, and a range of uncertainty in temperature estimates that envelops the shaft like a "sheath." [see the figure.] This image was produced by Michael Mann, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes (Nature, 1998; Geophysical Research Letters, 1999). Last year, Mann and Phil Jones claimed to have extended estimates back to A.D. 200 (Geophysical Research Letters, 2003). However, five independent research groups have uncovered problems with the underlying reconstructions by Mann and his colleagues in their 1998 and 1999 work that have persisted through his most recent collaborative efforts, calling into question all three components of the "hockey stick."

Fractures in the Shaft. Mann and Jones indicate that globally- and hemispherically-averaged air temperatures from A.D. 200 to 1900 were nearly constant. Missing from their timeline, however, are the widely recognized Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850). Most proxy records from around the globe show these climatic events, as Willie Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas and I concluded in a 2003 paper published in Energy and the Environment. For instance:

• In such widely disparate regions as Argentina, Chile, southern Peru, southern Africa and northern China, records indicate a marked warming at the beginning of the last millennium followed by extreme cold during the middle centuries.
  
• Historical proxies for temperature - such as tree rings, ice cores and bore holes - in New Zealand, Australia and California also confirm widespread, significant warming and cooling trends.
  

Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick also pinpointed methodological problems (Energy and the Environment, 2003) that plagued the version of the "hockey stick" used by the IPCC. McIntyre and McKitrick found errors in the collection and use of varying data from multiple sources. They contend that Mann and his colleagues in their 1998 and 1999 papers unjustifiably truncated or extrapolated trends from source data, used obsolete data, made incorrect calculations, and associated data sets with incorrect geographical locations. More recently, David Chapman, Marshall Bartlett and Robert Harris (Geophysical Research Letters, 2004) identified methodological problems in a 2003 Geophysical Research Letters study by Mann and G. Schmidt. Specifically, Mann and Schmidt eliminated specific proxy records (data from bore holes) they thought were inaccurate. Chapman et al. showed that Mann and Schmidt had unjustifiably excluded the bore-hole data and concluded that their methods were "just bad science" and that they presented a "selective and inappropriate presentation" of results. Jan Esper, David Frank and Robert Wilson (EOS Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, 2004) further argued that the fatal flaw with Mann, Bradley and Hughes' temperature reconstruction is its incorrect representation of longer-term trends. They observed that the statistical methods used inappropriately remove trends over long time periods. Basically, to construct their climate trend data, Mann and his colleagues used proxies with very limited data sets based on only one or two trees for the early part of the record and a methodology that removed long-term cooling trends by erroneously correlating temperature trends with the age of the tree.

This flaw in methodology was also highlighted by Henry Pollack and Jason Smerdon (Journal of Geophysical Research, 2004) and led to a retraction by Mann (and Scott Rutherford) in the Journal of Geophysical Research (June 2004). In this article they admit to underestimating the temperature variations indicated by the proxy data since 1400 by more than one-third, which explains why their previous work failed to track the Little Ice Age. While admitting this error, Mann and Rutherford fail to recognize the extent to which it undermines their historical reconstruction and its relation to present temperature trends.

Broken Blade, Bad Climate History. Recently, my colleagues and I closely examined the "blade" of Mann's latest temperature reconstruction (Geophysical Research Letters, February 2004). According to the IPCC (2001) and many other published sources, the earth warmed only 0.6°C (1°F) during the 20th century. However, that contrasts sharply with the most recent reconstruction by Mann and Jones, which shows warming over the last century of 0.95°C (1.5°F) - a temperature rise more than 50 percent larger than the IPCC claims. Mann's warming estimate has grown substantially over the last couple of years, apparently to accommodate his continuing claim that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the last two millennia, but we found that the blade of the hockey stick could not be reproduced using either the same techniques as Mann and Jones or other common statistical techniques. Since reproducibility is a hallmark of scientific inquiry and the blade does not represent the observed climate record, it is unreliable.

Tearing Holes in the Uncertainty Sheath. Mann and Jones' uncertainty assessment - the estimate of how much warmer or cooler than their reconstruction the temperature could actually have been - is based solely on how well the proxy records match the observed data. However, their assessment fails to account for several significant forms of error, including:

• Biases in hemispheric air temperatures estimates resulting from sparse and irregularly distributed instrumental records that under-represent the oceans, high latitude regions, mountainous areas (i.e., high altitudes), and non-populated landscapes;
  
• Reconstructions based on a small number of trees - including some proxy records limited to a single tree; and a spatially-limited set of proxy records - some reconstructions used less than five distinct geographic locations;
  
• The inability of a proxy record to represent regional air temperatures - because some proxy samples are contaminated by drought-sensitive species;
  
• The observed variability in both the proxy record and the instrumental record.
  

At the very least Mann and Jones should have noted these factors as potential sources of error in their results, meriting further research. My preliminary analysis indicates that the uncertainty is probably twice as large as Mann and Jones' indicate, meaning that recent temperature trends do not show unprecedented warming.

The Hockey Stick is Broken. Mann wrote the part of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001) that proclaims that nearly all of the climate change seen during the last two millennia occurred during the 20th century and that it is due to human activities. The report contends that industrialization put carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, leading to increasing global air temperatures. Furthermore, based on Mann's work, the IPCC claimed that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the last millennium and 1998 was the warmest year. But a review of the data shows that these claims are untenable. Mann's research is clearly the outlier.

Consider that if 1) the amount of uncertainty is doubled (an appropriate representation of the "sheath"), 2) appropriate 20th century increases in observed air temperature are applied (a correct representation of the "blade"), or 3) the period from A.D. 200 to 1900 correctly reproduces millennial-scale variability (a reliable representation of the "shaft"), then one can have no confidence in the claim that the 1990s are the warmest decade of the last two millennia. The assertions of Mann and his colleagues - and, consequently, the IPCC - are open to question if even one component of their temperature reconstruction is in error, let alone all three!

David R. Legates is Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware and an NCPA adjunct scholar

http://www.americanwx.com/bb/index.php?app=forums&module=post&section=post&do=reply_post&f=18&t=33077&qpid=1429857

Gish Gallop

[FPizz]

David R. Legates is Director of the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware and an NCPA adjunct scholar

David is a born again believer in "Intelligent Design" and signed "An Evangelical Response to Global Warming"

NCPA has "received over $465,900 from Exon-Mobile and was referred to as a group that "will write op-eds" by Phillip Morris

David is not allowed to refer to himself as "Delaware State Climatologist"

David is a poster child for why we should never believe anyone who is paid to lie by the Heartland Institute, the Marshall Institute or other Institutes or think tanks specifically established to propagandize scientific endeavors.

Davids ramblings might better be examined in the thread "Now We Know Who Pays our Trolls"

How about responding to what was posted for once instead of deflecting?

[TerryM]

How about responding to what was posted for once instead of deflecting?

All that was posted was a diatribe by a bought and paid for propagandist who believes the world was Intelligently Designed.

I believe I responded properly by pointing out the credentials of the person that Blue chose to represent his position.

[PhillipS]

Ipcc highlighted the stick in 2001. Buried it in 2007.

(garbage redacted)

Mann's paleoclimate reconstruction was hardly 'buried' in the AR4 report since it has its own subsection.

And posting anything from Energy & Environment does nothing to support your position. You do understand, don't you, that E & E is not really a science journal - it's just a denialist blog disguised to resemble a scientific journal. It only fools the gullible and those with impaired critical thinking. The editor, Dr. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, has gone on record to say "I'm following my political agenda -- a bit, anyway. But isn't that the right of the editor?".

I find it interesting that you would have us give more credibility to David Legates than to the National Academy of Science, which also did an assessment of Dr. Mann's research and found it to be sound. Do you not agree with their assessment,and if not why not - or do you feel that they are part of some conspiracy?

BTW - double pasting garbage doesn't turn it into gold. Just sayin'.

[dabize]

my God, the McInytre crap has been rebutted at least a dozen times, in great detail, in the last month alone. why does anyone have to continually rebut common knowledge?

The principle of the Big Lie hasn't changed since it was formulated by Stalin et. al. 70 years ago.

It's the debater's equivalent of siege warfare..........