Brown: AGW skeptics are “flat-Earthers”

The CRU computer codes are flawed, too.

Wethal on December 5, 2009 at 2:23 PM

I’m hoping for snow in Copenhagen next week. Want to see them screeching about global warming as the temperatures drop. Maybe the Gore Effect, if he’s still coming, despite cancelling the “$1200 for a handshake” bit.

Wethal on December 5, 2009 at 3:00 PM

Although McIntyre’s exposure of the “hockey stick” was upheld in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and Briffa. These appeared to confirm the rewriting of climate history in the “hockey stick”, by using quite different tree ring data from Siberia. Briffa was put in charge of the key chapter of the IPCC’s fourth report, in 2007, which dismissed all McIntyre’s criticisms.

At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.

This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a “hockey stick” pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU’s studies, which led McIntyre to dub it “the most influential tree in the world”.

But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU’s leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used “Mike [Mann]‘s Nature trick of adding in the real temps” to “Keith’s” graph, in order to “hide the decline”. Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining.

A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre’s Climate Audit, known only as “Lucy Skywalker”. She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.)

Christopher Booker, The Telegraph.

It all comes down to one friggin’ tree. And people laugh at the Druids.

Wethal on December 5, 2009 at 3:48 PM