Massive scientific fraud: Blatant and grossly deceptive data selection ("cherrypicking") by Warmist "scientists"

Clearly, this blog has nothing, or next to nothing, to do with Global Warming. The only reason the topic ever comes up is because I believe Global Warming is used as a way for the Left to hammer at Capitalism, which in turn softens our strength of resolve in the fight against the Jihad.

And Global Warming has come up several times in comments threads recently. Some of our commenters and contributors believe that man-made Global Warming exists and is a threat. That's your right to believe it. As they say, you have a right to your own opinion, but you don't have a right to your own facts.

I think man-made Global Warming is, quite literally, the spread of Communism through different means, and I think the very idea of it is absolute bullshit. During my 46 years on this planet, I have been taught by scientists, real scientists, that we were headed for an ice age, that we were overpopulating the Earth and would eat each other like rats in a cage, that we were going to run out of oil by the late 80's, etc., etc., etc.

I was in Gifted classes when I was a young child. The classes I was in were conducted in an experimental new format, where we learned about social and environmental issues, as well as reading, writing, arithmetic, and history. In short, I was given something like the education students are given today.

I personally feel that, in a sense, I had my childhood stolen from me by teachers who were teaching me, from the time I was 9 years old, that the world was coming to an end IF WE DIDN'T DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT RIGHT AWAY, AND OF COURSE, THE GOVERNMENT IS DOING NOTHING ABOUT IT.

This is the way I was taught, and it is the way our kids are taught now. My daughter has Anthropogenic Global Warming smoke blown in her face constantly at her elementary school.

What do you think happens to children who believe the world is coming to an end, IF WE DON'T WE SOMETHING ABOUT THE PROBLEM RIGHT AWAY, AND OF COURSE, THE GOVERNMENT IS NOT DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT?

I can tell you what happens. The child grows up living is a cognitive and spiritual dissonance. On the one hand, they are told they should study hard, get good grades, and make something of themselves, and they sincerely want to do that, but at the same time, they believe there is little or no hope for them. They will likely die early, or at the best, be living in a Mad Max hell of a world, fighting for their very survival every day.

The Leftist AGW crowd is stealing the hope of our children.

I will repeat; THE LEFTIST AGW CROWD IS STEALING THE HOPE OF OUR CHILDREN.

That further weakens resolve, as our children grow up only half-believing the world is a place worth living in.

So, I bring you this, from J.R. at the Astute Bloggers:

These guys would not make a real scientist's a**hole. They were pretending to use tree-ring data to create a picture of the climate before thermometers were invented. And they claimed that their data showed no Medieval warm period but record warming in the late 20th century. And their data did exactly that. But how did they get their data? By ignoring a whole heap of data and just picking out a tiny subset of trees that suited their preconceptions. And if you use ALL the tree-ring data, you get totally opposite results. See the divergence in the graph below. Following the graph is a summary of the huge battle skeptical scientists had in order to get the raw data concerned. The Warmists knew that they had committed a repeated fraud and did their damndest to cover it up. Scientific fraud is a serious matter. They should lose their jobs.



Here’s a re-cap of this saga that should make clear the stunning importance of what Steve has found. One point of terminology: a tree ring record from a site is called a chronology, and is made up of tree ring records from individual trees at that site. Multiple tree ring series are combined using standard statistical algorithms that involve detrending and averaging (these methods are not at issue in this thread). A good chronology–good enough for research that is–should have at least 10 trees in it, and typically has much more.

1. In a 1995 Nature paper by Briffa, Schweingruber et al., they reported that 1032 was the coldest year of the millennium – right in the middle of the Medieval Warm Period. But the reconstruction depended on 3 short tree ring cores from the Polar Urals whose dating was very problematic. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=877.

2. In the 1990s, Schweingruber obtained new Polar Urals data with more securely-dated cores for the MWP. Neither Briffa nor Schweingruber published a new Polar Urals chronology using this data. An updated chronology with this data would have yielded a very different picture, namely a warm medieval era and no anomalous 20th century. Rather than using the updated Polar Urals series, Briffa calculated a new chronology from Yamal – one which had an enormous hockey stick shape. After its publication, in virtually every study, Hockey Team members dropped Polar Urals altogether and substituted Briffa’s Yamal series in its place.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=528. PS: The exception to this pattern was Esper et al (Science) 2002, which used the combined Polar Urals data. But Esper refused to provide his data. Steve got it in 2006 after extensive quasi-litigation with Science (over 30 email requests and demands).

3. Subsequently, countless studies appeared from the Team that not only used the Yamal data in place of the Polar Urals, but where Yamal had a critical impact on the relative ranking of the 20th century versus the medieval era.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3099

4. Meanwhile Briffa repeatedly refused to release the Yamal measurement data used inhis calculation despite multiple uses of this series at journals that claimed to require data archiving. E.g. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=542

5. Then one day Briffa et al. published a paper in 2008 using the Yamal series, again without archiving it. However they published in a Phil Tran Royal Soc journal which has strict data sharing rules. Steve got on the case. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3266

6. A short time ago, with the help of the journal editors, the data was pried loose and appeared at the CRU web site. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7142

7. It turns out that the late 20th century in the Yamal series has only 10 tree ring chronologies after 1990 (5 after 1995), making it too thin a sample to use (according to conventional rules). But the real problem wasn’t that there were only 5-10 late 20th century cores- there must have been a lot more. They were only using a subset of 10 cores as of 1990, but there was no reason to use a small subset. (Had these been randomly selected, this would be a thin sample, but perhaps passable. But it appears that they weren’t randomly selected.)
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7142

8. Faced with a sample in the Taymir chronology that likely had 3-4 times as many series as the Yamal chronology, Briffa added in data from other researchers’ samples taken at the Avam site, some 400 km away. He also used data from the Schweingruber sampling program circa 1990, also taken about 400 km from Taymir. Regardless of the merits or otherwise of pooling samples from such disparate locations, this establishes a precedent where Briffa added a Schweingruber site to provide additional samples. This, incidentally, ramped up the hockey-stickness of the (now Avam-) Taymir chronology.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7158

9. Steve thus looked for data from other samples at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size in the Briffa Yamal chronology. He quickly discovered a large set of 34 Schweingruber samples from living trees. Using these instead of the 12 trees in the Briffa (CRU) group that extend to the present yields Figure 2, showing a complete divergence in the 20th century. Thus the Schweingruber data completely contradicts the CRU series. Bear in mind the close collaboration of Schweingruber and Briffa all this time, and their habit of using one another’s data as needed.

10. Combining the CRU and Schweingruber data yields the green line in the 3rd figure above. While it doesn’t go down at the end, neither does it go up, and it yields a medieval era warmer than the present, on the standard interpretation. Thus the key ingredient in a lot of the studies that have been invoked to support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series (red line above) depends on the influence of a thin subsample of post-1990 chronologies and the exclusion of the (much larger) collection of readily-available Schweingruber data for the same area.

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Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me (John Ray) here

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