Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
Kåre Fog has examined the lists of alleged errors in An Incovenient Truth put out by Monckton, the CEI and so on and counted how many actual errors they found. The score: in the film and book combined there were 2 errors and 12 flaws. (Fog defines a flaw as "a misleading statement which does not fully agree with the facts".)
For comparison, Fog lists 110 errors and 208 flaws in Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist".
A complete list of the errors in AIT:
F, B p174: "We´ve had 30 so-called new diseases that have emerged in just the last quarter century." Diseases referred to in the book and/or the film are Dengue fever, Lyme disease, West Nile virus, arenavirus, Machupo virus, avian flu, Ebola virus, Marburg hermorrhagic fever, E. Coli 0157:H7, Hantavirus, Legionella, Leptospirosis, multi-drug-resistant TB, Nipah virus, SARS and Vibrio Cholerae 0139.
Most of these diseases are not affected by climate change.
F: "That is why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand." B p186: (showing a photo from one of the Tuvalu islands) "Many residents of low-lying Pacific nations have already had to evacuate their homes because of rising seas."
While some people from Tuvalu have emigrated to New Zealand because of the threat of rising sea levels, the wording implies that entire populations have left. Gore's spokeswoman said:
We acknowledge that the wording of the film here is unfortunate
I don't have room to list all of Lomborg's errors, but he has more errros than Gore makes in total just on the subject of polar bears.
Politics
Environment
Comments
Lomborg has always been laughably crazy when it comes to population biology (his first book actually claimed that since we're catching so many fish, fisheries must not be in decline), but he reaches new heights when talking about polar bears.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/29/bjorn_lomborg/index2.html
Lomborg says polar bears will escape climate change unscathed, because apparently they have the power to consciously seize control of their evolution and will choose to turn into some different sort of animal, more or less immediately. He got his diploma from Pokemon University.
Posted by: TTT | February 13, 2008 11:48 AM
But as we all know, not all errors are equal! Under the framework of £reedom $cience -- as defined by experts in the field such as Steven Milloy -- we should distinguish between freedom-loving errors and freedom-hating errors. Even 1,000,000 freedom-loving errors are nothing compared to 1 freedom-hating error. Therefore, the score isn't Gore 2 : Lomborg 110, it's more like Gore 2,000,000 : Lomborg 110. Quo errat demonstrator.
Posted by: bi | February 13, 2008 12:14 PM
I'm not completely convinced this is a fair comparison. "The Skeptical Environmentalist" contains a lot more material and covers many more subjects than An Incovenient Truth. Therefore, all things being equal one would expect more errors. However, even given that 110 to 2 is significant.
Posted by: Joshua Zelinsky | February 13, 2008 1:33 PM
Bah. The Skeptical Environmentalist is 540 dense pages of specific referenced claims. Both the movie and the book version of an Inconvenient Truth convey over an order of magnitude less textual information content and the info they do convey is mostly unreferenced and vaguely stated so it's easy to argue that the false claims made therein aren't really errors or aren't "important" errors.
Have you read the book? AIT has large type, large spacing, large margins and huge pictures, often alternating a short, narrow column of text with a two-page photograph. (You can verify this with Amazon's "search inside the book" feature - their featured "excerpt" starts with 25 lines of text in two columns with a lunar landscape taking up the bottom third of the page, then two pages of space pictures - no text at all there - then a page of black with a thin single column of text off on the upper right side of a black page.)
In short, AIT is a picture book. So errors per page probably isn't the right metric. Errors per sentence would be an umambiguous improvement. Better yet, find some way to compute the percentage of testable, specific claims made that are erroneous. I suspect Lomborg would win by that metric.
Similarly when measuring "errors per minute" in the movie, it might make sense to leave out the significant chunk of the movie where Gore is reminiscing about life back on the farm or on the campaign trail or talking about how losing his sister changed his life.
FWIW, my favorite bit of misinformation in the AIT movie was the claim that a frog in water that is heated slowly won't jump out. It's blatantly false - Gore is passing along as truth an old urban myth because he likes the symbolism of it. Which seems like the problem of the whole movie in a nutshell.
Posted by: Glen Raphael | February 13, 2008 1:39 PM
And presumably you'd want to add the, ahem, unfortunate error in claiming that a copy of the hockey stick was one of Lonnie Thompson's ice core records?
Posted by: Bishop Hill | February 13, 2008 1:49 PM
Bishop, that's being counted as a flaw, not an error. See for yourself (which should have been the first thing before posting): http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/Goreacknowledgederrors.htm
Posted by: Nils Simon | February 13, 2008 2:13 PM
I mentioned the frog partly because it's not listed in that allegedly "complete list of errors", demonstrating that the list isn't actually complete but merely some sort of representative sample. (And partly because the frog thing is an error that should have been obvious to any intelligent editor - it didn't require special domain-relevant expertise to tease out what might be going on there: it's just a flat-out lie.)
Referring to Mann's hockey stick as "Dr. Thompson's Thermometer" was actually listed (as a "flaw") in the "complete list of errors" so Fog gets half credit. I would count it as an outright error because if you look at the correct chart, the one that actually came from Lonnie Thompson, rather than the false hockey-stick chart Gore shows, the Medieval Warming Period is no longer such an insignificant red blip. Gore isn't only saying "I'm showing you data from Dr. Thompson" - that would be a flaw - he's also saying "The data from Dr. Thompson shows an insignificant MWP" - that part is the error.
Posted by: Glen Raphael | February 13, 2008 2:22 PM
5 Bishop Hill: Read the page. That's listed there as a 'flaw' (defined, as Tim notes, as "a misleading statement which does not fully agree with the facts").
Since the information appeared in a paper by Thompson (as a comparison to ice core records, to boot), but was itself a combination of MBH98 and the HadCRUT data (and was cited as such in the Thompson paper), all Gore got wrong was the citation, misleading audiences from the source.
Considering the NRC exoneration of the hockey stick's general conclusions and the point Gore was using the graph to make, correcting this flaw amounts to no change in the overall message.
I'd suggest looking a bit deeper into the 'Gore and "Thompson's Thermometer"' argument.
Posted by: Brian D | February 13, 2008 2:30 PM
Glen Raphael:
The comparison already accounts for most of your objections. Even considering only the material on global warming alone, Lomborg's errors far exceed those of Gore with flying colours:
And in terms of density:
Posted by: bi | February 13, 2008 2:38 PM
bi: I just used Amazon's "inside the book" to estimate relative densities of the two books. If the excerpts are representative as to the relative page densities, Al Gore's book would amount to 44.5 pages of Lomborg's type density. So 14 errors amount to roughly one error every three pages. So Gore still comes out better than Lomborg on a per-character metric, but not hugely so.
(Showing my work: I estimate roughly 630 lines of text per 7 pages of Skeptical Environmentalist @ 44 characters per line. I count 95 actual lines of text in 7 pages of An Inconvenient Truth @40 characters per line. Inflation factor due to less text and more pictures: 7.295. This was based on the paperback version of both books. Actual number of lines of text in AIT in the 7 pages surveyed was: {46, 0, 0, 29, 10, 0, 10})
Posted by: Glen Raphael | February 13, 2008 3:17 PM
Here is Thompson's "thermometer" and the Hockey Stick from the original paper that Gore used. People can judge for themselves if there is a "signficant" MWP in the Thompson ice core data.
http://cce.890m.com/thompson-mann-rotated.jpg
Posted by: cce | February 13, 2008 3:51 PM
11:
Good lord. That's what had the auditors red- faced and screeching? That's pretty amusing.
Posted by: Boris | February 13, 2008 4:06 PM
The chart Gore actually presented was actually even more hockeystick-ish than the version in Dr. Thompson's paper, due to creative smoothing, coloring, and recentering. The fact that the MWP was "a tiny red bump" was the result of this creative charting.
What still has auditors "screeching" is the fact that Lonnie Thompson often neglects to archive his data and it changes from one paper to the next so it's impossible to verify his calculations are correct.
Posted by: Glen Raphael | February 13, 2008 4:23 PM
Gore used the Hockey Stick from the graphic I provided (top graph). He meant to use the Thompson thermometer (bottom graph). He (or more accurately, his graphics people) improperly shaded the Hockey-Stick/Instrumental overlap, but there was no distortion in the magnitude of present day temperatures.
The MWP itself was shown as it exists in Thompson's paper. Everything above the line was shaded red. Everything below the line was shaded blue. Gore pointed to one little blip as "the Medieval warming period," but as skeptics will tell us, the MWP covers those centuries that are kinda-sorta warmer than subsequent centuries, regardless of where the line passes through them.
Posted by: cce | February 13, 2008 4:48 PM
Glen, the damn Medieval Warm Period wasn't warmer than today and probably wasn't global, according to every reconstruction made in the last ten years or so. What's your point? That Gore erroneously showed an unimportant MWP before it was clear that the MWP was unimportant? Premature accuracy?
Posted by: Barton Paul Levenson | February 13, 2008 4:50 PM
And this has what to do with Gore accidently using the wrong graphic in his book.
Standard denialist horseshit technique you're displaying here. Not merely moving the goalposts, but moving to another playing field altogether.
Posted by: dhogaza | February 13, 2008 5:09 PM
The MWP was probably global and appears to have been roughly of the same magnitude as recent warming according to a variety of recent reconstructions that don't involve tree rings. Notably, this one:
http://www.ncasi.org/publications/Detail.aspx?id=3025
McIntyre, McKitrick and others have amply demonstrated that the MWP/modern relationship you get depends on what sort of cherrypicking is being done with the data. Choose one set of ice cores and you get a warmer MWP than now; choose a different set and you get a colder one. Choose one outdated set of tree ring studies from the US and get a colder MWP; update to use the most recent set and you get a warmer one. And so on. You only get a consistent hockey stick through the combination of bad methods (according to Wegman) and bad data (according to the NAS study which said strip-bark samples should be avoided).
Posted by: Glen Raphael | February 13, 2008 5:24 PM
Glen, you should have stopped a few posts ago. By referring to Loehle's paper in Energy & Environment you are only making yourself look even more stupid.
Posted by: Ian Forrester | February 13, 2008 5:34 PM
dhogaza: Gore presented the chart of Dr. Thompson's thermometer as a form independent confirmation of the hockey stick curve. One issue with that claim is that the chart he was showing wasn't of Dr. Thompson's results. But a related question is whether Dr. Thompson's actual results - the chart Gore should have shown - do serve as independent, replicable confirmation. This is relevant to whether the AIT claim should be called an "error". In any case, some of Dr. Thompson's issues can be found here:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?cat=26
Posted by: Glen Raphael | February 13, 2008 5:37 PM
Ian: Barton said "according to every reconstruction made in the last ten years or so." Craig Loehle's paper is a recent reconstruction; Q.E.D.
Yes, the paper has been attacked by various parties. The author has since responded to various criticisms and issued an update (found at the link I gave earlier along with the original paper) which "has data, urls, a map, proper confidence intervals and hypothesis tests, and corrections to dating issues Gavin found." FWIW, he also states that "the shape of the curve didn't change appreciably."
Posted by: Glen Raphael | February 13, 2008 5:51 PM
The NRC panel concluded that the MWP was not geographically diverse and they further concluded, with the same confidence as the IPCC, that modern temperatures are warmer than at any time in at least a millennium. That was based on numerous, non-imaginary, reconstructions and the evaluation of all of the uncertainties involved.
Posted by: cce | February 13, 2008 5:58 PM
GR,
Put down the Hockey Stick.
Tell us something new.
Posted by: luminous beauty | February 13, 2008 6:07 PM
For reference, the Realclimate article on the Loehle paper: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/past-reconstructions/#more-506
Posted by: guthrie | February 13, 2008 6:25 PM
OMG. Climate Audit Freaks are here with their discredited, regurgitated arguments!!!
Posted by: Moses | February 13, 2008 6:47 PM
Yes, the paper has been attacked by various parties. The author has since responded to various criticisms and issued an update (found at the link I gave earlier along with the original paper) which "has data, urls, a map, proper confidence intervals and hypothesis tests, and corrections to dating issues Gavin found." FWIW, he also states that "the shape of the curve didn't change appreciably."
the Loehle proxies, after the corrections, end in 1935. so no "qed" what so ever.
i doubt that the Loehle trick of adding the SMOOTHED data from GISS to the 1935 reconstruction temperature would pass ANY peer review.
if you splice the GISS data onto the reconstruction and don t SMOOTH it, to lose the last 15 years, you will see that current temp might even be higher than the upper error range. if you chose an error range for modern temperature (from 1000s of THERMOMETERS) it will be TINY in comparison to the one around the Loehle reconstruction.
IF there is an overlap with the upper error range of the Loehle MWP, then it will be SMALL.
Posted by: sod | February 13, 2008 6:52 PM
And, of course, he ignored the other issues Gavin raised, without so much as mentioning that those objections had been raised.
Posted by: dhogaza | February 13, 2008 7:53 PM
Glen Raphael:
So you're saying we should judge Gore's presentation by something Gore didn't show. Holy batman.
Posted by: bi | February 13, 2008 10:27 PM
"FWIW, my favorite bit of misinformation in the AIT movie was the claim that a frog in water that is heated slowly won't jump out. It's blatantly false - Gore is passing along as truth an old urban myth because he likes the symbolism of it. Which seems like the problem of the whole movie in a nutshell."
That's just plain stupid.
Posted by: George | February 14, 2008 12:50 AM
Sod: regardless of when it ends, Loehle's "spaghetti graph" demonstrates a significant MWP with essentially global coverage. Barton made two claims - that the MWP wasn't warmer than today and that it wasn't global. I was responding primarily to the latter. We can't currently prove it was warmer then than today because our best means of determining the temperature then is to average a bunch of proxies that individually have dating and scaling uncertainties which will tend to drag down any record highs no matter how you combine them. The averages are bound to be less extreme than any highs or lows actually seen; the smoothed averages will be even more so. On top of that add in any reasonable uncertainty band and just about any conclusion at all with respect to the modern/medieval relationship will start to seem "plausible" in the IPCC sense.
Nonetheless, here's the overall mean from the original paper, which had decent global coverage and suggest a healthy MWP, one higher than the most modern /proxy-based/ measurements that met his criteria show:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2392/2047251195_13655e6124.jpg
dhogaza: Craig has responded to Gavin's arguments in other contexts but it's silly to expect every random bit of mud Gavin chose to sling would be reflected in the published corrected and improved article.
One great thing about Craig's article is that he listed objective criteria for choosing the series he did and he followed those objectives to the best of his abilities. (Many prior studies seem to have allowed a much wider latitude for cherry-picking, never making it clear why one series was included and another similar series with opposite trend excluded.) Another is that he he didn't base it on secret unarchived data or methods, making it much easier for his critics to raise legitimate issues. Lastly, he responded to most of the issues raised, resulting in a stronger paper.
There were very few criticisms that have been made of Craig Loehle's approach that weren't equally applicable to that of, say, Moberg.
Posted by: Glen Raphael | February 14, 2008 12:59 AM
Raphael, here's what Gavin wrote:
(emphasis mine)
Does this sound like "a random bit of mud"?
Especially when denialists, um, 'skeptics' themselves try to discredit the use of climate models precisely by pointing to an alleged lack of validation -- the good old "climate models can be rigged to fit any data" canard? (Yes, validation is an important issue; but the denialists are being bogus because real climate scientists do take care of validation.)
Posted by: bi | February 14, 2008 2:39 AM
And again, Raphael, what's the great idea with judging Gore's book and presentation according to something Gore didn't show?
Posted by: bi | February 14, 2008 2:45 AM
Uhg. Defending the smoothed hockey stick graph used by Gore again... What about if we find a new consenus with the latest peer reviewed paper on this subject? Loehle's 2000 year reconstruction goes back further.
Posted by: climatepatrol | February 14, 2008 4:42 AM
climatepatrol:
...what?
Posted by: bi | February 14, 2008 5:03 AM
Sod: regardless of when it ends, Loehle's "spaghetti graph" demonstrates a significant MWP with essentially global coverage. Barton made two claims - that the MWP wasn't warmer than today and that it wasn't global. I was responding primarily to the latter.
sorry Glen, but you claimed:
"the shape of the curve didn't change appreciably."
Loehle was forced to change his "end date" back from 1980 (still pretty far behind "today") to 1935. so you don t think that the form of a HOCKEY STICK changes "appreciably", when you cut of the blade?
Uhg. Defending the smoothed hockey stick graph used by Gore again... What about if we find a new consenus with the latest peer reviewed paper on this subject? Loehle's 2000 year reconstruction goes back further.
i would prefer to speak of a 1900 years reconstruction. i DO notice, that you guys prefer to leave out comments about the END DATE (1935!!!), when plotting the Loehle results.
ps: i haven t seen any evidence that E&E does peer review. if they do, they missed that Loehle had his end date wrong by 50 years. the magazin is doing it s best, to discredit its own WEAK credentials.
Posted by: sod | February 14, 2008 7:23 AM
Glen Raphael posts:
[[You only get a consistent hockey stick through the combination of bad methods (according to Wegman) and bad data (according to the NAS study which said strip-bark samples should be avoided).]]
The NAS study said that fourteen subsequent studies to Mann et al. all got hockey-stick curves, so I guess you don't know what you're talking about.
Posted by: Barton Paul Levenson | February 14, 2008 8:50 AM
Someone should be doing this with all the books on ID to reveal all the errors in them.
Posted by: Matt LaCrosse | February 14, 2008 10:15 AM
The latest version of the Hockey Stick goes back 2000 years. Others go back that far as well. In fact, the NRC report was titled "Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years." They concluded that you can only go back to about 900 AD and still retain any confidence in the results.
Posted by: cce | February 14, 2008 10:39 AM
Barton: The NAS study didn't bother to determine whether those subsequent studies shared the same flaws as MBH. For instance, NAS said strip bark samples should be avoided, but many of those subsequent studies used strip bark samples. You can't reasonably say "sure, this study had flaws X and Y, but its conclusions were broadly confirmed by other studies (that also had flaws X and Y), so the flaws in the original study don't matter." That's essentially what NAS did.
The more general problem is that the subsequent studies weren't really independent - they didn't just use the same type of data, they often used the exact same series. To get independent confirmation, you'd need to go out and collect new data that hadn't already been mined and analyzed as part of the original argument you're trying to confirm.
Bring the proxies up to date!
http://www.climateaudit.org/index.php?p=89
Matt: this sort of error-auditing often been done with ID and creationism sources. Google "talk.origins" and "talk design" for a starting point.
Posted by: Glen Raphael | February 14, 2008 11:15 AM
LOL!
ROTFL!
(Apologies for explaining the joke: it's correct, grammatical Latin and means "thereby errs the demonstrator". Where did you get this gem? Did you discover it yourself?)
Posted by: David Marjanović | February 14, 2008 11:48 AM
Glen Raphael plays the stripped bark card.
I'd like Mr. Raphael to explain exactly what the problems associated with core sampling of trees with stripped bark are.
Color me suspicious how this throw away line with no supporting discussion or explanation made it's way into the NAS review.
It is not surprising it has become an icon of the CAuditors and their transcendental capabilities of weaving such apparently indubitable doubt from the most gossamer of threads.
Posted by: luminous beauty | February 14, 2008 11:53 AM
It does peer review but it's not a scientific journal (except maybe "social" or "political" science) so who knows what qualifications the "peer reviewers" have. The editor does not claim to use peer scientists for reviewing.
So which proxies apart from Fennoscandia (which is in Europe) show any significant MWP? Answer: none.
All of this to-do over a paper that has nothing to do with showing that global warming is happening, it merely shows how significant the current global warming is compared with natural climate variations over the last 1000 years.
Posted by: Chris O'Neill | February 14, 2008 1:10 PM
David Marjanović:
Oh... I found it on Wikipedia.
On £reedom $cience, I must admit a shameful error: while replying to the post Riyadh Lafta, I discovered that the methodology of £reedom $cience isn't the totally unprincipled mess that I thought it was. The truth is that £reedom $cience is a long, arduous, painstaking, and rigorous process. The selection of Patriotic Americans for the research team, the removal of liberal bias, and the submission of the fruits of research to Peer Review (by reviewers such as Michelle Malkin et al.) -- each of these steps is fraught with great difficulty, and must be executed with extreme care.
(On a less flippant note, it does now seem that movementarians have erected their very own "rigorous" "academic process", except it's organized along totally different principles.)
= = =
Regarding my point on validation, I hear Raphael saying,
And luminous beauty says,
I nominate the above phrase for the award of Best Phrase Ever. :)
Posted by: bi | February 14, 2008 1:22 PM
It's at that point that Mr. Raphael and Mr. McIntyre suffer from cognitive failure. Their comfort zone is the quote: NAS said strip bark samples "should be avoided". Don't expect them to ever venture outside their comfort zone.
Posted by: Chris O'Neill | February 14, 2008 1:26 PM
What's the problem with this or another kind of peer review of the new reconstruction? The important thing is that the non-treering proxies Loehle had already been peer-reviewed to start with. I would like to ask the specialists here if you know an exact description about the proxies used and the splicing of proxy data with giss data? Heck. It was about as warm as now at the peak of the early mevieval warm period. The short-term peaks (less than 29 years) may have been higher such as for instance January 2007 was about 0.8°K higher than January 2008. So what's this unprecedented warming if the whole globe can cool by 0.8°C in one year?
Posted by: climatepatrol | February 14, 2008 3:26 PM
the proxies used and the splicing of proxy data with giss data? : In the mann spaghetti graph I mean?? What does make Mann more credible a source than Loehle? Politics? Majority rules? Or the description of the accurate science?
What do barks tell us about the winter season? Close to nothing in higher latitudes. That's high school knowledge, isn't it?
Posted by: climatepatrol | February 14, 2008 3:30 PM
climatepatrol:
You're so open-minded and so interested in the subject that you can't be bothered to read the explanations people have already given?
Oh sorry, I shouldn't have asked. After all, the open-minded, skeptical climatepatrol has branded me as an "evil mind".
Posted by: bi | February 14, 2008 3:38 PM
I know the answer to some of my questions have already been given. Gavin of RC seems to be some sort of archscientist in the AGW community. Most people feel save just to quote him.
Posted by: climatepatrol | February 14, 2008 3:41 PM
OK bi. The human heart/mind is ever so deceiving. No bi, I don't judge you. No man and no woman is only good or only bad. Neither am I:-). As long as you discuss in a fair way and bring new basis for discussion, I'll try to respond. But where you just linked my eye is where I didn't find any relevance. Sorry. There was relevance by LB alright. It led to an article by Gavin I had already read. Nothing new under the sun:-).
Posted by: climatepatrol | February 14, 2008 3:52 PM
luminous: As I understand it, the problem with strip bark samples is that their relationship to temperature is unclear.
Problem #1: strip bark samples show too strong a growth signal in the early 20th century to be merely reflecting temperature. A popular theory regarding this is that the extra growth is due to CO2 fertilization, but not everyone accepts this theory and it's not clear how much one should correct for it to improve the signal.
Problem #2 aka "the divergence problem": strip bark samples often suggest cooling in the 1990s. If you take some series used in MBH which ended in the 1960s or the 1980s and go back to resample (Gavin would call this "validating using out-of-sample data" :-) ), you would expect to find warming in the 80s and 90s, but this is not the case. Rather, you often find a flat or declining signal.
Again, there are interesting and potentially plausible theories to account for it. For instance, perhaps the tree growth/temperature relationship is an inverse U shape rather than linear, where you get more growth up to some optimum temperature level, then you start to get less growth when the temperature exceeds that level. If this is true, then it could prevent tree samples from correctly showing how warm it was in the distant past; we would expect it to "diverge" then just as it has today.
Problem #3: the most likely connection should be between tree growth and local temperature, but often the strip bark samples show a spike that is particularly unrelated to local thermometer-measured temps. Mannians have been known to introduce the notion of "teleconnection" to deal with this sort of thing - perhaps the temperature increase over here somehow affects the climate in other ways that improve tree growth over there.
In summary, strip-bark trees don't make a good temperature proxy today - when we have good temperature records - so the case for using them as a temperature proxy for centuries ago has issues. Until these issues are resolved, their use should be avoided. As the NAS recommended.
Posted by: Glen Raphael | February 14, 2008 4:36 PM
What does make Mann more credible a source than Loehle?
you mean apart from Mann being a climate scientist?
and apart from publishing in REAL scientific magazins?
your hero Craig Loehle is working for an institution, that describes its purpose like this:
NCASI's Mission: To serve the forest products industry as a center of excellence for providing technical information and scientific research needed to achieve the industry's environmental goals and principles.
http://www.ncasi.org/about/default.aspx
Posted by: sod | February 14, 2008 5:04 PM
If you expect to be taken seriously by scientists, you don't ignore the kind of criticism you'd get if you were to submit a paper to a scientific journal. Especially when that criticism comes from a leading scientist in the field, and when you can't get any support from any other reputable scientist in the field.
The paper would never have passed peer review if it had been submitted to a serious venue.
Posted by: dhogaza | February 14, 2008 6:19 PM
NAS's "While "strip-bark" samples should be avoided" quote is based on the paragraph on the previous page of their report that begins with "The possibility that increasing tree ring widths in modern times might be driven by increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, rather than increasing temperatures, was first proposed by LaMarche et al. (1984) for bristlecone pines". So they're not suggesting (and neither does anyone else) that there is any problem with this proxy before atmospheric CO2 levels started to increase. Indeed, MBH99 shows very good agreement between the North American PC#1 and the composite northern treeline series (which only goes back usefully to 1428 AD) until rising CO2 levels started making a difference. (Or perhaps we should tell those naughty northern treeline trees not to "teleconnect" with bristlecone pines.) So the bottom line is that bristlecone pines make good proxies before CO2 levels started to rise and the only significant issue for using them in reconstructions for this period is how to calibrate them. So arguments over anything other than calibration don't make sense.
Posted by: Chris O'Neill | February 14, 2008 6:47 PM
dhogan: Every proxy Loehle used had already been previously validated as a temperature signal in the published scientific literature, putting him well ahead of many of the studies Gavin supports. Nobody is saying Craig should ignore any criticisms or that this is the final word on the matter, but the question of what needs to be addressed in this article (as opposed to some future one) is not Gavin's decision or yours. This well may not be the article Gavin would have written but it stands on its own merit doing exactly what it claims to do and acknowledging what it doesn't. You might even want to try reading the paper before dismissing it based on Gavin's sneering assessment.
Chris wrote: "So which proxies apart from Fennoscandia (which is in Europe) show any significant MWP? Answer: none."
Good grief. Maybe it's too much to get you guys to read the entire original Lohle paper, but how about just the supplement? It's short, really. Here's a link:
http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/AGW/Loehle/SupplementaryInfo.pdf
The "References" has some nice plots starting on page 14.
Posted by: Glen Raphael | February 14, 2008 6:57 PM
and
There seems to be some misunderstanding of what gives "peer review" its value and consequently the value of papers that are "peer reviewed". A "peer" review is only as good as its reviewer's expertise in the subject so if, for example, Einstein's paper on the photo-electric effect had only been reviewed by zoologists then I very much doubt that he would ever have got a Nobel prize for it, regardless of how good the reviewers might have been as zoologists. The same thing goes for reviewers for "Energy and Environment". The editor makes no claim that her reviewers are credible climate scientists so the papers it publishes are not credible climate science papers.
Posted by: Chris O'Neill | February 14, 2008 7:38 PM
You may find this link of interest:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shaopeng/97GL01846.pdf
Posted by: Alan D. McIntire | February 14, 2008 11:58 PM
Alan, the paper you link has already been discussed here. Only skeptics take it as showing a MWP.
Posted by: Tim Lambert | February 15, 2008 2:37 AM
53-#56
Sorry, Tim, I take your hint that we should stick to the main topic. We skeptics just have to accept the fact that school books regarding the MWP have to be rewritten since the existence of the IPCC and that Gore represents the mainstream with his presentation on this one (Science, Nature, AGU,...) albeit labelled as "flawed".
Nevertheless, here is a list of the 18 previously peer-reviewed "proxy record papers" as used by Loehle (not just bore wholes):Loehle proxies
Posted by: climatepatrol | February 15, 2008 5:39 AM
climatepatrol:
Why not, you know, "stick to the main topic", which is Gore vs. Lomborg?
We're talking about grave issues like massive flooding and loss of arable lands, climatepatrol. Not some fantasy issue about what you want your precious textbook to read like.
The "flaw" was just in saying "Thompson" instead of "Mann". Way to go in manufacturing a mountain of doubt from a shred of nothing.
Posted by: bi | February 15, 2008 5:56 AM
Sure. I brought this to an end I hope. And if you really want to talk about those grave issues and not merely the adaption of polar bears to a changing environment (with or without AGW), here is the link to an online version of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Posted by: climatepatrol | February 15, 2008 7:00 AM
Glen,
Nothing in your rant explains why stripped bark trees should be avoided. Any of your problems could apply to any set of trees. They are problems of selection. Some tree's growth is dominated by moisture changes, others by temperature changes, some by fire incidents, some by disease and insect infestations, some by changes is soil, some provide a record of regional volcanic activity, some have no useful information at all. That they could be problems with MBH98 are belied by MBH's careful and expert selection and validation process, which the CAuditors ignore in favor of their fevered fantasia of imagining remotely possible errors that, if they were real, still wouldn't amount to a hill of beans.
Why do professional dendrochronologists avoid stripped bark trees as a general principle? What is different about bristlecone pines that makes them an exception to that general principle?
If you can answer these questions, I'll begin to believe you might have the slightest grasp of the subject.
Posted by: luminous beauty | February 15, 2008 10:12 AM
Only in the event that they contain claims about the MWP being global rather than just European. Since the historical records were only European, there was never justification for claiming global observation.
Posted by: Chris O'Neill | February 15, 2008 10:24 AM