McIntyre had the data all along

One of McIntyre’s repeated complaints about Briffa was that he refused to release his data. For example, in his post Fresh Data on Briffa’s Yamal #1:

A few days ago, I became aware that the long-sought Yamal measurement data url had materialized at Briffa’s website – after many years of effort on my part and nearly 10 years after its original use in Briffa (2000).

I am very grateful to the editors of Phil Trans B (Roy Soc) – at long last, a journal editor stood up to CRU, requiring Briffa to archive supporting data.

This got turned into statements like this one, from Tom Fuller:

The data, which the scientists had refused to release for a decade, came to light when the Royal Society of London demanded they archive their findings before publishing their latest paper.

But now McIntyre has admitted that he had the data all along. The data wasn’t Briffa’s and back in 2006, Briffa referred McIntyre to the original source:

Steve these data were produced by Swedish and Russian colleagues – will pass on your message to them]
cheers, Keith

When a reader asked him why he didn’t just get the data from the original sources, McIntyre dropped a bombshell:

In response to your point that I wasn’t “diligent enough” in pursuing the matter with the Russians, in fact, I already had a version of the data from the Russians, one that I’d had since 2004.

He had it all along and despite writing thousands and thousands of words about Yamal somehow somehow failed to mention this until now. Truly I am in awe of McIntyre’s ability to make mountains out of molehills.

The only substantive point that McIntyre made was the sample size was small, but Deep Climate reports that you get the same results with a larger sample:

Now comes new evidence that McIntyre’s accusations were completely false. And not only that, one of the Russian researchers who actually control the raw tree-ring data that McIntyre was mistakenly hounding Briffa for, has apparently confirmed that utilization of a newer more complete Yamal data set has no substantial effect on Briffa’s Yamal temperature reconstruction.

Lastly I note that Andrew Bolt back from vacation has used Yamal to declare that:

Belief in man-made global warming will soon be laughed out of existence.

Comments

#1 luminous beauty
October 14, 2009

Nasif,

You realize that TSI variability is undetectable at the Earth’s surface, don’t you?
#2 Chris O'Neill
October 14, 2009

Whale Spinor:

“Ah I see. Bizarrely enough, this wasn’t said in response to anything Nail said.
Posted by: Chris O’Neill | October 13, 2009 9:54 PM”

Correct. Bizarrely enough, it was in response to Mark’s discovery of the “gauge 3 boson”.

No shit Sherlock.
#3 Nasif Nahle
October 14, 2009

@Mark…

No, insolation and total solar irradiance are not the same thing. The total solar irradiance is the load of solar energy striking on the upper atmosphere, and insolation is the amount of solar irradiance which hits on the surface. Insolation is modified by many factors, like cloudiness, albedo, dust, aerosols, etc. TSI is not because it is the energy emitted by the Sun reaching our planet.

For your second question on protons speeds, it’s off topic and Tim Lambert has notified me on not to write on off topic issues. Please, read the next reference:

D. A. Gurnett and W. S. Kurth. Electron Plasma Oscillations Upstream of the Solar Wind Termination shock. Science; Vol. 309, pages 2025 – 2027. 23. September 2005.

There you’ll find what the speed of the GCR’s protons from the termination shock is, which is the speed that I indicated in my article.

There are many books on astrophysics that confirm the speed consigned by Gurnett and Kurth in their article published in science.
#4 Nasif Nahle
October 14, 2009

@luminous beauty…

“Nasif,

You realize that TSI variability is undetectable at the Earth’s surface, don’t you?”

You’re right; however, we can deduce it through the analysis of proxies. Solar physicists have developed a methodology for deducing the total solar irradiance from sunspots number from observations from ground (you say “surface”) observatories; for example, Judith Lean, Wang and other scientists.
#5 Nasif Nahle
October 14, 2009

Other proxies for calculating the TSI from the “surface” are 10Be, 16C, and Ca-II. The accuracy of those proxies is high and the error of calculation is into acceptable parameters. Remember that most reconstructions of TSI go back to 1610 AD, while satellite measurements of TSI started in 1976.

Another reliable proxy is hematite stained grains, assessed by Bond and colleagues. We can reconstruct the Total Solar Irradiance based on HSG from 40000 years ago up to date.

All those proxies found on the “surface”.
#6 Dave Andrews
October 14, 2009

Jeff Harvey,

40 posts since I asked you for details of your University lectures, where they could be found and if they were open to the public.

Response — zilch. Do they actually happen?
#7 Dave Andrews
October 14, 2009

Mark,

So now I’m not ‘human’?

Dang, the secret’s out, I’m a Dalek. But remember RESISTANCE IS USELESS…..RESISTENCE IS USELESS…RESISTENCE IS etc.
#8 dhogaza
October 14, 2009

But remember RESISTANCE IS USELESS…..RESISTENCE IS USELESS..

Well, at least you’ve got all the spelling bases covered …
#9 Bernard J.
October 14, 2009

Dave Andrews at [#210](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/10/mcintyre_had_the_data_all_alon.php#comment-1998028).

Ever thought that perhaps Jeff Harvey is busy doing real science rather than waiting with bated breat at his computer monitor for your every posting?

Nevertheless, if you are so keen to catch a Harvey lecture, perhaps you would go one step further and challenge him to a public debate. You live in the same corner of the world as he, and I am sure that Jeff would make space for such an event at his institution, seeing as his stance on matters bothers you so much. If he is in error you could set him straight, and it would do much to improve your firmly-cemented reputation here for producing absolutely nothing of any substance in any post that you make.

Please consider locking horns with Jeff in person. Tim Curtin threatened to do so before his trip to Europe last August, but when I tried to press him for a firm commitment he found the first excuse that he could to wriggle out of it.

I am sure that you are made of sterner stuff, so I look forward to hearing of the outcome of such a debate.
#10 Jeff Harvey
October 14, 2009

Dave Andrews,

Thanks Bernard, you summed it up perfectly.

DA: I am a scientist, I am on a sabbatical and I am doing three experiments right now, writing up a bunch of manuscripts and reviewing papers. I do not give your banal posts much priority, I am afraid.

Yes, I do give lectures on invitation and for student courses. I have spoken in several countries and at a number of universities on the interface between science and public policy. I have lectured at Princeton and Stanford Universities in the United States, Aarhus and Copenhagen in Denmark, University of Helsinki, and at a number of venues in The Netherlands.

Satisfied?
#11 A Physicist
October 14, 2009

Mark & Chris O’Neill – There are 3 gauge bosons in the standard model; photons, W & Z bosons and gluons. Grand unified theories postulate another 2 but no experimental evidence for these currently exists. The gravitational interaction may be carried by a boson called the graviton but whether it is a gauge boson is still undetermined.

However it must be clearly said that there is no such entity as a gauge 3 boson as you have stated. I suspect Whale Spinor knows this well and is having a bit of fun at your expense. His/her name is presumably a play on the Weyl Spinors which are a particular decomposition of the Dirac Spinor used to characterise particle spin.
#12 Tim Lambert
October 15, 2009

Mark, Nasif: I’ve deleted some off-topic comments. Please take it to the open thread.
#13 Mark
October 15, 2009

A Physicist, you may need to read more.

Heck, even Spinor read more than you.
#14 Dave Andrews
October 15, 2009

Jeff Harvey,

I don’t doubt that you are a busy scientist with an academic background. But you as good as said to me that I should attend some of your lectures in order to ‘improve’ my understanding.

Now, how can I do that if you are currently not lecturing?

Bernard J,

Most of your comment is completely besides the point. (see above)
#15 Chris O'Neill
October 15, 2009

Dave Andrews:

Now, how can I do that if you are currently not lecturing?

Duh, wait until he starts again.
#16 Jeff Harvey
October 15, 2009

Dave Andrews,

I will let you know the moment I go to the UK (guessing that is where you reside) to speak about politics and the environment. Promise.

Satisfied?

J
#17 Bernard J.
October 15, 2009

Dave Andrews.

If you are only interested in Jeff’s lectures in order to, as you say, ‘improve’ your understanding, rather than attending in order to improve your understanding, then I reckon that my comment is not as beside the point as you seem to think.
#18 dhogaza
October 16, 2009

I am a scientist, I am on a sabbatical and I am doing three experiments right now, writing up a bunch of manuscripts and reviewing papers. I do not give your banal posts much priority, I am afraid.

Well, surely Watts has your ass! Since he only has a high-school education, he’s not burdened with your schedule and therefore is best equipped to eliminate science as a methodology with any explanatory power!

You’ve been owned!
#19 Dave Andrews
October 16, 2009

Jeff Harvey,

Re 216, yes, look forward to it.
#20 Glen Raphael
November 5, 2009

There’s a Bill/PaulH/dhogaza exchange above regarding “the Lorax thread” at Climate Audit. The question is posed:

“It seems that the Lorax thread has been removed. What happened exactly?

to which dhagoza replies:

“I don’t know, but google finds the Lorax thread, and if you chase the link, it’s gone. But of course, only Real Climate etc censure …”

Cute. What actually happened is that Lorax himself asked Steve to remove “his” thread after somebody figured out Lorax’s Super Secret Identity and started dropping hints about it. Source: [comments at Rabett](http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/10/auditing-auditor-or-dr.html)
#21 MrPete
November 9, 2009

Wow, first time I’ve read a thread here in a long time. Y’all sure enjoy ignoring science in favor of ad hom’s! I’m sure you’ll find plenty of ad hom fodder for me. After all, even people who have a clue (including posters here) sometimes make mistakes. Even speling errors.

I’ll trust you really do want what you claim (facts, logic), so I’ll supply some in spite of the venue.

A few items of clarification:

a) Source referrals

McIntyre was NOT “referred to the original source.” Briffa said that he (Briffa) would contact the original source. Not the same. Even more important…

b) Data sets and data bases

I won’t try to explain Nasif’s “data” vs “database” as an explanation, although someone here certainly stuffed it in claiming a “flat file” is not a “database.” (A database is an organized collection of information, usually in a computer, usually automatically searchable.)

To me, this is a more useful and accurate analogy:

Knowing you have a set of data from somewhere is insufficient information to know that you have the data used by someone else for a particular analysis, especially an analysis whose details were also withheld.

I may know that both I and my neighbor have a “Quick-set” key that came from Home Depot in 2005 (if I own a reasonably new home.) That’s insufficient information to know that I have the key to my neighbor’s home.

Amazing how easily people get confused on this!

c) Blocking

(For completeness; this has been mentioned on other blogs…): someone in #161 complained about being banned from a blog due to receiving a “blocked” notice.

Get a clue, that was a message from the popular WordPress Bad Behavior antispam plugin.

Hope that’s helpful for somebody.
#22 Marco
November 9, 2009

Let me also clarify a few things, MrPete:
a) Briffa told McIntyre he would send the request on to the owners of the data. Since Briffa in his articles very clearly indicates what the source of the data is, McIntyre should have had no problem identifying who it was. And lo’ and behold, alreayd in February 2004 McIntyre had received the data from Hantemirov and Shiyatov.
b) If you are not sure you have the correct data, you can always ask whether it really is. Did McIntyre do so? No, he just kept on bugging Briffa to give him the data…

Oh, and no data analysis methodology was withheld.
#23 luminous beauty
November 9, 2009

>Get a clue, that was a message from the popular WordPress Bad Behavior antispam plugin.

So what? Bad Behavior can be configured to block individual IP addresses.
#24 Dano
November 9, 2009

Mr Pete:

Have you published your paper yet overturning the warmer paradigm? You could be the first of the Chorus, Amen crowd to actually DO something.

So, how’s the paper coming? Who has accepted the manuscript?

Let us know so we can all be the first to congratulate someone actually DOING something over there.

Best,

D
#25 Eli Rabett
November 9, 2009

Marco, allow Eli a moment. In 2004 the Russians had ALREADY sent McIntyre the data set that they had shared with Briffa. They then get an Email from Briffa, saying, this guy wants the data set. They say to themselves: Been there, done that. McIntyre then engages in a five year hissy fit.

On yes, it appears that McI got the data set from the Russians when he first asked for it and it would not be surprising if his request said, that he wants the data set that Briffa used in his 2000 paper, and they said here it is.

Piece of work.
#26 MrPete
November 9, 2009

LB, you must be thinking of another tool. BB has no such ability, and in any case, CA has never manually blocked IP’s (maybe you’re thinking of the old Spam Karma?) WP anti-spam systems do auto-block spam IP’s (Good thing, I’ve seen high volume WP sites get dozens of spams a minute…and my own email server receives multiple spam attempts per second. Totally crazy.)

M, Eli, you can surmise what you want, but McIntyre has published his communications on this. And my “key” analogy is apt. Even if Home Depot sells me a house key, that doesn’t in any way confirm that I used the key. There’s a long history of data sets being tweaked in various ways as part of the input filtering, so unless Briffa confirms his data sets, how can anyone know what’s going on?

Think about the many go-rounds Steve had with Mann et al on this. Sent here, there, everywhere, at first believing and trusting. Ultimately he was told “you didn’t use the RIGHT version of our data! Oh, we didn’t give you that did we… go look in this folder we never told you about.” One learns to be more cautious after a few such experiences.

Simple evidence that it isn’t as simple and obvious as you want to believe: nobody else was able to confirm Briffa’s data or analysis until now, including D’Arrigo et al. Why is the squash player the first to get there?

D, sorry, life’s too full lately (coworker’s kidney failure changes my Real World quite a bit.) And my perspective isn’t disproof of a paradigm but rather (a) pushing for better scientific work in this area and (b) admitting that we all know less than we think. Particularly about our ability to understand the problem and be able to engineer a solution.
#27 Tim Lambert
November 9, 2009

MrPete, Climate Audit has [accused me of deliberately blocking someone actually blocked by Bad Behavior](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/11/precondition-failed.php), so perhaps you could take it up with them?
#28 MrPete
November 11, 2009

Hi Tim,
Big Sigh. I’ll gladly bring it up. Wasn’t aware of any of this**

This is one of the frustrating aspects of my specialty (data, computers, etc). It’s bad enough when poeple get fooled by spam-trash…and here we have a supposedly “helpful” message for users of Deltoid and CA. How can anyone imagine that “Precondition Failed” is a useful message to real people?! I’m glad BB has cleaned up their messages since then!

/rant=off

** (My participation ebbs and flows… people only come and drag me in by the ear when systems go kablooey. If you guys need help with performance trouble, I may be able to help. (Check out the WPtuner plugin sometime )
#29 George
November 23, 2009

McIntyre said he had “a version” of the data; not “the data” as dishonestly summarized between the quotes.

And, if you had followed the context of his messages, you would have quickly found that there were multiple versions of this data. Furthermore, the full discussion covers the team’s failure to provide data on many counts.

Above and beyond that, if you had read this
article: The Yamal implosion
you will find that the Russian version of the data, “Yamal had little by way of a twentieth century trend. Strangely though, Briffa’s version, which had made it into print before even the Russians’, was somewhat different.”

I have to conclude that your claim is incorrect.
McIntyre had data but not Briffa’s data.

Let’s see how long this post stays up and if the article gets corrected. I’ll take some screen shots.
#30 dhogaza
November 23, 2009

McIntyre said he had “a version” of the data; not “the data” as dishonestly summarized between the quotes.

As it turns out, it was *the same*data. He says he didn’t know it was exactly the same as used, but it’s not clear he made any effort to find out, either. Questions directed to the Russians could’ve cleared it up. Of course, it’s possible McIntyre had managed to piss them off but who knows?

McIntyre had data but not Briffa’s data.

There is no “Briffa data”. Briffa’s reconstruction uses a different technique than the Russians, and gives different chronologies (they were looking at different things), but both are performed on the same data, the Russian data, which McIntyre had. Briffa’s RCS methodology is also established and published in the literature (he’s the world authority on the methodology).

The main thing one gets from a critical reading of McIntyre’s efforts to scuttle Briffa is that he really doesn’t know shit about dendrochronology work.
#31 Tallbloke
May 10, 2012

Steve McKintyre says:

Briffa had three sites: Taimyr, Tornetrask and Yamal. The first time that data on Taimyr and Tornetrask became available was in Sept 2009. Statements to the contrary are disinformation. I had obtained a data set for Hantemirov and Shiyatov 2002 from Hantemirov in 2004. There are different data versions at many of these sites (Tornetrask for example); Briffa 2000 did not provide core counts or other identifying information and one could not assume that it was the same data set as was used in Hantemirov and Shiyatov (which did not cite Briffa 2000). On an earlier occasion, I used data from Mannâs website to which i had been directed by Mannâs associate and Mann later claimed that it was the âwrongâ data and a different version materialized. I therefore take care to ensure that Iâm using the ârightâ data. As it turns out, Briffa knew that Hantemirov had sent me the data for Hantemirov and Shiyatov and could have satisfied my rquest merely by saying that he had used the same data as Hantemirov and SHiyatov and that would have satisfied my inquiry. Or just sent me the data. Thatâs what any reasonable person would have done. Instead, Osborn lied to Sciencemag saying that he didnât have the measurement data. Phil Trans B did no more than require authors to comply with journal policies. When I examined the Phl Trans B archive, I learned that the data version in Briffa e al 2008 was the same as the small dataset that I had obtained previously from Hantemitov and reported this at Climate Audit. As I said above, briffa could have answered my inquiry in a straightforward manner, but refused to do so.

Also worth noting is that Rob Wilson tried to get Yamal data from Briffa and was also refused â a refusal that was disregarded in the âinquiriesâ.
#32 NoNeedForAName
May 27, 2012

>In response to your point that I wasn’t “diligent enough” in pursuing the matter with the Russians, in fact, I already had a version of the data from the Russians, one that I’d had since 2004.

Here’s McIntyre’s next sentence: “What I didn’t know until a couple of weeks ago was that this was the actual version that Briffa had used.”

That’s some integrity OP shows.