GOP’s only scientists at ‘Scopes’ climate hearing are Richard Muller and John Christy. Go figure!
Skeptical Science debunks more Muller disinformation
by Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, March 31, 2011
UPDATE: GOP Chair Hall referred to the emails of “East Angeles"!
Muller says of surface temperature dataset, “Some of the most worrisome biases are less serious than I had thought." That’s because he doesn’t read the scientific literature!
There is a climate science hearing trial today at 10 a.m. of the full House Science Committee, “Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy” (webcast here).
The Charter (here) makes clear this is a Scopes-like trial of Climategate, since it has an extended discussion of the stolen e-mails (which it claims were “leaked” — as if!) along with innuendo-laden treatments of “Data Quality” and the “IPCC process.” The Charter never mentions the multiple vindications of the scientists whose emails were stolen and of the IPCC itself — and it omits any discussion of the massive amount of data and independent analyses that underpin our understanding of climate science. And those phony attacks are then used to question EPA’s rather obvious finding that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases are a danger to the health and well-being of Americans.
The fossil fuel-funded Tea Party and climate zombies of the GOP have turned it into the party of no science — see Tim Pawlenty: “Every one of us” running for president has flip-flopped on climate change and National Journal: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones.” So rather than calling this the Scopes trial, let’s just call it the Nopes trial.
The Democrats were allowed one witness and invited a serious climate scientist, MIT’s Kerry Emanuel. The GOP had four witnesses and invited 3 non-scientists to spread disinformation on greenhouse gas regulations and costs. Of the two actual scientists they invited, Richard Muller and John Christy, only one is actually a climate scientist. Christy, though, is also a serial disinformer. Skeptical Science debunked point by point his last testimony (see “Should you believe anything John Christy says?“). For more, see House GOP line up the usual disinformers for climate science hearing.
Muller likes to claim he is an independent, apolitical physicist trying to restore “credibility” to the temperature record. But in fact, like Christy, the Koch-funded Muller has also launched phony attacks on climate science for years (see here). Like Christy, Muller is a serial disinformer, as we’ve seen (see “Koch-funded scientist Richard Muller makes up story about Al Gore, Ralph Cicerone, and polar bears"). Indeed, Skeptical Science has begun a multipart debunking of Muller, which I repost below:
[Note: SkS accuses Muller of "misinformation" -- but the charge below has been debunked so many times in the past two years, including by the independent commissions reviewing the emails -- that it must now qualify as disinformation. Willful ignorance of the facts -- like ignorance of the law -- is no defense.]
The most cited ‘Climategate' email is one from Phil Jones discussing a graph he produced for a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, where he discusses “Mike’s trick” and “hide the decline.” A number of misconceptions have arisen concerning this email. Unfortunately, a prominent source of ‘hide the decline’ misinformation Professor Richard Muller from Berkeley. One of Muller’s errors is confusing several separate techniques, blurring them into a single “hide the decline”. Muller commits this error in a public lecture(emphasis added):
A quote came out of the emails, these leaked emails, that said “let’s use Mike’s trick to hide the decline.” That’s the words, “let’s use Mike’s trick to hide the decline.” Mike is Michael Mann, said, “Hey, trick just means mathematical trick. That’s all.” My response is I’m not worried about the word trick. I’m worried about the decline.
Muller uses the phrase “Mike’s nature trick to hide the decline” as if it’s Phil Jones’s actual words. In a lecture recorded last weekend at Berkeley, Muller continues to expound on how Michael Mann’s trick was used to hide the decline (emphasis added):
What they said is “how can we hide the decline?” And the suggestion came back from Phil Jones at the UK, “Let’s use Mike’s trick to hide the decline.” Mike’s trick consisted of erasing that data, calling it unreliable, and then substituting the temperature data from thereon. [Readers, this is a completely fabricated lie on Muller's part!]
However, the original text from Phil Jone’s email indicates otherwise:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
It’s clear that “Mike’s Nature trick” is quite separate to Keith Briffa’s “hide the decline.” Muller has taken different sections of Phil Jone’s emails and morphed them into a single phrase. To understand how this is a misleading characterisation, it’s helpful to examine exactly what “Mike’s Nature trick” and “hide the decline” refer to.
What does “hide the decline” refer to?
Phil Jones’ email is often cited as evidence of an attempt to “hide the decline in global temperatures.” This is incorrect. The decline actually refers to a decline in tree-ring density at certain high-latitude locations since 1960. However, Muller doesn’t make this error – he clearly understands that global temperatures have been rising in recent decades as indicated by the instrumental record.
Tree-ring growth has been found to match well with temperature, and hence tree-ring width and density is used to plot temperature going back hundreds of years. However, tree-rings in some high-latitude locations diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. This is known as the “divergence problem." Consequently, tree-ring data in these high-latitude locations are not considered reliable after 1960 and should not be used to represent temperature in recent decades.
In Phil Jones’ original email, he refers to a graph produced for the cover of a 2000 WMO report.
Figure 1: Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records (WMO 2000).
To construct the green line, Jones took tree-ring density data from Annual climate variability in the Holocene: interpreting the message of ancient trees (Briffa 2000). Note – the reason the paper was eventually published in 2000, not 1999, was due to a publication delay. We can see the original tree-ring density data in the figure below, taken from Briffa (2000). The green line represents Low Frequency Density (LFD) and diverges from the instrumental temperature record (the thick black line), as noted by Briffa in the caption.
Figure 2: An indication of growing season temperature changes across the whole of the northern boreal forest. The LFD curve indicates low-frequency density changes. Note the recent disparity in density and measured temperatures.
In creating the WMO graph, Jones cut off the tree-ring density curve around 1960 when it diverged from instrumental temperature and grafted the instrumental temperature onto the green line. This technique has been rightly criticised for failing to distinguish between reconstructed temperature and the instrumental temperature in a graph. However, the decline in tree-ring density is not a hidden phenomena – it’s been openly discussed in the peer-reviewed literature since 1995 (Jacoby 1995) and was also discussed in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) and Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).
Lastly, it bears remembering that other research finds tree-ring density is reliable before 1960. Briffa (1998) finds that tree-ring width and density show close agreement with temperature back to 1880. The high-latitude tree-rings that show divergence after 1960 also match closely with other non-diverging proxies going back to the Medieval Warm Period (Cook 2004). This indicates the divergence problem is restricted to modern times.
What is “Mike’s Nature trick”?
This refers to a technique (in other words, “trick of the trade”) used in a paper published in the journal Nature by lead author Michael Mann (Mann et al. 1998). The “trick” is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales. This graph is commonly known as the hockey stick.
Mann’s 1998 paper in Nature plotted temperature back to 1400 AD. The temperature reconstruction was extended back to 1000 AD and published in Mann et al 1999 which was reproduced in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR). The IPCC TAR version of Mann’s hockey stick is shown below:
Figure 3: Northern Hemisphere mean temperature anomaly in °C (IPCC TAR).
There is nothing secret about “Mike’s trick.” Both the instrumental (red) and reconstructed temperature (blue) are clearly labelled in Mann’s 1998 Nature article, the follow-up Mann et al. (1999) and the IPCC Third Assessment Report.
A common and broadly held misconception is that Mann’s hockey stick hides the decline. There is no “decline” in Mann’s reconstructions. As we shall examine shortly, the source of “the decline” come from temperature reconstructions calculated from tree-ring density at high northern latitudes (Briffa 1998). There are very few of these in Mann’s proxy data and hence his reconstructions never required removal of any declining tree-ring density.
Thus it’s clear that “Mike’s Nature trick” has nothing to do with Briffa’s “decline.” There is no “decline” in Mann et al. (1998) and Mann et al. (1999). To conflate two separate techniques via the phrase “Mike’s Nature trick to hide the decline” is adding to the glut of ‘Climategate' misinformation.
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