Climate & Climate Change

Queen’s University Belfast holds an extensive database on tree rings, particularly Irish oaks; information that may be used in the reconstruction of past climate conditions.  A request for this information from Doug Keenan under the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Legislation was disputed on the basis of intellectual property rights, compliance costs and usefulness of the information as a proxy for temperature. 

John Abbot and I review the saga and its implications in a new paper:

Accessing environmental information relating to climate change: the case of Irish oaks tree rings. Environmental Law and Management 2010 Volume 22, Issue 4, 172-181.

Quoting from the paper,

“The QUB case suggests a degree of misunderstanding with respect to some of the legal issues, which is not entirely surprising. The case also reveals confusion amongst the dendroclimatology community as to exactly which trees are useful to reconstruct past temperatures, arguably a more significant finding given the reliance on these interpretations in formulating public policy…

“Much of the tree ring data requested by Mr Keenan specifically related to Irish oaks. According to Mr Keenan, this data is extremely valuable for global warming studies for reconstructing temperatures over past millennia.  Professor Mike Baillie [a recognized expert in dendrochronology who became the public voice for QUB], however, disputes this, claiming that the oak data is not relevant to temperature reconstruction records. 

‘Although ancient oaks could give an indication of oneoff dramatic climatic events, such as droughts, they were not useful as a temperature proxy because they were highly sensitive to water availability as well as past temperatures. In my view it would be dangerous to try and make interpretations about the temperature from this data. It’s been dressed up as though we are suppressing climate data, but we have never produced climate records from our tree rings.’

Dr Rob Wilson from the University of St Andrews tree ring laboratory has concurred, stating that ‘oaks were virtually useless as a temperature proxy’.

In 1982 Professor Baillie and co-workers did in fact publish a study using oaks from 13 sites in Britain including some from Ireland, reporting temperature and rainfall reconstructions. In more recent technical publications Baillie and co-workers, however, explain that 20 years
ago dendroclimatic studies using Irish oaks were discontinued because trees growing in the British Isles are less sensitive to temperature than trees in Scandinavia and Siberia…

In light of these reservations that the temperature signal from oak trees may be difficult to determine, it is relevant to note that a multi-proxy study incorporating 47 data series, of which 37 were based on tree ring widths, with 7 from oaks, including 1 from Northern Ireland
spanning the period 1001–1970, was cited in the 2007 IPCC report.

More recently, Professor Michael Mann and co-workers have incorporated tree ring data from oaks, including Irish oak data from QUB, in multi-proxy temperature reconstructions of the last millennium in support of their famous ‘hockey stick’ temperature proxies which featured prominently in the 2001 IPCC reports, which later came under intense scrutiny for its statistical validity. In this technical paper more than 110 datasets from oaks were included in a primary set of 926 tree rings from the International Tree Ring Data Bank. For some multi-proxy reconstructions this primary dataset was reduced to 484 by statistical screening, but it is unclear to what extent the oak data was retained.

Out of curiosity I created a graph of annual average temperature anomalies based on HadCRUT3 temperature data but omitting 1943-1971 . 

I don’t for a moment believe that the HadCRUT3 data is accurate and reliable, however, I found the graph interesting.

I remind you that IPCC attributed the first half of the rising period to natural causes and the second half to human activity.

I think it looks more like consistent warming out of the Little Ice Age and the omitted period is a time when La Nina conditions dominated.  Another hypothesis is that the rise in temperature is due to increasing night-time cloud cover due to industrialisation.

Cheers, John McLean

Click on graph image for larger view.

Most people know that the stock market is a volatile place and that the price of Rio Tinto shares has fluctuated significantly both up and down over the last thirty years.  But this is how at least one modern climate scientist might go about promoting Rio Tinto shares…

The first graph shows how the price of Rio Tinto shares varied over a 30 year period up until Feb 2009.

Note that the price ALWAYS goes up.

Note that the long term linear average rise is close to $1 per year over 30 years.

The second graph tells us that over the past year the rate of increase is now about thirty times the long term average.

On this basis Mr Mann, the stockbroker, advises all his clients to sell everthing, borrow as much money as possible and buy Rio because:

Rio shares NEVER go down AND they are now going up 30 times faster than ever before.

The values used to plot the graphs are genuine.

***********

If a broker in Australia actually did this the would probably end up in jail for misleading and deceptive conduct, even though the points used to construct the graphs are all genuine.

THE Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) admits it was wrong about urban heating effects as a professional statistical analysis by Andrew Barnham exposes a BOM claim that “since 1960 the mean temperature in Australia has increased by about 0.7 °C”; the BOM assertion has no empirical scientific basis.

Read more here:  http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/11/new-retreat-from-global-warming-data-by.html

[Read more…] about Confirmation Bias at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (Part 2)

SEVERAL weeks ago on the Science Show, broadcast nationally by our ABC, the host Robyn Williams interviewed a journalist, Bob Ward, masquerading as an expert on climate science.    Mr Ward proceeded to make various inaccurate statements and false claims including that he had systematically reviewed the literature on climate science.    As a consequence of this systematic review the listener was lead to believe that Mr Ward had accurately identified a paper by Professor Bob Carter, James Cook University, as the worst paper ever published on climate science. 

In fact Mr Ward has made no systematic review, and the focus on Professor Carter and a paper he published two years previously was not news.    Furthermore Professor Carter was not invited onto the program to debate Mr Wards as suggested in the following letter, but rather to make a pre-recorded comment.

The real news that week was that Professor Carter’s new book, The Counter Consensus, was to be launched at a small function in Melbourne – something the program failed to mention.  

I complained to the ABC about the interview which I construed as a spiteful attack on Professor Carter’s credibility orchestrated by host of the science show, Robyn Williams, a well known hater of so called ‘climate sceptics’.

I received the following official reply yesterday which is complete nonsense.  Indeed the program violated the ABC’s various codes because while purporting to be factual, was inaccurate and not in context. 

[Read more…] about National Broadcaster Refuses to Apologize to Bob Carter