Tree rings record manure not temperature

[Richard111]

Very much a tongue in cheek title but a lot of truth in there.

Do read this link from WUWT:

A hands on view of tree growth and tree rings – one explanation for Briffa’s YAD061 lone tree core

It was like a breath of fresh air to read the opinions of a man who loves his work.

Did not post it here because I am not sure of the etiquet. (would be better here, more people may read it)

[admin]I have no problem with anyone excerpting from a source,as long it does NOT exceed 25% of the article,and that a link is posted back to the source,from where it came from.[/admin]

[Sunsettommy]

Two or three years ago,I posted at Climate Audit pointing out ,that the Bristlecone tree ring data Dr. Mann used as part of his paper,was a poor choice for constructing proxy data base for past 1,000 years of Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction.

I stated then that the tree's in question live in a cold high altitude climate,that does not reasonably represent a connection to most of the Western United States climate,since it is in ISOLATED climate niche,since the growing season is very short and any cooling or warming trend in such rare locations,will be STILL be an isolated climate niche.

Steve did not seem to understand how insignificant such data is,since it represents a TINY climate zone,and no where else in America! It is NOT a represenative sample!

[Mike Davis]

SST:
I tend to read that site but seldom post there as well as WUWT. The Dedros have stange ideas about what the rings represent and think they can extract seperate temperature from some of the rings when they are in a stressed environment such as high altitude or latitude. I think that temperature is a limiting factor but the minimum temperature is more important than the max and extremes in min and max would display similar characteristics of stress. But all of that ignores the effects of moisture and food. There are many combinations that needed to be accounted for before one factor could be extracted from the whole.

[Sunsettommy]

[quote author=Mike Davis link=topic=264.msg1873#msg1873 date=1254622618]
SST:
I tend to read that site but seldom post there as well as WUWT. The Dedros have stange ideas about what the rings represent and think they can extract seperate temperature from some of the rings when they are in a stressed environment such as high altitude or latitude. I think that temperature is a limiting factor but the minimum temperature is more important than the max and extremes in min and max would display similar characteristics of stress. But all of that ignores the effects of moisture and food. There are many combinations that needed to be accounted for before one factor could be extracted from the whole.
[/quote]

Yeah the rings are formed by many climatic and biological variables,some difficult to measure,and some that may not be thought of at all.

It is a weak proxy in my opinion.

[Richard111]

It was explained to me many years ago how tree rings from different trees could be used to establish a very accurate short term timeline extending a few thousands of years. This was a valuable tool for dating geological finds. Don't remember temperature being discussed. A similar sequence of narrow to wide rings established a similar period of YEARS where the trees exhibited similar growth rates.

There should be educational material available that explains how to extract temperature changes from tree rings at Universities. My kid has graduated so I can't ask. Anyone?

[Richard S Courtney.]

Friends:

There are three issues which seem to be being confused here.

The first is the issue of scientific practice.

Briffa is seriously ill with kidney failure and it is to be hoped that he will soon be able to make a full recovery. Assuming he does recover then he will need to defend against a prima facie case of his serious scientific malpractice. That case is as follows.

Data which were in the possession of Briffa have been obtained for scrutiny by the scientific community. This revealed that there was a large data set and Briffa selected from that data set for conduct of his analysis. He published that analysis and its results.
But, importantly,
Briffa failed to state that he had selected from a larger data set
and
Briffa failed to state any criteria he used for his selection.

These failures invalidate Briffa’s analysis. Indeed, they are a severe scientific malpractice that is tantamount to fraud in that they misrepresent the analysis which Briffa conducted.

The second issue is the validity of dendrochronology studies of past climates.

This issue arose when Mann, Bradley & Hughes published their 1998 paper (known as MBH98) that provided the first Hockey Stick. It purported to be an analysis of tree rings (i.e. a dendrochronology study) which showed global temperature was near constant for a thousand years until global temperature rose rapidly through the twentieth century. The resulting graph of global temperature v. time was known as a hockey stick graph because the shape of the graph is similar to the shape of an ice-hockey stick: the near-constant temperature period resembling the handle and the rapid rise resembling the blade of the stick.

The analysis in MBH98 is probably the most discredited analysis in the recent history of science having been shown to be flawed by McIntyre & McKitrick (known a M&M) in a two papers they published in E&E (in 2003 and 2006) and in GRL (in 2005), and the flaws in MBH98 found by M&M were confirmed to be correct by expert committees appointed for the task by the US Senate and the US National Academy of Science.

Perhaps the most serious of the flaws in MBH98 was that the statistical method used by Mann, Bradley & Hughes tends to generate a graph of hockey stick form when provided with any data. Indeed, use of the method to analyse random data in the form of red noise generates a hockey stick nine out of ten times. Hence, obtaining a hockey stick graph by use of that method only indicates the nature of the method, and it indicates nothing about the data that was processed by use of the method.

The IPCC had published the MBH 98 hockey stick in its Third Assessment Report (TAR: 2001). Indeed, the TAR published it in eighteen different places including in its Summary for Policymakers. But Fourth Assessment Report (2007) of the IPCC did not publish the MBH 98 hockey stick and did not mention it because it had been completely discredited by then.

The Wegman Committee had investigated the improper statistics used to generate the MBH98 hockey stick. That Committee reported that there is a clique of researchers who share the same data, jointly publish, and peer review the publications of each other. Mann, Bradley, Hughes and Briffa are leading members of that clique.

The clique continued to publish papers using the same data and the same and similar methods. Indeed, they continued as though MBH98 had not been discredited and supporters of climate alarmism (e.g. RealClimate.org) promoted a surreal pretence that MBH98 had not been discredited.

But there is a problem with the use of tree rings to determine past temperatures that is more fundamental than the analysis method; viz. trees are not thermometers.

Tree growth is affected by several things including frost damage, variations in water supply, and periods of disease. There is no method to travel back in time to determine if and when growth of a tree was affected by such variables. Hence, the past temperature indications of dendrochronology can vary as a result of the samples of trees which are analysed.

Furthermore, there is a so-called divergence problem. Trees that seem to show a correlation between temperature and growth rate prior to 1970 fail to show the correlation after 1970. This is assumed to be a result of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration fertilising tree growth after 1970.

Whatever the reason for the divergence problem, the problem is severe. If an effect destroys the correlation after 1970 then it cannot be known if that or some other effect destroyed the correlation in times past. Carbon dioxide is not the only nutrient available to trees that varies with time; for example, water does, too.

Even if it is assumed that the observed divergence problem is a function of recent elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and, therefore, it is unique to modern times, it cannot be known that similar divergence has not happened for a variety of possible reasons in the past.

The Briffa analysis provides a variety of results depending on which samples of the available trees are analysed. It does not matter if the variation is large or small because the sampled trees are a convenience sample (i.e. the only data that is available) and is not a random sample so statistical assessments of variance are not valid.

Importantly, the discovery that Briffa used a selection of data from the available data means his analysis is invalid. He did not use all the available data, he did not reject data for any stated a priori reason, and he did not select data for use according to any a priori reason.

Any post hoc explanation for his data selection cannot correct his analysis because post hoc justifications cannot – and do not – overcome a flawed a priori choice of selection (failure to state selection criteria is a very severe flaw).

The Wegman Report is extremely important to this. The clique peer reviewed Briffa’s analysis and agreed publication of Briffa’s analysis. But it is a known fact that they shared the data with Briffa and, therefore, they must have known his data selection was invalid.

Hence, the dendrochronology studies of past climates are now known to be completely invalid. The investigations of MBH98 showed that the dendrochronology studies use statistical analysis methods that provide wrong indications, the analysed data are imperfect, and the divergence problem is unresolved. In addition to all that, the recent disclosure shows that data selection is flawed, and peer review of publications by the clique is worthless.

The third issue is validity of published science papers.

The Wegman Report expressed concern at the existence of the clique. And the recent disclosure proves the correctness of that concern. The clique fails to conduct proper peer review but accepts obviously flawed papers for publication. (There is also some evidence that the clique also acts to reject sound papers for publication when those papers oppose the views promoted by the clique, but this is not the place to discuss that).

It is proper scientific practice to ensure that all publications are accompanied by provision of all pertinent data related to that publication. This ensures that readers of the publication can replicate the work with a view to confirming or rejecting it. (Incidentally, this requirement to provide all pertinent data is one reason why most commercial research is not published in public literature).

But several journals have not ensured that publications are accompanied by provision of all pertinent data: M&M have been seeking dendrochronology data from Nature, Science and GRL for a decade.

The Editor of the Philosohical Transactions B of the Royal Society of London has upheld the proper practice of ensuring that all the dendrochronolgy data pertaining to Briffa’s paper are available. This has resulted in the revelations I discuss above.

Hence, the peer review and data provision practices of several leading scientific journals are now known to be severely corrupted.

Richard

[JohnWho]

Yet there are so many who accept these studies, especially since they've been "peer reviewed".

Unbelievable!

[Richard111]

[quote author=JohnWho link=topic=264.msg1886#msg1886 date=1254796826]
Yet there are so many who accept these studies, especially since they've been "peer reviewed".

Unbelievable!


[/quote]

Not at all!

Ministers target climate change doubters in prime-time TV advert


The UK government has an agenda and it is nothing to do with climate. It has seen the ultimate opportunity to gain control over the population and it is using taxation to further this agenda.

If you are going to teach your children about the future explain how gulags come about.

[Richard111]

Give your children a copy of the book "Anthem" by Ann Rand. Read it yourself too.

[Richard111]

Gosh! This is on the BBC !!!!!

Cosmic pattern to UK tree growth

Quote:The growth of British trees appears to follow a cosmic pattern, with trees growing faster when high levels of cosmic radiation arrive from space.

Researchers made the discovery studying how growth rings of spruce trees have varied over the past half a century.

As yet, they cannot explain the pattern, but variation in cosmic rays impacted tree growth more than changes in temperature or precipitation.

The study is published in the scientific journal New Phytologist.

[Sunsettommy]

LOL,

I am sure Dr. Mann accounted for that,in his "Hockey Stick" paper.

:

[Richard111]

Why Are Dendro Shafts So Straight?

WOW oh WOW!!!! Read this! It seems any given treering width is a composite of at least the annual temperature of the last 20 years and possibly up to the last 60 years!!!

To me this means treering data is meaningless as a temperature indicator.

[Sunsettommy]

If i recall it was Dr. Isdo who published a Bristlecone tree ring paper that stated that it was useful for measuring precipitation and not for temperature.

That some of the data in that paper was taken by Dr. Mann for his silly H.S. paper and thought it was based on temperature.

It has been years since I read about it so I do not have the link.