Global Warming => Global Cooling ? The Big Chill

[AdD 1]

Recently on this forum I came across a post by a fellow Canadian asking why global warming is bad for a country with so much land rendered useless by permafrost. The short answer has to do with what is trapped in the permafrost, large quantities of methane. When released into the atmosphere, methane is much worse than CO2 because it traps 50 times more heat. Thus, as temperatures in the arctic rise, a vicious cycle of greenhouse gas release will occur. Even if all emissions from human activities stopped today, we may have already triggered a period of warming we are completely unable to influence.
So what, you ask? You Canadians will have some prime real estate! Well, maybe, and maybe not. As the recent movie "The Day After Tomorrow" touched on, the currently observed melting of arctic ice has the potential to upset the delicate balance of salinity that drives the North Atlantic current.

SUDDEN CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH HUMAN HISTORY
by Jonathan Adams and Randy Foote

"Assume that the Arctic ice began to melt. Ocean circulation modeling studies suggest that a relatively small increase in freshwater flux to the Arctic Sea could cause deep water production in the North Atlantic to cease. During glacial phases, the trigger for a shut-off was the sudden emptying into the northern seas of a lake formed along the edge of a large ice sheet on land (for instance, the very large ice-dammed lake that existed in western Siberia), or a diversion of a meltwater stream into the path of the Gulf Stream (as seems to have occurred as part of the trigger for the Younger Dryas cold event). A pulse of fresh river water would dilute the dense, salty Gulf Stream and float on top, forming a temporary lid that stopped the sinking and pulling of water that drives the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream could weaken or switch off altogether, breaking the 'conveyer belt' and allowing a sea ice cap to form, preventing the Gulf Stream from starting up again. Theoretically, the whole process could occur very rapidly, in the space of just a few decades or even several years. The result could be a very sudden climate change to colder conditions, as has happened many times in the area around the North Atlantic during the last 100,000 years. "
http://dieoff.org/page127.htm

Well guess what, the ice is melting . Where do we go from here? Hope we won't need igloos.

Life is ez
On the dz
Every jumper's dream
3 rigs and an airstream

[rushmc 23]

The ice is melting here and on Mars. Why because the sun is in a period of putting out more energy.
(a reason for golbal heating not caused by man?)

But I am sure GWB caused the sun to get hotter too

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[Gravitymaster 0]

From the site he quoted:

Sudden transitions after 115,000 years ago:

The Eemian interglacial seems to have ended in a sudden cooling event about 110,000 years ago, recorded from Ice cores, ocean sediment cores and pollen records from across Eurasia. Following the end of the Eemian, a large number of other sudden changes and short-lived warm and cold events have been documented. These are most prominent in the ice-core record of Greenland and the pollen records of Europe, suggesting that they were most intense in the North Atlantic region.

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A new detailed study of two Greenland ice cores (GRIP and GISP2), just published in Science (Taylor et al. 1997), suggests that the main Younger Dryas-to-Holocene warming (about 11,000 years ago) took several decades in the Arctic, but was marked by a series of sudden steps in warming, each taking less than 5 years. About half of the warming was concentrated into a single period of less than 15 years. A rapid global rise in methane production at the same time suggests that the warming and moistening of climate (causing more methane output from swamps and other biotic sources) was a globally synchronized change, with the water vapor content of the atmosphere as the most likely 'messenger' in this transition, by virtue of its effect as a greenhouse gas (see below).

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Other sudden climate transitions since the start of the Holocene: Following the sudden start of the Holocene about 11,000 years ago, there have been a number of sudden, widespread climate changes recorded from the palaeoclimatic record around the world. The most striking of these is a sudden cooling event, about 8,200 years ago and giving cool, dry conditions lasting perhaps 200 years before a rapid return to conditions warmer (and generally moister) than the present. This event is detectable in the Greenland ice cores, where the cooling seems to have been about half-way as severe as the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene difference. This change again hit the European population hard, leaving a vacuum into which came new peoples, when the climate again warmed. This new population was proto-Indo-European, and likely brought into Europe the beginnings of the Neolithic, agricultural, culture, which had arisen in the Middle East in response to climate stress.

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Assume that the Arctic ice began to melt. Ocean circulation modeling studies suggest that a relatively small increase in freshwater flux to the Arctic Sea could cause deep water production in the North Atlantic to cease. During glacial phases, the trigger for a shut-off was the sudden emptying into the northern seas of a lake formed along the edge of a large ice sheet on land (for instance, the very large ice-dammed lake that existed in western Siberia), or a diversion of a meltwater stream into the path of the Gulf Stream (as seems to have occurred as part of the trigger for the Younger Dryas cold event). A pulse of fresh river water would dilute the dense, salty Gulf Stream and float on top, forming a temporary lid that stopped the sinking and pulling of water that drives the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream could weaken or switch off altogether, breaking the 'conveyer belt' and allowing a sea ice cap to form, preventing the Gulf Stream from starting up again. Theoretically, the whole process could occur very rapidly, in the space of just a few decades or even several years. The result could be a very sudden climate change to colder conditions, as has happened many times in the area around the North Atlantic during the last 100,000 years.

All in all, a very interesting article definitely worth a read.

[kallend 2,148]

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The ice is melting here and on Mars. Why because the sun is in a period of putting out more energy.
(a reason for golbal heating not caused by man?)

But I am sure GWB caused the sun to get hotter too

Have you done the calculations to indicate what % of global warming is due to the Sun, and what % is due to the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Thought not.

Best to leave science to scientists, faith to churches, and lying spin to politicians.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[Andrewwhyte 1]

Damn! There goes my Club Med Tuktoyaktuk idea. There's this nice spot just east of Kugmalik Bay I had all picked out.
Oh well, back to selling the tar sands to the yanks.

[EricTheRed 0]

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The ice is melting here and on Mars. Why because the sun is in a period of putting out more energy.
(a reason for golbal heating not caused by man?)

But I am sure GWB caused the sun to get hotter too

Do you ever get tired of being a parrot. Seems this is the only verse you know.

illegible usually

[rushmc 23]

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The ice is melting here and on Mars. Why because the sun is in a period of putting out more energy.
(a reason for golbal heating not caused by man?)

But I am sure GWB caused the sun to get hotter too

Do you ever get tired of being a parrot. Seems this is the only verse you know.

What a joke of a statement I am getting very tired of the environmentalist whackos and thier lackies saying man is destroying the planet. For all the researchers that say we are heating the planet there is another saying they have no evidence...and guess what I think the second one is more right!!!!!

This in not about the planet. It is about forcing others to live like the whacos want and getting money out of the USA. Why, because they do not think it is fair the US is so strong GET OVER IT!

If the whacos had not had so dam much influence gas prices would be lower now because we would have more refineries, we would be drilling in AK and off the California coast like we should be.

I am the parot? Give me a fucking break.......

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[DRLOVE 0]

Global warming has been going on since the ice age... Just another scare tactic dream brought to us by democrats.

===============================

[billvon 3,118]

> For all the researchers that say we are heating the planet there is another
>saying they have no evidence...

Nope. You have to look very hard to find the second ones, and they are generally lunatics.

>and guess what I think the second one is more right!!!!!

You can think that Oscar the Grouch caused the last ice age if you want; doesn't change much.

>This in not about the planet. It is about forcing others to live like the
>whacos want and getting money out of the USA.

You're confusing science and politics. The science defines what's happening. The politics determines who stands to benefit. Just because you don't like the groups that you imagine may benefit does not decrease the value of the science. It's like smoking your entire life and saying "those stupid doctors don't know what they are talking about when they tell me to quit!" because you prefer to believe you are doing something smart. But the odds of your getting cancer don't change because you don't want to believe the doctors.

Want to understand what's going on? Take a trip to northern Alaska. See for yourself if the ice cap is changing, if the tundra is melting, if the glaciers are retreating. Do your own tests on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (it's not hard.) Do some experiments with a broad spectrum light source and a tank of various gases. It might give you a better insight into what's happening than the latest Michael Crichton novel.

>If the whacos had not had so dam much influence gas prices would be
>lower now because we would have more refineries, we would be drilling in
>AK and off the California coast like we should be.

Wow, that's worse than blaming GWB for 9/11. It's not our tremendous and ever-increasing demand for oil, and it's not that we're reaching the limits of how much we can pump and ship, and it's not that China is coming up strong on our heels - it's all the environmentalists! We could all drive Excursions and pay $0.10 a gallon if they'd just stop their incessant whining.

[billvon 3,118]

> Global warming has been going on since the ice age...

And has recently taken a sharp upswing due to our increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 50%. See attached.

There is no question at all that the climate will change with time. Always has, always will. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, we've seen everything from hothouses to ice ages. The question is - is it a good idea to force it to change as fast as possible when we don't know what the results will be? If the answer is yes, then buy that Excursion and switch to all coal power.

[rushmc 23]

Print what you want. I am not saying temps are not going up. I do not think man is causing it.

And if you think that science only backs that man si causing the warming, I want some of what you are smoking.

As for the 0.10 and SUV statement.........you backed up my argument.......

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[kallend 2,148]

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Print what you want. I am not saying temps are not going up. I do not think man is causing it.

And if you think that science only backs that man si causing the warming, I want some of what you are smoking.

As for the 0.10 and SUV statement.........you backed up my argument.......

I deduce from your response that you are not a scientist. What are your qualifications to make this judgment?

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[rushmc 23]

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Print what you want. I am not saying temps are not going up. I do not think man is causing it.

And if you think that science only backs that man si causing the warming, I want some of what you are smoking.

As for the 0.10 and SUV statement.........you backed up my argument.......

I deduce from your response that you are not a scientist. What are your qualifications to make this judgment?

I deduce from your response that you are a scientist and think yourself to be qualified to have an opinion based on your research

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[kallend 2,148]

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Print what you want. I am not saying temps are not going up. I do not think man is causing it.

And if you think that science only backs that man si causing the warming, I want some of what you are smoking.

As for the 0.10 and SUV statement.........you backed up my argument.......

I deduce from your response that you are not a scientist. What are your qualifications to make this judgment?

I deduce from your response that you are a scientist and think yourself to be qualified to have an opinion based on your research

So what ARE your qualifications?

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[rushmc 23]

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Print what you want. I am not saying temps are not going up. I do not think man is causing it.

And if you think that science only backs that man si causing the warming, I want some of what you are smoking.

As for the 0.10 and SUV statement.........you backed up my argument.......

I deduce from your response that you are not a scientist. What are your qualifications to make this judgment?

I deduce from your response that you are a scientist and think yourself to be qualified to have an opinion based on your research

So what ARE your qualifications?

Ah, I see, I can't have an opinion. I get it.

I can't do any reading or learning and develope an opinion that man is not causing the problem. But one does not need to be qualified to preach doom and gloom and use scare tactics.

Get off your high horse and give me a break

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[mr2mk1g 10]

Kallend has not presented his opinion, merely asked for the qualifications on which you base yours. Others here, such as Billvon with that graph, have presented the opinion and data of scientists who have conducted studies into climate change.

You however are merely presenting your own opinion. On the one hand we have scientists presenting scientific studies and data. On the other hand we have your opinion. I could point out which would normally be seen to carry the most weight... but I guess that's probably not necessary.

[kallend 2,148]

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Print what you want. I am not saying temps are not going up. I do not think man is causing it.

And if you think that science only backs that man si causing the warming, I want some of what you are smoking.

As for the 0.10 and SUV statement.........you backed up my argument.......

I deduce from your response that you are not a scientist. What are your qualifications to make this judgment?

I deduce from your response that you are a scientist and think yourself to be qualified to have an opinion based on your research

So what ARE your qualifications?

Ah, I see, I can't have an opinion. I get it.

I can't do any reading or learning and develope an opinion that man is not causing the problem. But one does not need to be qualified to preach doom and gloom and use scare tactics.

Get off your high horse and give me a break

Everyone can have an opinion. Not everyone can have a well informed opinion, though.

That's why I want to know how qualified you are to have an opinion on the source of global warming, or even to evaluate the merits of the scientific research being done.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[rushmc 23]

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Kallend has not presented his opinion, merely asked for the qualifications on which you base yours. Others here, such as Billvon with that graph, have presented the opinion and data of scientists who have conducted studies into climate change.

You however are merely presenting your own opinion. On the one hand we have scientists presenting scientific studies and data. On the other hand we have your opinion. I could point out which would normally be seen to carry the most weight... but I guess that's probably not necessary.

Again, I fail to see what I need to be qualified in to have an opinion. While I have not posted what reports I have built my opinion from (and by the way, most of the other research is based on "models" projecting what might happen given inputs supplied) I have taken time to investigate so called gobal worming. I have come to a conclusion that the sience is (for the most part )bogus.

Most of the reporting seen is for the global warming "cause". But despite was has been posted in this thread, there is consideral disagreement what is causing it.

A good example of the global warming mind set was the considerable effort given to get the huricane experts to say global warming is causing more and stronger huricanes. (what a great disapointment to those that wanted it otherwise)

So, discount what ever you want, when I have taken the time to find again those reports giving other sides the source is attacked in one form or another. (another tackit imployed by the wackos)

Do the dam reserch yourself. I have looked at both sides.......have you? Or is the media enough for you

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[rushmc 23]

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Print what you want. I am not saying temps are not going up. I do not think man is causing it.

And if you think that science only backs that man si causing the warming, I want some of what you are smoking.

As for the 0.10 and SUV statement.........you backed up my argument.......

I deduce from your response that you are not a scientist. What are your qualifications to make this judgment?

I deduce from your response that you are a scientist and think yourself to be qualified to have an opinion based on your research

So what ARE your qualifications?

Ah, I see, I can't have an opinion. I get it.

I can't do any reading or learning and develope an opinion that man is not causing the problem. But one does not need to be qualified to preach doom and gloom and use scare tactics.

Get off your high horse and give me a break

Everyone can have an opinion. Not everyone can have a well informed opinion, though.

That's why I want to know how qualified you are to have an opinion on the source of global warming, or even to evaluate the merits of the scientific research being done.

Once again, your show your arogance. Since you do not agree with me, I am uninformed. You are a hoot

"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

[kallend 2,148]

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Print what you want. I am not saying temps are not going up. I do not think man is causing it.

And if you think that science only backs that man si causing the warming, I want some of what you are smoking.

As for the 0.10 and SUV statement.........you backed up my argument.......

I deduce from your response that you are not a scientist. What are your qualifications to make this judgment?

I deduce from your response that you are a scientist and think yourself to be qualified to have an opinion based on your research

So what ARE your qualifications?

Ah, I see, I can't have an opinion. I get it.

I can't do any reading or learning and develope an opinion that man is not causing the problem. But one does not need to be qualified to preach doom and gloom and use scare tactics.

Get off your high horse and give me a break

Everyone can have an opinion. Not everyone can have a well informed opinion, though.

That's why I want to know how qualified you are to have an opinion on the source of global warming, or even to evaluate the merits of the scientific research being done.

Once again, your show your arogance. Since you do not agree with me, I am uninformed. You are a hoot

Why don't you answer the question? Whether or not I am a hoot has nothing to do with the validity of your opinion. Your qualifications have everything to do with the validity of your opinion.

I didn't say you were uninformed. I just asked for your qualifications. YOU seem to admit to being uninformed, though.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[mr2mk1g 10]

Of course you can have an opinion - they're like assholes, we all get to have one.

But just remember that many will not care to pay much attention to your opinion because of your background. Ever listen to a whuffo tell someone about how it's impossible to breath in freefall? Sure they've read about the phenomena in their research and formulated a theory about the physics of it based on their knowledge of how fast the "wind" is going and hell they've even put in a little observational evidence based on the tandem they did.

Doesn't mean they're right though...

[tso-d_chris 0]

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Ah, I see, I can't have an opinion. I get it

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." --Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

[EricTheRed 0]

Hey, I think he got it right! rushmc said:

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> For all the researchers that say we are heating the planet there is another saying they have no evidence...

So on one side you have 'all the researchers' who say man is having an effect on global warming.
On the other side we have 'another' that claims they have no evidence.

Sounds like an accurate discription ofhte debate. Thousands of scientists with data and one loon with an opinion and a microphone.

illegible usually

[Gravitymaster 0]

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Kallend has not presented his opinion, merely asked for the qualifications on which you base yours. Others here, such as Billvon with that graph, have presented the opinion and data of scientists

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who have conducted studies into climate change.

You however are merely presenting your own opinion. On the one hand we have scientists presenting scientific studies and data. On the other hand we have your opinion. I could point out which would normally be seen to carry the most weight... but I guess that's probably not necessary.

Would information from the University of Alabama be acceptable?

***http://www.uah.edu/News/climate/25years.pdf

How about this:

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Breaking the hockey stick
The famous graph that supposedly shows that recent temperatures are the highest in a thousand years has now been shown by careful analysis to have been based on faulty data

Marcel Crok
Special to the Financial Post


January 27, 2005


Few people dispute that the earth is getting warmer, but there are people -- so-called "climate skeptics" -- who question whether the change is historically unique and whether it is the result of human activity. These skeptics are generally outsiders, reviled by "true" climate researchers.

On the one hand, Michael Mann, the first author of the two noted hockey-stick papers (in Nature in 1998 and in Geophysical Research Letters in 1999), is the unofficial king of climate research. In 2002, Scientific American included him as one of the top 50 visionaries in science. On the other hand, the two Canadian skeptics are outsiders: Ross McKitrick is a professor of economics and Stephen McIntyre is a mineral exploration consultant -- which Mann likes to call a conflict of interest.

Climate skeptics are most prolific on the Internet, a platform for novices, the scatterbrained and the experienced alike. Not surprisingly, the climate researchers whom we consulted (predominantly Dutch) presumed the work of the two Canadians to be unconvincing. We at Natuurwetenschap & Techniek were initially skeptical about these skeptics as well. However, McIntyre and McKitrick have recently had an article accepted by Geophysical Research Letters -- the same journal that published Mann's 1999 article. This, together with the positive responses of the referees to that article, quickly brought us around.

Even Geophysical Research Letters, an eminent scientific journal, now acknowledges a serious problem with the prevailing climate reconstruction by Mann and his colleagues. This undercuts both Mann's supposed proof that human activity has been responsible for the warming of the earth's atmosphere in the 20th century and the ability to place confidence in the findings and recommendations of the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The political implication is a serious undermining of the Kyoto Protocol with its worldwide agreements on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

In their two seminal papers, Mann and his colleagues purported to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the last thousand years. Since 1000, temperatures gradually decreased (the shaft of the hockey stick), only to increase sharply from 1900 onwards (the blade).The implication is obvious: Human interference caused this trend to change. McIntyre and McKitrick merely attempted to replicate this oft-quoted study. In doing so, they identified mistake after mistake. They also discovered that this fundamental reconstruction had never actually been replicated by the IPCC or any other scientist. In their replication, basically derived from the same data, temperatures in the 15th century were just as high as they are today -- an outcome that takes the edge off the alarmist scenario of anthropogenic global warming. The criticism by the Canadians is mostly technical in nature: They claim that Mann and his colleagues have misused an established statistical method -- principal component analysis (PCA) -- so that their calculations simply mined data for hockey-stick shaped series and that Mann's results are statistically meaningless.

The scientists that we consulted did not immediately recognize the implications of Mann's eccentric method, suggesting the possibility he himself may not have been aware of the apparent mistake. However, in response to our inquiries, Mann denies any errors and rejects any criticism in strident terms.

Up to January, 2005, none of McIntyre and McKitrick's findings had been published by major scientific journals. Thus, in the opinion of established climate researchers, there was no reason to take them seriously. Climate researchers were quite comfortable in their consensus and repeatedly referred to this "consensus" as a basis for policy. The official expression of the consensus comes from the IPCC. This group, under the flag of the United Nations, comes out with a bulky report every five years on the state of affairs in climate research. Hundreds of climate researchers from every corner of the world contribute to it. In the third report in 2001, Mann himself was a lead author of the chapter on climate reconstructions.

Mann's hockey-stick graph was the only climate reconstruction to make it to the IPCC "Summary for Policy Makers." Its conclusion read: "It is likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year during the past thousand years." This statement has been used by governments the world over to promote the Kyoto Protocol.

Stephen McIntyre first came across the hockey stick in late 2002. The Canadian government used the graph to promote the Kyoto treaty. McIntyre explains by telephone: "When I first saw the graph, it reminded me of dot.com profit forecasts, which were also hockey sticks. It was a compelling graphic, but, in the mineral exploration industry, my own field, compelling graphics are one of the techniques used to interest investors in financing mineral exploration."

McIntyre has scrutinized promotional graphics and large data sets for years. "From my own experience, I thought that the graphic looked excessively promotional," he said. "A trick of mining promoters is to overemphasize some isolated results. I wondered if this had been the case with the hockey stick as well. I thought that it would be interesting to look at the data underlying this graphic -- as though I was looking at drill core from an exploration project. The interest was simply personal; I had no intention of writing academic articles and never expected what happened afterward."

McIntyre sent an e-mail to Michael Mann in spring 2003, asking him for the location of the data used in his study. "Mann replied that he had forgotten the location," he said. "However, he said that he would ask his colleague Scott Rutherford to locate the data. Rutherford then said that the information did not exist in any one location, but that he would assemble it for me. I thought this was bizarre. This study had been featured in the main IPCC policy document. I assumed that they would have some type of due-diligence package for the IPCC on hand, as you would have in a major business transaction. If there was no such package, perhaps there had never been any due diligence on the data, as I understood the term. In the end, this turned out to be the case. The IPCC had never bothered to verify Mann, Bradley and Hughes' study."

Despite billions of dollars spent on climate research, academic and institutional researchers had never bothered to replicate Mann's work either. In 2003, McIntyre tackled the job and, from an unusual hobby, the task has since grown to become almost a full-time occupation. On an Internet forum for climate skeptics, he met Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, just outside of Toronto. Since meeting in person in September of 2003, the two have been working on the project together. McIntyre does most of the research and McKitrick asks questions and assists in the writing of papers.

Reliable temperature measurements have only been available since around 1850. Before this period, researchers have to rely on indirect indicators, or "proxies," such as tree rings, ice cores, sedimentary layers and corals, of which tree rings are the most commonly used. Scientists studying tree rings will summarize the growth at one site into a single index or chronology, which might start, for instance, at 1470 and end at 1980.

Mann's study is the best known of the multi-proxy studies. For a realistic reproduction of the temperature in the entire Northern Hemisphere, Mann and others attempt to have a relatively even geographic distribution of proxies. This posed a difficulty. The majority of proxies were tree-ring "chronologies," especially from the U.S. Southwest. To achieve more even geographic distribution (and avoid being swamped by North American tree-ring data), Mann used principal component analysis to summarize networks of tree-ring sites, the largest of which was in North America. The 1998 article reported the use of 112 proxy series.

However, for some reason, Mann and his colleagues did not accurately document the data they had actually used. McIntyre says: "Of the series and sites listed in the original documentation, 35 were not actually used. To further confuse matters, in November, 2003, over five years after publication, Mann stated that they had actually used 159 series, instead of the 112 mentioned in his Nature article or in Rutherford's e-mail."

We decided to ask Dr. Eduardo Zorita of the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht, Germany, who has also recently examined the calculations behind the hockey stick. His response: "This is the first time that I've heard of the number 159. In our analysis of the hockey stick, we do not use the actual data, but a series of pseudo proxies, proxies we take from our simulations. We have always assumed 112 pseudo proxies."

McIntyre decided to check the PC calculations for tree-ring networks, by doing fresh calculations with original data from the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology (WDCP). His results were very different from Mann's. He and McKitrick then sent the full data set (originally downloaded from Mann's FTP site from the address provided by Rutherford) back to Mann for confirmation that this was actually the data set used. In response, Mann stated that he did not have the time to answer this or any other request.

McIntyre and McKitrick then tried to replicate Mann's Northern Hemisphere temperature calculations from scratch. The results largely coincided with the hockey stick, except for the 15th century, when their calculated temperatures were considerably higher than Mann's and were even higher than corresponding estimates in the 20th century. McIntyre emphasized: "We did not claim to have discovered a warm medieval period; we only stated that, given the many defects in the study, it could not be used to assert that the 1990s were the warmest years of the past millennium."

Their findings were published in the interdisciplinary journal Energy and Environment in October, 2003. Mann's early responses were quite unexpected. McIntyre: "Mann stated that we had used the wrong data and somehow we failed to notice errors in the data. This was outrageous, as we had downloaded the data from his own FTP site from the location provided by his own colleague, Scott Rutherford; we had described countless errors in great detail and had re-collated over 300 series to avoid these problems. Now, according to Mann, we should have taken the data off a different address at his FTP site, but this new address had never been mentioned in any publication or even on his own Web site."

A little later, Mann and his colleagues said that they had used a step-wise procedure to deal with missing data, while McIntyre and McKitrick had not. McIntyre says: "This was when the figure of 159 series first appeared. There is no mention of this stepwise method in his Nature article. A PCA calculation fails if there is any missing data."

But McIntyre and McKitrick were most intrigued by the attribution by Mann and his colleagues of the difference in results to three "key indicators" -- most notably a North American data series -- showing that, with different handling of these three series, they also obtained high early-15th-century results. McIntyre and McKitrick decided, for the time being, to concentrate on the years 1400 to 1450, the period with the biggest discrepancies.

"Mann's own response showed that his temperature reconstruction for the first half of the 15th-century depended on [data] from the North American network. We decided to find out everything that we could about these three indicators."

Because of the discrepancy between the published methodology and the methods actually used, the ambiguity over the data sets, and the sudden claim that 159 series had to be used, McIntyre and McKitrick requested original source code from Mann in order to fully reconcile their results. Mann refused. But McIntyre did make an interesting find at Mann's FTP site -- a Fortran program of about 500 lines for the calculation of tree-ring series, virtually the only source code on the entire site. They carefully studied the script and found a highly unusual procedure that had not been mentioned in the Nature article.

McIntyre says: "The effect is that tree-ring series with a hockey-stick shape no longer have a mean of zero and end up dominating the first principal [data] component; in effect, Mann's program mines for series with a hockey-stick shape."

At our request, Dr. Mia Hubert of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, who specializes in robust statistics, checked to see if Mann's unusual standardization influenced the climate reconstruction. She confirms: "Tree rings with a hockey-stick shape dominate the PCA with this method."

McIntyre and McKitrick decided to perform another check. Using computer simulations of so-called "red noise," they generated networks of artificial tree-ring data over the period of 1400 to 1980. Red noise is commonly used in climatology and oceanography. McIntyre says: "If we used Mann's method on red noise, we consistently obtained hockey sticks with an inflection at the start of the 20th century. We have repeated the simulation thousands of times and in 99% of the cases, the result of the PCA was a hockey stick."

Mann's climate reconstruction methodology would have yielded a hockey-stick graph from any tree-ring data set entered into the model, as long as there is sufficient red noise.

The two Canadians are no longer just one voice crying in the wilderness. On Oct. 22, 2004, in Science, Dr. Zorita and his colleague Dr. Hans von Storch, a specialist in climate statistics at the same institute, published a critique of a completely different aspect of the 1998 hockey-stick article. After studying McIntyre's finding at our request, Von Storch agrees that "simulations with red noise do lead to hockey sticks. McIntyre and McKitrick's criticism on the hockey stick from 1998 is entirely valid on this particular point."

And with respect for bandwidth, you can read more here:

http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/?p=66


I am not disputing the earth is warming. I'm just not willing to accept the conventional thinking put forward by those who scream the loudest. There most certainly are plenty of experts who will debate the findings of accellerated global warming. To accept the convetional modeling would be akin to, how did you put it "like a retarded child sitting in the back of the classroom"?

[mr2mk1g 10]

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Would information from the University of Alabama be acceptable?

Yes.

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how did you put it "like a retarded child sitting in the back of the classroom"?

Yeah, it was something like that.