Wood Romances

In my last post I shared about a fascinating paper that was just published with improved bias corrections for the cooling bias affecting SSTs between 1900 and 1930. As I was studying up on this paper, I was reminded of one of the hacked CRU emails discussing roughly the same problem back in 2009. The email was from Tom Wigley at UCAR to Phil Jones at CRU about bias correction issues affecting SSTs, especially from the 1940s and earlier. The language indicates that there's a context between the two that is left unexplained - that is, we're entering into a conversation mid stream, and there's language between the sender and recipient that people wouldn't necessarily understand without context (like what the "blip" is). The text of the email is below: From: Tom Wigley [University Corporation of Atmospheric Research] To: Phil Jones [CRU] Cc: Ben Santer [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] September 27, 2009 Subject: 1940s Phil,  Here are some speculations ...

A new (currently not paywalled) Nature paper[1] was published this week with some really interesting findings. The authors examined potential biases in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and found evidence of a cooling bias affecting SSTs between roughly 1900 and 1930 that, if corrected, would warm SSTS during that time frame and also coincidentally make the instrumental record conform more closely with model simulations for the early 20th century. Since this study did not discover a significant bias between 1850-1900, these corrections would not have a significant impact on the amount of global warming above the 1850-1900 mean, but it would have a significant impact on our understanding of multi-decadal variability in temperatures in the instrumental record. However, some on X have taken this to mean that scientists have overestimated the amount of global warming the earth has experienced. Ryan Maue called this a "bombshell climate paper" and found it disconcerting that it wa...

WA07 Demonstrating Verification Failure of M&M This is part 3 of a 3 part series on M&M's accusations of "tricks" on the part of MBH and the hockey stick. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here . Stephen McIntyre is reporting another "Nature Trick" on his ClimateAudit blog. The post is from Nov 24, 2023. As I've pointed out before, the MBH98/99 hockey stick have been replicated so many times that it's really old news. In 2007, Wahl and Amman were able to emulate the MBH98/99 hockey stick reconstruction and verify that it was robust to statistical method. But there were some slight differences between the two, and it seems some people won't be happy until they emulate it exactly.  An "Audit" of MBH98/99 In 2021, Hampus Söderqvist apparently succeeded in reproducing MBH98/99 exactly, but in the process of doing so, he discovered some minor errors from the infilling of grid box temperatures in Jones & Briffa 1992 that affected MBH98/99...

By 2007, the MBH98/99 papers had been thoroughly investigated. The MBH hockey stick was found to be robust to statistical method and it was replicated by multiple other reconstructions (above, and discussed  here , here and here ). After the CRU emails were hacked and published, a new set of conspiracy theories were popularized on blogs and YouTube - these were based on a misreading of various emails (discussed  here and here ), but contrarian rhetoric was ramping up to a frenzy. Mann was frequently labeled a criminal and fraud, the hockey stick was called a scam or a hoax.  The Mann v Ball Libel Suit In an interview with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy  (FCPP), Tim Ball was asked, "Various government and academic agencies have whitewashed the Climategate scandal so far. Do you think anyone will be prosecuted for fraud?” Tim Ball's response was, “Michael Mann at Penn State should be in the State Pen, not Penn State.” This was posted on the FCPP website and a...

Just recently I saw a video by John Robson from what he calls a "Climate Discussion Nexus." I've seen several of his videos before, and for the most part they simply put a nice-looking polish on old, debunked contrarian talking points so that you can see them with a higher production value than what you might see in a Tony Heller video. I've largely ignored most of these; John Robson is a historian, and it's pretty clear that he doesn't understand the evidence he's trying to refute. But in this particular video Robson's credentials as a historian could have served him well, if he had chosen to use his expertise to uncover the facts involved. The "Hockey Stick" as it Appeared in IPCC TAR In this video , John Robson attempts to describe the dissention between Michael Mann and his colleagues as they were preparing chapter 2 of the IPCC TAR. This chapter included the "hockey stick" graph with data from MBH99, Briffa 2000, Jones 1998, a...