Cooking the Books on 'Global Warming?' Are the Numbers Fudged?

The hockey stick debate is about two things. At a technical level it concerns a well-known study that characterized the state of the Earth’s climate over the past thousand years and seemed to prove a recent and unprecedented global warming. I will explain how the study got the results it did, examine some key flaws in the methodology and explain why the conclusions are unsupported by the data. At the political level the emerging debate is about whether the enormous international trust that has been placed in the IPCC was betrayed. The hockey stick story reveals that the IPCC allowed a deeply flawed study to dominate the Third Assessment Report, which suggests the possibility of bias in the Report-writing process. In view of the massive global influence of IPCC Reports, there is an urgent need to bias-proof future assessments in order to put climate policy onto a new foundation that will better serve the public interest.

In 10,000 repetitions on groups of red noise, we found that a conventional PC [Principle Component] algorithm almost never yielded a hockey stick shaped PC1 [first PC], but the Mann algorithm yielded a pronounced hockey stick-shaped PC1 over 99% of the time. The reason is that in some of the red noise series there is a ‘pseudo-trend’ at the end, where a random shock causes the data to drift upwards, and before it can decay back to the mean the series comes to an end. The Mann algorithm efficiently looks for those kinds of series and flags them for maximum weighting. It concludes that a hockey stick is the dominant pattern even in pure noise.

Scientists have uncovered a treasure trove of meteorological information contained in the detailed logs kept by those on board the vessels that established Britain's great seafaring traditition including those on Nelsons' Victory and Cook's Endeavour.

Every Royal Naval ship kept a detailed record of climate including air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and major meteorological disturbances.

A group of academics and Met Office scientists has unearthed the records dating from the 1600s and examined more than 6,000 logs, which have provided one of the world's best sources for long-term weather data.

Their studies have raised questions about modern climate change theories. A paper by Dennis Wheeler, a geographer based at Sunderland University, recounts an increasing number of summer storms over Britain in the late 17th century.

Many scientists believe that storms are caused by global warming, but these were came during the so-called Little Ice Age that affected Europe from about 1600 to 1850.

The records also suggest that Europe saw a spell of rapid warming, similar to that experienced today, during the 1730s that must have been caused naturally.

Boston (MA) - Scientists at MIT have recorded a nearly simultaneous world-wide increase in methane levels. This is the first increase in ten years, and what baffles science is that this data contradicts theories stating man is the primary source of increase for this greenhouse gas. It takes about one full year for gases generated in the highly industrial northern hemisphere to cycle through and reach the southern hemisphere. However, since all worldwide levels rose simultaneously throughout the same year, it is now believed this may be part of a natural cycle in mother nature - and not the direct result of man's contributions.

One thing does seem very clear, however; science is only beginning to get a handle on the big picture of global warming. Findings like these tell us it's too early to know for sure if man's impact is affecting things at the political cry of "alarming rates." We may simply be going through another natural cycle of warmer and colder times - one that's been observed through a scientific analysis of the Earth to be naturally occurring for hundreds of thousands of years.

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

A GISS spokesman ... explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare [train in motion] back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change ... Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

In the Spring of 2003, Stephen McIntyre requested the MBH98 data set from Mann. He is not a scientist or an economist, he was just curious how the graph was made and wanted to see if the raw data looked like hockey sticks too. After some delay Mann arranged provision of a file which was represented as the one used for MBH98. One of the first things Stephen discovered was that the PCs used in MBH98 could not be replicated. In the process of looking up all the data sources and re-building Mann’s data set from scratch, Steve discovered a quite a few errors concerning location labels, use of obsolete editions, unexplained truncations of available series, etc.

In his initial response, Mann argued that we had studied the wrong data set—in other words that the one he provided had mistakes in it and we ought instead to have used one in a newly-identified FTP archive at his university. Over the next month we examined his FTP archive and discovered that, in fact, it corresponded almost exactly to the file we had originally been working with. However it differed in important ways from the description of the data set in the original Nature paper. We supplied a list of these discrepancies to Nature and after their own investigation they ordered a Corrigendum from Mann et al.

Mann also objected that we did not exactly replicate his computational steps or sequence of proxy rosters. No one had ever replicated his results, and we now know others had tried but were also unsuccessful. To date we are the closest anyone has been able to come in print. We were not bothered by Mann’s response on this point, but it did seem pointless to differ over trivial issues. So we requested his computational code to eliminate these easily-resolved differences. To our surprise he refused to supply his computer code, a stance he maintains to today.

As for the proxy sequence, in building his PCs it turns out he had spliced together a number of different series in order to handle segments with missing data in the earliest part of the analysis. This was not explained in his Nature paper so Steve had not implemented it in the emulation program. We requested identification of the splicing sequence, which Mann refused to provide ...

It is still not possible to identify the final form of the data used in MBH98 since it requires forming sequences of spliced proxy PC segments and Mann has given conflicting counts of the number of underlying vectors involved. Still, Steve’s emulation program is very close to reproducing the original hockey stick, and is as close as anyone is able to get in the absence of cooperation from Mann and his colleagues.

Since our work has begun to appear we have enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing we are winning over the expert community, one at a time. Physicist Richard Muller of Berkeley studied our work last year and wrote an article about it:

"[The findings] hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics."

Recently Stephen McIntyre and I received an email from Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, retired director of the Royal Meteorological Institute of the Netherlands. He wrote to convey comments he wished to be communicated publicly:

“The IPCC review process is fatally flawed. The behavior of Michael Mann is a disgrace to the profession…The scientific basis for the Kyoto protocol is grossly inadequate.”

Whether such “mistakes” are made in genuine error or are part of a politicized push for man-made global warming to be universally accepted, and the evidence clearly suggests that latter is the case, the fact is that we can no longer tolerate the cry that “the debate is over” on man-made global warming in light of such gargantuan falsehoods.

Likewise, the push for carbon emissions to be reduced by 80 per cent or more, a figure that would completely cripple western economies and lower living standards to a near third world level, can no longer be accepted as a reasonable course of action now that the primary authority on man-made global warming, the UN IPCC, has been proven to be using fraudulent data to make its case.