Resurrecting Fred Singer and the MWP at WUWT

As if anyone needed more proof that WUWT is just another outlet for anti-science disinformation propaganda.  Today Anthony's put up a pack of lies by Fred Singer (archived here), who's made it his business to invent disinformation.  The article is another "hockey stick is a fraud" article.  Wouldn't it be nice if Fred Singer and Anthony Watts were added to one of the cases currently being heard in the US courts.

Fred Singer Manufactures Lies and Dispenses them at WUWT

Here is some of what Fred wrote in today's WUWT article:

...the Hockeystick is a manufactured item and does not correspond to well-established historic reality. It does not show the generally beneficial Medieval Warm Period (MWP) at around 1000AD, or the calamitous Little Ice Age (LIA) between about 1400 and 1800. In the absence of any thermometers during most of this period, the Hockeystick is based on an analysis of so-called proxy data, mostly tree rings, from before 1000AD to 1980, at which point the proxy temperature suddenly stops and a rapidly rising thermometer record is joined on.

Talk about "manufactured items".  Here are a few "hockey sticks" from the IPCC AR5 report.  I've indicated the times that are usually referred to as the MWP.  There's no fixed period.  I've also indicated the Little Ice Age - and you can see that in the case of the Little Ice Age there was cooling overall.  In the Medieval period most reconstructions in the Northern Hemisphere show a slight warming particularly starting around 950, but not so much in the southern hemisphere.  Globally there's a slight bump around 950.  So Fred's wrong on that score.  Nothing been "disappeared".  It's just that with more and more data the record is becoming more refined, but there are still differences in the different reconstructions - that aren't being hidden by anyone.  Click for larger image as always.

Figure 5.7 IPCC AR5 WG1 Reconstructed (a) Northern Hemisphere and (b) Southern Hemisphere, and (c) global annual temperatures during the last 2000 years. Individual reconstructions (see Appendix 5.A.1 for further information about each one) are shown as indicated in the legends, grouped by colour according to their spatial representation (red: land-only all latitudes; orange: land-only extra-tropical latitudes; light blue: land and sea extra-tropical latitudes; dark blue: land and sea all latitudes) and instrumental temperatures shown in black (HadCRUT4 land and sea, and CRUTEM4 land-only; Morice et al., 2012). All series represent anomalies (°C) from the 1881–1980 mean (horizontal dashed line) and have been smoothed with a filter that reduces variations on timescales less than ~50 years.

Fred bemoans the "good old days" when knowledge was scarce

Fred puts up a couple of drawings in a single image.  At the top of the drawing below is one of the images Fred included and at the bottom I've included a diagram from the first IPCC assessment report, published 24 years ago in 1990. This was before there were any global temperature reconstructions of the type we have today.  Fred is still living in the dim distant past.  He's getting on a bit (he's 89 years old) and can't hack this modern society or cope with new knowledge.

I don't know why Fred shifted the timescale to the left in his diagram above.  He could have left it as it was in the FAR report.  Anyway, about the Medieval Warm Anomaly, this is from FAR:

The late tenth to early thirteenth centuries (about AD 950-1250) appear to have been exceptionally warm in western Europe, Iceland and Greenland (Alexandre 1987, Lamb, 1988) This period is known as the Medieval Climatic Optimum China was, however, cold at this time (mainly in winter) but South Japan was warm (Yoshino, 1978) This period of widespread warmth is notable in that there is no evidence that it was accompanied by an increase of greenhouse gases.

In FAR (WG1), the word "medieval" appears only four times, once in the above diagram and three times in the text - and not once in the title of any reference.  In the AR5 report the word "medieval" appears 45 times including in the title of numerous references.

If you look at the top chart above and then the one below, you can see the difference between what was known in 1990 with what is known from scientific research conducted since that time. You can also tell from the text.  Compare the extract from FAR above with the following from the IPCC AR5 report (my bold italics):

For average annual Northern Hemisphere temperatures, the period 1983–2012 was very likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 800 years (high confidence) and likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years (medium confidence). This is supported by comparison of instrumental temperatures with multiple reconstructions from a variety of proxy data and statistical methods, and is consistent with AR4. Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multidecadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the mid-20th century and in others as warm as in the late 20th century. With high confidence, these intervals were not as synchronous across seasons and regions as the warming since the mid-20th century

You may have noticed Fred's references above were to work done in 1978, 1987 and 1988.  Fred did manage to move into the 21st century further on in his article, bypassing all the other temperature reconstructions and singling out  two authors whose work he seems to have approved from a science denying perspective.  After maligning Michael Mann and misrepresenting his early work while ignoring his later work, Fred wrote:

In actuality, we now have adequate proxy data from other sources, most particularly from Fredrick (sic) Ljungqvist and David Anderson. Their separate publications agree that there has been little if any temperature rise since about 1940! However, there was a real temperature increase between 1920 and 1940, which can be seen also in all the various proxy as well as thermometer data.

I guess Fred's not too familiar with the work of  Fredrik Ljungqvist because he misspelt his name.  Thing is, he also is not too familiar with the work of Fredrik Ljungqvist because he misrepresented it.  The following is from Ljungqvist et al (2012):

Our results show, in a comparative manner, the degree to which the various proxy types can be used to assess regional temperature variability on centennial time-scales. We conclude that during the 9th to 11th centuries there was widespread NH warmth comparable in both geographic extent and level to that of the 20th century mean. Our study also reveals that the 17th century was dominated by widespread and coherently cold anomalies representing the culmination of the LIA. Understandably, the centennial resolution of this study precludes direct comparison of past warmth to that of the last few decades. However, our results show the rate of warming from the 19th to the 20th century is clearly the largest between any two consecutive centuries in the past 1200 yr.

And does Fredrik Ljungqvist dispute the global surface temperature record in the instrumental era as Fred claimed?  I'd say not.  Here's another section of that same paper:

Analyses of instrumental data (Brohan et al., 2006) shows that the last decade of the 20th century was much warmer than the 20th century mean nearly everywhere over NH land areas with sufficient data (Fig. C1). Moreover, the first decade of the 21st century was even warmer in most locations, thus, providing evidence that the long-term, largescale, NH warming that began in the 17th century and accelerated in the 20th century has continued unabated (see Appendix C for more details).

What about David Anderson? I couldn't find any global temperature reconstructions (or hemispherical ones either) by any David Anderson - but I probably missed it.  Anyway, if it's this David Anderson he's talking about, then Fred's barking up the wrong tree.  This from a 2002 paper:

Climate reconstructions reveal unprecedented warming in the past century; however, little is known about trends in aspects such as the monsoon. 

 Incidentally, the work of Fredrik Ljungqvist is cited several times in the AR5 report.


Below is a reference to a Ljungqvist paper plus just a sample of all the published work of Michael Mann and his various co-authors, to give you some idea of just how selective is Fred Singer.  Notice his paper on the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Anomaly.  I'd say he knows a lot more about this than does professional denier Fred Singer.

Notice too all the different authors and how Fred Singer singles out Michael Mann?  That's the Serengeti Strategy in action.

(Copies of Michael Mann's papers are usually available at his website.)

Ljungqvist, F. C., Paul J. Krusic, Gudrun Brattström, and Hanna S. Sundqvist. "Northern Hemisphere temperature patterns in the last 12 centuries." Climate of the Past 8, no. 1 (2012): 227-249.. doi:10.5194/cp-8-227-2012 (open access).
Mann, Michael E., and Jeffrey Park. "Global‐scale modes of surface temperature variability on interannual to century timescales." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984–2012) 99, no. D12 (1994): 25819-25833.

Mann, Michael E., Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes. "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries." Nature 392, no. 6678 (1998): 779-787.

Mann, Michael E., and Philip D. Jones. "Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia." Geophysical Research Letters 30, no. 15 (2003).

Jones, Philip D., and Michael E. Mann. "Climate over past millennia." Reviews of Geophysics 42, no. 2 (2004): RG2002.

Mann, Michael E., Zhihua Zhang, Malcolm K. Hughes, Raymond S. Bradley, Sonya K. Miller, Scott Rutherford, and Fenbiao Ni. "Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 36 (2008): 13252-13257.

Mann, Michael E., Zhihua Zhang, Scott Rutherford, Raymond S. Bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, Drew Shindell, Caspar Ammann, Greg Faluvegi, and Fenbiao Ni. "Global signatures and dynamical origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly." Science 326, no. 5957 (2009): 1256-1260.

From the WUWT comments

It's mostly a lot of people raging at Michael Mann, not suitable for HotWhopper. The Serengeti Strategy works for WUWT dismissives but it no longer works with the general public, from what I can see.  There are a couple of choice comments that I can print though.

Steve from Rockwood says the recent warming "doesn't look natural".  Well, duh!

January 21, 2014 at 3:25 pm
Just looking at Mann’s reconstruction – it doesn’t look natural. The Earth has been cooling for 1,000 years and suddenly warms out of control? It can’t be real. If he had left in the LIA and MWP maybe I would have believed him.

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale must have a soft spot for Fred, because he accepts Fred's lies - though he couldn't swallow some of Don Easterbrook's lies yesterday. He says:

January 21, 2014 at 3:30 pm
Thanks, Fred. Nicely done.

Running (tree) rings around Anthony Watts - Ignoramus Extraordinaire

Anthony Watts has a tendency to put his foot in his mouth any time he lets his fingers touch his keyboard. (Ha ha - do you like the contortionist imagery?)  This time he's showing off his ignoramus side again in a WUWT article with the headline: Bad news for Michael Mann’s ‘treemometers’ ? (Archived here.)

Implications for paleoclimatology and Mann's hockey stick?

Anthony introduced his copy and paste press release by writing this (my bold italics):

From the “trees aren’t linear instruments and the Liebigs Law department” and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, comes this story that suggests the older trees are, the less linear their tree ring growth might be, which has implications for “paleoclimatology” and Mann’s hockey stick temperature reconstructions from tree rings.

I found Anthony's quote all over the internet - but only in copy and pastes from WUWT!  I'm guessing Anthony is about the only person whose first thought was that this has implications for “paleoclimatology” and Mann’s hockey stick.  Wishful thinking on the part of science deniers. (It's probably worth mentioning that nowhere in the remainder of Anthony's article or the sciencedaily.com press release or the abstract of the paper he was referring to was there any mention of tree ring growth, it's linearity or otherwise.)

The new paper Anthony was introducing wasn't about dendrochronology at all.  It was a paper about how for "most species, the biggest trees increase their growth rates and sequester more carbon as they age".

Anthony quoted himself in his introduction, with his reference to Liebigs (sic) Law.  (See below for some "paleo" curiosities about Liebig's Law and its successors.)  Back in 2009 Anthony Watts wrote an article about how plant growth is limited by the least available nutrient or requirement for growth.  It was one big logical fallacy article.  What he was trying to argue was dendrochronologists "don't know nuffin'" about tree growth.  He was suggesting that world-leading scientists who have spent most of their careers examining and analysing signals in tree growth, don't understand that there are multiple factors that affect plant growth.  He wrote:

I make no claims of being an expert in either forest growth or dendroclimatology. I’m simply presenting interesting information here for discussion.

But, I am amazed at the nonlinearity and interactivity of all limiting growth factors, and especially the parabolic response to temperature.

...If you see a wide tree ring, you can safely conclude the tree had a good year. If you see narrow rings you can conclude a poor growth year. But was that poor year a product of an unfavorable temperature range alone? Or was it due to lack of moisture or lack of sunlight or both? Not having local records for those, how would you know?

It seems to me that dendroclimatology has a lot of uncertainty.

Well, duh!

Anthony Watts: "scientists don't know nuffin'"

Anthony Watts was in effect saying that "scientists don't know nuffin'".  His logical fallacy was his "argument from personal incredulity".  In this 2003 paper by Keith Briffa, Tim Osborn and Fritz Schweingruber, the very first paragraph in the introduction is (my bold italics):

A large amount of tree-ring research is concerned with very localised site studies (Dean et al., 1996), necessarily reflecting the complex ecological processes that operate on small scales in forest ecosystems. Depending on the specific situation, dendrochronology can focus on the study of many different factors that influence tree growth. Examples include the following: the frequency of insect defoliation, the occurrence of severe frosts or fire, or the general competitional interactions in forest dynamics. The challenge for the tree-ring researcher is to establish an optimal representation or reconstruction of the past variability of the particular factor under study. This should involve providing realistic estimates of uncertainty, given that in practice many factors can act together to produce the changing patterns of tree growth that are measured.

Anthony's specialty is not dendrochronology but doubt and disinformation.  So he can't be expected to know the main points, let alone the finer points, of any subject let alone one as highly specialised as dendrochronology.  And if, in some parallel universe, an Anthony Watts did know anything about trees or the study of their cross-sections, do you think he would present it honestly?

Trees keep growing

Anthony Watts is barking up the wrong tree. The study to which Anthony's introduction purportedly related is published in Nature.  Stephenson et al conducted an analysis of 403 tropical and temperate tree species around the world and found that for most species, mass growth rate increases continuously with tree size.  In other words, trees keep growing as they age.  The press release states that trees "grow more quickly the older they get".  I don't have the paper so I don't know by how much growth rate accelerates with age.  The abstract does state that this doesn't conflict with observations of (presumably) old growth forests having declining leaf level and productivity:

The apparent paradoxes of individual tree growth increasing with tree size despite declining leaf-level and stand-level productivity can be explained, respectively, by increases in a tree’s total leaf area that outpace declines in productivity per unit of leaf area and, among other factors, age-related reductions in population density. Our results resolve conflicting assumptions about the nature of tree growth, inform efforts to understand and model forest carbon dynamics, and have additional implications for theories of resource allocation and plant senescence.

For some reason this notion of increasing growth as trees get older makes me think of fractals.  The bigger the tree the bigger the trunk, the more branches it has and the more it can sprout new branches.  So even if individual branches grow at the same rate as branches did when the tree was younger (or even more slowly), there are more of them as the tree ages so the total mass of the tree accelerates over time. I'll be interested to read the paper itself.

Supplementary data can be accessed here.  It's a list of all the species studied.  The fattest tree they recorded was Picea sitchensis, a conifer from North America, with a diameter of 270 cm.  According to Wikipedia the trunk diameter at breast height can exceed 5 m. The supplementary data doesn't include height.

The press release at ScienceDaily.com specifically mentions trees that grow around these parts, the mountain ash - Eucalyptus regnans.  These trees have a phenomenal growth rate - Sadly many of the largest and oldest specimens got chopped down in times past.

---

About Liebig's Law

Liebig's "Chemistry"

Liebig's Law, as it's sometimes referred to, is that growth is limited by the scarcest resource (in the case of plants, for example, by water, CO2 or soil nutrients).  This is said to have been first proposed by Carl Sprengel in 1828. Click here for Liebig's text, which has numerous references to Sprengel.


I came across another early paper, "Limitations of Blackman's Law of limiting factors and Harder's concept of relative minimum as applied to photosynthesis" by B. N. Singh and K. N. Lal published in Plant Physiology.  It was published in 1935 and the newest reference is dated 1925.  The paper points out that no resource acts in isolation, so it's not as simple as saying that growth is limited by the scarcest resource.  (For example, think of how plants respond to increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the response of stomata, which allows them to lose less water.)

---

Stephenson, N. L.et al. "Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size." Nature (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12914

Briffa, K. R., T. J. Osborn, and F. H. Schweingruber. "Large-scale temperature inferences from tree rings: a review." Global and planetary change 40, no. 1 (2004): 11-26. doi:10.1016/S0921-8181(03)00095-X

Singh, B. N., and K. N. Lal. "Limitations of Blackman's law of limiting factors and Harder's concept of relative minimum as applied to photosynthesis." Plant Physiology 10, no. 2 (1935): 245.

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From the WUWT comments

As usual, the dead wood WUWT-ers are all over the place.  Some are saying "this isn't anything new" while others are arguing "it's not so".  And others have opted for Anthony's "implications for paleoclimatology". (Archived here.)

@njsnowfan is still jumping up and down trying to get Michael Mann to listen to his "ice age cometh" argument and says:

January 15, 2014 at 12:01 pm
That will have to be filled under the category” Oh Mann” with all the rest.
Timber!!!

P.S Dr M. Mann
If you read my post, Just want to know if you are seeing signs of the sun freezing your hockey stick in the ice yet? Remember my first tweet to you when you blocked me 2 years ago. Yup this is I, so many blocked how could you remember me?

arthur4563 doesn't know much about factors that can affect tree rings and says "scientists don't no nuffin'":

January 15, 2014 at 12:07 pm
The biggest mstery is why anyone who claims intelligence in these matters would ever buy into the idea that temperature determines tree growth. I would think that any farmer would consider Mann a city-bred fool.

Donald Mitchell's mind works in strange ways - he says:

January 15, 2014 at 12:14 pm
I really do not see a problem for the alarmists. If the public finally realizes that the increased carbon dioxide increases the rate of growth, they can always claim that increasing temperatures cause increasing carbon dioxide. This not only wraps things up in a nice circular argument, but certainly would not affect their credibility in my estimation.

Theo Goodwin decides he likes this work, but rather oddly implies that he doesn't think dendrochronology is empirical when he says:

January 15, 2014 at 12:35 pm
Finally, someone is doing empirical research on treemometry. It comes only seventeen years after The Team ignored the obligation to do it. Once this work gets rolling, prepare to be amazed. Science will replace wishful thinking. Should be broadcast to all secondary school students.

And Theo Goodwin follows it up with another blunder when he says:

January 15, 2014 at 12:41 pm
Cam_S says: January 15, 2014 at 12:20 pm “Wow! This story has made it to The Guardian.”

I bet it gets disappeared. They do not yet understand its implications.

Alec aka Daffy Duck says "everybody knew that":

January 15, 2014 at 1:23 pm
??? They think this is new? I’m a layman but logged wood in Maine in my youth AND know the equation for the volume of a cylinder … I thought everyone knew tree faster and faster as they grow

Rud Istvan says "it's not universally true" - just look at the tree rings!:

January 15, 2014 at 1:35 pm
Another way to see that this is not universally true is simply to look at growth rings of a boll cross section. My wife and I just harvested two, a white pine and an oak, for proposes of making furniture at the cabin in Georgia. For both the hardwood and the softwood, the annual ring spacing starts large, and shrinks as the tree matures. Inner rings are more widely spaced, outer rings are quite narrow. One can measure this differential over time, and using the change over time in pi* delta r^2 (since volume is just times height, and trees reach their species typical maximum height long before maximum mass (explained by the hydraulic limitation hypothesis) can actually use calculus to work out optimum harvesting times depending on the wood sought-sawtimber or pulpwood (or, in the case of hardwood with extensive crowns, both).

While Gary Pearse says the opposite to Russ Istvan and this isn't "a new discovery" :

January 15, 2014 at 1:40 pm
A little arithmetic would have saved the researchers all that trouble:
(Circumference of year 20 ring / Circumference of year 10 ring) >2
given, on average, rings are similar in thickness plus there is growth upwards and outwards of the canopy. Certainly if you measured 100 trees the relation would be pretty firm. Sheesh what are they teaching in botany and forestry these days that this is a new discovery.
And:
“…growth accelerates as they age suggests that large, old trees may play an unexpectedly dynamic role in removing carbon from the atmosphere.” Suggests? It is a certainty! Sheesh, what arithmetic are they teaching botanists and foresters these days. No 95% certainty among these folks.

KNR decides that specialist dendrochronologists know nothing about tree growth:

January 15, 2014 at 1:48 pm
One thing for me that stood out was in ‘the team’ there was not one person who was well qualified in consider what actual effects tree growth, considering how important was to their claims . But then one thing climate ‘scientists’ have never been short of its ego and a extreme belief, against all evidenced, if their own intelligence. So perhaps they felt they did not need one.

M Courtney had the same thought as I did when he said:

January 15, 2014 at 3:13 pm
When talking of volume growth it is worth remembering that trees are fractal.
The growth in tree volume can be a twig from a branch. An increase in the external sixe of the tree may not be necessary.
So the limits of growth may not be reached on the lifetime of a tree.

Sad Lindzen, Surprised Tisdale and another Mann-Bash on a dull day at WUWT

I don't know if it's just the mood I'm in but Anthony Watts' blog WUWT seems rather dull today.  Here's a quick rundown.

How the mighty have fallen

Richard Lindzen has had to resort to publishing his non-science at WUWT (archived here).  How long is it since he published anything himself?  It must be quite a while.  His article is not original. It's just a repeat of denier talking points, with stuff like:

arctic sea ice is suddenly showing surprising growth

Lindzen's wrong!

Sea ice this year isn't growing as fast as it did last year!  It was almost a year ago when deniers were enthralled at the growth of sea ice in the Arctic, observing "2012 is the fastest refreeze ever!".   This year they'll have to admit that 2013 won't be breaking that record.  This day last year ice added 36% to the minimum whereas today it's only added 31% to the minimum, and it had longer to do so (via JAXA)! /sarc

Tisdale on oceans

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale is surprised that he found a chart he likes in the IPCC report (archived here).  I'm surprised at how short Bob's article is, compared to his usual fare.  He still manages to say really dumb stuff like this:

I’ve noted this a number of times before: the NODC should be commended for the amount of work that went into assembling all of the data required for their ocean heat content datasets.

But the NODC cannot be praised for their portrayal of their ocean heat content data as a globally complete dataset with little uncertainty.

"Little uncertainty"?  Bob must only look at the pictures without reading the text, where there is a strong emphasis on uncertainty and its measurement.  Even if he only looked at the pictures, he can't have understood them.  For example, from page 3-93 of Chapter 3 of the full report - note the gray bars:

Fig 3.21 Time series of changes in large-scale ocean climate properties. From top to bottom: global ocean inventory of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, updated from Khatiwala et al. (2009); global mean sea level (GMSL), from Church and White (2011); global upper ocean heat content anomaly, updated from Domingues et al. (2008); the difference between salinity averaged over regions where the sea surface salinity is greater than the global mean sea surface salinity (“High Salinity”) and salinity averaged over regions values below the global mean (“Low Salinity”), from Boyer et al. (2009).

Another Mann-bash

Anthony Watts hasn't done too much scientist-bashing lately, or not on a personal level.  He was probably getting twitchy, because he came up with an excuse that he figured probably wouldn't land him in court.

Anthony decided to fake some outrage at an image used as part of an election campaign (archived here).  He writes:

The imagery is dishonest.

Anthony Watts accusing someone of being dishonest.  Now there's irony in action.

Norfolk Virginia is a flood-prone city and there was an image highlighting the risks of rising sea level, over which Anthony decided to take personal offense.  It probably took him a while to figure out it wasn't "real" and he when he did he felt very foolish.  Enough to get real mad.  I can see him now, googling away looking for a picture of the house under beautifully clear water.  I doubt anyone else thought the picture was anything but illustrating a point.  But then, Anthony isn't all that bright.

Here's the picture, it's got a caption saying seas have risen by 14.5 inches since 1930.  I wonder if Anthony thought at first it was a very very tiny house, before he realised it was an illustration?

From the WUWT comments

Nope, sorry.  The Mann-bashers let forth their pent up fury in the usual fashion.  It's not repeatable. I barely scanned them myself because the ones I did read are so distasteful.  Ignorance at its worst, fuelled by the lack of opportunity Anthony's provided lately to come together as a lynch mob or vent their various spleens.  It's archived here for the ghouls.

Hockey by email ~ more vexatious lawsuits by political science deniers

It's pretty obvious that the vexatious lawsuits by ATI are not to explore science, I'd say they are to try to flag the spirits of the dispirited science deniers like blogger Anthony Watts and his ragtag band of followers.

Anthony has a new post titled: ATI Files Suit to Compel the University of Arizona to Produce Records Related to So-Called “Hockey Stick” Global Warming Research

Why the ATI files a law suit instead of just reading the published research is obvious.  Scientific research holds no interest for them.  They want to trawl through personal emails looking for something, anything, the smallest phrase that they think they might have some chance of misrepresenting as "dirt".

According to WUWT (archived here), ATI has filed yet another frivolous lawsuit, this time trying to get emails from the University of Arizona, where meso-climatologist Professor Malcolm Hughes is Professor of Dendrochronology.  Professor Hughes was a co-author of the 1998 temperature reconstructions published in Nature and related work - for example:

• Mann ME, Bradley RS and Hughes MK Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries, Nature, 392, 779-787 (1998)
• Mann, M.E., Bradley, R.S. and Hughes, M.K., Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations. Geophysical Research Letters , 26, 759-762 (1999)
• Bradley, R.S., K.R. Briffa, J. Cole, M.K. Hughes and T.J. Osborn, : The climate of the last millennium. In: Alverson, K., R.S. Bradley and T.F. Pedersen (eds.) Paleoclimate, Global Change and the Future. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 105-149 (2003)
• Mann, M.E., Rutherford, S., Bradley, R.S., Hughes, M.K., Keimig, F.T., Optimal Surface Temperature Reconstructions using Terrestrial Borehole Data, Journal of Geophysical Research, 108 (D7), 4203, doi: 10.1029/2002JD002532 (2003) (with correction)
• Rutherford, S., Mann, M.E., Osborn, T.J., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D. Proxy-based Northern Hemisphere surface temperature reconstructions: sensitivity to methodology, predictor network, target season, and target domain. Journal of Climate. 18, 2308-2329 (2005).
• Mann, M.E., Zhihua Zhang, Hughes, M.K.Bradley, R.S., Miller, S., Rutherford, S. and Fenbiao Ni. Proxy-Based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations over the Past Two Millennia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 105:13252-13257 (2008).
• and many more.

If you can't tell what sort of lobby group the American Tradition Institute is by its name (it's nothing to do with what I understand as proud American tradition), it's an extremist lobby group aka "think tank".  You can tell why they target high profile distinguished scientists such as Professors Hughes and Mann.  They figure they might be able to isolate and discredit them for the "crime" of doing solid scientific research and making an enormously valued contribution to the understanding of the world around us.

Needless to say ATI is anti-science and one of the grubbier organisations in the USA.  The fact that it thinks science is done by email says it all.  It's looking for any snippet in any email that it can distort the meaning of to try to "prove" climate science is a giant hoax.  It doesn't have a good reputation in the courts either.

Too late, deniers - that horse has bolted

Guess what, Anthony Watts (his rationalwiki entry where someone - not me - has kindly listed yours truly!) and Christopher Booker (more on him here and he's King of Hearts in Monbiots list of top 10 deniers) and Chris Horner (who is the muck-raker in chief at ATI and unsurprisingly failed to dig up any dirt on Professor Mann after gaining access to documents) - you're too late.

I know you aren't aware of the fact because you don't keep up with science and even if you tried you wouldn't understand it.  Not only are there too many hockey sticks around - beat up on one and there are many more waiting in line behind - but there are much longer temperature reconstructions now.  This is what Chris Horner and his denier backers are chasing, not from the upcoming IPCC report, nor from the 2007 IPCC report but from way back in TAR - from twelve years ago (the first paper was published fifteen years ago):

Source: IPCC TAR

Too many and too hot to handle!

But it's no longer just 1,000 years of northern hemisphere reconstructions, or 2,000 years of northern hemisphere and global reconstructions, and lots of them, plus long term regional reconstructions - now there is a reconstruction of the entire Holocene, from 11,300 to the present.  Not only that but there is a reconstruction of the last deglaciation from 22,000 years ago to 11,300 years ago.

This is what ATI and other deniers will be faced with after they've tried and failed to smash all the other hockey sticks - the wheelchair!

Adapted from: Jos Hagelaars on Our Changing Climate

What is Chris Horner to do?  How can he keep the ATI donor degenerates happy enough to keep him employed? A weak attempt at getting some mileage on the biggest anti-science blog in the blogosphere, maintained by a chap who still, after years of protesting climate science, fails at simple arithmetic and can't grasp the concept of temperature anomalies.   Will it suffice or will Chris Horner eventually be told he's spent enough of ATI's funds on pointless lawsuits?

Even if ATI does get access to some emails, just like their attempt at the University of Virginia, they won't find anything worth shouting to the world. (Whatever happened to the 200,000 plus stolen emails that deniers couldn't wait to chomp? Nothing, nada, zilch!)

It looks to me that what ATI wants to do is shut down research. To tie researchers and universities up in knots responding to lawsuits.  To shut down houses of learning because they don't like the lesson. Or maybe they hope to "prove" to the 8% dismissives that the all levels of government across the USA and the world, including the judiciary is corrupt and part of the secret climate cult, together with all scientific bodies and most of the general public.  Everyone, that is, except for the 8% dismissives that flock to the echo chambers of science denying blogs like WUWT.

Good luck with that - not!

Some of the idiotic comments at WUWT

The comments are archived here with the main WUWT article.

Gerry Dorrian is deluded and still looking for straws:

September 9, 2013 at 10:47 pm
Hopefully this will be one of the last straws on the hockey-stick’s back!

dp is calling for someone to hack university computers again and steal personal emails says:

September 9, 2013 at 10:55 pm
Mr. FOIA – time to act (again).

Go Home wonders why nothing of consequence was found in the 200,000 plus emails that were already stolen and says:

September 9, 2013 at 11:02 pm
So what happen to climategate 3 email dump? Was it a hoax or was it real?

Steven Mosher, who tried to make money from the stolen emails replies:

September 9, 2013 at 11:07 pm
its real

Richard111 can't believe no-one uncovered the non-existent mischief in the stolen emails and decides that it's all a conspiracy - he says:

September 9, 2013 at 11:27 pm
So why was it stomped on and by who?

And that's about it - only nine comments (not all shown above) after three or more hours.  It looks as if the most of the deniers at WUWT have lost interest - or maybe they are fast asleep.  It's night time in the USA.

Watt a Bad Memory - Letting the Lynch Mob Loose Again

Here is a story that proves itself.  Don Mikulecky writes about how Michael Mann has become a modern hero by being the target of active science deniers like Anthony Watts.  And Anthony denies (twice) and in doing so proves (twice) how he instigates the lynch mob attacks against Michael Mann.

Michael Mann is a Modern Hero

Anthony Watts is gloating about an internet poll on DailyKos at the bottom of an article written over a year ago by Don Mikulecky.  In the article, Don wrote about why he considers Michael Mann to be a hero.  Here is an excerpt:

Michael Mann was not someone who chose his role. Military persons can anticipate the possibility of being in situations where acts of heroism are called for. Scientists are certainly not in the same situation. Or at least, they have not been for a long time. Galileo comes to mind and it was the Church then that made his life one of great sacrifice. In these times the situation has deteriorated so rapidly that few of us have had a chance to evaluate the impact of what is going on. Science is a threat to the dark forces that are moving to control us all. People like Carl Sagan and Stephen jay Gould were out there early on fighting against these dark forces. They did a lot for us. Rachael Carlson and many others were on the front lines. Yet the situation with Professor Mann is something beyond all that. He has become a symbol for what our future is all about and he did not chose his role. No sane person would have.

Watts Up with Watts' Memory?

Anthony has made trashing Michael Mann his life's work.  So much so that he can't remember every time he sets his dogs onto him.  Anthony writes:

Note, this is a poll on the Daily Kos, one of the lefts most influential blogs, and there’s the result. Note that as far as I know, there’s been no freeping of the poll, and WUWT hasn’t mentioned it until Sunday night when I first was informed about it from Tom Nelson’s blog, nor have other climate skeptic blogs promoted this poll that I’m aware of, so I have to think this is what the Kos kids actually think of Dr. Mann.

What an interesting development.

But Anthony did mention it - a year ago when the article first appeared!

Anthony whistled and the lynch mob responded

On 13 March 2012, Watts writes an article about it with the title:

Kos asks about Michael Mann - hero or zero?

And at the bottom of Anthony's article is this:

...And, there is a poll at the end which has some surprising choices.

Update 3/14: One of the comments there is by somebody who posts here regularly, John Sully. He writes:
Anthony Watts posted about this over at his site and told the trolls to come and freep the poll. This is why year after year his site gets voted “Best Science Blog” or whatever.

Mr. Sully please point out exactly where in the 35 words I wrote (the rest are from Kos) in this essay I have “…told the trolls to come and freep the poll.” Otherwise sir, you are a liar. – Anthony

 In the 255 comments are these:

Tom B. says:
March 13, 2012 at 6:41 pm Thanks for pointing this out. Went over there to vote…. Please do the same.

Harold Ambler says:
March 13, 2012 at 7:04 pm I think I’m dreaming. Or this is simply the most satisfying poll I will ever be allowed to be part of.

And many many more in the same vein.  As one astute WUWT commenter wrote at the time:

Phil Clarke says:
March 14, 2012 at 4:17 am  Willis – “People ain’t buyin’ it.”
Actually Willis, from the way the numbers jumped after this post, readers of WUWt ain’t buying it.  Not quite the same thing.

Interesting development indeed!  (Notice that Watts has got more of his mob to vote in the time since his second article was written.)

Update:
Several hours later, the gloat plus all the comments were deleted by Anthony and replaced with:

[self snip] I was given a tip, and didn’t realize that this poll is over a year old and didn’t recall WUWT had previously covered it. Neither did Tom Nelson when he covered it last night, so I withdraw this article as it is not new.
http://t.co/tWap6uCzBe
Apologies to my readers. – Anthony

(Ha! If Anthony hadn't blocked me from his twitter feed, he might have found out sooner.)

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines

You can get  copy of Michael Mann's book from Columbia University Press or Amazon and probably elsewhere.

Watt a whopper of religious fervour

Anthony Watts criticises Michael Mann for refusing to 'debate' Roy Spencer because not only is Spencer a climate science denier, he is an evolution denier.

Anthony Watts can't tell the difference between science and religion as evidenced by the fact that he thinks this tweet, which is about science, is a comment on religion:

No @foxnews, I'm not interested in "debating" #climatechange & #evolution denier Roy Spencer (sourcewatch.org/index.php?titl…) on your "news" network
— Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) March 25, 2013

Prof Mann mentions only science and expresses the normal reaction from any scientist when asked to 'debate' a science denier.  (Nowhere does Mann mention religion.)

Real Scientists Don't Debate Creationists or Climate Science Deniers

You can just as easily substitute climate science denier for creationist in the following excerpt from an article by Richard Dawkins: (my paragraph breaks and emphasis)

Some time in the 1980s when I was on a visit to the United States, a television station wanted to stage a debate between me and a prominent creationist called, I think, Duane P Gish. I telephoned Stephen Gould for advice.

He was friendly and decisive: "Don't do it."

The point is not, he said, whether or not you would 'win' the debate. Winning is not what the creationists realistically aspire to. For them, it is sufficient that the debate happens at all.

They need the publicity. We don't.

To the gullible public which is their natural constituency, it is enough that their man is seen sharing a platform with a real scientist. "There must be something in creationism, or Dr So-and-So would not have agreed to debate it on equal terms."

Inevitably, when you turn down the invitation you will be accused of cowardice, or of inability to defend your own beliefs. But that is better than supplying the creationists with what they crave: the oxygen of respectability in the world of real science.

Does Anthony Watts deny evolution?

Anthony's knee-jerk reaction to Mann's tweet raises some interesting questions.  It is well known that Anthony Watts denies climate science.  Now we can legitimately ask if he also denies biological science?  I guess so, based on his reaction to the tweet.

Mixed Reaction from the Deniosaurs

There are some quaint comments on Anthony's shock horror article, including quite a few from people who said they can see the point that Mann is making, and others who wonder why Anthony jumped straight to religion when Mann didn't mention religion. (Good question.)

There are, of course, lots of comments from people who didn't bother to evaluate the article and just saw it as an excuse for more Mann-bashing.  One of the weirdest comments came from the 'Good Lord!' Monckton who wants to find some scientific papers on 'intelligent design':

My one question about intelligent design is why there seem to be no scientific papers about it in the reviewed literature. I should be grateful if anyone can help here.

233 comments later, Anthony decided to close the thread because it exposed too many seriously warped ideas held by the members of his nutty fan club.