WUWT Weirdos: Anthony Watts is hoping for email science

More desperation from deniers. Anthony Watts is very hopeful of getting his grubby paws on some more emails. The mindset of conspiracy theorists is mind-bogglingly stupid - and rancid.  The Peeping Toms among the denialati can't read or understand science, but they can spread snippets of emails all over the internet, provided someone tells them how to misinterpret them. Anthony starts off badly with a wrong headline:

Uh, oh, Mann’s MBH98 ‘hockeystick’ emails ruled fair game by judge

That wasn't remotely like the ruling of the appeals judge, according to the article Anthony linked to. He ruled that trial judges are to determine what documents the University of Arizona is to release to E&E Legal Institute. That organisation, E&E, seems to specialise in tying up the courts' to try to get access to scientists' email so that they can pore paw through them to try to prove that climate science is a hoax. Utter nutters.

Vicious attacks on Michael Mann: More smears from Mark Steyn and Anthony Watts' lynch mob

Today Anthony Watts is promoting Mark Steyn's last ditch attempt to discredit one of the world's leading climate scientists. Professor Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Director, Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. Mark Steyn is an ex-smut columnist turned smut blogger, who arguably viciously defamed Professor Michael Mann (any others?) and is now being sued by Professor Mann. Anthony Watts is a blogger who promotes climate conspiracy theories of the ugly kind, and falsely accuses scientists of fraud and more.

Note: I've added an addendum about the contents of the book below. [Sou 7:52 pm 13 August 2015]

The Hockey Stick

In 1998 a paper by Professors Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes was published in Nature - hereafter called MBH98. The paper had the title: "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries".  In that paper was a figure that was to become a symbol of global warming, even getting a name - the hockey stick. Below is Figure 5b, the Hockey Stick, from MBH98:

Figure 5 Time reconstructions (solid lines) along with raw data (dashed lines). ... b, for Northern Hemisphere mean temperature (NH) in 8C. In both cases, the zero line corresponds to the 1902–80 calibration mean of the quantity. For b raw data are shown up to 1995 and positive and negative 2j uncertainty limits are shown by the light dotted lines surrounding the solid reconstruction, calculated as described in the Methods section. Source: MBH98.

Oodles of hockey sticks on display for WUWT

Poor old WUWT is in the doldrums. Now that temperatures are shooting to unprecedented heights again, deniers don't know what to say or do. So they've fallen back on an old faithful.


Just when I was thinking it's been a while since WUWT took a shot at Professor Michael Mann, he makes another appearance. This time in an article by climate disinformer Doug L. Hoffman. Doug mistakenly thinks that the days of hockey sticks have passed. I'm here to tell him he's wrong - and to show him oodles of hockey sticks.

Doug's article is very long considering the point he is trying to make. He's arguing that the MBH98 hockey stick chart, which shows that modern temperatures have shot up suddenly from what they were for most of human civilisation, is "dead".  He's dead wrong!

Figure 5 Time reconstructions (solid lines) along with raw data (dashed lines)....b, for Northern Hemisphere mean temperature (NH) in 8C. In both cases, the zero line corresponds to the 1902–80 calibration mean of the quantity. For b raw data are shown up to 1995 and positive and negative 2σ uncertainty limits are shown by the light dotted lines surrounding the solid reconstruction, calculated as described in the Methods section. From MBH98

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.

The negative bias of Anthony Watts, Hockey Sticks and the Dunning Kruger Effect

Another funny from Anthony Watts.  I won't dwell on the subject matter. Despite the fact that its undoubtedly a fascinating field, dendrochronology is a very specialised area in which I haven't the slightest bit of expertise.  But neither does Anthony Watts. (That's me fawning :))

He's come across a paper in his daily trawls of denialist websites (or via email or smoke signals or whatever).  It's a new paper by Cecile et al in the journal Climate of the Past: A likelihood perspective on tree-ring standardization: eliminating modern sample bias. The paper is discussing a new method to determine what is apparently widely known in dendrochronology circles as "modern sample bias".  I've seen the term in this 2008 chapter/paper by Keith R. Briffa and Thomas M. Melvin, for example.

Anyway Anthony is jumping up and down clapping his hands with excitement.  Why?  I think it's because the authors used the word "negative" and "bias" together.  He reckons it means the Hockey Stick is finally broken!  The five millionth nail he's tried to drive in the coffin - still the Hockey Stick lives on.

Here is his jubilant headline and the first line of his article:

And here are the tags - so he's not trying to be funny :)

Anthony highlights the bits of his copy and paste that he thinks are important - I've italicised Anthony's bolded bits:

Dendrochronologists observed that the older a tree was, the slower it tended to grow, even after controlling for age- and time-driven effects. The result is an artificial downward signal in the regional curve (as the older ages are only represented by the slower growing trees) and a similar artificial positive signal in the final chronology (as earlier years are only represented by the slow growing trees), an effect termed modern sample bias. When this biased chronology is used in climate reconstruction it then implies a relatively unsuitable historic climate. Obviously, the detection of long term 15 trends in tree growth, as might be caused by a changing climate or carbon fertilization, is also seriously compromised (Brienen et al., 2012b). More generally, modern sample bias can be viewed as a form of “differing-contemporaneous-growth-rate bias”, where changes in the magnitude of growth of the tree ring series included in the chronology over time (or age, in the case of the regional curve) skew the final curve, especially 20 near the ends of the chronology where series are rapidly added and removed (Briffa and Melvin, 2011)....

...Furthermore, modern sample bias produced a significant negative bias in estimated tree growth by time in 70.5% of chronologies and a significant positive bias in 29.5% of chronologies. This effect is largely concentrated in the last 300 yr of growth data, posing serious questions about the homogeneity of modern and ancient chronologies using traditional standardization techniques.

Looks as if Anthony's put two and two together and come up with two and two fifths.   Now I won't pretend to understand the details of the issue of "modern sample bias", but it seems clear enough that it's to do with deriving signals from aged trees and the application of statistical analysis.

In keeping with the tree theme and hockey themes, I'll stick my neck out and say that Anthony's got the wrong end of the stick.  If, as is stated in the excerpt Anthony quotes, the majority of chronologies (70.5%) have a "significant negative bias", that would mean they underestimate whatever the parameter is that is being measured (eg temperature) in the last "300 yr of growth data".  So if one was to apply that to the Hockey Stick chart as a stand-alone - it would surely mean that the hockey stick is even steeper in modern times!  In fact, had Anthony read the paper, he might have noticed this:

D’Arrigo et al. (2008) suggest that modern sample bias may be responsible for the “divergence problem” in dendroclimatology, the widespread reduction in temperature 10 sensitivity of tree-ring chronologies in recent decades

Not that I'm suggesting that the various published Hockey Stick charts are negatively biased in the recent end of the data.  These dendro scientists know their trees too well for that.  I also know that there are numerous temperature reconstructions that all show the Hockey Stick shape and use many more proxies than tree rings - as well as the obvious fact of having modern thermometers these days that show the sudden rise in temperature in recent decades. And all these different studies match each other fairly closely and, in the periods of overlap, are a close match with the instrumental data sets.

I'll stop here before I go all DuKE myself!  Professor Mann and all the other Hockey Stick producers who followed, would know a zillion times more about "modern sample bias" and dendrochronology than I (or Anthony Watts) will ever know.


It seems a nice little example of Dunning Kruger Effect in action at WUWT - don't you think?