Another Global Warming 'Hockey Stick' Busted

UN Climate Reports:"They Lie" reports on how UN IPCC reports keep using discredited and suspect information to hype up climate change fears. It includes the amusing use of Wikipedia as a source for UN reports. It also notes another coup at Climate Audit.

Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit has busted another hockey stick: He has shown that a tree-ring temperature proxy study (Yamal reconstruction, done by Briffa) had selected and cherry-picked a mere 10 tree-ring cores to create a 'hockey-stick' reconstruction of temperature trends, a trend that disappears if you include all nearby relevant tree-ring proxy data:





The red line is the reported temperature trends from the original study, a reconstruction is based on a sample of only ten trees, and the green line shows the updated trends inclusive of all nearby available proxy data. Briffa used a narrow, selected, set of proxy data to generate a trend that has been used to help 'prove' global temperature trends. In effect, he threw out data that disagreed with the temperature trend he was trying to validate. It's a fine way to fool yourself into 'proving' a preconceived hypothesis.

Bishop Hill's The Yamal implosion is a layman's guide to what happened to get this uncovered and what it means for climate science. The story is reverberating, with Briffa responding to McIntyre.

McKitrick explains the story, saying:

Thus the key ingredient in most of the studies that have been invoked to support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series, depends on the influence of a woefully thin subsample of trees and the exclusion of readily-available data for the same area. Whatever is going on here, it is not science.

The temperature 'hockey stick' is a myth, constructed out of bad scientific methodology, 'lying through statistics' by over-interpreting narrow and selected data sets, and the hubris of ignoring data that contradicts politicized conclusions. The climate doom-and-gloom fearmongers, such as Al Gore, used the hockey stick to 'prove' we faced a crisis. Yet current global temperature trends are not cooperating at all with the fearmongers.

The world's climate is not in a crisis. However, there is a crisis in the credibility of climate scientists who have once again been shown to be skewing data and results. The IPCC and "Hockey Team" climatologists have been found to be withholding data, refusing to acknowledge critiques honestly, skewing statistics, and politicizing results. Skewed science like this has undermined the credibility of the whole edifice of climate change science.