Greenland/Antarctica Thickening

[kenl01]

Excellent article from http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/v ... nland.html


Visit to Greenland May Chill Hot Air Hoax

AFP’s science and health correspondent Jack Phillips recently took a trip to Greenland, the world’s northernmost landmass, to see for himself whether stories about global warming that have been promoted in the mainstream are true or false. His report follows.



SCORESBYSUND, GREENLAND—Mainstream newspaper, Internet and TV reports claim global warming is causing extensive melting of glaciers, icebergs and permafrost, which might lead to drastic increases in sea level and threaten inundation of coastal cities. But there is no evidence that the sea level is actually rising, only forecasts by computer models that have been based on thousands of assumptions.

Photographs of the shore of Greenland show the sea ice surrounding it has been melting. But upon my visit, this reporter was shown evidence that the icecap, where most of the ice is located, is growing significantly.

In Antarctica, temperatures on the icecap are decreasing. Satellite radar surveys of Antarctica and Greenland have shown that the icecaps are getting larger. Reports from the Mohn Sverdrup Center for Global Ocean studies in Norway state that, in the past 11 years, Greenland’s icecap has
increased over 21 inches.

A recent paper published in Science claims that ice is being deposited at the net rate of 26.8 billion tons a year in Antarctica.

Greenland, a Danish possession, is the largest island in the world, with an area of 1 million square miles. About 5 percent of the world’s ice sits in a cap that covers its entire interior. Only 200,000 square miles on the coast is not under the cap.

In some places the cap is almost 10,000 feet thick. Greenland’s northern extremity is the closest land to the North Pole. Water from the Arctic Ocean flows southward along the East Coast carrying icebergs from Greenland, which help cool the North Atlantic Ocean.

On my recent visit to Scoresbysund, about halfway up the eastern coast of Greenland, I had an opportunity to observe glaciers and icebergs first hand in the world’s largest complex of fjords.

A few hours in this region provided a glimpse of life above the Arctic Circle. This municipality, first settled in 1925, contains about 500 people, whose principal occupations are hunting and fishing. It is about the size of Great Britain and is relatively close to the largest national park in the world, encompassing about a third of the icecap.

This reporter saw firsthand how some glaciers near the mouth of Scoresbysund and the open ocean had melted away, leaving beds of stones at the water’s edge.

However, as the ship I was on, the Professor Molchanov, a former Russian Arctic research vessel, sailed deeper into the sound, away from the sea and toward the central icecap, I saw many glaciers that were not melting, and lots of icebergs produced by glaciers, which are clearly growing.

One glacier I saw was said to be six miles wide. One of the largest, I was told, is a 60-mile-wide glacier located some distance away on Greenland.

Inspecting a group of icebergs in a rubber Zodiac boat at close range is awe-inspiring. I saw several bergs that were at least 30 to 50 stories tall. Someone in the group I was traveling with estimated a height of more than 80 yards for one.

As we got close to one of these mammoths I could see its foundation deep under the water. Most of the ice, about 66 percent of the berg, remains submerged as it floats on the surface. These icebergs are part of the Earth’s conveyor system, which is responsible for the movement of air and
ocean currents that influence weather conditions. As the icebergs from the polar regions melt, the cold water they generate travels toward the equator.

In the equatorial regions, heat from the sun is more intense than elsewhere and it produces both currents of warm water and clouds of water vapor, which travel toward the poles. Some of the water vapor is deposited as snow on the ice caps and subsequently turns into ice. The heat released by the conversion of water vapor into liquid water, snow and ice in the polar regions is mostly radiated into outer space. This process creates very low temperatures in the icecaps. For example, –94 degrees Fahrenheit has been found in Greenland.

Despite what has been reported in the mainstream press, many scientists do not subscribe to the theory of global warming and believe that, overall, objective science is showing that the Earth is cooling, not warming.

The Physics of Glaciers, now in its second edition, by retired Canadian scientist Dr. W.S.B. Patterson, discloses that the maximum temperatures of the Holocene, the epoch in which we live, occurred about 5,000 years ago and that the Earth has been cooling since then.

Of course, superimposed on this long-term trend are shorter-term fluctuations in temperature. For example, in A.D. 1000 it was warmer than it is now and Northern Europe had a “Golden Age” when Vikings farmed Greenland.

However, Nordic settlements quickly disappeared when the Earth cooled from about A.D. 1300 to 1700, in what has been known as “the Little Ice Age,” an historical fact. Man’s actions did not cause this. It was Mother Nature’s work.

Subsequently, the Earth has been warming for the past 300 years. Consequently, it is reasonable to expect some ice to melt after that many years of warming.

However, the fact that temperatures now are lower overall than they were in A.D. 1000 indicates that the long-term trend is still in force. There is no evidence that a mere 300 years of warming has reversed the 4,600-year cooling trend. It is a fact that carbon dioxide increased during the last 100 years as a result of the industrial revolution and increasing population. But what caused temperatures to rise during the first 200 years? Many scientists argue that it was Mother Nature at work again.

The available data do not support the contention that the minuscule increase in carbon dioxide concentration—from 0.03 percent to 0.04 percent of the atmosphere—has significantly affected Earth’s temperatures.

On the other hand it is easy to find a close connection between cyclical changes in the radiation supplied by the sun and conditions on the Earth. In fact, Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovic, while incarcerated in a jail cell, provided mathematical support for the theory that variations in the orbits of the Earth, sun and moon were responsible for recurrent ice ages without the aid of a computer.

Nature is highly cyclical: night follows day, winter follows summer, global cooling follows global warming, and glaciations follow interglacial periods. All of these cycles can be explained in terms of movements of the Earth-moon system around the sun.

Dr. Willard Libbey carbon dated material connected with the end of the last glaciation and found that it was 11,000 years old. Other scientists have found that, during the past 20 million years, these periods have never lasted longer than 13,500 years. Therefore it is reasonable to believe that we are coming to the end of our present interglacial period and that sometime, within the next 1,700 years, it is likely the Earth will get much colder and less hospitable.

Don’t think that there are not doomsday scenarios associated with increased cooling. As heat from the sun diminishes during the end of interglacials, the increasing mass of the growing icecaps stresses the Earth’s crust. According to one theory, this increases volcanic activity.

About 80 percent of Earth’s volcanoes are underwater. When they erupt ocean temperatures will likely increase. Then air temperatures will increase and temperate zone glaciers will melt. Sea ice and ice on coastal areas will melt.

Evaporation will increase in the tropics, and more water vapor will travel to the poles, where it will deposit as snow. When this volcanic action diminishes, as the crust adjusts, the Earth will cool faster, and the probability of glaciation will likely increase.

Perhaps people should be grateful for the present warmth, disregard the politically modified science promoted by the global warmers, and pray that the warmth continues. Conditions in the Arctic leave a great deal to be desired, in my experience.

(Issue #52, December 26, 2005)

[x-y-no]

Don't know why you felt the need to post this twice.

See my response here: http://www.storm2k.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=79806

[sponger]

Sorry Ken, but any information to the contrary of mans causation of warmer temps or especially indications of over all cooling must be ignored.

All is well is a lousy way to get a research grant or to make head way in preventing any progress in improving the worlds standard of living.

When an ice berg melts its aha! Global Warming. When a contrary event takes places, it is a regional anomaly and not indicative of overall earth weather. I am glad I could clear this up for you!

[x-y-no]

Sorry Ken, but any information to the contrary of mans causation of warmer temps or especially indications of over all cooling must be ignored.

All is well is a lousy way to get a research grant or to make head way in preventing any progress in improving the worlds standard of living.

When an ice berg melts its aha! Global Warming. When a contrary event takes places, it is a regional anomaly and not indicative of overall earth weather. I am glad I could clear this up for you!

Are you really trying to be offensive and obnoxious?

Please point out where I have ever suggested that any evidence whatsoever be ignored. Please. Do so or retract this garbage. I believe there is a board policy against personal attacks on other members, and I view your post as such an attack upon me.

Jan

[JBG]

Don't know why you felt the need to post this twice.

See my response here: http://www.storm2k.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=79806

See my response to you response in the same place.

[JBG]

Sorry Ken, but any information to the contrary of mans causation of warmer temps or especially indications of over all cooling must be ignored.

All is well is a lousy way to get a research grant or to make head way in preventing any progress in improving the worlds standard of living.

When an ice berg melts its aha! Global Warming. When a contrary event takes places, it is a regional anomaly and not indicative of overall earth weather. I am glad I could clear this up for you!

Especially when the main financier of "global warming" has his hands dirty in numerous other frauds besides Kyoto, including most importantly "oil-for-food".

===============================================
Link to source in Toronto Free Press

How Montreal's Power Corp. found itself caught up in the biggest fiasco in UN history
by Kevin Steel, The Western Standard

Saturday, March 5, 2005


Cover Story
How the biggest scandal in history unfolded

*snip* (this part deals mostly with oil-for-food fraud)

Most Canadian companies look forward to the day they earn themselves a mention on the prime-time news. They hire PR firms and spend thousands to harass news editors with press releases to tout their latest acquisition, invention or foreign venture in hopes of convincing someone to give them even a passing mention on the national news–never mind the nearly unimaginable publicity of being plugged on a U.S. newscast.

But when Montreal-based Power Corporation of Canada found itself, in late January, the topic of a news story on America’s top-rated Fox News Channel, which draws millions of U.S. and international viewers, executives there probably weren’t thrilled. Unlike most publicly traded firms looking to build their brand on Wall Street, Power Corp. is, at the best of times, a quiet, often obscured company (in the past year it’s issued a total of five news releases). That might seem strange, given the massive size and, well, power wielded by the holding company. Power controls some of Canada’s biggest blue-chip companies, including the Investors Group, the country’s largest mutual fund dealer, and investment firm Mackenzie Financial. It owns insurers Great-West Lifeco, Canada Life and London Life. Power owns several Quebec newspapers, including La Presse. It also holds substantial positions in Chinese airlines and telecom firms and has large stakes in the world’s leading entertainment company, Bertelsmann, as well as a big piece of one of Europe’s largest oil producers. In 2003, Power Corp. reported annual revenues of $16 billion.

But the Fox News story wasn’t prompted by an announcement from Power of some billion-dollar takeover or the appointment of a new senior executive. It was something altogether different: the revelation that the man handpicked by the UN secretary general last April to probe the UN’s scandalized Oil-for-Food program, Paul Volcker, had not disclosed to the UN that he was a paid adviser to Power Corp., a story which had originally been broken by a small, independent Toronto newspaper, the Canada Free Press. Why did the highest-rated cable channel in the U.S. care? Because the more that Americans came to know about Oil-for-Food, which has been called the largest corruption scandal in history, the more the name of this little-known Montreal firm kept popping up. And the more links that seemed to emerge between Power Corp. and individuals or organizations involved in the Oil-for-Food scandal, the more Fox News and other news outlets sniffing around this story began to ask questions about who, exactly, this Power Corp. is. And, they wanted to know, what, if anything, did Power have to do with a scandal in which companies around the world took bribes to help a murderous dictator scam billions of dollars in humanitarian aid out of the UN while his people suffered and starved?

Just a month before the Canada Free Press revealed that Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman, is a member of Power Corp.’s international advisory board–and a close friend and personal adviser to Power’s owner, Paul Desmarais Sr.–a U.S. congressional investigation into the UN scandal discovered that Power Corp. had extensive connections to BNP Paribas, a French bank that had been handpicked by the UN in 1996 to broker the Oil-for-Food program. In fact, Power actually once owned a stake in Paribas through its subsidiary, Pargesa Holding SA. The bank also purchased a stake in Power Corp. in the mid-seventies and, as recently as 2003, BNP Paribas had a 14.7 per cent equity and 21.3 per cent voting stake in Pargesa, company records show. John Rae, a director and former executive at Power (brother of former Ontario premier Bob Rae), was president and a director of the Paribas Bank of Canada until 2000. And Power Corp. director Michel François-Poncet, who was, in 2001, the vice-chairman of Pargesa, also sat on Paribas’s board, though he died Feb. 10, at the age of 70. A former chair of Paribas’s management board, André Levy-Lang, is currently a member of Power’s international advisory council. And Amaury-Daniel de Seze, a member of BNP Paribas’s executive council, also sat on Pargesa’s administrative council in 2002.


In September, the U.S. Congress–conducting one of seven U.S. government investigations into Oil-for-Food, in addition to the UN probe–subpoenaed crates of documents from the bank, which earned $700 million for its work, ostensibly to investigate the companies that had been doing business through Paribas that may have ripped off Oil-for-Food. But Capitol Hill insiders say that Paribas itself is of interest to congressional investigators, in particular whether Paribas violated "know your client"—style banking regulations, which require banks to be vigilant in watching for money laundering and other criminal activities being conducted through their bank. In February, Congress subpoenaed more documents from the bank, looking for very specific information. "The international program was managed through the escrow accounts of BNP maintained in New York and we have pretty strict banking laws, pretty strict disclosure laws and have gotten even more so with the passage of the Patriot Act," says one aide to a senior Republican working for the House International Relations Committee, one of the bodies investigating the Oil-for-Food program. "There are some doubts as to the veracity of BNP’s compliance with the more stringent rules that are contained in the Patriot Act that were law by the end of ‘01."

The reason investigators are interested in Power’s possible links to the bank that acted as a clearing house for Oil-for-Food is because the firm also appears to have had a stake in an oil firm that had been working out lucrative contracts with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Subsidiary Pargesa owns the largest single stake in Total Group Inc. (a Belgian-French petroleum multi-national corporation formed from the merger of Total, Petrofina and Elf Aquitaine), which reportedly had been negotiating, prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003, rich contracts with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to develop and exploit the Majnoon and Nahr Umar oil fields in southern Iraq. Those regions are estimated to contain roughly a quarter of Iraq’s reserves. The contracts were on the verge of being signed in 1997, one year after the beginning of the UN’s Oil-for-Food program replaced U.S. sanctions on Iraq, when the French government intervened and stopped the deal. Paul Desmarais Jr., now chairman of Power Corp. (Paul Sr. retired in 1996, but is said to be active in the firm), sits on the board of Total, and Power director, François-Poncet, also sat on the board of Total’s predecessor firm, Totalfina Elf. Paribas also owned shares in Total as recently as 2000, records show.

Add up the facts that Power Corp. appears to be connected to an oil company that would benefit extensively if Saddam remained in power, with the bank appointed by the UN to help broker an Oil-for-Food program that appears to have been directly enriching Saddam, and which is being investigated for irregularities that may have abetted the wholesale corruption that eventually engulfed Oil-for-Food, and that Power’s owners have a professional and personal relationship with the man hired by the UN to investigate the corruption, and it’s no wonder that more and more questions are being asked about the firm.

The United Nations has refused to co-operate with the U.S. Congress investigations into the US$67-billion Oil-for-Food program and Security Council members Russia and France have refused to give Volcker the right to subpoena witnesses in the internal UN probe. But the way the scam appears to have worked is that Saddam was permitted to sell oil to customers he selected himself (he favoured French and Russian companies) at below-market prices, by allocating them oil vouchers. The customers could resell the oil at market prices and make a large profit, provided they kicked back a portion of the money to Saddam, who used the money for everything but badly needed food and medicine (the program came to be known by critics as Oil-for-Palaces). It is estimated that Saddam may have skimmed as much as US$2 billion from the aid program. And the fact that Iraqis were suffering while Saddam built up weapons and enriched his own personal wealth, obviously makes this scandal not only bigger, but more heinous than any run-of-the-mill Wall Street book-cooking. Companies implicated in what effectively amounts to crimes against humanity may never recover. And, to be clear, Power Corp. has not been linked in any direct way to the con. As for the fact that Power’s name has come up several times in the investigation, Power’s vice-president, general counsel and secretary Ted Johnson believes the news reports to be inaccurate and irresponsible. Says Johnson: "The stories coming out of the United States are a bunch of misinformation based on innuendo and half-truths."

There’s a tale they used to tell on Parliament Hill about a president, a billionaire, an ambassador and a prime minister. The four of them got into an elevator one day at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, when Jim Blanchard, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, began ribbing the billionaire, Paul Desmarais’s son André, about his recent marriage to France Chrétien, the daughter of then prime minister Jean Chrétien, as then U.S. president Bill Clinton listened in. "France certainly married well," Blanchard reportedly said to the prime minister. To which Chrétien replied, smugly: "André married well."

In reality, the wedding of France and André, in 1981, had only formalized the marriage between the Canadian government to the Desmaraises. While the family, worth an estimated US$4 billion and ranked the sixth richest in Canada, has always kept a fairly low profile, they have been in the news for decades--even if most Canadians never really noticed. The fact that the family happens to be friendly with the man who once ran the U.S. federal reserve won’t surprise those who know them: the Desmaraises are as well connected politically as they are corporately. And it’s arguable, based on the circumstantial evidence anyway, that nothing happens on Parliament Hill that isn’t, in some way, a product of the Desmarais family’s design. Prime Minister Paul Martin and former PMs Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau have all been close, personal friends of Paul Desmarais Sr. The story on Parliament Hill was that Trudeau’s leadership bid was cooked up in Power headquarters in Victoria Square in Montreal. In the hiatus of his political career in the 1980s, Chrétien cooled his heels sitting on the board of a Power Corp. subsidiary, Consolidated Bathurst, and Power executive John Rae ran Chrétien’s leadership campaigns in 1984 and 1990, as well as the 1993 election campaign that brought Chrétien to office. Martin got his start in the business world in the early sixties, working for then Power Corp. president Maurice Strong, and was made a millionaire, thanks to an undisclosed 1981 deal in which Desmarais sold him Canada Steamship Lines. Strong continues to act as one of Martin’s senior advisors.

But the connections don’t end there.

*snip*

If there’s one government in which Power has as much interest as it does in Canada, it’s the UN. Maurice Strong, president of Power from 1964 to 1966–who went on to run Ontario Hydro and Petro-Canada–is not only a member of the Privy Council for Canada and a direct adviser to Paul Martin, he’s also a senior adviser to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Appointed by Annan in 1997, after he took over the general secretariat, Strong’s specific role was "to assist planning and executing a far-reaching reform of the world body."

*snip*

How close Strong is with Power Corp. these days isn’t clear. But what is clear is that certain UN policies have been a boost to the value of the conglomerate. For one thing, the UN-created Kyoto Protocol–which was spearheaded by none other than Strong himself, born of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which he chaired–could have significant potential benefits for Power’s holdings in China. Through their subsidiary, CITIC Pacific Ltd., the Desmaraises own power-generating facilities, automobile concerns and myriad other industrial interests throughout the Communist nation. The fact that Kyoto’s framers deliberately created regulations that will hamstring exactly those sorts of businesses in the West by imposing limits on greenhouse gas production, but exempt China from those same limits, gives Power a competitive international advantage. Meanwhile, under the protocol, Chinese power plants will be able to sell clean air "credits," or allowances, to Western producers for cash. Some economists have predicted that Ottawa will buy credits as a way of meeting their Kyoto emissions targets.

*snip*

The fact that sustaining Saddam directly could have potentially benefitted a family connected to so many Canadian mandarins and politicians–and married into the family of the prime minister–led some Canadians to raise questions about the motivations behind the Liberal party’s decision to refuse to support the invasion of Iraq and Saddam’s ouster. When Chrétien announced that decision in early 2003, Opposition foreign affairs critic Stockwell Day asked in the House of Commons, "I do not fault the prime minister’s family ties with his nephew [Raymond Chrétien], our ambassador to France or with Paul Desmarais Sr., who is the largest individual shareholder of France’s largest corporation, TotalFina Elf, which has billions of dollars of contracts with Saddam’s former regime. With this valuable source of information and experience at his fingertips, has the prime minister ever discussed Iraq or France with his family or friends in the Desmarais empire?"

*snip*

Jason Kenney, a Conservative MP, says the questions being raised about Power’s possible connection to Oil-for-Food are worth asking. But he’s quick to point out that if the Liberals guided the country’s foreign policy based on their connections to Power, then we should be asking questions about the Canadian government, too. "I am not the least bit critical of the Desmarais family for being rational actors in a free marketplace and pursuing their advantage," says Kenney. "I am, however, somewhat disquieted by the degree to which Power Corp.’s corporate interest seems to influence Canadian foreign policy. Obviously, every company seeks to influence government policy–regulatory, taxation or otherwise–but Power Corp. seems to have a particularly unique influence over Canadian foreign policy." (emphasis supplied)

[sponger]

Jan, this certainly wasn't directed at you, but to the in crowd of the global warming debate.

You do have an over reliance on the peer review process. The article below, copied in full covers our famous hockey stick graph, which was peer reviewed and made it to the UN with out uncovering some major faults.




Breaking the hockey stick
The famous graph that supposedly shows that recent temperatures are the highest in a thousand years has now been shown by careful analysis to have been based on faulty data

Marcel Crok
Special to the Financial Post


January 27, 2005


Few people dispute that the earth is getting warmer, but there are people -- so-called "climate skeptics" -- who question whether the change is historically unique and whether it is the result of human activity. These skeptics are generally outsiders, reviled by "true" climate researchers.

On the one hand, Michael Mann, the first author of the two noted hockey-stick papers (in Nature in 1998 and in Geophysical Research Letters in 1999), is the unofficial king of climate research. In 2002, Scientific American included him as one of the top 50 visionaries in science. On the other hand, the two Canadian skeptics are outsiders: Ross McKitrick is a professor of economics and Stephen McIntyre is a mineral exploration consultant -- which Mann likes to call a conflict of interest.

Climate skeptics are most prolific on the Internet, a platform for novices, the scatterbrained and the experienced alike. Not surprisingly, the climate researchers whom we consulted (predominantly Dutch) presumed the work of the two Canadians to be unconvincing. We at Natuurwetenschap & Techniek were initially skeptical about these skeptics as well. However, McIntyre and McKitrick have recently had an article accepted by Geophysical Research Letters -- the same journal that published Mann's 1999 article. This, together with the positive responses of the referees to that article, quickly brought us around.

Even Geophysical Research Letters, an eminent scientific journal, now acknowledges a serious problem with the prevailing climate reconstruction by Mann and his colleagues. This undercuts both Mann's supposed proof that human activity has been responsible for the warming of the earth's atmosphere in the 20th century and the ability to place confidence in the findings and recommendations of the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The political implication is a serious undermining of the Kyoto Protocol with its worldwide agreements on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

In their two seminal papers, Mann and his colleagues purported to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the last thousand years. Since 1000, temperatures gradually decreased (the shaft of the hockey stick), only to increase sharply from 1900 onwards (the blade).The implication is obvious: Human interference caused this trend to change. McIntyre and McKitrick merely attempted to replicate this oft-quoted study. In doing so, they identified mistake after mistake. They also discovered that this fundamental reconstruction had never actually been replicated by the IPCC or any other scientist. In their replication, basically derived from the same data, temperatures in the 15th century were just as high as they are today -- an outcome that takes the edge off the alarmist scenario of anthropogenic global warming. The criticism by the Canadians is mostly technical in nature: They claim that Mann and his colleagues have misused an established statistical method -- principal component analysis (PCA) -- so that their calculations simply mined data for hockey-stick shaped series and that Mann's results are statistically meaningless.

The scientists that we consulted did not immediately recognize the implications of Mann's eccentric method, suggesting the possibility he himself may not have been aware of the apparent mistake. However, in response to our inquiries, Mann denies any errors and rejects any criticism in strident terms.

Up to January, 2005, none of McIntyre and McKitrick's findings had been published by major scientific journals. Thus, in the opinion of established climate researchers, there was no reason to take them seriously. Climate researchers were quite comfortable in their consensus and repeatedly referred to this "consensus" as a basis for policy. The official expression of the consensus comes from the IPCC. This group, under the flag of the United Nations, comes out with a bulky report every five years on the state of affairs in climate research. Hundreds of climate researchers from every corner of the world contribute to it. In the third report in 2001, Mann himself was a lead author of the chapter on climate reconstructions.

Mann's hockey-stick graph was the only climate reconstruction to make it to the IPCC "Summary for Policy Makers." Its conclusion read: "It is likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year during the past thousand years." This statement has been used by governments the world over to promote the Kyoto Protocol.

Stephen McIntyre first came across the hockey stick in late 2002. The Canadian government used the graph to promote the Kyoto treaty. McIntyre explains by telephone: "When I first saw the graph, it reminded me of dot.com profit forecasts, which were also hockey sticks. It was a compelling graphic, but, in the mineral exploration industry, my own field, compelling graphics are one of the techniques used to interest investors in financing mineral exploration."

McIntyre has scrutinized promotional graphics and large data sets for years. "From my own experience, I thought that the graphic looked excessively promotional," he said. "A trick of mining promoters is to overemphasize some isolated results. I wondered if this had been the case with the hockey stick as well. I thought that it would be interesting to look at the data underlying this graphic -- as though I was looking at drill core from an exploration project. The interest was simply personal; I had no intention of writing academic articles and never expected what happened afterward."

McIntyre sent an e-mail to Michael Mann in spring 2003, asking him for the location of the data used in his study. "Mann replied that he had forgotten the location," he said. "However, he said that he would ask his colleague Scott Rutherford to locate the data. Rutherford then said that the information did not exist in any one location, but that he would assemble it for me. I thought this was bizarre. This study had been featured in the main IPCC policy document. I assumed that they would have some type of due-diligence package for the IPCC on hand, as you would have in a major business transaction. If there was no such package, perhaps there had never been any due diligence on the data, as I understood the term. In the end, this turned out to be the case. The IPCC had never bothered to verify Mann, Bradley and Hughes' study."

Despite billions of dollars spent on climate research, academic and institutional researchers had never bothered to replicate Mann's work either. In 2003, McIntyre tackled the job and, from an unusual hobby, the task has since grown to become almost a full-time occupation. On an Internet forum for climate skeptics, he met Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, just outside of Toronto. Since meeting in person in September of 2003, the two have been working on the project together. McIntyre does most of the research and McKitrick asks questions and assists in the writing of papers.

Reliable temperature measurements have only been available since around 1850. Before this period, researchers have to rely on indirect indicators, or "proxies," such as tree rings, ice cores, sedimentary layers and corals, of which tree rings are the most commonly used. Scientists studying tree rings will summarize the growth at one site into a single index or chronology, which might start, for instance, at 1470 and end at 1980.

Mann's study is the best known of the multi-proxy studies. For a realistic reproduction of the temperature in the entire Northern Hemisphere, Mann and others attempt to have a relatively even geographic distribution of proxies. This posed a difficulty. The majority of proxies were tree-ring "chronologies," especially from the U.S. Southwest. To achieve more even geographic distribution (and avoid being swamped by North American tree-ring data), Mann used principal component analysis to summarize networks of tree-ring sites, the largest of which was in North America. The 1998 article reported the use of 112 proxy series.

However, for some reason, Mann and his colleagues did not accurately document the data they had actually used. McIntyre says: "Of the series and sites listed in the original documentation, 35 were not actually used. To further confuse matters, in November, 2003, over five years after publication, Mann stated that they had actually used 159 series, instead of the 112 mentioned in his Nature article or in Rutherford's e-mail."

We decided to ask Dr. Eduardo Zorita of the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht, Germany, who has also recently examined the calculations behind the hockey stick. His response: "This is the first time that I've heard of the number 159. In our analysis of the hockey stick, we do not use the actual data, but a series of pseudo proxies, proxies we take from our simulations. We have always assumed 112 pseudo proxies."

McIntyre decided to check the PC calculations for tree-ring networks, by doing fresh calculations with original data from the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology (WDCP). His results were very different from Mann's. He and McKitrick then sent the full data set (originally downloaded from Mann's FTP site from the address provided by Rutherford) back to Mann for confirmation that this was actually the data set used. In response, Mann stated that he did not have the time to answer this or any other request.

McIntyre and McKitrick then tried to replicate Mann's Northern Hemisphere temperature calculations from scratch. The results largely coincided with the hockey stick, except for the 15th century, when their calculated temperatures were considerably higher than Mann's and were even higher than corresponding estimates in the 20th century. McIntyre emphasized: "We did not claim to have discovered a warm medieval period; we only stated that, given the many defects in the study, it could not be used to assert that the 1990s were the warmest years of the past millennium."

Their findings were published in the interdisciplinary journal Energy and Environment in October, 2003. Mann's early responses were quite unexpected. McIntyre: "Mann stated that we had used the wrong data and somehow we failed to notice errors in the data. This was outrageous, as we had downloaded the data from his own FTP site from the location provided by his own colleague, Scott Rutherford; we had described countless errors in great detail and had re-collated over 300 series to avoid these problems. Now, according to Mann, we should have taken the data off a different address at his FTP site, but this new address had never been mentioned in any publication or even on his own Web site."

A little later, Mann and his colleagues said that they had used a step-wise procedure to deal with missing data, while McIntyre and McKitrick had not. McIntyre says: "This was when the figure of 159 series first appeared. There is no mention of this stepwise method in his Nature article. A PCA calculation fails if there is any missing data."

But McIntyre and McKitrick were most intrigued by the attribution by Mann and his colleagues of the difference in results to three "key indicators" -- most notably a North American data series -- showing that, with different handling of these three series, they also obtained high early-15th-century results. McIntyre and McKitrick decided, for the time being, to concentrate on the years 1400 to 1450, the period with the biggest discrepancies.

"Mann's own response showed that his temperature reconstruction for the first half of the 15th-century depended on [data] from the North American network. We decided to find out everything that we could about these three indicators."

Because of the discrepancy between the published methodology and the methods actually used, the ambiguity over the data sets, and the sudden claim that 159 series had to be used, McIntyre and McKitrick requested original source code from Mann in order to fully reconcile their results. Mann refused. But McIntyre did make an interesting find at Mann's FTP site -- a Fortran program of about 500 lines for the calculation of tree-ring series, virtually the only source code on the entire site. They carefully studied the script and found a highly unusual procedure that had not been mentioned in the Nature article.

McIntyre says: "The effect is that tree-ring series with a hockey-stick shape no longer have a mean of zero and end up dominating the first principal [data] component; in effect, Mann's program mines for series with a hockey-stick shape."

At our request, Dr. Mia Hubert of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, who specializes in robust statistics, checked to see if Mann's unusual standardization influenced the climate reconstruction. She confirms: "Tree rings with a hockey-stick shape dominate the PCA with this method."

McIntyre and McKitrick decided to perform another check. Using computer simulations of so-called "red noise," they generated networks of artificial tree-ring data over the period of 1400 to 1980. Red noise is commonly used in climatology and oceanography. McIntyre says: "If we used Mann's method on red noise, we consistently obtained hockey sticks with an inflection at the start of the 20th century. We have repeated the simulation thousands of times and in 99% of the cases, the result of the PCA was a hockey stick."

Mann's climate reconstruction methodology would have yielded a hockey-stick graph from any tree-ring data set entered into the model, as long as there is sufficient red noise.

The two Canadians are no longer just one voice crying in the wilderness. On Oct. 22, 2004, in Science, Dr. Zorita and his colleague Dr. Hans von Storch, a specialist in climate statistics at the same institute, published a critique of a completely different aspect of the 1998 hockey-stick article. After studying McIntyre's finding at our request, Von Storch agrees that "simulations with red noise do lead to hockey sticks. McIntyre and McKitrick's criticism on the hockey stick from 1998 is entirely valid on this particular point."

Tomorrow: Part II. The Gaspe trees and the file marked "censored."; Excerpted from Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, a Netherlands science journal. Translated by Angela den Tex.

© National Post 2005








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[Jim Hughes]

Thanks for posting this sponger. I had never heard about any of this involving the Hockey Stick data so I am somewhat skeptical of course. But I am also open minded. I would like to hear what others have to say about this.

I find it very hard to believe that tree ring data, in the SW of the USA, were used as an important part of filling in a time period in any reliable research. Talk about skewed numbers.

NO YEARLY or decadal trends should be acceptable if you can not come up with numerous proxies spread out all over the world.



Jim

[Extremeweatherguy]

Sorry Ken, but any information to the contrary of mans causation of warmer temps or especially indications of over all cooling must be ignored.

All is well is a lousy way to get a research grant or to make head way in preventing any progress in improving the worlds standard of living.

When an ice berg melts its aha! Global Warming. When a contrary event takes places, it is a regional anomaly and not indicative of overall earth weather. I am glad I could clear this up for you!

There is no proof to say that man IS causing global warming. There are theories, but it has not officially been concluded that man is the cause. In my own opinion I think that any warming that the earth over the last 100 year will not continue. Just because they predict it will and just because the computer models tell them it will means nothing to me. I want to see them get a forecast for day 7 right first and then I will start believing anything past that..and come on if the models cant get it right for 10 days out, then why would they get it right for 50 years out?

[x-y-no]

Sorry Ken, but any information to the contrary of mans causation of warmer temps or especially indications of over all cooling must be ignored.

All is well is a lousy way to get a research grant or to make head way in preventing any progress in improving the worlds standard of living.

When an ice berg melts its aha! Global Warming. When a contrary event takes places, it is a regional anomaly and not indicative of overall earth weather. I am glad I could clear this up for you!

There is no proof to say that man IS causing global warming. There are theories, but it has not officially been concluded that man is the cause. In my own opinion I think that any warming that the earth over the last 100 year will not continue. Just because they predict it will and just because the computer models tell them it will means nothing to me. I want to see them get a forecast for day 7 right first and then I will start believing anything past that..and come on if the models cant get it right for 10 days out, then why would they get it right for 50 years out?

Modeling weather and modeling climate are two very different propositions. Perhaps an analogy will help: suppose one is trying to predict the behavior of a river rapids. It's probably impossible to predict the position and size of every eddy and wave for more than a matter of seconds before chaotic behavior detroys all predictive skill. But one can very reliably predict the total flow of water through the rapids for a very extended period.

[x-y-no]

Thanks for posting this sponger. I had never heard about any of this involving the Hockey Stick data so I am somewhat skeptical of course. But I am also open minded. I would like to hear what others have to say about this.

I find it very hard to believe that tree ring data, in the SW of the USA, were used as an important part of filling in a time period in any reliable research. Talk about skewed numbers.

NO YEARLY or decadal trends should be acceptable if you can not come up with numerous proxies spread out all over the world.



Jim

Jim:

There are a series of articles about the "hockey stick" criticisms at RealClimate:


(arranged in chronological order from oldest to newest)

4 Dec 2004 -Temperature Variations in Past Centuries and the so-called "Hockey Stick"
4 Dec 2004 - False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction
6 Jan 2005 -On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick
18 Feb 2005 -Dummies guide to the latest “Hockey Stick” controversy

For the other side of the argument, Steve McIntyre's site is here: http://www.climateaudit.org/

[kenl01]

One of my favorite sites is the John Daly temp stations (NASA maintained and supervised) over the long term.

http://www.john-daly.com/stations/stati ... Greenland/


Many stations (about 50%) have shown an overall cooling trend since last century.