Gores Hockey Stick: The greatest scientific fraud since Piltdown man.

This graphic compares the RCS chronologies from the two slightly different data sets: red – the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive (with the 12 picked cores); black – the RCS chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample of living trees instead of the 12 picked trees used in the CRU archive. The difference is breathtaking. Source Steve McIntire.

Most of us are familiar with the story of Piltdown man, sometimes called the man who never was. In 1912 a series of skull fragments and a jawbone were unearthed at Piltdown, a village in England. While the discovery was always regarded as controversial, it was not exposed as a fraud until 1943, consisting of the skull of a modern human and the jawbone of an ape. During those 40 years this hoax seriously impacted on the study of human evolution.

We can all remember the infamous hockey stick graph, made known to all of us in Al Gores “An inconvenient truth,” the one where the predicted temperature was to imminently go through the roof. Though widely discredited over the ensuing years it has continued to be used as a scare tactic in the quest for government action on global warming, the appeal for its promoters being profits in Gores case, and power over all over our activities and massive taxation in the case of governments. We would never consent to this other than in an emergency, so one has been manufactured for us.

I have maintained for some time now that GW is a scam having read numerous articles disputing the findings of the IPCC who maintain in an unscientific manner that the debate is closed. Now it appears that the basic information going into the hockey stick is shaky at best, and is most likely fraudulent.

In the following I have used Bishop Hill for the easy reading, the full article is recommended. For more information and ready reference to Steve McIntyre's posts go to “Watts Up With That?” “Quote of the week #20 – ding dong the stick is dead”

From “Bishop Hill”: l

The story of Michael Mann's Hockey Stick reconstruction, its statistical bias and the influence of the bristlecone pines is well known. McIntyre's research into the other reconstructions has received less publicity, however. The story of the Yamal chronology may change that.

… Back at the start of McIntyre's research into the area of paleoclimate, one of the most significant of these was called Polar Urals, a chronology first published by Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. At the time, it was used in pretty much every temperature reconstruction around. In his paper, Briffa made the startling claim that the coldest year of the millennium was AD 1032, a statement that, if true, would have completely overturned the idea of the Medieval Warm Period. It is not hard to see why paleoclimatologists found the series so alluring.

……. In typical climate science fashion, just scratching at the surface of the Briffa archive raised as many questions as it answered. Why did Briffa only have half the number of cores covering the Medieval Warm Period that the Russian had reported? And why were there so few cores in Briffa's twentieth century? By 1988 there were only 12 cores used, an amazingly small number in what should have been the part of the record when it was easiest to obtain data. By 1990 the count was only ten, dropping still further to just five in 1995.

The reasoning behind Briffa's subsample selection may have been a mystery, but with the other information McIntyre had gleaned, it was still possible to perform some tests on its validity. This could be done by performing a simple sensitivity test, replacing the twelve cores that Briffa had used for the modern sections of Yamal with some of the other available data. Sure enough, there was a suitable Schweingruber series called Khadyta River close by to Yamal, and with 34 cores, it represented a much more reliable basis for reconstructing temperatures.



McIntyre therefore prepared a revised dataset, replacing Briffa's selected 12 cores with the 34 from Khadyta River. The revised chronology was simply staggering. The sharp uptick in the series at the end of the twentieth century had vanished, leaving a twentieth century apparently without a significant trend. The blade of the Yamal hockey stick, used in so many of those temperature reconstructions that the IPCC said validated Michael Mann's work, was gone.