Stephen McIntyre makes false claim to committee, invalidates whole AGW skeptic case

Steve McIntyre, one of the main AGW (Man-made climate change) sceptics, has made a submission to the UK Parliament's Science and Technology Committee into the East Anglia University hacked emails. His submission is here.

In para. 7 he refers to tree ring data. This has a close relationship to temperature, except in the later years of a tree's life, when rings are stretched thinner, and therefore produce a false impression of colder climate. Dendrochronologists therefore have to make an adjustment to the data to allow for this fact.

McIntyre however states in his paper, "there was no scientific basis for such an arbitrary adjustment". (para. 8).

I wrote a polite question on his blog discussion thread asking him about this point.

Posted Feb 28, 2010 at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Reply

Steve, you say “there was no scientific basis for such an arbitrary adjustment” [of the tree ring record], my understanding is that it is a feature of dendrochronology that more recently laid down tree rings are thinner than those buried more deeply within the tree. Which would create a scientific basis for applying an adjustment. Would it not?

Steve: Not this adjustment.

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  MrPete
  Posted Feb 28, 2010 at 7:54 PM | Permalink | Reply
  Re: Richard Lawson (Feb 28 13:38),
  That’s not an arbitrary adjustment. Carefully-constructed mathematical methods, with some physical principles underlying, take care of the general time-related growth changes. Even those engender much discussion. But at least they aren’t completely arbitrary.
  

So it seems that McIntyre is wrong about tree rings. The charitable interpretation is that he does not understand. But he should do, because he has been banging on about it for years and years.
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Now, then, let's get into Daily Express mode: [CAUTION: IRONY WARNING!!]

CLIMATE CHANGE SCEPTIC MAKES ERROR SHOCK
Canadian engineer Steve McIntyre, the self-styled "scientist" at the heart of the vicious attack on the future of the planet, has an error of science right at the heart  of his submission to respected Science and Technology Parliamentary Committee. He does not understand the basic facts of tree ring data. This latest revelation totally invalidates the case of climate skeptics, and proves that ...

[IRONY WARNING ALL-CLEAR]

Sorry, I can't keep it up.  But this is indeed a cameo of what is happening.  The sceptics take a single error, inflate it into a general refutation of the whole picture, weak-minded and gullible journalists take it up, and the grasp of the public on what is going on is further diminished.
Goebbles must be giggling in his grave.

Here is a detailed answer to McIntyre by Briffa on this question.

Climate science is a proxy for ideological clash

The interminable debate about the minutiae of the science - today's news is about regrettable flaws in the methods of Jones and Wang - is really a proxy for a titanic ideological struggle between free market fundamentalism and ecological economics. The free market cannot deliver sustainability any more than Communism could. If anthropogenic climate change is happening, then we must found our economics on ecology, guiding the market, not letting it run free. This is anathema to the free marketeers, therefore climate science must be proven wrong.

CRU Data Loss: Sunday Times misled its readers.

I wrote this last Sunday, then just saved it, in case the Sunday Times got it wrong.

They did.

But the impression made by the headline story is much greater than the truth that I have just picked up on Real Climate, namely, that the destroyed data were just copies. Maybe best to have kept them, for reference, but the original datasets are safe in the National Met Service.
Source. (click on comments, go to #218).

Here's what I wrote at the time:

It is disturbing to read in the Sunday Times that in the 1980s the Climate Research Unit dumped the original paper and computer tape data relating to global temperature measurements.

Who took this decision? Why? It is pretty weak to say, as they do, that climate change was not seen as such a pressing issue in the 1980s.

Data should be sacrosanct in science. It should not be destroyed.

I bet they kept the minutes of the meetings that made the decision to destroy the data. Better put them under police guard before someone "loses" them too.

Of course, the Sunday Times report may be inaccurate, and someone may have a copy of the data.