"Nevermind."
Posted on 01/13/2005 4:20:13 PM PST by neverdem
A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.
Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isn't. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place.
In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the "hockey stick," the famous plot (prominently displayed by the IPCC report, 2001), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago--just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.
I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue.
But now a shock: independent Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.
But it wasn't so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but also it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called "Monte Carlo" analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place.
In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) different data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean of zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average around that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each data set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance. In standard PCA, each data set is normalized over its complete data period; for the global climate data that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was the interval 1400-1980. But the computer program Mann used did not do that. Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time period 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval. This is the time when the historical temperature is well known, so this procedure does guarantee the most accurate temperature scale. But it completely screws up PCA. PCA is mostly concerned with the data sets that have high variance, and the Mann normalization procedure tends to give very high variance to any data set with a hockey stick shape. (Such data sets have zero mean only over the 1902-1980 period, not over the longer 1400-1980 period.)
The net result: the "principal component" will have a hockey stick shape even if most of the data do not.
McIntyre and McKitrick sent their detailed analysis to Nature magazine for publication, and it was extensively refereed. But their paper was finally rejected. In frustration, McIntyre and McKitrick put the entire record of their submission and the referee reports on a Web page for all to see. If you look, you'll see that McIntyre and McKitrick have found numerous other problems with the Mann analysis. I emphasize the bug in their PCA program simply because it is so blatant and so easy to understand. Apparently, Mann and his colleagues never tested their program with the standard Monte Carlo approach, or they would have discovered the error themselves. Other and different criticisms of the hockey stick are emerging (see, for example, the paper by Hans von Storch and colleagues in the September 30 issue of Science).
Some people may complain that McIntyre and McKitrick did not publish their results in a refereed journal. That is true--but not for lack of trying. Moreover, the paper was refereed--and even better, the referee reports are there for us to read. McIntyre and McKitrick's only failure was in not convincing Nature that the paper was important enough to publish.
How does this bombshell affect what we think about global warming?
It certainly does not negate the threat of a long-term global temperature increase. In fact, McIntyre and McKitrick are careful to point out that it is hard to draw conclusions from these data, even with their corrections. Did medieval global warming take place? Last month the consensus was that it did not; now the correct answer is that nobody really knows. Uncovering errors in the Mann analysis doesn't settle the debate; it just reopens it. We now know less about the history of climate, and its natural fluctuations over century-scale time frames, than we thought we knew.
If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions. Suppose, for example, that future measurements in the years 2005-2015 show a clear and distinct global cooling trend. (It could happen.) If we mistakenly took the hockey stick seriously--that is, if we believed that natural fluctuations in climate are small--then we might conclude (mistakenly) that the cooling could not be a natural occurrence. And that might lead in turn to the mistaken conclusion that global warming predictions are a lot of hooey. If, on the other hand, we reject the hockey stick, and recognize that natural fluctuations can be large, then we will not be misled by a few years of random cooling.
A phony hockey stick is more dangerous than a broken one--if we know it is broken. It is our responsibility as scientists to look at the data in an unbiased way, and draw whatever conclusions follow. When we discover a mistake, we admit it, learn from it, and perhaps discover once again the value of caution.
Richard A. Muller, a 1982 MacArthur Fellow, is a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches a course called "Physics for Future Presidents." Since 1972, he has been a Jason consultant on U.S. national security.
"Vinyards in the UK and a place in Bavaria called "Valley of the Limes." Sure it's only circumstantial evidence, but it is hard to explain away with the Medieval Warming."
You win the prize! Its not like these are obscure historical facts, vinyards in England suggests that the "science" is all wet. I also seem to remember viking accounts of the northlands being more green than they are today with the archeology backing the stories up.
I'm sure another FReeper can confirm this.
I don't think it was poor mathematics at all. I think it was deliberate.
Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but also it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Like CBS, they liked the answer, so they didn't question the results. That is of course putting the best possible spin on it. The worst it that they did it more or less deliberately to fulfill their agenda.
While this could be simple incompetence, it sounds to me like an awfully hard mistake to make accidentally.
A favorite liberal saying "The ends, justifies the means", only to them.
"Nevermind."
Pings to the GGG group!
Never heard that. I'll now use it in my anti-global warming arguments.
In Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" he talks about how the plant was so warm and humid several 10,000 years ago that the Sahara desert was a grass land. Until the global warming "scientist" can explain why, I won't give them the time of day. Heck I grew up in the 70's when the new ice age was approaching.
This scare tactic is straight out of Machiavelli's "The Prince"
See the article at post #11 for why it might be deliberate.
Bjorn Lomborg AgainIn March I posted an item about Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish statistician who was pilloried after going public with the politically incorrect truth that most of the environmentalist litany is myth, and things in general are getting better, not worse. It seems that George Orwell's prescience of "Recdep," the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where news and history are rewritten to suit policy, is well attested to in Europe. For the story of the amateurish attempt to discredit Lomborg, making no attempt at objectivity and answering scientific references with slanted magazine articles, see James K. Glassman's Denmark's Ministry of Truth at TCS Europe. Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist was what started it all off.
James Hogan
Posted on January16, 2003
The Skeptical Environmentalist:
Measuring the Real State of the World
by Bjorn Lomborg
ping
Where do you think "Greenland" got its name?
On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick
I find it difficult to follow the arguments but for the technically minded...knock yourselves out.
Seriously, I always thought the GW theory was bunk because even what I read about early medieval history and the late Roman Empire in archeological journals in the 1970's discussed the evidence for the Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm Period and the intervening cold periods. Th evidence for large climatic swings was already seen at that time in the pollen, foodstuffs and written reports (e.g. the Franks crossing the frozen Rhine in the 5th century).
I remember several years ago reading some items at www.sepp.org about the leading global warming model having a small problem...
THEY LEFT OUT THE OCEANS! 70%+ of the planet, LEFT OUT!
Dr. S. Fred Singer is one of, if not the leading scientist on debunking global warming.
His book Hot Talk, Cold Science is a must read.
"John Daly, RIP, cracked the hockey stick theory as soon as it came out."
He's dead? Oh dear, I was a fan of his 'Still waiting for Greenhouse' site, but now I see that it is gone.
I'm sorry to hear this. We lost a champion for common sense.
Good Evening,
In that particular instance, Limes refer to a system of old Roman fortifications and not citrus fruit.
I believe they ran for some 500 miles along the Rhine and the Danube.
Cheers
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