The Magic Larch of Yamal

[marchesarosa]

YAD061


In The Climate Files, Fred Pearce wrote:

When I phoned Jones on the day the emails were published online and asked him what he thought was behind it, he said” It’s about Yamal, I think”...

The word turns up in 100 separate emails, more than ‘hockey stick’ or any other totem of the climate wars. The emails began with it back in 1996 and they ended with it.




The matter is receiving attention again on Climate Audit climateaudit.org/2011/04/09/yamal-and-hide-the-decline/

and WUWT wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/09/the-pre-climategate-issue-that-is-the-issue/

[marchesarosa]

Maybe disgruntled Russian dendrologists whose work was to provide the data which CRU then abused by creating a "hockystick" from a single sample decided to get even with CRU by means of the Climategate release of emails?

Maybe those who fingered the Russians as being behind the hack were not too far wrong?

Just speculating, mind you. I still think it was Mrs Briffa in cahoots with Harry.

[marchesarosa]

From: Rashit Hantemirov
To: Keith Briffa
Subject: Short report on progress in Yamal work
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998 19:17:12 +0500

Dear Keith,

I apologize for delay with reply. Below is short information about state of Yamal work. Samples from 2,172 subfossil larches (appr. 95% of all samples), spruces (5%) and birches (solitary finding) have been collected within a region centered on about 67030′N, 70000′E at the southern part of Yamal Peninsula. All of them have been measured...........
Rashit Hantemirov, Lab. of Dendrochronology, Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, 8 Marta St., 202 Ekaterinburg, 620144, Russia.

[marchesarosa]

Of course, a timberline moving northward could indicate warming. But there is also the fact that timberlines have moved southwards indicating the opposite.

It's all grist to the "natural variation" mill, isn't it?

[marchesarosa]

"In the recent resume of Hantemirov’s PhD Thesis (2009, in Russian), there’s a Fig. 18 showing the shifts of the tree line.

There’s now a move to the North in the 19-20th centuries, but it is a return to the “normal” after the rather sharp southern move of the 18th century. The Fig shows treeline and temperatures (with 50yr filter smoothing)."

Courtesy of Climate Audit
climateaudit.org/2011/04/09/yamal-and-hide-the-decline/

[marchesarosa]

tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/6355/

Lucy Skywalker compares the temperature measuring stations close to Yamal to check whether Briffa's selection from the Yamal tree rings (and others) REALLY track temperature.

Brilliant!

[marchesarosa]

All comes to he who waits!

Keith Briffa, of CRU, who was responsible for the dendro graph showing supposedly "unprecedented" late 20th century warming (based on a single tree in Russia) and upon whose data Michael Mann constructed his iconic "hockey stick", has had a re-think, has incorporated data that before he omitted and has now produced a dendro graph of temperature that does not look in the least alarming! (See the blue line in the last graph below!)

Well done, Steve McIntyre, on his blog Climate Audit, for doggedly revealing the folly of the Yamal uptick and Micheal Mann's travesty of "research"

climateaudit.org/2013/06/28/cru-abandons-yamal-superstick/

[marchesarosa]

Sweet!

[principled]

Unfortunately Marchesa, this "modification" has come to late for the UK where our non-sensical energy policy (based on "anthropogenic CO2 global warming") means that we are likely to be reading by candle light in the not too distant future, or reading by electric light and industry working by candle light, whichever the government feels will lose them less votes!
I suspect that my blood boiling is adding to the World warming at the moment!
P

[marchesarosa]

I realise it is hard to stop a gravy train when it has a head of steam, principled.

However, in the world of academic climatology this is BIG turnaround! And well done KEith Briffa of finally coming clean with ALL the data in his possession.

As far back as 1998 Keith Briffa knew the Yamal larch uptick was false. It has taken him until 2013 to publish the full data available to him.

Here is one of the first tranch of CRU emails. It is to Keith Briffa from Rashit Hantemirov, the dendrologist who collected the tree ring data from which Briffa subsequently made a rather peculiar "selection". Note the final sentence in bold. That is the crux of the matter. I have always wondered why Climatologists did not simply investigate the changing sub arctic tree line as a proxy for global climate change instead of messing around with tree rings which are affected by any number of variables apart from temperature and simply cannot be treated as treemometers. But read on. This email contains the meat of the matter.

(document 907975032.txt):

From: Rashit Hantemirov
To: Keith Briffa
Subject: Short report on progress in Yamal work
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998 19:17:12 +0500

Dear Keith,

I apologize for delay with reply. Below is short information about state of Yamal work. Samples from 2,172 subfossil larches (appr. 95% of all samples), spruces (5%) and birches (solitary finding) have been collected within a region centered on about 67030′N, 70000′E at the southern part of Yamal Peninsula. All of them have been measured.
......
There are no evidences of moving polar timberline to the north during last century.

Rashit Hantemirov, Lab. of Dendrochronology, Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology,
8 Marta St., 202 Ekaterinburg, 620144, Russia.

When Fred Pearce asked Phil Jones, head of CRU in 2009 what was the Climategate leak/hack all about, Jones said he thought it was about Yamal, presumably because even he knew that particular "uptick", on which all subsequent "hockey stick" temperature "reconstructions" are based, stank to high heaven.

[alancalverd]

It's worrying to think that anyone could take tree rings as indicative of temperature alone. Tree growth depends on the availability of CO2, water (not too little, not too much), sunlight, disease, and soil minerals, not to mention adjacent trees and other plant species, all of which vary over years and decades.

Madness.

[marchesarosa]

Dendrology should never have been permitted to escape from Archeology departments, Mr Calverd. It's only effective use in in dating wooden artefacts. That it has escaped is a measure of the desperation of paleoclimatologists grasping at straws to try to demonstrate "unprecedented" late 20th century temperatures.

[marchesarosa]

I have always (since 2007 anyway!) wondered why climatologists did not investigate changes in the polar tree line as a proxy for global temperature change. Where trees find it hospitable to grow in terms of both altitude and latitude is surely a more useful measure of climate change than the width of individual tree rings?

It seems some Russians have been working on this matter as Steve McIntyre reports here:

climateaudit.org/2013/07/07/treeline-changes-and-altitude-inhomogeneity/#more-18069

Here is a graph showing the change in altitude of the tree line by researchers Mazepa et al 2011.



This data puts into perspective the claim that late 20th century temperatures were "unprecedented". It certainly shows the deterioration in climate between the Medaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age very well! The 20th century and first decade of the 21st century do not seem to show an "unprecedented" change of climate according to these historical tree line observations!

Another nail in the coffin of AGW climate alarmism, I hope.

[marchesarosa]

Here are the "latest" "findings" of Keith Briffa of CRU, in a paper this year, 2013. They are shown in green (B13) in comparison with the Mazepa and Shiyatov findings.

Briffa, unsurprisingly, is still perceiving a "hockey stick" whereas there is no hockey stick evident in the finding of the other two researchers.