If a Peer Review Fails in the woods....

Historical climate data may be skewed. Who's to blame?

Treemometers: A new scientific scandal

At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.

At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the ring data to create a "reconstruction" of historical temperature anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors.

Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is problematic, and a dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In dendro jargon, this disparity is called "divergence". The process of creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples - a choice open to a scientist's biases.

Yet none of this has stopped paleoclimataologists from making bold claims using tree ring data.

Fraudulent? What's behind the climate change data that many scientists and environmentalists hang their hats on?

The scandal has serious implications for public trust in science. The IPCC's mission is to reflect the science, not create it.


As the panel states, its duty is "assessing the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data." But as lead author, Briffa was a key contributor in shaping (no pun intended) the assessment. A small group was able to rewrite history.

When the IPCC was alerted to peer-reviewed research that refuted the idea, it declined to include it. This leads to the more general, and more serious issue: what happens when peer-review fails - as it did here?

The scandal has only come to light because of the dogged persistence of a Canadian mathematician who attempted to reproduce the results. Steve McIntyre has written dozens of letters requesting the data and methodology, and over 7,000 blog posts. Yet Yamal has remained elusive for almost a decade.

Any thoughts?

-Dev

[edit on 2-10-2009 by DevolutionEvolvd]

who would have thought...

peer pressure is bad, but peer review is supposed to be good? the logic escapes me, tbh. What's real sad is that errors will in all likelyhood remain in the compilations, whether the original paper is purged or not.

slightly related thread:

www.abovetopsecret.com...


crucial GW studies based on selective sampling

network.nationalpost.com...

But an even more disquieting discovery soon came to light. Steve searched a paleoclimate data archive to see if there were other tree ring cores from at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size. He quickly found a large set of 34 up-to-date core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than Schweingruber himself! Had these been added to Briffa’s small group the 20th century would simply be flat. It would appear completely unexceptional compared to the rest of the millennium.

should we believe that the guy forgot all his real results while forlornly picking mostly fossilzed trees which, coincidentially jived well with GW? i'D also question the wisdom of sampling a couple of trees from the same region, but that's just me. maybe it's true, conmen really *do* make for a better consensus, after all.