Wednesday
Sep152010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Fred Singer on HSI
Sep 15, 2010 Climate: HSI Fred Singer reviews The Hockey Stick Illusion in Right Side News:
This is probably the best book about the Hockey Stick...There is little one can add to Montford's comprehensive account.
Reader Comments (8)
I agree with the review; it provides confirmation of the veracity of your book and is a proper review, based on a reading of the book.
However, you need to correct one statement; you are only a resident of Scotland, not a Scot but an Englishman.
I'm not sure who's done the editing on the Singer review but whoever it was needs a slap upside the head.
Never edit someone else's text unless you know, absolutely, what you're talking about. The insertion of "[of temperature]" does nobody any favours. Fox News got it wrong when it proclaimed that "the decline" was as simplistic as a decline of temperature - a stick the sceptics/deniarrrs have been beaten with ever since - and this re-run amounts to a double-whammy.
Bish, maybe you could contact Fred and draw attention to the edit that's been made to his piece. Maybe he could suggest a better edit, and one that improves comprehension rather than undermines it. As it stands now, it does Fred no favours, it does us no favours, and it does the reader no favours either.
Well said SimonH.
Another thing - I had always understood that Jones, although he admits saying in an email that he WOULD destroy emails (if FOI were resorted to), he denies that he ever actually did so. Yet the review has him admitting that he did - "Perhaps some of the emails that Phil Jones admitted to having deleted...".
Have I missed something?
As SimonH says, punctiliousness and pedantry are unfortunate necessities in this game.
TomFP,
Search for:
"If he pays 10 pounds (which he hasn't yet) I am supposed to go through my emails and he can get anything I've written about him. About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little - if anything at all."
My understanding from what little they've said is that this was probably the routine clearing out of a full inbox, and since all the emails were logged in the mail system, they were not necessarily actually deleted everywhere - a point they probably didn't realise at the time (else why those requests to delete after reading?) but is proving very useful to them now.
On the other hand, Steve McIntyre reported an FOIA request for an email attachment which was turned down on the grounds that the document no longer existed. (Sorry, I forget when.) So who can say?
It's very difficult to provide solid evidence of what does not exist.
I was interested in looking at the Satelite Surface Temperature record alluded to in this article so I checked out "Satelite Temperature Measurements" at Wiki? Can anyone point me to where I can get the data for the charts that are shown on this page?
A couple of points immediately came to my attention:-
- The data series for the Satelites in the first chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Satellite_Temperatures.png) clearly plateaus around 0.4C. However, the second (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radiosonde_satellite_surface_temperature.png) seems to plateau lower for the same period. It looks like the second has been smoothed and this could be the reason but I would be like to double check.
- Just eyeballing the data the per decade numbers don't "feel" right? Could simple be an "Eyeballing" issues but I would be curious to check the actually data. As an aside this would also allow a calculation on how significant it actually is?
Many thanks for anyone whom can help.
Fred Singer is a world famous meteorologist; he was the first Director of the National Weather Service in the US. My youngest son is a statistical meteorologist (advanced degrees in both statistics and meteorology), and he holds Fred Singer in highest regard and refers to him as one of his heroes.
I found this account to be most interesting, especially coming from someone who became very familiar with The Hockey Stick by his own accord. The additional details Singer provides leaves no doubt that he was a qualified reviewer of HSI.
SimonH,
When I read the review, I paused there for a moment too. I know what you are saying, but the "mysteriously, tree rings diverge from the instrumental proxy" spiel is something I dont believe in either.
You know what I am saying,...if tree ring data are good reflections of temperature for certain periods (which they use for calibration), and going a bit forward in time, if the tree rings do not match the temperature record, why not conclude that the ring network is recording temperature it experienced?
Re ttopwwdw
But as you say, some evidence is contradictory. Jones said he routinely deleted old emails, yet old emails appeared in the FOIA file. It's an assumption that it does not exist, or there's no evidence of deletion. Muir-Russell was meant to look, but didn't due to time constraints. If evidence exists, it's likely to be on the backup server currently assisting the police with their investigations. That may show emails or files flagged for deletion, but still archived.