Judd Legum at Think Progress reports some outrageous claims by Inhofe:
Yesterday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) attacked Al Gore and global warming science, claiming that Gore was "full of crap" on global warming.
Appearing on Glenn Beck's radio show and CNN television program, Inhofe said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which concluded that global warming was real and caused by humans, used "one scientist." Inhofe added: "[A]ll of the recent science...it confirms that I was right on this thing. This thing is a hoax."
Legum corrects Inhofe's misrepresentation of the science, but I want to look at something else Inhofe claimed:
Yes, well, you know, I have to say this, and I'd say that probably 75 percent of the viewers that are watching this right now have bought into this thing, this global warming thing, in saying that it was man made gases. And I was the same way 3 1/2 years ago when I became [chairman] of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. And so I thought -- right then, you might remember the Horton econometrics survey ... that came out. And they said how much it would cost America if we signed onto the Kyoto treaty, about $2,750 per family per year in the price of energy and all that.
Anyway, I saw that, and I thought, "Well, it's my responsibility as a chairman to make sure that the science justifies this kind of loss." And the more I checked into it, the things started with the United Nations, the International Panel on Climate Control, and they used one scientist.
So Inhofe says that when he became chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works he believed in man made global warming but then he investigated the matter and changed his mind? That's odd, because here's what he said in an October 23, 1997 press release:
U.S. Senator James M. Inhofe (R-OK) today strongly criticized President Clinton's rush to accept the alarmist theories of "global warming" as the basis for pushing the United States to adopt an international treaty to constrain so-called "greenhouse" gas emissions.
"The President's climate change policy is arbitrary, premature and unwarranted," Inhofe said. "It is based largely on selective science, alarmist rhetoric and political calculations. As with his ill-conceived rush to impose new EPA air quality mandates, the President chooses to ignore substantial bodies of contrary scientific evidence and opinion, while he grossly downplays the costs of new regulations."
Inhofe said that Clinton ignored four key conclusions which came out of a global warming science hearing held in July by the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee: 1) That we don't know how much human activity has influenced global climate; 2) That based on up-to-date satellite data, we are not sure if there has been any global warming; 3) That even if we eliminate all man-made emissions, it may not have a noticeable effect on the environment; and 4) That all of these uncertainties will not be resolved before this December, when the Administration plans to lock us in to the binding commitments of the global warming treaty.
Seems like he didn't believe in global warming, never mind man made warming.
But maybe he changed his mind between 1997 and 2003 and then changed it back in 2003? If so, he never told anyone about it. Here's how The Daily Telegraph reported things on 8 January 2003:
Control of the environment and public works committee, in particular, has shifted to Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a fierce sceptic on global warming, who once compared the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo.
Mr Inhofe has said his committee would turn away from considering air pollution measures this year, in favour of major highway construction programmes.
It is Inhofe's claim to have changed his mind about man made global warming that is a hoax.
As well as claiming that Gore was "full of crap", Inhofe said that Gore was like Hitler:
The Oklahoma Republican compares "An Inconvenient Truth," which he doesn't plan to see, to Adolf Hitler's book "Mein Kampf."
"If you say the same lie over and over again, and particularly if you have the media's support, people will believe it," Inhofe said.
And Kit Stolz has a chat with Andrew Revkin, another person that Inhofe has attacked.
Every time Inhofe opens his mouth and makes over-the-top comments, it is a net loss for his cause, which is clearly to undermine the claim that humans are having a significant impact on the climate.
He may pick up a few supporters here and there, but it really makes no difference, because when presented with the choice (as they have been in the case of global warming), most people will believe a scientist over a politician hands down.
Indeed, in America (at least) scientist is one of the most trusted professionals, while politician is one of the least.
Inhofe and his buddies (poor fellows) have "put all their pucks into the Hockey net" only to find that few members of the public even know what the "hockey stick" is -- and even fewer care.
Here some good ones I jotted down from a recent CNN interview:
"I didn't see the movie of Al Gor, I wouldn't be able to do that. But at least I get all the statements that he made and I can't find one that is an honest statement." hmmmm....
"We found that since 1999 that the science [behind global warming] is the other way around, but you don't get this in the media, casue the media wants you to believe that the science is settled."
I must get hit with the label "conspiracy theorist" once a day, by these guys that continuosly posit their "theory" that there is a media "conspiracy."
What's the deal with this claim? I've stumbled across variants of it several times in the past few days (including one claim that IPCC based their conclusions mostly or entirely on MBH).
My guess? They believe "et al" to be an honorific title like esq.
My take is that the "one scientist" brouhaha is the sort of silliness you get when you nitpick the literal transcript of spoken remarks. Like Slate's "bushisms" and "kerryisms" feature.
There was one scientist who was primarily responsible for the hockey stick being in the IPCC report in the form it took; that scientist was Michael Mann, who coauthored the relevant paper and was a lead IPCC author. Had Inhoefe said "in the IPCC there was one scientist named Michael Mann who did X", nobody would take this to imply there weren't any other scientists around. But how different than that is this quote?
"...things started with the United Nations, the International Panel on Climate Control, and they used one scientist. And his name was Michael Mann, the famous hockey stick..."
The original stream of spoken text was a run-on sentence, some transcriber arbitrarily chose to put a period after "one scientist", and people looking for any excuse to criticize Inhoefe pounced on it.
First, Wegman et al. say there's a whole network of scientists, then Inhofe says there's just one ... can't they people make up their bloody minds!
"There was one scientist who was primarily responsible for the hockey stick being in the IPCC report in the form it took; that scientist was Michael Mann, who coauthored the relevant paper and was a lead IPCC author."
Michael Mann was one of 3 authors on the MBH (Mann Bradley & Hughes) papers and one of 10 lead authors on TAR Chapter 2 (Observed Climate Variability and Change). On the TAR as a whole there were 122 lead authors and 515 contributing authors. You'd think one of them would have said something...
It's not clear to me whether Inhofe outright denies future global warming like Lindzen and Gray, or if he just obfuscates about whether warming is human-caused. I'd love to challenge him or his staff to a bet if it's the former. Any more info would be welcome.
I actually caught this when it was on flipping through the channels. It didn't come as a surprise to me that Beck had him on. Beck seems to have a penchant for jumping on every anti-science bandwagon that comes his way. He's a religious nutcase who finds common ground with fringe loony-toons who claim to be doing science.
Just the fact that people in this country can make such egregiously false statements unopposed makes me want to heave. God bless the Western Hemisphere's version of Iran.
Gawd help us.
Inhofe is a lunatic that advances the cause of the debate not one inch. He is the pro-AGW crowd's best friend.
However, now that the Hockey Stick has been smashed into a thousand fragments (will anyone analyse it for tree rings to see what the temperature is in 2006? Heh) we can get on to some real science. There's some interesting work being done on aerosols and people are more aware that land use is having an impact (such as at M Kilimanjaro).
Hi Carlo - what do you mean by the Western Hemisphere's version of Iran?
Hee, hee.
Try centering PC1, per Wegman, and see what the hockey stick looks like.
The end result of the attacks by M&M, Barton, Inhofe et al. has been that:
1) The hockey stick has gotten a phenomenal amount of attention. It would probably have been better for the quality of the public debate if other important results in climate science had gotten more attention, and the hockey stick less, but at least everyone with eyes has seen the damn thing at least once.
2) The overall shape of the hockey stick has been validated, and MBH's conclusion that the present warming is unlike anything we've seen in centuries has been vindicated. It is precisely because so much effort has been expended unsuccessfully in trying to discredit it that the hockey stick is now accepted so widely.
"2) That based on up-to-date satellite data, we are not sure if there has been any global warming;"
In 1997 that was a perfectly rational statement. Only in the past year have those satellite numbers been brought into line.
In fact, nine years ago, the entire idea of significant anthropogenic warming was still suspect.
Sen. Inhofe is a shameless yahoo having no respect for honesty. I just turned the page of Science to yet another climate-change article, this one by Jonzen &al. discussing changes in the timing of bird migrations. Some folks spend their time arguing against warming; others are actually doing research into the consequences of warming that have already started to occur.
Science has been running articles on global warming for the last fifteen years. Can you believe that? And Inhofe and his clones are still saying it's a fad, a hoax, or whatever.
Mann's research behind the hockey stick has been discredited:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=062706E
The "hockey stick" is a at best a gross exaggeration of the truth or at worst a brilliant example of comfirmation bias.
You're new here, aren't you JasperPant? TCS has published dozens of articles over several years claiming that the hockey stick is broken. You'd think if it was really broken they would have only needed one...
Except for the truly hardcore sceptics, commenters felt that the NRC report vindicated Mann. [See here](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/06/nas_report_on_hockey_stick_rel…).
jre, you need to make two corrections to MBH to make the results reasonably valid. (1) fix the stats, (2) remove the known-bad data (tree series that aren't temperature proxies). Make both changes and the hockey stick goes away.
Check out some updated series in figure 6 on page 10 here.
Glen - Actually, that is not true at all. In fact, that was exactly my point.
Take another look at the green line in the recalculated MBH timeline. It "fixes the stats", as you put it, and excludes the less well-replicated Gaspé series, and -- guess what? -- the hockey stick is still there.
Why do you suppose that might be? I'll suggest that it is because the present warming really is unprecedented on a millenial time scale, and any honest analysis of the data is going to come up with something resembling a hockey stick. When you "fix the stats" and "remove the known-bad data" and your conclusions don't change, it ought to lead to a fair suspicion that Mann, Bradley and Hughes were and are, for want of a better term, right.
The term "hockey stick' in this debate is unfortunate, because it makes false implications. When people say 'the hockey stick is broken' it creates an image of no warming. It also implies that Mann were disproven, rather than the truth, which is that the uncertainties of their analysis was increased. And it ignores the fact that there are additional studies, some using a different methodology, which give similar quantitative conclusions and which are not subject to the criticisms of the Mann founder papers.
The entire debate is over the OTHER end of the 'hockey stick.' There is no question that the planet has warmed a lot; if nothing else (and there is 'else') we have warmed coming out of the LIA. The debate is over what happened before the LIA, and although a lot of people are aware of where the debate sits, it is worth making clear.
The NAS report said that the quantitative multiproxy studies of Mann and the papers subsequent to him, are solid going back 400 years (no surprise there) and have utility but with greater uncertainty going back to 900AD, and have so much uncertainty before that as to not be useful. Wegman's analysis looked at only a subset of what the NAS did, and doesn't change the conclusion. What Mann et al said is that current temps are outside past temperatures, given the uncertainties they calculated, and that is what is being disputed.
The arguments are about the shape of that older record, and the uncertainties, and whether we can reliably claim based on the uncertainties that current temps are outside those bounds. That needs to be clear and is worth repeating - the "hockey stick" debate is NOT about whether the record says it is warming now (it clearly is) or about what the temps actually are now, it is about what temps were like in the past relative to today.
Now: the NAS also looked at a lot of other data regarding past temperatures, not just the Mann-style multiproxy reconstructions. The majority of their report concerned those other kinds of evidence. They included localized quantitative and qualitative observations from across the globe, and cited examples of unique climate-influenced events from high latitudes at both ends of the globe, and from tropics, on time scales of a couple thousand to several thousand years. They did not couch or limit their language on those; they called them evidence of millenially-anomalous temperatures or climate.
They also went on to say that because the uncertainties from the Mann et al reconstructions were higher than originally thought, that the quantitative claims of millennially unique temps, going back toward the earlier part of that range to 900AD especially, were not solid but that given all the other supporting data, they were plausible. They did NOT say the conclusions were wrong, they said they were a bit more quantitatively limited than originally claimed, and in fact they offered a lot of other data saying the conclusions were essentially "right." That is, in accordance with reality (given all the other evidence), even if there were some errors in these founder papers.
If people are going to be arguing this; they need, at minimum, to consider the entire picture the NAS provided.
Tim W, it was reasonable in 1997 to doubt the AGW hypothesis, and bodies like the IPCC were pretty careful in pointing out the uncertainties, and making it clear we were talking about a balance of probabilities. But
(1) It's entirely unreasonable to doubt the hypothesis now
(2) Uncertainty didn't and doesn't provide a case for doing nothing
(3) The point of the post is not to criticise Inhofe's 1997 views, but to point out that he's lying about them
jre,
Where did your graphic come from? Is all the data and methodology publically available such that a third-party could validate it and has it been so validated? How do you account for the difference between your chart and the top line in this one?
(that was a screen capture of Figure 8, page 14, from mckitrick's report)
Let's try that JPEG link again. Ah, much better.
Okay, I think I figured it out. Your chart only corrected some of the bad data.
We know that *all* of the hockey-stick shape in MBH came from the bristlecone pine series. (How we know: if you remove the pines there's no hockey stick shape.) We also know that the data on the pines doesn't reflect local temperature and suspect what it is actually showing is CO2 fertilization. So to fix the problem one can either discard the pines entirely (and lose "skill") or leave them in but try to correct it by scaling the results for CO2 concentration. jre's chart does neither. Instead it fixes one issue with the pines - the problem of inappropriately extrapolating data around 1400 - but ignores the larger issue that really did make a difference to the final result.
Of course, I could be wrong. Corrections are welcome.
Take a look at the other side of the argument by reading
this.
So you're having problems posting valid links too, eh? Glad it's not just me! Did you mean to post this? If so, the "second falsehood" described in "Myth #4" is what prompted the Wegman report, which seems to have upheld all those "spurious allegations" (aka "claims") of the guy who "works in the mining industry" (aka, "statistician") that were then "scurrilously parroted" (aka "reported on") by others. :-)
(I've read RealClimate since the beginning. Lately I just seem to find ClimateAudit a lot more convincingly argued.)
Re: "jre,
Where did your graphic come from? Is all the data and methodology publically available such that a third-party could validate it and has it been so validated? How do you account for the difference between your chart and the top line in this one?
(that was a screen capture of Figure 8, page 14, from mckitrick's report)
Posted by: Glen Raphael | July 25, 2006 07:27 PM
Let's try that JPEG link again. Ah, much better.
Posted by: Glen Raphael | July 25, 2006 07:30 PM"
This from the "study" which could not get past the peer-review process because of its fatal flaws. Glen, you've got to try better than that!
And Glen, the image jre cited was from the following article, which is in press in the PEER-REVIEWED journal Climatic Change:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/refs/WahlAmmann_ClimaticC…
Please read it and it will stop you from spouting off your nonsense.
Stephen: Point taken, but M&M's work has been transparent throughout whereas Mann's has been sufficiently opaque that even now, eight years later, Wegman couldn't use Mann's provided data and method descriptions to verify Mann's results. Many of the other studies from the Hockey Team have similar problems. So I'm not going to trust a chart from them without knowing who generated it or where it came from so that it theoretically could be audited, even if it hasn't yet been.
John: with a little more searching I'm guessing you actually wanted to send me here. Yes, the chart I found resembles "the yellow line". And it should!
The strangest claim on that page is:
If you have evidence that some set of data is not a valid temperature proxy, including it does NOT make your results more valid! It may make some stat numbers look better, but so would adding baseball scores from the same period. If you discover you have bad data and removing that data drastically changes your result and makes it statistically invalid, that's not an argument for just leaving the bad data in. Rather, it is an argument that your study is fundamentally broken and probably shouldn't even be published.
Hence the claim "the hockey stick is broken".
Stephen: Thanks! I'll take a look at the paper.
John Q. Sure, we went over this in that long thread at CT.
Good point Glen. I brought up a similar point on another thread.
Does anyone have a defense for Mann on this one, or is he going to be left out to dry?
The primary code, all the data, and links to the freely available statistical application R are located here. Knock yourself out.
The claim that the reconstruction contains "bad data" is, purely and simply, false. Tree rings are perfectly good temperature proxies, as acknowledged by the NAS report:
So, to recap:
1) You know who generated the plot in question, and where it came from, and it not only "theoretically could" be audited, it has been.
2) There is no reason to believe that tree ring data are not valid temperature proxies, and their inclusion does make the reconstruction more valid.
3) The reconstruction has been performed in different ways by different people, and the fundamental conclusions have been shown not to change when data subsets are included or excluded, or different centering methods are used, or different verification statistics applied.
Hence the claim "the hockey stick has been validated."
Re: Nanny's "Does anyone have a defense for Mann on this one, or is he going to be left out to dry?"
The Wahl/Ammann paper defends the premise and the general results of Mann et al.'s work. The M&M criticisms of MBH are reconsidered by W&A and a reanalysis was done on MBH's work which did not really change their results. It only served to move the upper shaft of the hockey stick a millimetre or two and does not "break the hockey stick" as contrarians say.
Take another look at this to see the W&A interpretation:
http://www.realclimate.org/images/WA_RC_Figure1.jpg
In NO WAY do they endorse the M&M version, proven by the fact that the M&M results generally fail in its statistical validity.
While it may be interesting in a scientific sense, whether one researcher (Mann) is wrong or right (or perhaps somewhere in between) in this case should make little or no difference to the policy debate about global warming.
Should not, but apparently does to some.
One can debate this that and the other statement made in the wegman report or the recent NAS report, but as long as one omits one key statement from the NAS report, one skirts the critical issue:
"Large scale surface temperature reconstructions [like those of Mann] for the last 2,000 years are not the primary evidence for the widely accepted views that global warming is occurring, that human activities are contributing, at least in part, to this warming, and that the Earth will continue to warm over the next century."
It is long past time to shift the focus away from Mann and his hockey stick.
What is the "CO2 fertilization adjustment" mentioned in the caption to Fig. 8 shown in the screenshot above, that M&M used to reduce the recent temperature numbers?
I haven't found any research published on bristlecones' growth rate with variations in CO2.
Oh, never mind, I found the references; the issue has been covered and beaten to death without any actual experimental work results published, and the bristlecones are far south of the 50 degree latitude line so it's argument by analogy at best.
"It may make some stat numbers look better, but so would adding baseball scores from the same period."
The point about validation of a reconstruction is to show that it (the reconstruction) is substantially better than noise, e.g. better than 99% or more examples of noise. The noise in this case is generated by the statistical properties of the proxies, i.e. you make a series of noise pseudo-proxies and use these to make a series of reconstructions. If the real reconstruction is any good then its validation measures will be better than those of the noise-based reconstructions in the vast majority of cases (e.g. better than 99% of cases). So the argument then is that the proxies are very unlikely to be just noise and very likely (99% likely) to indeed have responded to the variable being reconstructed.
One thing McIntyre is still claiming is that the RE validation score needs to be at least 0.54 to claim 99% liklihood while Wahl and Ammann say their results only require a score of 0 to claim 98.5% liklihood. W&A's reconstructions give an RE of 0.44 or higher for their and the MBH proxy networks back to 1400. Even with McIntyre's claim, I'd guess that an RE of 0.44 would still give a liklihood of at least 95%. Even with McIntyre's disputed RE estimates, his claim that the hockeystick reconstructions lack liklihood looks pretty shakey.
Hank
The caption tells us that a fertilization adjustment has been 'applied to the full length of the Bristlecone series'. Of course it is not clear what that means or how that was done. Apparently the uber rigorous standards on methodology apply only to MBH. I believe the first literature to address possible CO2 fertilization was by LaMarche et al in 1984. In a review published in 1997, Jacoby and D'Attigo concluded the problem is not widespread and can be recognized and avoided. However, desperate times call for desperate measures and be it the celebrated divergence problem or CO2 fertilization some will grasp at any straws. It seems to me that the audit lads appear to have applied some fudge factor to get the results they were seeking.
JP: What it means is described in the associated paper by reference to MBH99. Quote: "MBH99 acknowledged that the bristlecone series are flawed and need an adjustment to remove the CO2 fertilization effect. But they only applied the correction to the pre-1400 portion of the series.
When we apply the correction to the full series length the hockey stick shape disappears regardless of how many PCs are retained." (page 14)
I looked up MBH99 and verified that first sentence - MBH99 does acknowledge the need for such an adjustment. (page 2 at this link). I haven't attempted to verify how the correction was done by either Mann or McKitrick, but consider another of McKitrick's points:
"If the flawed bristlecone pine series are removed, the hockey stick disappears regardless of how the PCs are calculated and regardless of how many are included. The hockey stick shape is not global, it is a local phenomenon associated with eccentric proxies. Mann discovered this long ago and never reported it. " (p. 13)
Simply removing the series leaves no room for clever fudge-factors, and we've already established that that, too, destroys the Hockey Stick. So it's quite fragile.
(Apparently the evidence that "Mann discovered this long ago" was that they found an adjusted version of the data in Mann's own ftp directory)
Glen
It does not matter how many times you repeat the hockey stick is fragile, that does not make it so. In order for you to accept McKitrick's point that you have reproduced above, you must ignore the other credible information that clearly demonstrates otherwise. This credible information is published in quality journals by researchers in the field. If you actually read the papers by MBH you will note that McKitrick's interpretation is in error. MBH99 do not acknowledge the Bristlecone series is "flawed" and McKitrick's application of some unknown CO2 fertilization fudge factor to the whole length of the "Bristlecone series" is simply laughable. If you consult the literature on CO2 fertilization that should be clear.
But this is your universe, if you select to ignore the techniques and methods of a discipline developed over decades and a comprehensive literature in paleoclimatology in favour of the interpretation by a second rate economist, hey its your reality.
Well, no.
"Reality is what doesn't go away when you quit believing in it." -- P.K. Dick
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1054960&displaytype=printable
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- R. P. Feynman
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commissio…
JP, please confirm: Is this not MBH99? Does it not, on page two, argue for the application of a correction factor in response to CO2? Right-side column. In response to Graybill and Idso(1993).
Quote: "It is plausible that the divergence of the two series is related to a CO2 influence on the ITRDB PC#1 series. The residual is indeed coherent with rising atmospheric CO2 until it levels off in the 20th century...we consider the residual to be non-climatic in nature, and consider the ITRDB PC #1 series "corrected" by removing from it this residual..."
Mann is arguing for a fudge factor to be applied in order to salvage a problem with the high-altitude data. Wait, here's his earlier description of the problem: "A number of the highest elevation chronologies in the western US do appear...to have exhibited long-term growth increases that are more dramatic than can be explained by instrumental temperature trends in these regions."
Thus, as far as I can tell, Mann and McKitrick are in full agreement as to the need for a "CO2 fertilization fudge factor" to be applied to the Bristlecone series. They might disagree to some degree as to how or where to apply the correction, or somebody might just have made a mistake in their math. I am not qualified to judge which side did the math correctly on their respective datasets, but (post NAS, post-Wegman) I think I know which side to bet on.
Thought you might be interested in this - today's OnPoint interview features Andy Revkin of the New York Times. He defends the reporting of scientific knowledge despite conservative criticisms, specifically from Sen. Inhofe.
You can watch the video free (no login) at http://www.eande.tv/main/?date=072706 or read the transcript at http://www.eande.tv/transcripts/?date=072706
Cheers
Glen, the "PC #1" is the same thing as the "PC1" earlier in the thread, here, in response to your asking about it:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/07/inhofes_global_warming_hoax.php…
Glen
The quote you provided from McKitrick states the MBH acknowledge the Bristlecone series are 'flawed', there is no such statement in MBH. McKitrick is playing loose with the facts. It may come as a surprise but in many areas of science it is necessary to make any number of corrections and adjustments. MBH report the adjustments and corrections that they made, it was published and the paleoclimatic community was given the opportunity to evaluate that work. Eight years on, and the results of MBH have been conmfirmed by many other researchers using a variety of other proxies. If MBH's hockey stick was broken it would not have passed the test of peer evaluation.
Yes post Wegman, post NAS it should be quite clear what 'side' an objective researcher would fall on. The NAS report confirmed the basic results of MBH, while Wegman did not evaluate the results but rather focussed on one very narrow application of a multivariate statistical technique. Arguments about statistics will never be concluded. Ever. However, Wegman did demonstrate an absolute ignorance of atmospheric science and in the process made quite a fool of himself. In short he would be in good company with the confused Sen Inhofe.
Its been fun.
JP: MBH99 said a series used in MBH98 now requires a "correction". How could it require a "correction" if there's no "flaw" to correct? :-)
As for Wegman, why wouldn't arguments about statistics find a conclusion? The statistics part of the argument should be the easy part to resolve. Is there any statistician who has weighed in on Mann's side of the argument? (honest question!)
Hank: Thanks, but I didn't claim it was. PC#1 is an input and PC1 is an output. However, the latter appears by all acounts to be highly affected by changes in the former.
Hank: Ignore my last comment to you - I hit "post" prematurely.
Tim: Thanks for letting these arguments run their course!
"Mann and McKitrick are in full agreement as to the need for a "CO2 fertilization fudge factor" to be applied to the Bristlecone series."
In spite of this fudge factor, reconstructions back to 1450 with and without the Bristlecone series agree extremely well with each other (Wahl and Ammann). If the Bristlecone series introduce a huge bias as some would have us believe, why doesn't this bias show up at all after 1450?