Climatologists at RealClimate.org debunk another pseudoscientist

Today, a new post on Realclimate.org debunks yet another pseudoscientist claiming to have found the cure to all of our global warming blues. Read the article here.

Of all the blogs I read, my favorite and most trusted (and also voted top Science Blog of 2005) is RealClimate.org. One role that they have played in the recent past has been to report on pseudo-science climate reports that regularly seem to take the Internet by storm. They cast these reports in the light of actual science.

This weekend, such a report hit the media, popping up in the Daily Telegraph and theNational Review suggesting that a century of climate science and physics should be discounted because of the study of self-proclaimed climate guru Steve McIntyre. In his erroneous study, he took a tree-ring temperature record that has been painstakingly reconstructed from trees in Siberia and demonstrates that if you throw out all of the trees that are sensitive to climate (i.e. the trees that one would want for a climate reconstruction) and replace them with tree-ring records that were discarded in the study (because the trees did not demonstrate a sensitivity to climate), that you do not reproduce the warming signal seen in climate records from around the world.

Fascinating. So, if we throw away all of the valid data (selected using age-old techniques in dendrochronology) and replace them with bogus data (thrown out because they didn’t record any climate signal), we find that there is no warming signal in Siberia. And we should be amazed in some way by this?

In actuality, if we threw away all of the tree-ring records, here is what we are left with:

Frankly, all of this pseudoscience does very little to impress me. It’s akin to me walking into an optometrist’s office during an exam and suggesting that they just continue to increase the magnification on the patient’s prescription until they can see clearly. It would not only be a poor suggestion and demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of the world of optometry on my part, but it would be insulting to the optometrist that spent years studying the trade to insinuate that I knew better than they. So, why do non-climatologists so frequently tread on our turf?

The folks at Realclimate might have some answers. At least they seem to have a bit more patience for this than I do. Read more here.

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