[Guest post by John Mashey]
This is a follow-up to the original falsification, flat-earth maps and dog astrology journal @ STW or cleaner version by Neverending Audit. It originally was a comment to be attached to WMC’s Attacked! or WUWT: taking incompetence to a whole new level.
Introduction
The origin of IPCC(1990) Fig 7.1(c) may be historically interesting, but far less than the history of its later abuse, mis-use, and falsification, combined into a fine marketing campaign.
– See pp.199-203 of FAR Chapter 7. Fig7.1(c) p.202, errs in its specific scale (Years before present) and the general Fig 7.1 caption (“global”). The latter clearly contradicts the text of pp.199-203, which several times expresses doubts about a “MWP-big” (global, synchronous, generally warmer than 1990), in contrast to LIA, generally thought to be more-or-less global. The experts didn’t believe in MWP-big, but in “MWP-mix,” i.e., warm in North Atlantic region and some others, but cooler elsewhere and high warmth neither global nor synchronous. They expressed relevant uncertainties requiring research, rather than thinking Fig 7.1(c) to be unalterable truth, forever, a “flat-Earth map.” Of course, the temperature of 1000AD is absolutely irrelevant to current and future temperatures, but it is a nice red herring.
– The well-caveated figure was gone by IPCC(1992), and IPCC (1995, 2001, 2007) saw science progress in normal fashion, with increasingly- better approximations, as scientists tried to reconstruct both global and regional temperature variations, working towards longer intervals. Every credible millennial reconstruction (including MBH99), had an MWP cooling into an LIA but they covered larger geographies that naturally had less extremes. They did not “make the MWP go away,” they just did not support MWP-big, which was never claimed by IPCC.
Fig 7.1(c) forgotten by almost all, until McIntyre in mid-2005
Since IPCC(1990) had been scientifically obsolete for years, and was not widely available, scientists weren’t thinking about MWP-big, although anti-science advocates often gave cherry-picked examples (Vikings in Greenland, grapes in UK) to claim it.
Even Fred Singer, in “Hot Talk Cold Science” (1999, p.56), while arguing for a MWP-big, cited p.203 of IPCC(1990), but did not think to employ Fig. 7.1(c). That was mostly forgotten until March-June 2005, when McIntyre and McKitrick re-introduced it, backed by strong marketing, involving influential folks, some of whose history is given in CCC.
– Washington thinktanks/front groups (Competitive Enterprise Institute, Cooler Heads Coalition and George Marshall Institute, where McIntyre and McKitrick had been “experts” since early 2004)
– Politicians, such as James Inhofe and Joe Barton
– The Wall Street Journal, whose June editorial told an outright falsehood
– (2006) the Wegman Report, whose “blueprint” was the 05/11/05 talk given by McIntyre
– Since then, “Fig 7.1(c)” has appeared in numerous booksand even more websites, generally attributed to IPCC(1990), although sometimes IPCC(1995) or just IPCC. Sometimes they even give the right page number (202), although Singer and Avery(2007), Alexander(2008) and Goreham(2009) all thought it was Fig 22 of IPCC(1995). Variants of “Fig 7.1(c)” appear widely. See Google images: medieval warm period graph. These are most commonly used to argue that a cabal of climate scientists hid the TRUE MWP-big by introducing the MHB99 hockey stick.
McIntyre originally (03/16/05) cited this as “To understand the role of the hockey stick in Kyoto promotion, one need look no further back than the IPCC Second Assessment Report in 1995. The millennium temperature history portrayed in that report is shown in the diagram below.”. That was obviously wrong, but propagated into McKitrick’s 05/05/04 APEC talk, and more importantly the 05/11/05 talks in Washington, DC. for thinktanks and on Capitol Hill. Those were the “blueprint” for the Wegman Report. In a few months, some of McIntyre and McKitrick’s 1995/1990 errors got corrected to 1990, but not all, as WMC notes in Attacked! As of this writing, the page is this. It mentions “IPCC 1990 Figure 7c” (sic, it’s 7.1(c)). That isn’t the real problem, though.
McIntyre’s IPCC graph was not an image from IPCC (1990 or any other).
Most people’s graphs ascribed to IPCC were not images from IPCC. Although the curves are usually similar to Fig 7.1(c), typographical elements (capitalization, length of vertical words, font (serif versus san serif), dash at left or not. The erroneous “Years before present” was usually changed to “Years.” That shows that most people using this graph to proclaim MWP-big true and hockey-stick false, had not looked at IPCC(1990). If someone had a copy of IPCC(1990), why would they not use the real image?
In academe, this is called false citation, misrepresentation of a source, or falsification/fabrication. Such things can be academic misconduct, not because the curve is wrong, but because the different image (not labeled “after” or “derived from”, etc) strongly implies that the original source was not consulted.
Some have gone even further, distorting the graph, as was done in the Wegman Report. At least Wegman admitted in testimony that “No, I have not been able to obtain a copy of the 1990 report.”
By 06/25/05, McIntyre clearly had and wrote about did have IPCC(1990), followed by IPCC(1992) and IPCC(1995). Of course, as WMC notes, the real chronology made the 03/16/05 story nonsensical, but somehow the overall theme not only stuck, but propagated widely.
McIntyre’s post of 05/09/08, “Where did IPCC 1990 Figure 7c Come From”, showed the same image used many times, attributed to IPCC. He wrote:
“Today we’ll help the climate science community identify the provenance of a graphic shown below, that was produced in 1990 by a mysterious organization known to insiders as IPCC.”
Later in the same post, he showed a scan/screen grab of the correct IPCC(1990) Figure 7.1 (a, b, c). Part (c) is NOT the image he’d been using since 2005.
What is the real provenance of that old image?
Tasmanian (non-scientist) John Daly was a “science advisor” for the Western Fuels Association. See p.11 for that, but pp.8-11 are well worth reading. (H/T John Robert Hunter). Daly died in early 2004, so we can’t ask him how he got/created that image. However, he certainly had it:
04/14/01: “The `Hockey Stick’: A New Low in Climate Science”, ascribing the image to 1995.
06/26/03: updated to fix 1995 to 1990
Did McIntyre get the image directly from Daly’s website? Or via someone else? In the interest of transparency and disclosure, inquiring minds want to know. Was all this deliberate or just incompetence (as per Napoleon)?
Wall Street Journal tells 2 falsehoods 06/21/05
McIntyre wrote 06/21/05 about a WSJ Editorial that day and followed the next day with more. Sadly, the WSJ Editorial (paywall) contained an unambiguous falsehood as it showed the same image, but wrote “Trend in average temperature over the past 1,000 years, exactly as shown in the 1990 report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dotted line represents mean.” Of course, it was not the exact image from the IPCC, and the dotted line did not represent the mean, so the WSJ wrote two clear untruths. Did they do this research themselves? Where did they get the graph? Inquiring minds want to know that also.
Inhofe used it again in The Greatest Hoax (2012)
Here p.33 has the (somewhat fuzzy) image, giving p.202, but of course, not where this image came from.
Some Chronology (more in CCC, pp.27-28, p.183, and M&M history with Myron Ebell, GMI)
02/14/05 WSJ front-page article by A. Regalado, “Face-off” about M&M (CCC, p.183)
02/18/05 WSJ OpEd “Hockey Stick on Ice: Politicizing the science of global warming”
03/05/05 Singer posted preprint of Deming’s article, 3 months before JSE did
03/16/05 Original post by McIntyre on the Figure + Deming
05/04/05 McKitrick talk/paper for APEC
05/11/05 M&M spoke for GMI+CHC, and on Capitol Hill, introduced by CEI/CHC’s Myron Ebell, see annotated talk @GMI.
06/21/05 WSJ editorial “Kyoto by degrees”, McIntyre post on it
06/22/05 2nd post on WSJ editorial
06/24/05 Around 4PM Friday afternoon, Jean Marie McGinley (Barton staffer), created PDFs of the Barton/Whitfield letters to {Mann, Bradley, Hughes, Pachauri, Bement}, and up on website.
06/24/05 Before 6PM Myron Ebell sent copies (CCC, p.166) to William Perhach in the G.W.Bush White House and others.
06/25/05 McIntyre publishes something that actually shows he’s seen IPCC(1990)
06/26/05 (Sunday) McIntyre wrote House of Representatives Committee.
Hence, the letters were publicized before the recipients likely even got them, certainly, Bradley had not, as he was hiking in Europe. Sending letters to people might be a normal way to get information. Publicizing the letters before they even got them is something else.
While this might seem like a well-organized marketing campaign, in which the Wegman Report became a part, some might claim it is just coincidence.
Summary
Although John Daly had a version of Fig 7.1(c) in 2001, it had been mostly forgotten for 15 years. Then McIntyre and associates rewrote history to promote it as 1990 IPCC truth that the hockey stick was invented to hide. The image propagated widely, often employed by people who really had no idea of its provenance and either ignored IPCC(1990) or did not read it. Again, it is not that the curve misrepresents Fig 7.1(c), but that using that curve without the surrounding caveats is a real cherry-pick, and using a different image strongly hints that someone did not have IPCC(1990) at hand.
This is a great example of the contrast between:
– science, which admits to uncertainty, works to lessen it by doing research, argues over real issues within the rules
versus
– anti-science where a long-obsolete flat-earth map is rediscovered and history rewritten to make it absolute truth, backed by an unsupported claim in a “dog astrology journal” by a guy with interesting views … and people actually believe all this and repeat it, endlessly, even in 2012.
[nb: minor updates a few hours post-pub.]
Refs
* TC tweaking McI (webcite)
Or 
I remember old sci-fi stories, where the colony ship would take generations to turn up in a new system, they’d take a brief look from orbit, land, and get overwhelmed by monsters / bacteria / natives / whatever exciting thing the author had thought up. And the obvious question was always: well, why didn’t they spend a bit longer checking everything was all right? And the answer of course was that would make the story too boring.
