I think Gavin Schmidt got up on the wrong side of the bed today, either that or he was so mad when he wrote the latest piece on Yamal at RC, he was so mightily angrified that he set himself up for making dumb mistakes.

He really makes a laughingstock of himself in this feckless piece of disinformation about the Yamal affair. It reeks of desperation. He even manages to use my objections to NCDC using an incomplete, non quality controlled preliminary dataset posted on the web solely to keep volunteers updated of the survey status and for no other purpose, as an “unpublished” work suitable for scientific consumption. NCDC went ahead and used it for a paper anyway, despite my objections. Somehow in the bizarre hockey team entrenched mindset of Gavin, this is comparable to the team’s objections to releasing FOI sought data on Yamal. Note to Gavin – my file was already public!

You’d think a scientist could get this simple fact right.

Gavin writes:

UK FOI legislation (quite sensibly) specifically exempts unpublished work from release provided the results are being prepared for publication. So McIntyre’s appeals have tried to insinuate that no such publication is in progress (which is false) or that the public interest in knowing about a regional tree ring reconstruction from an obscure part of Siberia trumps the obvious interest that academics have in being able to work on projects exclusively prior to publication. This is a hard sell, unless of course one greatly exaggerates the importance of a single proxy record – but who would do that? (Oh yes: YAD06 – the most important tree in the world, The global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie etc.). Note that premature public access to unpublished work is something that many people (including Anthony Watts) feel quite strongly about. Worse, McIntyre has claimed in his appeal that the length of time since the Briffa et al (2008) paper implies that the regional Yamal reconstruction has been suppressed for nefarious motives. But I find it a little rich that the instigator of a multitude of FOI requests, appeals, inquiries, appeals about inquires, FOIs about appeals, inquiries into FOI appeals etc. is now using the CRU’s lack of productivity as a reason to support more FOI releases. This is actually quite funny. Furthermore, McIntyre is using the fact that Briffa and colleagues responded online to his last deceptive claims about Yamal, to claim that all Yamal-related info must now be placed in the public domain (including, as mentioned above, unpublished reconstructions being prepared for a paper). How this will encourage scientists to be open to real-time discussions with critics is a little puzzling. Mention some partial analysis online, and be hit immediately with a FOI for the rest…?

Our favorite Yamal tracking historian, Andrew Montford explodes Gavins claims at Bishop Hill.

Montford writes:

Gavin Schmidt has issued the official response to the recent excitement over Yamal. I have to say, even on a brief glance through it is a wild piece of writing.

Briffa, as we know, reprocessed data from Hantemirov and Shiyatov in his 2000 paper on Yamal. He used the same data again in his 2008 paper on regional chronologies. Schmidt says:

McIntyre is accusing Briffa of ‘deception’ in stating that he did not ‘consider’ doing a larger more regional reconstruction at that time. However, it is clear from the 2000 paper that the point was to show hemispheric coherence across multiple tree ring records, not to create regional chronologies. Nothing was being ‘deceptively’ hidden and the Yamal curve is only a small part of the paper in any case.

As McIntyre’s article is quite clear that the Yamal regional chronology dates back only to 2006 it can of course not be relevant to the 2000 paper. This is something that he makes quite clear in his article.

One of the purposes of Briffa (2000) was clearly to demonstrate the effect of RCS methodology on the Hantemirov and Shiyatov 2002 dataset. I have no objection to CRU claiming this “purpose” for Briffa (2000). But, by 2008, this was no longer their “purpose”. Indeed, one doubts whether the editors of Phil Trans B would have accepted a 2008 paper with such a mundane purpose. The actual “purpose” of Briffa et al 2008 is stated quite clearly and was entirely different: it introduced and discussed “regional” chronologies.

Schmidt is therefore engaging in some serious disinformation. Unfortunately, this is not the only occasion. For example, he points out that McIntyre had long ago received “the data” from the Russians who originally collated it.

Full story here: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/5/11/realclimate-on-yamal.html

Gavin should know by now that he can’t get away with this sort of stuff. I wonder what Phil Jones will do next week.

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