The original Briffa reponse to the McIntyre icluded the following:
Our current practice when selecting data to incorporate in a regional chronology,
is to include data exhibiting high levels of common high-frequency variability
Judged according to this criterion it is entirely appropriate to include the data
from the KHAD site (used in McIntyre's sensitivity test) when constructing a regional chronology for the area.
However, we simply did not consider these data at the time,
focussing only on the data used in the companion study by Hantemirov and Shiyatov and supplied to us by them.
Notice he doesn't state why he omitted the Schweingruber trees in lieu of a smaller sample.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/
Briffa later explains that adding the excluded trees doesn't change his results.
But that response is 9 years late, disputed and irrelevant:
1) the Russians that supplied Briffa his data published
a subsequent study, utilizing Yamal trees. Their results shows different results, flatter tree growth.
According to whattsupwiththat.com they formed a result as follows:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpr...mirov-shiyatov-0_2000_zoomed2.png?w=509&h=300
2) Briffa refused to share his data for many years, making it
suspicious. This was bad judgment at best and not
a way to gain respect from the scientific community. Even though Briffa knew scientists
wanted his data, he was willing to ignore them, until he published a paper in 2008
referencing the data, before releasing it.
The Royal Society of London demanded
that the CRU archive their findings before publishing more papers. Eventually it appeared at the CRU website.
http://climateaudit.org/2009/09/26/briffas-yamal-crack-cocaine-for-paleoclimatologists/
3) Biffa's cohorts at CRU acted suspicious and defensive as seen in the ClimateGate emails.
His coauthor, Tim Osborn couldn't provide answers about the data used in Briffa's Yamal sample?
Preposterous!
Email - Ex.
Apart from Keith, I think Tom Melvin here is the only person who could shed light on the McIntyre
criticisms of Yamal. But he can be a rather loose cannon and shouldn’t be directly contacted about this....
Apparently they worried about spilling some truth?
4) Tree ring analysis is questionable science, sampling needs to be
performed carefully. A few outliers can skew a small sample one way or the other.
Has Briffa applied Error Bounds on his sample?
One shouldn't rely on limited samples, if more exist.
A CRU scientist might however and that is what Briffa did, without reason. He used a complex
analysis but with too few 20th century samples. This invites criticism and
the 20th century results are speculation at best.
5) It shouldn't be overlooked that Biffa's selection
was destined to show global warming and nothing less.
Briffa's climate studies consistently show global warming in some way or another.
Why would we ever expect him to produce a paper showing the opposite?
That would be illogical.
6) Keith Briffa has reportedly hid climate data elsewhere using
programming tricks, etc. as seen in Climategate emails, so probability
suggests this wasn't just sloppy science, but worse. We will
investigate this in a future class.
7) Even the data sample at the CRU werbise appears to be hiding the variation in YAD061.
The graphs could have been more space separated on the CRU webpage, but maybe they
want it to appear hidden to the casual observer.
Again, the Russian study of the Yamal area showed cyclical temperatures
over a longer time span without a huge upturn.
A warming trend started in the 19th century, long before
current high CO2 levels.
There was no trailing hockey stick result
as Briffa's 2000 paper might suggest.
If it existed, Briffa had not proven it.
