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[Update June 17th] Scholars & Rogues sparked a vigorous discussion about various tree-ring chronologies, and readers are encouraged to look through the discussions on S&R as well as McIntyre’s Climate Audit for all the juicy details.  We also wish to note a correction made by Angliss regarding which graph was in discussion, but that point was not quoted by Desmogblog here. 

Finally, we wish to highlight Desmogblog’s interest in the subject.  We distinguished below between “the new famous ‘hide the decline’ statement, which Fox News picked up as meaning ‘hide the decline in all global temperatures’,” vs. the more subtle discussion points of specific pieces of climate evidence. 

Last week we mentioned a detailed analysis by Scholars & Rogues about how the stolen emails lack enough context to draw conclusions about climate science.  This week in part 2, Brian Angliss gets more into the nitty-gritty details, challenging statements made by self-appointed Climate Auditor and mining executive Steve McIntyre and others. 

Often McIntyre’s discussions are not commented on by climate scientists, because they aren’t worth replying to.  RealClimate.org does when a response is warranted, but most claims and assertions go unchecked, becoming memes within a small subsection of passionate climate scpetics.  Angliss has found numerous misrepresentations within McIntyre’s writing, calling him out on exactly the kind of thing he likes to accuse real climate scientists of. 

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Misinterpreting a new study requires there to be a new study in the first place. Though it may seem obvious, this basic truth was evidently lost on the throngs of deniers who pounced on a story about solar variability that appeared on the news aggregator ScienceDaily—on May 12, 2008.

The piece, entitled “Solar Variability: Striking a Balance with Climate Change,” makes the point that, over the course of the Earth’s history, the sun and volcanic eruptions have typically exerted the largest influence on climate change. In recent decades, however, the sun’s influence in particular has been replaced by that of anthropogenic activity—something which Robert Cahalan, a climatologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says “has never happened before.”