LOUD SPECULATIONS

A heartfelt cry from Anastassia Makarieva, a Russian scientist working in the field of climatology. She is referring to the Keith Briffa (of UEA) controversy over the Yamal "magic tree" - the ONLY one demonstrating the desired signal of late 20th century "unprecedented" warming. Briffa's are the crap tree-ring proxy findings which had to be hidden with a "trick" to "Hide The Decline" as revealed in ther Climategate email.

But she wrote this criticism BEFORE the leaked emails were released. So you see, Aubrey, some of us were well prepared for the email disclosures; they did not come out of the blue; I did not take them "out of context"; I was already well-immersed in "the context", and had been trying hard to ensure others (you and auntie and skylark, for starters) were aware of "the context", too.

Here's what she said on 18th November 2009:



"In my perception, that some old trees 150 m within the tree-line and not below started growing fast in the last century is a very interesting fact deserving attention. It is the persistent, not to say maniacal, intention to link it — by any means — to warming that appears absolutely unscientific. Fashion rules the mainstream journals; if you do not link your study to AGW, the limited space will be taken by others who do. How many studies that did not confirm warming remain unpublished and their authors, by consequence, discouraged from continuing their careers in science? Is there any statistics?

I can testify that the pattern is wide-spread by my own experience. Once we made a study linking largest body size in extant air-breathing cold-blooded animals to ambient temperature from consideration of their energy budget, to show that the largest animals live in the warmer regions. We submitted our work (no whatsoever link to climate change) to Nature and it was rejected even without being sent out to review, just of no interest. Four years after our work was published in a different journal, a group of paleobiologists took up our approach to reconstruct paleotemperatures from the body size of the largest extinct snake they had excavated.

This research was published in Nature, received a News and Views coverage, and an extensive discussion. In comparison, the largest extinct frog study published a year earlier did not make it to either Nature or Science (to be accurate, I do not know whether the authors had submitted it there). But interestingly, the frog, unlike the snake, did not reconstruct paleotemperatures.

Yielding to fashion, the mainstream scientific mass-media are sweeping unprejudiced science away to make space for loud speculations. In the extreme, even if an author has serious results at hand, he will be unable to publish them high unless making a clown of himself by stretching his conclusions to say at least something about climate change. With each new generation of researchers the proportion of clowns favored by such artificial selection can be expected to hockey-stick. Talk AGW or die."



Here's where she said it:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7779