Scientific Fraud: the Briffa case
Keith Briffa and others have used measurements of tree rings in Siberia to estimate the local variations in temperature over the past 2,000 years, and to support an integrated "Global Warming" view of climate change over the last decades and centuries.
The sum of the evidence is that their hypothesis is simply false. Worse, they have deliberately been manipulating the evidence, and withholding data, in order to promote their hypothesis.
The underlying hypothesis is that the rings and their variations are an accurate and reliable proxy of temperature. That hypothesis is, by the admission of the proponents of that hypothesis, false for the last 50 years because the relation of measurements of tree rings and actual local temperature during the last half-century are the opposite of what the hypothesis claims they should be.
This has been used to promote the Global Warming theory (i.e. that it is caused by industrial activities and getting worse and climatic disaster looms).
What are the facts?
Briffa and others decided to exclude the tree measurements after 1960, because they don't match actual temperature measurements. In other words, since 1960 the tree rings are known to be an inaccurate and unreliable proxy of temperature.
Still, they claim that the proxy is fully accurate and reliably matches actual temperature measurements for 80 years prior to 1960. And they further claim that the proxy is accurate and reliable for the prior millennia.
If a theory is demonstrably false for fifty years, but happens to appear true for eighty years before that, what is the proper conclusion? to reject the hypothesis as false or seriously incomplete (missing fundamental, causal explanations) -- or to hide the contradictions and affirm that the hypothesis is valid over the previous two millennia (when no actual temperature measurement is available to confirm the claim)?
If someone's answer is to pretend to know the temperature of the past 2,000 years based on that provably false hypothesis, they are a scientific fraud.
Leave a comment