Yamal controversy

The Yamal controversy was an explosion of drama in the global warming blog wars that spilled over into the pages of mainstream newspapers. In the wake of Climategate, deniers latched onto a set of tree-ring data called the Yamal series that had been the topic of some of the leaked e-mails (after they were done squawking about "nature tricks" and "hiding the decline", of course). The Yamal series refers to the tree-ring data taken from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia by a team of Russian researchers, Rashit M. Hantemirov and Stepan G. Shiyatov, in the late 1990s. Hantemirov and Shivatov released more of their data in 2009 and Steve McIntyre jumped all over it, snarking:
Keith Briffa, a climatologist at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich, had based a number of temperature reconstructions on a subset of the Yamal data. He claimed he had used a different methodology than Hantemirov and Shivatov because the original methodology didn't preserve long-term climate change.The Yamal ring-width chronology of Briffa (2000), Keith Briffa at CRU McIntyre accused Briffa of cherry-picking. Of course, it would be perfectly legitimate to criticize Briffa's reconstruction and perform a new reconstruction on one's own. However, McIntyre just downloaded some other unrelated Yamal dataset from the internet and chucked it into the original set.Hey Ya!(mal), Real Climate Deniers, obviously, failed to care about this and the "Yamal is a lie!" claim shot through the deny-o-sphere, with Anthony Watts picking up the story next.A hands on view of tree growth and tree rings – one explanation for Briffa’s YAD061 lone tree core, Watts at LOLWUWT It then found its way into the right-wing rags, with James Delingpole and others declaring that the "hockey stick" graph had been soundly "debunked."How the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie, Delingpole in The TelegraphDead Ringer, Ross Kaminsky in the American Spectator 
However, Briffa's Yamal reconstructions were only included in four of the twelve hockey stick reconstructions and even McIntyre criticized other deniers for blowing his "critique" of Briffa out of proportion and walked back his accusations of cherry-picking. Sure enough, both Briffa and a member of the original Russian team released full reconstructions using the previously unreleased data and the hockey stick shape returned, confirming Briffa's original assertions.Examining the validity of the published RCS Yamal tree-ring chronology, Briffa and Thomas Melvin at CRUClimate “auditor” Steve McIntyre: Yamal like "crack cocaine", Let the Backpedaling Begin, Deep Climate
However, the incident was still missing something: That classic McIntyre hypocrisy. McIntyre had been whining for quite some time that Briffa had been blowing him off (gee, wonder why?). However, Briffa, even though he had a good excuse, hadn't been stonewalling McIntyre — the complete dataset was under the control of the Russian team that had collected it. After Briffa notified him of this, McIntyre then flippantly replied he had had the data all along!
==External links==
*Climate scientists withheld Yamal data despite warnings from senior colleagues, The Guardian
*Climategate: Hiding the Decline?, Skeptical Science
==See also==
*Wegman Report
==References==
Category:Denialism
Category:Climatology
Category:Global warming
Category:Pseudoscience