WUWT readers may recall that Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit blog discovery of UNEP’s use of a Wikipedia “hockey Stick” graphic by “Hanno”, was the subject of last week’s blog postings.
The Yamal data hockey stick controversy overshadowed it, and much of the focus has been there recently.
The discovery of a Wikipedia graphic in the UNEP Climate Change Science Compendium must have been embarrassing as it shows the sort of sloppy science that is going into “official” publications.
In this case, the United Nations simply grabbed an image from Wikipedia that supported the view they wanted to sell. The problem with the graph in the upper right of page 5 of the UNEP report is that it itself has not been peer reviewed nor has it originated from a peer reviewed publication, having its inception at Wikipedia.
And then there’s the problem of the citation as “Hanno 2009” who (up until this story broke) was an anonymous Wikipedia contributor.
Yet UNEP cited the graph as if it was a published and peer reviewed work as “Hanno 2009″.
Here’s my screencap of the page from the UNEP Climate Change Science Compendium report from last week
In this case, the United Nations simply grabbed an image from Wikipedia that supported the view they wanted to sell.
The hockey stick, based on tree ring proxies has met an inconveniently timed death it seems.
It appears now that somebody at the United Nations must have gotten the message from blogland, becuase there has been a change in the graphics on page 5.
Below is page 5 as it appears in the UNEP Climate Change Science Compendium today:
It’s gone. It has been replaced with the familiar GISS land-ocean record, not quite a hockey stick, but close enough.
You can see the GISS graph from the GISTEMP web page right here, oddly the UN used the 2005 version (citing Hansen et al 2005) rather than the 2009 version of the graph, seen below. Might it be that pesky downturn at the end of the graph? Or maybe they are just Google challenged?
It sure would be nice if such publications could display animated GIFS, for example this one showing two different vintages of GISS data:
Maybe climate blogs can convince the UN to change their graph yet again.
Thanks to sharp eyed WUWT reader Lawrie (of Sydney Australia) for pointing out the change made to the UNEP document.
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