Nature has a new paper with another “angle” attempting to prove global warming.
Geologists led by Brown University have determined the east African rift lake has experienced unprecedented warming during the last century, and its surface waters are the warmest on record.
Willis Eschenbach, who had done some research on the same lake, grew concerned about the report because he knew there were no temperature records for the lake.
I was puzzled by the claims in the new article regarding the changes in Lake Tanganyika surface temperatures, because I knew that there was almost no historical data on lake surface temperature. I wondered how they determined the surface temperature of the lake over the past 1,500 years. So I sprung the $18 to purchase the Nature paper and find out …
It soon turned out to be tree ring data methods. The researchers used a “proxy” that they can correlate to lake temperatures. They then proceeded to toss out parts of the proxy data that didn’t help their goal of showing warming, used fancy axis and other graphing techniques to minimize visible anomalies that put holes in their theory, and although claiming to know lake temperatures for 1500 years, they only actually had three (3!!!) actual measurements, all from 2003. How can you proxy 1500 years, with just 3 actual samples to correlate to?
He sums up the “science”:
My point is, the Tierney 2010 report is a study of the change in Lake Tanganyika surface temperature over time, which contains no measurements of the change in LST over time, and which has exactly three actual surface temperature measurements, which are poorly cited, are from different parts of the lake, and are all from 2003 …
I don’t know the reason these ‘scientists’ did such shoddy research – whether incompetence, grant seeking, or political motivations, or all of the above– I don’t know. All I do know is that we can’t trust this branch of science to perform quality science. I see no reason to further fund their activities, nor to make decisions based on their work.