The first double-blind experiment analysing the role of human decision-making in climate reconstructions has found that it can lead to substantially different results.
The experiment, designed and run by researchers from the University of Cambridge, had multiple research groups from around the world use the same raw tree-ring data to reconstruct temperature changes over the past 2,000 years.
While each of the reconstructions clearly showed that recent warming due to anthropogenic climate change is unprecedented in the past two thousand years, there were notable differences in variance, amplitude and sensitivity, which can be attributed to decisions made by the researchers who built the individual reconstructions.
Professor Ulf Büntgen from the University of Cambridge, who led the research, said that the results are “important for transparency and truth – we believe in our data, and we’re being open about the decisions that any climate scientist has to make when building a reconstruction or model.”
Read more at University of Cambridge
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