by Rud Istvan
This instantly ‘famous’ 2013 Science hockey stick paper derived from Marcott’s 2011 Ph.D thesis at Oregon State University, available here. His thesis doesn’t show a hockey stick ‘blade’ projecting above its anomaly baseline NCDC 1961-1990. H/T to Jean S, posted at Climate Audit. Something changed after the thesis was published to produce the new ‘blade’ in Science. That something was significant, since the Science paper’s Supplementary Information discussion said it did not enable discriminating such a temperature variation (i.e. a ‘blade’) on such a short a time scale.
See my previous post here, Lets Play Hockey Again, which was right about the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) but wrong about the ‘blade origins. Mea Culpa. Here we deduce whence the ‘blade’ came using ‘crowd-sourced’ science.
First, SI table S1 and thesis figure C1 confirm both use exactly the same 73 proxy records. The only difference is that thesis series MD98-2181 was renamed KY07-04-01 in the SI.
Second, thesis figure C7 graphed each proxy series individually using the mean and 2 sigma error band from its Monte Carlo statistical error estimation technique. A visual check confirms that there is no near T0 (1950) ‘blade’ visible in any of 73 dithered proxies, although five have distinct upticks near ‘present’ (the past 100-200 years or so visually). These include Dome C (Antarctic ice core δD with ±30% uncertainty), MD98-2165 (equatorial Mg/Ca), TN057.17 (temperate diatom mat with ±0.75°C uncertainty), Agassiz Renland (Arctic borehole δ18O with ±30% uncertainty), and GeoB3910, an equatorial alkenone. The thesis itself shows (below) that these are insufficient to uptick the ensemble.
Importantly for what follows, figure C7 also shows start and end dates for each proxy series as given by their references, along with their proxy age/date [radioisotope] controls. 20 unequivocally carried through about 1850, and 9 extended beyond T0 (1950). All the other proxies ended earlier in time. For example, proxy MD95-2043 (Cacho 2001, alkenone, Western Mediterranean) ended about 942 AD per its reference, with a notable ending uptick from the Medieval Warm Period. Remember this proxy for a couple of pages more.
Third, the outstanding Ph.D thesis on which this Science paper was based does not contain a hockey stick ‘blade’ anywhere. We can compare five important correlated pieces of information from its chapter 4 and supplemental data to deduce where and how the Science ‘blade’ originated. To start, both 2000-year reconstructions were compared to Mann 2008. The purple lines are the ‘standard’ simple area weighted mean 5×5 grid reconstructions.
The Science ‘blade’ is obvious. It does not exist in the thesis. Something changed.
The ‘blade’ (above anomaly baseline) is visibly present in all Science reconstruction methods, yet in none in the thesis. It is therefore not an artifact of the various reconstruction methodologies. Something changed in either the data or in the data processing algorithms to produce the blade in Science.
The blade is obvious in the mean of all 1000 dithered Monte Carlo proxy simulations in Science, yet is non-existent in the equivalent 10000-simulation thesis mean. The thesis error band widens symmetrically and significantly as T0 is approached. It must, given that Science reported the mean proxy resolution is 180 years, and the median is 120 years. This validates the thesis’ basic statistical algorithm as directionally correct and obviously useful.
The schematic algorithms used to generate the above error information are identical. Without comparing the underlying code, it is impossible to ascertain with complete certainty that there was no algorithm change in Science. But beyond any reasonable doubt, the ‘blade’ arose from some data change rather than from some algorithm change
The ‘blade’ is only present in data for figure S12a’s 20-year sampled reconstruction after 1900. It is not present in the 100-year version that goes to 1900, and which closely tracks the 20-year version to that time. Although lower frequency sampling will mask any earlier changes, significant data changes obviously occurred in the years after 1900 where the blade arose.
The latitude coverage in Science and the thesis is identical (horizontal grey bars). It has to be, since using the same proxies. The number of Mann2008 proxy records increases identically as the present is approached (vertical tan bars). They have to, since the same study. In both Science and the thesis, the number of Holocene proxies available at ‘2000’ is identically about 70. It should be. (And actually is exactly 70 based on scrutiny of thesis figure C7). These figures appear to be accurate visual representations of the underlying analytical facts.
But the number of Holocene proxies is not the same after about 1550 (500 before T0). Oddly, Science includes more proxies until after 1900. Even more oddly, in the thesis 9 ‘survived’ 1950, yet in Science none did.
Zero. And that is the proverbial smoking gun. The data were changed by re-dating, and Science figure 1G proves it without digging into proxy details buried deep within the SI proxy data spreadsheets.
The authors of this paper re-dated selected proxies after the thesis to take advantage of ‘mean dropout’ to fabricate a ‘blade’. As proxies end, only those that remain contribute subsequent information. Three ‘proxies’ over five time periods illustrate how this works. Each hypothetical ‘proxy’ individually signals no change over time, although proxy 3 oscillates neutrally around a 0 anomaly.
Time period 4 3 2 1 T0
Proxy 1 -1 -1 -1 -1 na
Proxy 2 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1
Proxy 3 +1 -1 +1 -1 +1
Recon. mean +1/3 -1/3 +1/3 -1/3 +1
To generate the blade in Science, it sufficed to ‘pull back’ in time some ending downtick proxies, and pull forward to T0 some ending upticks. It is evident from 1G compared to 4.3C that 9 were pulled back at least a few decades. We shall look at one below. It is also evident that about 10 others were pulled forward, since in Science at 1850 (100 before T0) there were still about 30 proxies in the area weighted mean, while in the thesis there were only about 20. The Science ‘blade’ was manufactured by ±time shifting proxy start/end dates to take advantage of mean dropout. Unfortunately, time shifting from reference dates with associated multiple age controls is nowhere noted or justified in the Science paper or the accompanying SI prose. It should have been.
The bigger question is whether it was justified even though not disclosed?
Comparing SI proxy data to the original reference data shows exactly what was done, and discloses whether re-dating might have been justified. The inestimable Climate Audit[or] Steve McIntyre has done so for the alkenone proxies (31 of 73 total), the largest subgroup. Steve plotted the re-dated Science SI alkenones using the paper’s ‘standard’ weighted area mean 5×5 reconstruction (SI data spreadsheet page 2, column AJ) to produce remarkable ‘McIntyre 1’:
The rise from 1920 to 1940 is over 1°C (more than IPCC AR4 over a century), ending far above the anomaly baseline NCDC 1961-1990, and even above NCDC 1990-2010 (red)! Alkenones alone essentially explain Science figure 1a.
Steve emailed Dr. Marcott on or about 3/13, inquiring how this ginormous sudden rise could be. The response was that the Science paper said uncertainty increased toward T0 as fewer proxies were available, so this result was probably ‘not robust’. He never said that to his many MSM interviewers about the new hockey stick, saying instead “It’s really the rates of change here that’s amazing and atypical”. Not robust but still amazing? Steve’s email gave Dr. Marcott an opportunity to mention re-dating. He chose not to do so, perhaps unaware that published figures 1G versus 4.3C provided conclusive ‘smoking gun’ evidence without studying the gory SI data details in the SI Excel spreadsheet.
Marcott was probably also unaware that Steve had already said publicly that proxy re-dating was problematic, and that he would comment on it. The day after publishing Marcott’s nonresponse, Steve published his re-dating comment, with McIntyre 2 worth more than a thousand words. Black is Science with Marcott’s re-dating. Red is Marcott’s thesis before re-dating.
(Steve’s time axis is reverse labeled from Science, counting up not down.)
To get this subset result Marcott pulled back two negative alkenone proxies so they did not contribute to the most recent 20-year points. OCE326-GGC30 with a steady decline was pulled back 191 years despite three radiocarbon age controls in the past two millennia. Here it is from figure C7 with its radiocarbon age controls (+).
The second ‘re-dated’ negative alkenone proxy (SI#23, Isono 2009, off central Japan) seems particularly indefensible. This proxy record is an unusually valuable composite of a piston core plus a box core from the same location. Piston cores penetrate deeply to sample long ago sediments, but the coring process makes the top unreadable (typically for many hundreds of years). Box cores are shallow in time, but preserve resolution to the core top. Isono dated his core top to 1991 (Marcott’s date notation -41), and carefully spliced the cores together with a large overlap period to create a long continuous record with about 32-year resolution. The reference core top date must be approximately correct, since 3 cm below was the classic isotope ‘bomb spike’ caused by atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in the 1950’s. Since it is not possible to ‘re-date’ the incontrovertible beginning of the atomic era, the most recent three (negative) proxy data points of Isono’s proxy just ‘disappeared’, conveniently removed from the 1940 Science ‘blade’ calculation. (Excel NaN [Not a Number] is triggered by division by 0.)
5 other alkenone proxies with ending upticks were pulled forward. MD95-2043 ends at ‘942’ according to its reference and 7 age controls. It of course shows a distinct MWP peak at its end. Marcott pulled it forward exactly 1008 years to T0 1950, so the MWP onset contributes to the 20th century blade. (This wonderfully precise re-dating had the additional ‘virtue’ of diminishing the MWP signal.) Here are the proofs from Science SI Excel data comparison
Here are MD95 2011 (pulled forward an ‘unexplained’ 510 years) and 2015 (pulled forward an ‘unexplained’ 690 years) from thesis figure C7:
No justification is given for such extreme re-dating of proxies containing numerous radioisotope (+) age controls. If the original reference papers had large date errors, these should have been corrected in the thesis. In the absence of any kind of explanation, this has the appearance of either gross incompetence then or fabrication now.
The curious minor re-dating of GeoB 6518-1, oddly pulled back just 32 years, shows beyond any reasonable doubt it was not incompetence. Quite the opposite; the re-dating appears to have been carefully and skillfully done. This post 1950 uptick was pulled back just enough so that all of it got included in the pre-1950 ‘blade’ reconstruction. Here is that proxy from thesis figure C7:
Note the post-1950 age control (+) that Science re-dating overrode.
Hockey is a fast contact sport. The whistle has blown on an obvious high stick foul just 11 days after Science first published Marcott’s hockey stick. This post is with sincere thanks to the formidable Steven McIntyre of Climate Audit, to whom I ‘passed the puck’ in my previous on-line posting ‘Let’s Play Hockey Again’ at Dr. Judith Curry’s invaluable Climate Etc.
JC Comment: This post is a follow-up to Rud’s previous post, which now has over a thousand comments. Again, I am not personally digging into the science aspects of this study, although I find the sociology of what is going on here very interesting. All this makes Mike’s Nature trick seem straightforward.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
A sign of recklessness, or insanity, to tout such a flawed paper in the manner it was. And yet, the lie dashed its way around the world, while Steve was putting on his boots.
The brittleness of the narrative is being exposed. Fragile it is, gently, gently.
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I’m stifled by tight-fitting giggles at the closeness of 1939.07 to 1940. Ooh, what a close shave that data had.
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Are the skeptics saying the temperature didn’t rise nearly a degree since the LIA, as Marcott said, or are they just saying Marcott is right for the wrong reasons? I haven’t followed the debate on this, but I think his temperature rise is about right compared to thermometers, especially for land areas.
Much too smart for this, Jim D. Say it ain’t so.
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kim
Faith is a blessed thing – even when it’s blind.
Max
So the skeptics ARE saying that the thermometer temperature didn’t rise that much over land, and that is why this is a big deal? Maybe someone else can explain it better than kim did.
Observe the narrative need for catastrophic warming, observe the recent lack of warming, observe the presentation of this paper by authors and funding source, draw your own conclusions, and please put them out here. All ears, here.
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I don’t follow. You think 1 C since the LIA would be catastrophic or just truly what happened over land?
The warming since the Little Ice Age has been massively beneficial for human culture and for the whole earth’s biome. The next such warming, if we get it, will also be massively beneficial for all concerned.
But we’re not likely to get it. CO2 as a warming agent is impuissant, and the next glaciation looms.
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Jim D, there is a commenter named ‘hmmm’ who has said @ 8:13 on the latest Core Top thread @ ClimateAudit in response to Richard Teleford what I tried to say to you above.
Your pretended innocence is revelatory, just as Richard’s is to hmmm.
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Kim, so you are comforted by the upward spike that continues into the future, or would you prefer it to stop going up now?
Well, since it’s imaginary, I shadow box with it.
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Kim, you mean imaginary like the Arctic sea ice disappearing is imaginary, or imaginary like the Argo ocean heat content rise?
Marcott’s spike, and future extensions of it, are imaginary. Global warming since the depths of the Little Ice Age are not imaginary. There is a difference, and confidence in attribution has something to do with it.
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Marcott’s spike is somewhat similar to what you might get by plotting BEST. So, do you expect it to now go flat suddenly or tail off to flat more gradually while also noting that CO2 shows a sharp recent rise.
If you compare Marcott’s spike to BEST, you are comparing apples and oranges, and the resemblance is co-incidental. In this case the co-incidence is the result of fraudulent manipulation of the data, ordinarily criminal were the public involved.
Hey, we are involved!
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And Jim D, you’ve given yourself away. From past commenting, we know you are too smart for this line of reasoning. We also know that Mann, Marcott, and Shukan are not too smart for this line of reasoning.
So, please, stop embarrassing yourself, and giving the whole game away.
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Consensus is agreement. You can describe consensus by what they profess to believe. Skeptics do not have consensus and you cannot say one thing to represent what skeptics believe. You cannot cover what skeptics believe with any blanket statement.
kim, Fan below compared it to HADCRUT3. It agrees with that too. Had Marcott just used the temperature record, this graph would have been fine. The skeptical types are splitting hairs to say he somehow got it right with the wrong methods. Their whole complaint is somewhat muted because it draws attention to this type of Holocene graph, which they normally would not want to do for obvious reasons.
Jim, there are a couple of problems. The manipulations of the data are one set of problems. I am waiting for the response from the authors since I don’t see anything so far that they wouldn’t have known about and thus must have perfectly legitimate reasoning at their fingertips for why they did the things that are being listed as issues. The problem that the paper has in general even, if the answers the authors can provide are convincing, is that the resolution of the bulk of the paper is over several hundred years and the comparison is being made to 100 years. Average in the LIA with the last century and you have a comparable comparison. The argument that we just know this time it will be different and the warming will be sustained and substantial just isn’t going to be convincing to skeptics. They don’t use the same crystal ball that you do and the future is less certain.
Apparently you just don’t get it, but I’m surprised and dismayed.
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We can but hope that the warming will be ‘sustained and substantial’. Look at Marcott’s Holocenic graph, such as it is. Yes, I choose warming.
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kim, I get that this is all a personal attack on young scientist named Marcott, but it distracts from what the Holocene temperature record actually says, which is a lot like Marcott showed.
Jim D, you are a case study in how true belief in the CO2 control knob can blind one to the flaws, and the mistaken memes derived from them, in this paper.
Yes, Jim D, Marcott’s overly smoothed Holocenic curve shows us nothing about the present but that we are at the cool end of the Holocene. And you want to demonize the one weak weapon we have against glaciation? Madness, over the long term.
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A billion years of evidence goes into the control knob plus actual physics that quantifies it. Complete denial of such an effect is not rational. A true skeptic would say it is possible, but (then fill in an idea that also explains the data, or something that explains why they think the data are wrong but coincidentally confirms the control knob).
Kim, I lean more towards the methodology suggested by the scientists during the non-cooling scare of the 70s. Putting soot on the ice to prevent the expansion of the poles. We know soot works. CO2 we aren’t so sure about.
Apples and oranges? Set a Best apple and a Marcott orange in a room. Check their temperature after 11.3 hours.
One is not going to be room temperature?
An imaginary rise is beneficial to delusional folks such as kim. The rise would be good if it existed, but it doesn’t exist. That’s called a rationalization trick-box.
The problem with people like that is they have no self-awareness and can not even understand the inconsistencies that come out of their mouths.
Yes, some of us can look at the data and theories dispassionately and understand the statistics and science for what it is. Others can’t, which includes the schleptics and the plausible deniers and that crowd.
Good idea to read this account on “Meta-rationality”:
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/meta-rationality/
which is the extension of “unfooling yourself”
What is also troubling is the amount of gaming that goes on. It’s meta-irrationality when you can no longer tell if the arguer is actually taking a real stance or is simply trying to prank the argument, either by becoming increasingly preposterous or silly.
I don’t know what to call this other than a kind of trolling prank that seems to be in vogue. There is certainly evidence that this exists based on ridiculous survey responses . It also occurs on TV shows such as Jay Leno where people intentionally appear as clueless or embarrassing as possible when asked questions on current events.
Typical dialog between Siri and a Plausible Denialist
Siri: The average global temperature is increasing.
PD == No it isn’t.
Siri: But it is.
PD == Well that’s good, as I like it warmer.
Siri: Glad to see you agree
PD == Only as far as it keeps us out of an ice age.
Siri: So you do accept GHG forcing?
PD == No
Siri: What other mechanism is halting the slide to the ice-age then?
PD == What is happening is irrelevant when you consider the emails.
Siri: What does that have to do with science?
PD == Feynman. At least he plays fair.
Siri: That is quite an accomplishment since last I heard he is dead.
PD == Chaos suggests that he could come back to life, as the death attractor is weak in comparison to the power and resiliency of the earth.
Siri: Well that is good to know, as we can harness that power with wind turbines and PV technology.
PD == That’s no good — too many birds and bats are killed
Siri: Is that something we can deal with?
PD == Not when it forces people to go hungry, as bat-meat is prized in certain cultures.
Siri: But the energy source is important too, is it not?
PD == Au contraire, we have endless fossil fuel supplies.
Siri: Wouldn’t that cook us in terms of GHG generation?
PD == It is endless but within limits.
Siri: What you are saying is that alternatives will be within reach should the time come?
PD == Yes.
Siri: So you have smart guys working on this?
PD == Willis is street smart, as it takes street smarts to have s*x with three women at the same time.
Siri: How do you know that?
PD == He told me hisself.
Siri: What else does he say?
PD == The GHG theory is wrong.
Siri: What are the alternate theories?
PD == There are dozens and dozens of them … some guy keeps a list.
Siri: Among these dozens, they can’t all be right, can they?
PD == Only empirical evidence can prove them wrong.
Siri: But lack of direct evidence is what you use to challenge GHG.
PD == Only because climate scientists are incompetent and can’t prove AGW in a laboratory setting, like Cavendish Labs in Cambridge using glass boxes and such.
Siri: Perhaps education can change that.
PD: Yes, we can lure Prof. OManuel out of retirement.
Siri: What do use as a lure?
PD: How dare you! This is civilzed discourse.
—
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Which are melting, BTW.
Jim D: So the skeptics ARE saying that the thermometer temperature didn’t rise that much over land, and that is why this is a big deal?
Analysis has shown (pending some really good explanation by Marcotte et al) that there are problems with the Marcotte et al Science paper; and the main result widely hyped by Marcotte and the press is not supported by the data.
If you have other reasons for believing in AGW, so be it. This paper is in trouble.
Webby
I love your simplistic “typical conversation” approach.
Let me give you an alternate (using the same characters:
Typical dialog between Siri and a Plausible Denialist
Siri: The average global temperature is increasing.
PD == Not right now it isn’t.
Siri: But it did until 1998.
PD == That’s OK with me, as long as it doesn’t start really cooling for a longer time.
Siri: But the models say it will warm even more rapidly.
PD == All model predictions so far have failed, from Hansen 1998 to the IPCC TAR/AR4 forecasts.
Siri: Well, but there was warming, wasn’t there?
PD == Until around 1998, yes, at half the rate predicted by Hansen, but after that, no.
Siri: OK. So you agree that there was some late 20thC warming, even if much less than predicted?
PD == Yes.
Siri: Would you also agree that human CO2 emissions were a primary cause for this warming?
PD == Not really, as there is no empirical evidence to support that hypothesis.
Siri: Yes, but we have many model runs, which provide evidence for CO2 as a principle driver
PD == No they don’t. Model outputs are only as good as the inputs (GIGO).
Siri: But, if CO2 really is a potent GHG, as the models demonstrate, shouldn’t we curtail emissions?
PD == Only if this can be done at no added cost to humanity over the use of fossil fuels.
Siri: But there are studies, which show that curtailing GHG emissions will save us money long term.
PD == I have read what Bjorn Lomborg has to say on this, and he disagrees this is the best choice.
Siri: What would you think is the best choice?
PD == Get more data first to see if GHGs really are a problem.
Siri: But, assuming these data confirm what the models are telling us, what then?
PD == We should prepare to be able to adapt to any climate challenges that Nature or GHGs pose locally or regionally, if and when these appear imminent.
Siri: But wouldn’t that already be too late?
PD == Not really. Why should it be?
Siri: A carbon tax would help us set our priorities and reduce fossil fuel use, wouldn’t it?
PD == Lomborg has addressed this; a carbon tax simply puts an added burden on society with no positive effect.
Siri: But we have to do something, don’t we?
PD == Not really. Most important is to get our data right first, before we embark on any corrective actions
Siri: Wouldn’t a world-wide extension of Kyoto help all nations work together to solve the problem?
PD == I believe this is a pipe dream – there will never be a binding global agreement signed by all nations.
Siri: But shouldn’t we in the industrially developed world set the good example of reducing our CO2 first?
PD == And commit economic suicide in the process – what for?
Siri: Doesn’t someone need to take leadership here to solve this problem?
PD == What problem?
Siri: Well, the emission of all that CO2 to levels we haven’t seen in millions of years.
PD == But what’s the problem?
Siri: We don’t know for sure that there is a problem, but there could be one.
PD: Like what, for example?
Siri: Well, warming of up to 6°C over this century.
PD: There isn’t enough carbon in all the fossil fuels on Earth to reach 6°C of warming.
Siri: How in the world do you figure that?
PD == WEC tells us that be 2008 we had used up 15% of the total recoverable fossil fuels that were ever on our planet, leaving 85% in place then.
Siri: That seems like a very high estimate of remaining fossil fuels; I thought we are facing “peak oil”.
PD == Yes, but even at this high estimate, we could never exceed 980 ppmv CO2 when all are gone.
Siri: That can’t be right – how did you figure that?
PD == If 15% got us from 280 to 385 ppmv in 2008, the remaining 85% will get us to 980 ppmv.
Siri: OK, I guess that’s right, but still that is a very high level and will cause major warming.
PD == Like how much, would you estimate?
Siri: Again, I think that could lead to warming of 6°C, or even more .
PD== Wrong. At the latest ECS estimates of around 1.5°C, this could lead to 2°C warming; at the old IPCC estimate of around 3°C, this could lead to 4°C warming – both as an asymptotic maximum ever attainable if and when all fossil fuels are 100% used up some 200-300 years from now.
Siri: I never looked at it that way, but it makes sense; but don’t you think 4°C warming is too much?
PD == The more likely number is 2°C, since it is based on latest data on ECS.
Siri: But don’t we have to include ALL the GH warming since pre-industrial times, adding 1.5°C?
PD == Why? We’ve already seen (and enjoyed) that warming without any bad effects.
Siri: But that’s the convention we use in climate science.
PD == A silly convention. Change it.
Siri: You’re telling me that all I’ve read by IPCC and elsewhere is wrong and that AGW is no potential threat to humanity or our environment.
PD == Yep. That’s what I’m telling you. But go out and question things critically yourself and see what you conclude.
Siri: OK. Thanks for the tip.
PD == You’re welcome
MiniMax,
How is that serial data manipulation coming along?
http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/10/new-perspectives-on-climate-sensitivity/#comment-304226
Is it that you just can’t help manipulating data? More of that gaming strategy of yours, eh?
Now I understand why Willard calls you MiniMax.
And don’t worry, I documented the atrocities, so there is a record should you decide to update your flikr account chart.
As I think McIntyre pointed out, most (or all?) of the proxies are marine sediments which should correlate with SST’s or even deeper ocean temp.’s, not the higher and more “volatile” atmospheric temperatures. Even in Rud’s post above he shows that the 1920-1940 temp. is way off the actual.
I would say this story has a hard time getting traction unless they show the result is wrong in an important way (i.e. one the public would understand, not a time shift error that can’t be seen on a 10000 year scale). Unfortunately for skeptics their emphasis only brings out the kinds of graphs that Fan has shown here, with thermometer records and projections, which won’t help the skeptical cause to make public.
“Marcott’s overly smoothed Holocenic curve shows us nothing about the present but that we are at the cool end of the Holocene.”
Well that’s the the climate skeptic error in a nutshell.
If it’s overly smooth then how can you possibly know we are at the cool end?
How do you know the past 100 years of warming haven’t already taken us past the holocene maximum?
You can’t know that, not unless you accept a way of comparing the instrumental record with proxy reconstructions.
Sad, lolwot; the smoothing doesn’t eliminate a warmer end and a cooler end of the Holocene.
Not shown, of course, by this study, but many series do show higher temperatures at the Holocenic climate optima.
I take your point about melding temperatures and proxies for them, but the problem is intractable at present. The problem will remain intractable, and tarnish everything it touches, so long as climate science tolerates academic misbehaviour such as this article by Dr. Marcott illustrates.
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“Marcott’s spike is somewhat similar to what you might get by plotting BEST. ”
Are you being ignorant on purpose. Marcott has no spike. He manufactured it by pulling MWP data forward. His idea was to show that proxy data supports instrument data. But it does not. He has no proxies to show what he claims. His proxies don’t show contemporary warming. His real proxies don’t support the instrument data. Only his fraudulent data does. Best data is also fraudulent. It claims that UHI is negative. Hundreds of studies show that it is hugely positive. Only the satellite data can be trusted. But it shows nothing alarming. Some warming is happening. But so what. The earth is always either warming or cooling. And the current warming is neither alarming or unusual.
JCH
The BEST apple and Marcott orange will both be within 0.01C of room temperature, but the Marcott orange will not be edible – because it is rotten, as the posts by Rud Istvan have demonstrated.
Max
> Now I understand why Willard calls you MiniMax.
Yup.
At least I don’t call him MaxiMin.
Willard, thanks for documenting the atrocities.
One of the reasons that I come back here is that I am very tuned into Rovian strategy of attacking your opponents strong points, applying projection, and setting up strawmen.
The more that the skeptics try to obscure some hidden truth, the deeper the hole that they dig themselves. Witness, MaxiPad’s attempt to stop the leakage of his failed attempts to debunk the very simple log(CO2) fits to the land-based warming.
Those are the places that it pays to keep investigating. When one gets closer to hidden truths, the more the anti-scientists howl with disapproval. For some strange reason, it also helps with motivation. Something to do with Illegitimi non carborundum.
willard (@nevaudit) | March 21, 2013 at 8:36 am |
> Now I understand why Willard calls you MiniMax.
Yup.
At least I don’t call him MaxiMin.
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How noble of you! Almost as noble as me calling you Wee Willie instead of Swillard. Our charity doth overfloweth.
WebHubTelescope | March 21, 2013 at 9:01 am |
” Witness, MaxiPad’s attempt to stop the leakage of his failed attempts to debunk the very simple log(CO2) fits to the land-based warming.”
Hmmm… WebHubColonoscope and MaxiPad. You two are almost kissing cousins huh?
Land-based warming in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere perhaps. Everywhere else, not so much. You know why. CO2’s effect on surface temperature is negligent where there is water free to evaporate in response to the increased downwelling mid-infrared radiation. It’s a straightforward property of water that it evaporates when illuminated with EMR in that frequency range. It’s what causes the topmost millimeter of the ocean’s surface to almost always be 1C cooler than the water below it. Given ocean surface is over twice land surface and some of the land some of the time is quite wet this drags down the average that CO2 warming can acheive on a global basis. It’s why you boys were blindsided by a 15-year (and still growing) pause in the rise of global average temperature. Someday you’ll publically accept what I’ve described. I’m pretty sure you privately accept it even now and are just too emotionally vested in the catastrophic anthropogenic warming narrative to let go of it. Sort like it’s hard for babies to let go of the ba-ba or the binky or the blanky. The global warming narrative has become an essential part of your existence and you don’t know what you’d do without it. I feel your pain but I’m real glad I don’t share it.
I appreciate Springer’s almost plausible argument. He is claiming water will evaporate directly from infrared radiation without raising its temperature.
An individual molecule can only directly vaporize from an absorbed photon if that photon possesses enough energy to transfer to the molecule so that it can overcome the heat of vaporization barrier.
On the other hand, a thermal bath works in a statistical mechanical fashion, and it is only enough that a Boltzmann factor is applied to ensembles of water molecules to determine the probability of a single molecule leaving the surface. This leads to the Clausius-Clapeyrone law and Henry’s law.
The infrared photons that dominate the downwelling spectrum are all individually less energetic than the heat of vaporization required. Therefore, the infrared radiation transfers it energy to vibrational and rotational states of the liquid water, and that thermal energy can diffuse away from the surface, thus raising the temperature of the water both near the surface and below it through diffusion, eddy diffusion and convection. This temperature rise allows the water to evaporate through Boltzmann (aka Arrhenius) activation.
Springer is sounding more like Myrrrhhh.
@Web: The problem with your argument is that it presumes that there is not a statistical distribution of kinetic energies among the top-most water molecules, such that a certain percentage of them are within a single photon’s energy of the heat of vaporization. That, of course, is silly.
Qbeamus, Stop with the negative logic. Articulate what you want to say like a normal person. What I described is thermal activation.
1. Its not just skeptics who object to the modern area part of the chart.
2. The rise shown in the graph is
A) at the wrong time
B) not supported by the math or analysis.
I will say that a few folks who believe in AGW have privately expressed their disapproval of the chartmanship. Its unnecessary. Its Wrong, but without it perhaps there is no headline because the paper confirms what we already knew. we are close to be as warm or warmer than it has been in the past 12K years. That observation isnt very interesting since the question is how much warmer will we be in 30,50,100 years.
That is an eminently sensible and well-written argument, steven mosher. Bravo!
Mosher’s Corollary An efficacious remedy for a short flimsy single-study hockey blade is a long robust multi-study blade!
Steven Mosher:
The answer is most likely not a whole lot warmer and chances are the globe will be a whole lot colder!
You are chasing the wrong problem and the only defense is to adapt to the coming cooling.
Stephen Mosher: You wrote: the question is how much warmer will we be in 30,50,100 years.
That is easy to answer. It will follow the pattern of the past ten thousand years. After the oceans warm and the Arctic does open, it always snows more and tips us back toward colder. Place yourself at about this temperature in the Medieval Warm Period or the Roman Warm Period and look 30, 50, 100 years beyond and that will be closer than any other model. Earth’s past data is the best model for the future.
CO2, aerosols, solar cycles, orbit cycles, etc, might change the temperature a little, might try to change the temperature a lot, but this well bounded cycle has a set point that is based on the temperature that Arctic Sea Ice melts and freezes.
This is the real tipping point. When the Arctic opens Earth cools and when the Arctic closes Earth warms.
Steven writes:
“I will say that a few folks who believe in AGW have privately expressed their disapproval of the chartmanship. Its unnecessary. Its Wrong, but without it perhaps there is no headline because the paper confirms what we already knew.”
And therein lies the problem. Why don’t these folks publicly express their dissaproval? Why are only the skeptical sites discussing the issues with the paper? Surely by now the pro AGW side must see that silence is not helping their cause.
“without it perhaps there is no headline.” Don’t you think you could have removed the equivocating phrase “perhaps” from that sentence?
Tim:”Surely by now the pro AGW side must see that silence is not helping their cause. ”
The AGW side own the mass media and the journals. They got out the story that they wanted to get out. Why should they debate the critics/deniers? Jim D has given the AGW crowd’s serviceable non-response, for propaganda purposes. Don’t expect a comprehensive, legitimate defense of the paper. It ain’t necessary. The only meaningful place to attack this crap is in the Republican controlled Congressional oversight committees. Defund the funders of this crap.
” the paper confirms what we already knew”
There are hundreds of AGW papers that are wrong that are used to “confirm” the theories of your cult. But just because they tell you what you want to hear, does not make them true.
Tim.
Why dnt they express their disapproval publically?
That’s a good and fair question. I suppose there are as many different answers as there are people.
1. they dont feel like its their job to police science. Science is self correcting and maybe after 40 years or so as with piltdown man the bad stuff will be dropped.
2. They dont want the same done to them.
3. They dont want to get twisted up in the climateball circus.
4. They saw what happened to Judy.
5. They dont have time or have better things to do.
Like one guy, looks at it, reads it quickly, and says Bullshit, they cant get
that spike from those proxies.. He aint gunna spend time on bullshit
6. They think criticism should be private and praise public..
Many many reasons, none of them says much about physics.
me? I can criticize it openly. why?
“we are close to be as warm or warmer than it has been in the past 12K years.”
Horse manure. It was warmer 6000 to 8000 years ago and the Arctic was clear of ice in the summer then.
“because the paper confirms what we already knew. we are close to be as warm or warmer than it has been in the past 12K years.”
How come I don’t know that?
“no headline because the paper confirms what we already knew. we are close to be as warm or warmer than it has been in the past 12K years.”
I don’t think this argument can be reasonably made yet, and I wish it could. I certainly haven’t run across any evidence to support this conclusively.
Steven Mosher writes:
“1. they dont feel like its their job to police science. Science is self correcting and maybe after 40 years or so as with piltdown man the bad stuff will be dropped.”
Steven, I respect your posts on this site and others, particularly because of your fidelity to the proper use of language. I am dumbstruck by this sentence. Do you not see the inconsistency in that statement? How can science be self correcting if other scientists don’t feel like it is their job to police science? Exactly who should police science? Politicians?
This topic isn’t some dry, obscure academic debate that only a few specialists care about. People are demanding action – large, expensive action based on “the science.” Out comes a paper that gives support to the most aggressive corrective actions. The press highlights the findings (i.e. another validation of the hockey stick). Steve McIntyre has documented significant flaws with the paper which challenge the hockey stick conclusion. Yet others that agree with him are silent.
Nice. And people wonder why skeptics remain so.
Steven Mosher | March 20, 2013 at 10:40 pm |
“me? I can criticize it openly. why?”
Because you don’t have a career in climate science to worry about. You don’t have to go along to get along. You can say whatever stupid things you want without consequence. That’s why. Same as me in other words. But unlike you my predictions that date back to 2006 are right on target with regard to black carbon being far more significant than thought in NH glacier and sea-ice melt and anthopogenic global warming in general being highly exagerrated with unjustified extrapolation from a natural warming cycle. Seven years later and 15 years into a cessation of lower troposphere warming I was bang on right. AGW is on the order of 0.05C/decade globally and it’s a good thing because it is largely delivered to high northern latitudes in the winter which benefit from milder winter temperatures.
Thanks for playing. Better luck next time.
Don Monfort | March 20, 2013 at 12:33 pm |
+1
Herman Alexander Pope | March 20, 2013 at 9:45 am |
“This is the real tipping point. When the Arctic opens Earth cools and when the Arctic closes Earth warms.”
Exactamundo! I’ve made an analogy to Arctic sea ice and the thermostat in an automotive cooling system many times. Snow and ice make a great insulator. It’s why the inside of an igloo is 60F higher than outside with just body heat to warm the interior. It’s why sled dogs bury themselves in snow when they sleep. When Arctic sea ice opens up more it exposes more water to evaporative and radiative cooling both of which are nullified when ice covers the water. Only conduction can move heat from water to air through an ice cover and ice is a piss poor thermal conductor.
Why more people don’t arrive at this common sense conclusion that no engineer worth his salt should miss is a mystery to me. Good for you. I noted your prediction last fall of greater snowfall this winter and almost prophetically people up north are now asking what the F is up with all the cold and snow on the first day of spring. Good call. You da man.
lolwot | March 20, 2013 at 7:13 pm |
“How do you know the past 100 years of warming haven’t already taken us past the holocene maximum?”
Because over 100 higher resolution proxies from all over the world including the Antarctic penninsula covering just the past 2000 years indicate it was warmer during the MWP than it is now. If today isn’t the warmest time in the past 2000 years it can’t possibly the warmest time in the past 12,000 years either. Write that down.
Jim D – the Dan Rather of Climate Etc. The papers may be obviously forged, but the story is still true. So, in the words of the worst Secretary of State we have ever had – “What difference does it make” if people are lying.
Gary,
Love the analogy. Now, will people remember what this did to Rather’s credibility? Then again, perhaps it doesn’t matter. Credibility doesn’t appear to retain the value it once held.
May or may not be. You don’t know these papers were forged. there was a difference of opinion on that. The full actual records have still not been made public despite many requests. But you don’t care to believe it even if it were true do you? In this respect you demonstrate the same lack of care for the truth that the climateers show. Different ideologies, same human traits!
JimD, Did you read the post? The blade is a statistical artifact and the author acknowledges its not robust. The time resolution of the reconstruction is 5 orders of magnitude longer than the resolution of the land surface record. So it is nonsense to talk about relative rates of warming as one of the authors did in an interview.
We simply don’t know how the last century of warming compares to the last 12000 years based on this paper. It adds nothing new as Mosher points out and the press reports and the authors statements are totally unsupported by the science itself.
Your approach is one of either willful ignorance or deliberate obtuseness. You cannot separate the paper from its PR. The PR focuses on the uptick wrongfully shown in the headline graph – an uptick that was obtained, apparently, through deliberate manipulation of certain datasets, as show in McIntyre’s analysis and nicely summarized and explained above by Rud. Examples of the PR are shown here:
True face of climate’s hockey stick graph revealed – http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23247-true-face-of-climates-hockey-stick-graph-revealed.html
We’re Screwed: 11,000 Years’ Worth of Climate Data Prove It – http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/were-screwed-11-000-years-worth-of-climate-data-prove-it/273870/
Global warming is epic, long-term study says – http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/08/world/world-climate-change/index.html
Global temperatures are close to 11,000-year peak – http://www.nature.com/news/global-temperatures-are-close-to-11-000-year-peak-1.12564
Scientists Find an Abrupt Warm Jog After a Very Long Cooling – http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/scientists-find-an-abrupt-warm-jog-after-a-very-long-cooling/
The latter headline is from Revkin – who should know better.
So far, what we have is a relatively unexceptional plotting of early Holocene temperatures. The resolution of that plotting makes it impossible to determine whether there were any centennial (or less) temperature swings during periods such as the Minoan, Roman or Mediaeval warm periods. In fact, as you yourself argue in this thread, the study shows nothing about modern warming. The lack of resolution, however, means that you cannot compare their graphing of the early Holocene with the 0.7 – 0.8 degree C. temperature change experienced over the course of the 20th century. As Robert Rohde noted in discussion with Revkin:
“The 20th century may have had uniquely rapid warming, but we would need higher resolution data to draw that conclusion with any certainty. Similarly, one should be careful in comparing recent decades to early parts of their reconstruction, as one can easily fall into the trap of comparing a single year or decade to what is essentially an average of centuries.”
The temperature spike shown at the end of their “headline” graph was only obtained through apparently deliberate manipulation of core top dates – manipulation that resulted in excluding some data while including other. Neither the paper nor its SI includes any justification for this re-dating: while a general assumption was given (i.e., core-top dates were to be assumed to be 1950 unless otherwise provided in the source), they have changed the dating of core tops which have clear and well defined dates. Those changes were made without explanation and only by doing so, were they able to obtain the apparent temperature spike at the end of the graph (one which actually does not correspond with measured temperature changes, given that their study date stops mid-20th C).
This approach and manipulation of data should be condemned not condoned.
Ian,
Thank you. It was looking like nobody was going to respond rationally to Jim D’s seemingly innocent musings.
Jim,
Either I have given you more credibility than deserved up to now, or you are playing cute.
Which is precisely the point. The data end points were purposely changed to make the graph appear to correlate with thermometers. In other words, the error is not an error, it was deliberate. This makes it scientific fraud.
Rud Istvan
Thanks for all your efforts in exposing this study as yet another “shtick”.
Max
Thanks. I merely stand on the shoulders of Giants like Steve McIntyre and Judith Curry and Anthony Watts and…
But I thought I might contribute a nice lawyerly bow tie to this particular debacle.
Regards, and enjoy my book on same.
It’s well done. I expect that the “discourse” on this paper will continue for a while.
Good article! What book are you referring to?
Serious question: did you actually read the paper (freely available through Google Scholar)? Because in the version I read, the blade is explicitly not robust and the authors repeatedly insist that their method cannot capture high frequency information.
” He never said that to his many MSM interviewers about the new hockey stick, saying instead “It’s really the rates of change here that’s amazing and atypical”. ”
He’s talking about the instrumental record and projected warming. Note that the current warming is not a high-frequency “spike”, because it is expected to be durable – even if we completely stop pumping CO2, temperatures will remain high for centuries.
Readme, So the Author’s knew the blade was not robust, knew the blade did not exist in the thesis, knew the method could not capture high frequency information, yet included it anyway for exactly what reason? Dramatic effect, academic suicide, 15 minutes of fame or to trash Science mags reputation?
“It’s really the rates of change here that’s amazing and
atypicalspurious”. Would have been better or perhaps ““It’s really the rates of change here that’s amazing andatypical nonsense that tends to discredit paleo-climate”It wasn’t very long ago that a number of Paleo-climatologists banded together to express their displeasure with liberties being taken. The Paleo Reconstruction Challenge was initiated to restore the reputation of paleo-climate. Now we have a new Phd arbitrarily re-dating the diligent work of the true paleo-climate “professionals” in a haphazard manner to get published in a glossy.
For some reason I am not in the least surprised.
Capt dallas:
It would not be surprising if the goal of the authors was to discredit some of the Paleo research and Science mag for publishing/ promoting this drek.
Temperature will remain high just about as long as temperature remained high during the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm period. This normal and natural warm period should and will be much like the warm periods that happened before in this ten thousand year paradise that we have enjoyed. More CO2 will make green things grow better while using less water, but temperature and sea level will stay inside the bounds of the last ten thousand years.
+1
It’s hard to enjoy it with all the Cassandras yaketty-yakking and trying to increase my taxes. :)
Herman,
You forgot to mention that this benevolent period will be washed out in the paleclimate record because of the low resolution proxy measurements used.
Paleoclimate?
Jeff, Paleclimate is a keeper,
“I looked, and there before me was a paleclimate! Its rider was named Energy Poverty, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by regulation, famine and plague, and by the wild Polar bears of the earth.”
I reckon that would be a paraphrase.
Readme-
You write- “Because in the version I read, the blade is explicitly not robust and the authors repeatedly insist that their method cannot capture high frequency information.”
It may come as a surprise that when queried by Revkin, Mann began with the following Media Chyron-
“The key take-home conclusion is that the rate and magnitude of recent global warmth appears unprecedented for at least the past 4,000 years and the rate at least the past 11,000.”
Given that the blade is not robust, and the data’s 0.003 yr^-1 cutoff frequency cannot reveal high rates of change or multicentennial temperature extremes, here is an obvious, serious question:
Did Mann (who is rumored to have been one of the reviewers) actually read the paper?
Naw, Michael ‘Piltdown’ Mann ran with the convenient narrative, inconveniently untrue. He runs, and nature holds the rope.
============
Readme: He’s talking about the instrumental record and projected warming.
The “projected warming” is not actually the topic of the thesis or the Science paper. The issue here is how the analyses for the Science paper produced such a different result from the analyses for the thesis. So far, Marcotte et al have not explained how both can be reasonably accurate.
Readme
Maybe yes.
Maybe no.
We (that includes you and me plus Hansen, Trenberth, Jones and the IPCC) don’t have an earthly notion what is going to happen to our “globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature anomaly” over the next two years, let alone the next few hundred years.
To think otherwise is simply fooling yourself.
Don’t fall into that trap.
Max
The next two years and the next hundred years will find temperature in the same bounds as the last ten thousand years. This is the new normal.
Readme, the answer to your question is self evident. I read the paper, the SI, and studied the Excel data. And the thesis, whence some of the figures come. How else could this have been written.
I agree with you about the caveats. That was my previous post. But those have gotten ‘forgotten’ in the MSM reporting of this result. Go see the Atlantic headline “we’re Screwed”. And he was not talking about the instrumental record. He was talking aboutnhowmhis Science paper showed an alarming upturn in the proxies. I thought as you did originally, hence the mea culpa at the beginning of this guest post.
Regards
The “MSM” made him do it.
More apparently, Marcott, Shukan, and the funding source, made the MSM do what they wanted to do anyway. This is not even a sporting contest, to play with narrative as at jacks, while nature blows the scratchings in the dust around.
===================
No, the reviewer(s) probably suggested it or pressure from his advisor to make it sexier so it could be a “Science paper” did. The MSM just did what it always does – go for the flashiest headlines and the ones they like best are the ones that happen to agree with their own political and “moral” beliefs.
So, Readme, what does the paper actually(maybe) show? A downward trend(smoothed as troubled waters) throughout the Holocene. How about a lifeboat drill on this ship of state instead of a polar bear viewing side excursion?
===================
This is the most favored part of the Holocene for sea ice because the northern summer is in the furthest part of the orbit from the sun, but somehow the sea ice is disappearing anyway. The Holocene Optimum melted the ice age glaciers because at that time the northern summer was closest to the sun in the 25000 year precession cycle. So now we are half a precession cycle away from that.
There is a lovely irony about the climate discourse in here, and a yawning dilemma for the alarmist narrative. I was amazed to see this sentence in CNN’s first reporting of this article: ‘If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now, and getting even colder’.
========================
Indeed, CO2 levels are now near 400 ppm, which is what they were about 20 million years ago, so this is what prevents it from being the coldest in 10000 years. Last time we had 400 ppm, we had no Greenland ice cap or Arctic sea ice and sea levels were higher. The ice ages didn’t start until 2 million years ago when it first dropped to less than 300 ppm. It’s your control knob effect.
‘coldest in 10,000 years’. Yes, Jim D, you are becoming aware of the narrative dilemma, emerging from the mist like a locomotive.
============
It pays to understand paleoclimate. It means there are no surprises in what is happening now.
JimD, “The establishment of the modern meridional and zonal SST distributions leads to roughly 3.2 degrees C and 0.6 degrees C decreases in global mean temperature, respectively. Changes in the two gradients also have large regional consequences, including aridification of Africa (both gradients) and strengthening of the Indian monsoon (zonal gradient). Ultimately, this study suggests that the growth of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets is a result of the global cooling of Earth’s climate since 4 Myr rather than its initial cause.
My bold. link http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1324186/
The “modern meridional and zonal SST distribution” is a result of the Drake Passage and Panama changes. The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) provides a wealth of information.
There is also a few new studies based on the GFDL (Toggweiler et al. among others) models that indicates that the density gradient due to fresh water in the Arctic is not sufficient to halt the THC.
Annan and Hargreaves or was it Hargreaves and Annan have a new paper that indicates a much lower “sensitivity” based on paleo-reconstructions.
There is a whole new world of Earth Science unfolding before our very eyes.
Oh, how many surprises the surprising Doctor Marcott’s smoothing hides.
===================
JimD, BTW, I was curious how much impact the isolation of the Antarctic had on global temperatures based on the normal radiant balance, so i did some quick estimates using the Meridional energy flux based on the satellite based SST OI v2 data.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-isolation-of-southern-pole.html
As a rough check, I am incline to believe Brierley and Foderov has a pretty state of the art Ocean model.
Jim D
Guess that mean the Antarctic sea ice is at the closest part of its orbit in the summer there, right?
How do you explain that end-summer Antarctic sea ice is growing (end-February 2013 = 29% above the 1979-2000 mean baseline)?
Max
JimD, Ever really wonder if climate was controlled by insolation or ocean circulation?
Nielsen has.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-KP7wTwKqG4g/UUkuweyzcsI/AAAAAAAAHhg/SyVMsdYW_iA/s912/southern%2520ocean%2520recon%2520nielsen%25202009.png
That is using 1950 as present.
Those are irregular 1450 to 1700 years pseudo-cycles. Since the Ice age frequency shifted from 41ka to ~100ka, there is no good reason to think they might not have another shift in store. A possible double dip Holocene with the same roller coaster ride. That “abrupt shift at the end started in ~1900ad, which is about what the new hockey stick master should have noted. As they say, timing is everything.
I think there has been some mention of unpredictable natural variability on fairly large scales, ~+/- 2 C degrees or so, but not much more, at least for the oceans.
Jim D
I cited the Antarctic sea ice extent anomaly compared to the 1979-2000 baseline.
But even more interesting is the GLOBAL (Arctic + Antarctic) sea ice extent for the latest month (end-February).
It is at 18.49 million square km, compared to a 1979-2000 baseline of 18.58 msk, or 0.5% below the baseline after all these years.
Amazing, right?
Hardly any change at all,
Max
Jim D | March 19, 2013 at 9:03 pm | Reply
“This is the most favored part of the Holocene for sea ice because the northern summer is in the furthest part of the orbit from the sun, but somehow the sea ice is disappearing anyway. The Holocene Optimum melted the ice age glaciers because at that time the northern summer was closest to the sun in the 25000 year precession cycle. So now we are half a precession cycle away from that.”
That’s all bunged up. Axial precession is the big Kahuna and it’s only halfway to the extreme the favors glacial advance. Apsidal precession, which you describe, isn’t quite that simple.
Earth’s furthest approach to he sun is currently July 5th, a bare two weeks into summer. It has to occur in the hottest part of summer, around August 5th, for the greatest effect to which you refer. But you have a point because it is indeed in the summer and it could be in the winter. However, that’s a double edged sword. Northern hemisphere summer is now about 4 days longer than northern hemisphere winter. That’s because orbital speed changes with position within the elliptical orbit. At the closest approach to the sun the earth is moving the fastest in its orbit. So although insolation is weaker now in the summer because of the ellipse summer also lasts longer and the result is a wash favoring neither winter nor summer total insolation.
Be that as it may the planet is going over the hump in axial precession moving towards the favorable stage for glacial advance. You seem disappointed that the interglacial period isn’t showing any sign of ending. I understand tree huggers. Trees are good. But you’re an ice hugger and that baffles me. What’s good about ice? Trees don’t grow in ice. Nothing grows in ice that I’m aware of. Please explain the rationale of ice hugging.
Earth’s
furthestclosest approach to he sun is currently July 5thTypo fix
Plus one.)
Yr award, Kim, was meant ter link ter yr 8.55 pm
‘troubled waters’ comment.
Rud Istvan, what is your reaction hockey super-stick that is being promulgated by the Dutch climate-science website Klimaatverandering?
Rud Istvan, are climate-change denialists not fiddling, but quibbling — indulging in demagogic denialism’s trait #13: quibbling — while the planet burns?
Rud Istvan … quibbles aside … is it scientifically plausible that the hockey super-stick is real?
The world wonders, eh?
‘warming quickly’? Says who and why? Not this study, my child.
=============
• 13 Quibbling The emotional faith that cherry-picked refutations of weak climate-change science suffice to refute strong climate-change science.
The good news, kim, is that the habit of quibbling *can* be unlearned! Indeed, the Pontifical Academy of Science is planning an entire conference focused upon the moral necessity to address these serious topics seriously:
Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature
Joint Workshop of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences
2-6 May 2014
That will be a *GOOD* scientific conference, eh kim?
Will your conference understand that a warmer world sustains more total life and more diversity of life?
===============
Kim, the Pontifical Academy of Science is unlikely to embrace your Panglossian philosophy, for sound scientific reasons, eh?
I hope kim reads about optimist Candide in that first link.
Voltaire tends my garden, when I’m too busy.
====================
a fan of *MORE* discourse: • 13 Quibbling The emotional faith that cherry-picked refutations of weak climate-change science suffice to refute strong climate-change science.
Quibbling, again?
The result widely reported from the paper is not supported by the data, and the result contradicts the results of the thesis. If you disagree, then show how the result can be obtained from the data, and reconcile the thesis and the Science paper. Otherwise you are a waste of time.
‘Fan’, if you wish to debate, bring facts rather than aspersions and emoticons. Else, best go elsewhere. Since I speak fluent German and grok Dutch, your reference to the Dutch website Klimaatveranderung (Klimatveranderung auf Deutsch) carries about as much weight as a reference to John Cook’s SkepticalScience (where even the site name is the opposite of the site facts).
No regards to you.
Rud Istvan, logical form and factual content of your reasoning strikingly parallel the logical form and factual content of Willis Eschenbach’s reasoning … perhaps everyone here on Climate Etc can appreciate that, eh?
Rud,
Is his thesis really “outstanding” or just a good one? Do you know enough about this area to make that conclusion? Not being snarky, just wondering. I mean there are many very good PhD theses out there in many areas. And this one did not tell us much new and may have understated the MWP. I would save the “outstanding” (personally) for a thesis that discovered a new cancer drug or a new mechanism for a disease that immediately suggested ways to look for new treatments. And this kind of funding is getting pushed out by all the funding into climate and alternate energy sources.
“The Two Epochs of Marcott” in Dutch? Is that double Dutch?
It is odd that according to Dr. Marcott our grandparents in the 1900s spent their freezing childhood in a climate colder than 95% of the Holocene, while in the 1930s they sweated and raised families in almost the top quartile. And none of them thought to mention it.
LOL +2
@ Fan It seems like when one is supporting a losing proposition they should recognize it sooner rather than later and quit digging the hole deeper. I can tell that as the evidence mounts against you, on any number of fronts, you are getting a little more desperate, which accounts for all the slightly off point comments. Reading your comments in five years should be a hoot.
@dennis adams
To Fan you say
‘ Reading your comments in five years should be a hoot.’
They are already pretty tittifillarious.
Fan’s (supposedly) conclusive answer to any point witters on about his and James Hansen’s ‘moral worldview’.
Last time around he invoked the Pope on his side as well. A fine man in many ways no doubt but not a guy, I surmise, with a detailed knowledge of paleoclimatological statistics.
The cynics among us might consider this theological interruption to be a second rate attempt at distraction.
But however hard Fan tries to avoid it, the elephant is still in the bathroom.
12 standard deviations, huh? That’s some prediction. Some would call it crazy, but not this hunney-bunney.
fan,
I recently came across some emoticons that should be a required attachment for most of your posts.
(_o_) an ass that’s been around
(_zzz_) a tiresome ass
(_?_) Dumb Ass
We are cooling, folks; for how long even kim doesn’t know, but Doctor Marcott knows it’s been about 11,000 years.
=============================
CGC says alarmist kim.
Kim:
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 years! ;)
A fan of *MORE* discourse | March 19, 2013 at 9:18 pm
Actually, no, the world doesn’t wonder, Fan. Because while you may still be wondering, the rest of us can smell garbage when it is laid out in front of us.
The paper was published once without the blade of the hockey stick, and by munging the same data, published again with the blade … and you wonder if the blade is real?? Really???
Start at the top and read the whole thing again, my friend … you clearly didn’t understand Rud’s clear expose of the scientific malfeasance. If you still don’t get it, go read Climate Audit.
And if you still don’t get it … well, then what are you doing in serious scientific discourse?
w.
Hmmm … the “morning Willis” and the “evening Willis” are strikingly different personas: posts by the morning Willis are commonly are well-reasoned, polite, and even charming, whereas the evening’s posts commonly are bellicose, abusive, and even irrational.
Perhaps tomorrow morning’s Willis will appreciate that the Hockey Super-Stick is an ingenious synthesis of multiple independent lines of evidence, such that cherry-picked quibbles that focus upon a small number of Marcott end-point proxies are only marginally relevant to the overall scientific issues?
The question asked … quibbles aside … bluster aside … abuse aside … is straightforward: is it scientifically plausible that the Hockey Super-Stick is soberingly real?
Nope. Nada. Nein.
And you had best leave your disgusting ad hominem slurs elsewhere.
Judith has a lot on her plate, and should not have to deal with the likes of you and yours.
At any other site you would have been murderated by now.
Auf Wiedersehen. Hoffentlich bis ins Ewigkeit.
Again my deepest disregards
Rud Istvan, custom requires that you use the word “ilk” in referring to folks who believe (like me and the Pope) that James Hansen’s worldview is likely to prove broadly correct, both morally and scientifically.
Note, for example, that advanced Google search finds 213,000 results of the general form: “You and your ilk are getting more and more desperate”.
your colleague in “ilk”, FOMD
Fanny
You asked a question:
Rud Istvan gave you a straight answer: “NO”.
Assuming you were referring to the “daddy” of all hiockey sticks, the Mann et al. version, there are many reasons for arriving at this conclusion, Fanny, regardless of where one sits on the ongoing scientific debate surrounding AGW and the CAGW premise, as outlined by IPCC in its AR4 report.
The biggest reason is that it has been statistically discredited (even before the “hide the decline” discovery) by McIntyre and McKitrick.
This was corroborated under oath before a congressional committee by the Wegmancommittee.
http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/108/home/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf
The Wegman committee concluded that the M+M critique was valid for statistical reasons having nothing to do with climate science per se and that the “hockey stick” conclusions were not valid.
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/StupakResponse.pdf
These findings were validated again under oath before the same committee by a panel from NAS.
http://www.energy.probeinternational.org/climate-change/lawrence-solomon-under-oath-north-faults-mann-too
The whole grisly tale leading up to this and following it can be read in Andrew Montford’s book.
So, in this case, it is no longer scientifically plausible that the Mann hockey stick is real.
It also casts serious doubt on the claim made by IPCC in AR4 that the “warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1,300 years”.
Now, as far as Marcott et al. is concerned, it has already come under scathing attack (by Rud Istvan and others). Deep flaws in the methodology and some last-minute finagling of data have been exposed.
In view of all the rebuttals and falsifications that have already come out, I’d say that there is only a very slim chance that it is “scientifically plausible that the Marcott et al. paper is soberingly real”.
My guess is that it will, like the Mann hockey stick, end up on the trashheap of scientific history as yet another bogus paper.
But we shall see.
Max
a fan of *MORE* discourse: The question asked … quibbles aside … bluster aside … abuse aside … is straightforward:
Is the result of the Marcotte et al Science paper supported by the data and analysis? You seem to want to write about everything else but that.
How can it possibly be plausible when one of the authors has previously published a totally different graph while citing exactly the same base data? I cannot help but agree with a previous commenter that either the original thesis is incompetent or the latter one deceptive. Given the analisys in the post,I lean towards deception,but please feel free to demonstrate incompetence.
@ A Fan
The question is not whether
‘James Hansen’s worldview is likely to prove broadly correct, both morally and scientifically (*)’
it is whether the paper under discussion can be distinguished from attention-seeking junk.
And it seems pretty clear that the answer to that is ‘No’. Even if Marcott’s underlying thesis work is correct (which has yet to be reexamined) he has polluted the paper beyond repair by this tacky Hockey Stick stunt.
Sadly for him he may well have done similar damage to his career. Like Gergis before him, the hubris of media attention will lead to the nemesis of being damaged goods.
*And it’s news to me that science or indeed ‘Science’ progresses by the use of concepts such as the morality of a worldview. Nor by being ‘broadly correct’.
When I trained in science it was about data and observations. What a long way it has travelled in 35 years! And to this observer at least – in exactly the wrong direction.
Excellent work like Rud’s and Steve McIntyre’s and Jean S’s and Doug Kennan’s and many others is beginning to nudge it back to the correct course.
But it is noticeable – and shocking – that all the guys doing us this invaluable service are – in the best sense of ‘lovers of the subject’ –
amateurs. The so-called ‘professionals’ do little but close ranks as they watch their monstrously unscientific edifice take heavy fire and slowly crumble about their ears.
They have nothing better than vapid statements like
‘my worldview is broadly morally correct’.
Tosh and balderdash!
‘
Thank you for that good question, MRM! The simple no-quibble answer is, that Steve Mosher called it right!
Now … what is the natural, logical, and crucially important follow-up question, Matthew R Marler?
As Rud has already said, any suggestion that Willis is in any way different in the morning, afternoon or the evening is an ad hom.
To comment on personal characteristics instead of focussing on the argument is a surefire indicator of fighting a losing battle!
Willis kind of invites it on himself with all the talk of his setsual escapades. Is that the attention-seeking junk you guys are talking about?
a fan of *MORE* discourse: Steve Mosher called it right!
Yes he did! The part of the paper that has generated all the publicity (“warming at an unprecedented rate”, and all that) and got it accepted at Science is unsupported by the data. Other than that, the paper only says that much of the time since the end of the Ice Ages was warmer than what we have now, and much of the time wasn’t warmer than what we have now.
Rud,
From below:
Willis Eschenbach | March 20, 2013 at 1:07 pm
I assume you’ll get right on that? No doubt, your “disgust” must be unbearable!
lol!
Peter –
Just because I thought you might like a refresher!
Willis Eschenbach | March 20, 2013 at 1:07 pm
Just to be clear, not an excuse for Fan’s sillyness… Just to comment on the never-ending irony of blog foodfights… lest anyone forget.
nor his silliness.
Rud –
Oops. Mistaken cut-and-paste above – I wouldn’t want you to miss your opportunity…
Only a matter of time ’till you take Willis to task. The countdown has started.
Of course, he could always offer the excuse that the “MSM” made him do it.
“Skeptics” = never-ending amusement.
Joshua, Willis may or may not be right about his opponents’ courage, but what he says is not an ad hominem. He is making an ethical point about them directly.
mike –
I think that arguments about what technically is or isn’t an ad hom is one of the most amusing features of blog discourse. It is almost always nothing other than a reflection of combatants’ inability (or unwillingness) to control for their own subjectivity/confirmation bias/motivated reasoning.
I get the distinction that you are making there, but: (1) I think that the distinction is unknowable, actually. Do you really think that in his rant about people being “cowards” – people I will point out that Willis doesn’t know personally, who he has formed a definitive judgement of with no actual information to assess their character – is not meant as a (at least partial) statement on their motivations and reasoning? Seriously? Do you think that you could ever impugn someone’s integrity so without also expecting carry-over to the validity of their argument?
And, (2) The main point I was making was the selectivity of “disgust” and concern about ad homs. Even if we did determine your distinction between insulting a person and criticizing their argument (a distinction I don’t accept), the precisely same reasoning could be turned around to characterize Fan’s post. In his post, Fan didn’t attack Willis’ arguments by virtue of attacking Willis’ character. He attacked Willis’ arguments by attacking the attributes of Willis’ arguments (by virtue of the silly distinction of when Willis posted).
If we wanted to play the “Blog Ad Hom Definition Game,” I’d say we could just as easily say that Fan’s posts is less of an ad hom, from a technical standpoint, than Willis’ rant.
The point is that neither Fan’s nor Willis’ syntax has any place in serious scientific discourse. So let’s just acknowledge that neither deserves to be taken seriously when they write such nonsense. Arguing about the application of ad hom to either’s comments only becomes more same ol’ same ol’
Well, perhaps Willis will speak for himself. For myself, that was exactly the impression I got as the point what he said: “This is wrong. These people have a moral obligation as scientists and human being to stand up against this kind of thing, as we expect them to stand up against plagiarism and fudging data outright.”
What’s more, I’ve heard him say this kind of thing before, so I think it matters to him. He went off topic here, but that’s his business.
Mike –
Guess we just have one of those agree to disagree scenarios. I think it is silly to assert that calling people he’s never met “cowards” is not attacking the integrity and validity of their arguments and scientific perspective. The logic is possible, but just not plausible, IMO.
How Willis might speak for himself seems immaterial: Someone could always claim their intention was misunderstood. What matters to me is the evidence available and the plausibility of the arguments. Say what you will about Willis, but one thing he has done is provide plenty of evidence. IMO, just the fact of habitually and loudly passing judgement on the character and motivations of people he’s never met speaks volumes about the quality his reasoning when he goes “off topic” as you euphemistically describe.
Even if this were a one-off, I might have a different interpretation. It isn’t a one off.
It is a pattern that he repeats often, and even goes further to rationalize with his own version of “cowboy noble cause” justification. I know some people that grew up on ranches. They might be boorish in their weak moments, but they also stand up to be accountable for their actions. I fail to understand why anyone serious about climate “skepticism” would make excuses for Willis when he displays such fundamentally flawed, biased, and unscientific analysis.
IMO, I see some “skeptics” make some reasonable arguments – even skeptical I would say, but at times they leave a stain on the nobility of skepticism. This would be a case in point. I don’t see any way around it.
The same would be true for Fan’s weak argumentation. Wouldn’t you agree in that case?
Tell you the truth, I am not really competent to judge most of the scientific issues here. I’m more or less a spectator. But it seems to me that Willis attempts to present scientific studies on various topics. Someone else will have to judge their quality.
Fan, on the other hand, and _almost all commenters on almost all blogs_, is a spectator, not someone doing scientific work. As such, I ignore his comments entirely no offense intended, as I ignore most of what commenters say everywhere. It’s not that I don’t see why they think I should take their opinions seriously. It’s that I don’t see why they take their own opinions seriously. As I said, I am a spectator and I know it; they should too. Following blogs voraciously doesn’t make me an expert, reading and working out the scientific papers in the field is the only way to get an opinion I will take seriously.
The threading is a bit wonky here but this comment is for Joshua, who seems to think that I might have a double standard when it comes to ad homs. No, I don’t think that I do but as you have previously said, its all pretty subjective.
The difference between what Willis said in a generic sense about a group of people and what was specifically said of Willis as an individual by Fan is to me quite clearly the difference between a general snark and an ad hom.
Peter D –
Hmmm. Ok. I will acknowledge that is a difference of type. I’m not sure it substantiates a distinction between ad hom and non-ad hom – it is still attempting to demean someone’s perspective by insulting their character – but it is a difference.
But what does that difference mean? That it is better to demean numerous people that you’ve never met and that you have no interaction with whatsoever than to demean one person that you haven’t met but have interacted with through blog comments?
But tell me – you seemed to object to Fan’s comment on the basis of a logical fallacy embedded therein. Do you really think that Willis’ rant against (who knows how many?) people that he has never even met reaches some higher standard?
If we look beyond debate comparing the negative attributes of each post – do you see something about the value added in the different comments, respectively, that is worthy of note? If so, what would that be?
Joshua “The point is that neither Fan’s nor Willis’ syntax has any place in serious scientific discourse. ”
I agree with this (except to replace the word “serious scientific” with the words “general blog” because the territory seems not ideal for any degree of rigour) but acknowledge that arguing about semantics would be a waste of everyone’s time.
Fair enough, Peter.
Hahaha, a ‘Mark’ @ Climate Audit has the perfect roasting of an old chestnut:
‘Marcott is both valid and confirms the hockey stick. Unfortunately, the parts that are valid do not confirm the hockey stick and the parts that confirm the hockey stick are not valid.’
==================
Hehe.
We invented a hockey stick,
We invented it thrice,
Tryin’ ter show weather’s
Nasty, now, not nice.
I think we need a new convention to cover the use of the term ‘Doctor’ when applied to climate ‘science’.
I propose that the usual term ‘Dr.’ be applied to those who have completed a Ph.D. where as the term ‘Doctor’ be applied to those who have not only completed a Ph.D but have also then gone on to practise their doctoring on some real live data. Doctor Marcott might be an example…
Doctor is supposed to mean ‘teacher’. What is Doctor Marcott teaching us?
====================
Perhaps the term witch doctor is appropriate?
Or Dr of Illusion?
Go with the flow (especially of money)
Max
there’s another word for this kind of doctor: QUACK
Max,
Marcott may take offense at your quack comment.
He is, after all, a Beaver (Oregon State University) and not a Duck (University of Oregon).
Marais de Marcott.
==============
When Dame Edna was simple Edna Everage back in the seventies, she described leftist political hero Dr. Jim Cairns as “not a make-you-better doctor”. She said it with a tone she reserved for Catholics, migrants and Sydney people.
What about “not a make-you-better doctor” or NaMYBD after Ph.D.? At least for “earth sciences” and such like.
Lew,
How about doctor (Dr.) and doctorer (Drr.)?
Why is all this discussion necessary? It is an open and shut case of fraud. Obviously Marcott was “leaned on” to make the necessary changes but by whom? He is the guy who is going to face the consequences.
One of the most unfortunate outcomes of Marcott et al and Mann et al and the maneuverings of Mann and the gang will ultimately be a perceived black mark on the whole of science and the conscientious efforts of many in what may prove to be areas of significant concern.
In this case, I cannot see how the results in Science were not predetermined and then a method used to get those results formulated.
If one believes there is a strong AGW signature (I don’t) this kind of work
will ultimately prove negative rather than positive in convincing others.
This branch of science is imitating the ‘climate’ of politics. Politicians seemed to have moved from an ‘atmosphere’ of serving to one of winning.
Can anyone say there is currently a high amount of respect given to politicians, even though some may be supreme in their efforts?
DarrylB, your comment is trenchant. I worry about this also, but for other reasons. We face future resource and environmental issues far beyond the Euro crisis or the US budget deficit. None having to do with CAGW. Read my previous two ebooks on same.
At some point the debate has to get real. But that won’t happen until the ‘junk science’ represented by this paper ‘disappears’, rather than the solid contradictory data that this paper ‘disappeared’.
Regards
Hear, hear!
You are correct Rud Istvan! That is why you and I can both endorse the Vatican’s common-sense program for real climate-change debate
Aren’t these “Sustainable Nature” economic considerations wonderful, Rud Istvan?
The Church’s thoughtfully foresighted analysis is greatly appreciated, Pope Francis!
Rud,
I’ve repeatedly made similar comments on how there are far bigger issues needing to be addressed than potential impacts from “climate change” and attempts to focus resources on these suppossed impacts is most likely going to lead us down a dark alley.
Cue a fan comment with links to Hansen or some non-relevent graph.
Climate science, the Inquisition for climate data. Here the Torquemadas of smart hide it, invert it, re-date it, teleconnect it, manufacture it in computers models, and in short torture it in any way imaginable to get it to confess the holy truth of CAGW.
Michael Mann – you can’t Torquemada anything.
Remember, do yer remember
Upside Down Tiljander, back
in 2009? What goes around
comes around, an alkenone –
reconstructed – new – hockey – Schtick
from Marcott – Shakun – Clark and, er, Mix.
This is what Post-Modernist Science looks like. It is all about power and money and nothing else.
Kim: you are awesome this evening. Nice to see you stepping out with such vigorous eloquence.
+1
Kim is always good!
SP/MR
Kim drives the alarmists mad! Love every minute of it. I leave it to the master.
Isn’t that the point, that it’s all just a game to you?
WEB,
If there is a game involved, it is pin the tail on the donkey.
For this thread fan is on the verge of being recognized as a new sub species – the multi tailed ass(icon).
Rud, It was interesting to watch as the initial inklings that something wasn’t right with the study became voiced and looked at from different angles. I remain fascinated at Steve’s analysis of the proxies and study methods. Thanks for pulling all of this together as the information unfolds and working with Steve to lay it out in understandable terms.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, an essential part of Marcott’s method is that of perturbing the raw temperature data 1000x for each datum within the age-uncertainty for that datum. The Marcott Magic is that for 1950-dated data the age-uncertainty is zero. Marcott’s output is binned into 20-year bins, but with the zero age-uncertainty of 1950-dated data, those data do not cross-pollinate their temperatures into other 20-year bins, whereas everywhere else all the 20-year bins freely exchange temperatures. The outcome is that from 8400BC-1900AD the Marcott temperatures are very much smoothed, but the final 1940AD bin (holding 1930AD-1950AD data) is insulated, not exchanging temperatures with its neighbors, and so sticks out like a sore thumb with its raw non-averaged temperatures.
So Marcotte’s perturbation-algorithm guarantees that the 1940-bin temperature will be differently-formulated than all the rest of the Holocene in that it alone retains its raw average temperature. This was fine for Marcott’s thesis, because those temperatures were not, ahem, “fiddled”. For the “Science” article, however, they were indeed “fiddled” as outlined in the main article here, and also as analyzed by Steve McIntyre on his Climate Audit site.
I’ve outlined this before on other websites, and I presume this will be uptaken in the final analysis because it is an essential element of what was done in the Marcotte “Science” article.
NZ Willy,
How do you cram a proxy record measured every 120 years into a 20 year bin without interpolating the data or excluding the data?
The re-dating was so skilfully done that it took Steve McIntyre et al, hardly any time at all to discover the skill used :-)
The idea that weasel words of uncertainty can be contained within an academic publicly funded paper,whilst the authors go on a public relations spree stating certainty, is well just not science but PR for the cause.
To paraphrase Professor Feynham PR will always loose to science/nature.
While Republican politicians are gerrymandering congressional districts Democrat scientists are gerrymandering climate data.
I seriously begin to wonder if academics are really as bright as they like to tell us they are.They certainly don’t seem to be very worldly-wise.
Here we have four supposedly clever guys producing a paper with some results that are at least ‘surprising’ and it never seems to have occurred to them that somebody might just raise an enquiring eyebrow and wonder exactly how they were arrived at.
Nor did it seem to cross their mind that a reader might idly pick up Marcott’s PhD thesis on the same topic and note the striking differences. You do not need to be a Nobel Prize winner to imagine that the other eyebrow might become twitchy at this point.
Even a non-climatologist of only average intelligence might conclude that some definitive explanation for these ‘interesting’ phenomena will likely be needed. But that somebody might question their work appears to have come as a complete bolt from the blue to our Four Hapless Musketeers. ‘Rabbits in the headlights’ is the expression that springs to mind. After nearly a fortnight of brick by brick demolition, they have had no response whatsoever.
Sensible far-sighted authors would have addressed these points in their paper..and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that even mediocre authors would have had a Q&A pre-prepared with the answers to the likely top 20 objections and talking points.
As to the peer-reviewers and peer-review process I think that the exercise so far has amply demonstrated how laughably inadequate it is. That no reviewer had eyebrows of sufficient mobility to prevent the paper being published without such explanations is ludicrous.
Anybody from the ‘real world’ who has ever been involved in presenting ‘new stuff’ (as I have) surely views this lack of preparation as shamefully amateur and deeply unconvincing. If the authors really wanted their work to be taken seriously they should have acted professionally and thoroughly from Day 1.
Instead they give the impression of not knowing their arses from their elbows.
“Here we have four supposedly clever guys producing a paper with some results that are at least ‘surprising’ and it never seems to have occurred to them that somebody might just raise an enquiring eyebrow and wonder exactly how they were arrived at.”
LOL Latimer. My thoughts exactly. Hard to fathom. I guess they don’t call it an “ivory tower” for nothing. Curious about the origin of the term, I found on a quick search that it originally appeared in the bible Song of Solomon 7:4:
“Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.”
The idea being that “ivory tower” came to symbolize virginal purity and eventually a place of unworldly isolation.
Again, want to tip my hat to Fan, who continues to be the skeptics great ally and friend.
Pokerguy,
“Thy neck is as a tower of ivory”. Only the part at the top is virginal, untouched by the real world.
Cleverness and naïveté are not mutually exclusive. The process of earning your credentials in any group means submersing yourself in commonly shared memes. There’s little profit in being a maverick when depending on the acceptance of others. The danger, of course, is that the memes may not accurately represent reality and that more accurate ones are rejected by the group. A cabinet maker can be blindingly clever with three tools but he rarely if ever produces furniture as elegant as the one whose training included a dozen tools. But because of his restricted training, the former was taught that his three are superior and sufficient. Only curiosity and understanding of human nature might make this naive one question his circumstances before experience teaches its cruel lesson. Cleverness has little to do with it.
…but the thrill we’ll never know Is the thrill that’ll getcha when you get your picture on the cover of the IPCC (IPCC)
Wanna see my picture on the cover (IPCC)
Wanna buy five copies for my mother (Yes) (IPCC)
Wanna see my smilin’ face on the cover of the IPCC
More and more it seems that people with huge egos, power in isolation, (that is, with no over sight) and that live life’s separate from having to accept responsibility for their actions, increasingly feel that they are invincible. They will continue to test the borders of consequential actions because they have the feeling of being above it all and are immune.
Examples: members of congress texting nude pictures of themselves, ponzi
schemes which are certain to collapse, scientists presenting work which
almost insults our intelligence. (and a peer review process that is increasingly becoming a good old boys and girls club)
As a retired high school teacher, the foundation to what I taught seems to be crumbling and yes it does make me angry. I keep thinking that if it is apparent to me, how come it is not so apparent with so many within the walls of ivory.
As in Donna L’s book which shows the IPCC to be a spoiled child. there never was an adequate policy of checks and balances in ‘the gold standard organization’ no oversight.
Regardless of pro or con beliefs on AGW, this kind of work lowers the standard for all us.
I normally just read this blog to learn.
But today I have to say that KIM, who normally gives lines all of about five words really has become verbally prolific.
If by slim change we should ever meet, I will be sure to buy you a cold one.
Thank you, Rud Istvan, for an unequivocal no-quibble answer that expresses the irrational quintessence of climate-change denialism.
We have seen the denialist quintessence before on Climate Etc when denialists refuse to entertain even the logical possibility that James Hansen’s scientific worldview is broadly correct …
… because this would mean that the consensus-science Hockey Super-Stick provides a credible depiction of humanity’s future.
Rud Istvan, the denialist faith that AGW cannot possibly be a sobering reality is (by denialists) unquestioned-and-unquestionable, unjustified-and-unjustifiable, undenied and undeniable.
That’s why denialists resort to quibbling (and other classic demagogic forms), eh?
It’s a good thing that institutions like the Vatican Academy are embracing a more rational, more foresighted, more scientific, more moral response.
Isn’t that good, Rud Istvan?
Morning Fan,
Methinks that your appeal to The Church of all places, as an authority in matters of science speaks for itself.
Your insight is 100% correct PokerGuy!
The Catholic Church rejects climate-change denialism because:
• quibbling over Galileo’s science … was futile,
• quibbling over Darwin’s science … was futile, and
• quibbling over Hansen’s science … will be futile.
For one simple reason: the Hockey Stick is real, eh?
Your insight is astute, PokerGuy! Thank you!
fan,
what parish to you attend Mass at?
For me it is Holy Trinity and St Anthony’s (depending on whether I’m in Oregon or Washington).
Why, the very same parish as the redoubtable Wendell Berry!
You belong to this same parish, timg56!
I clicked on your Wendell Berry link and as usual, it had zero bearing on the question. No where does it mention his religious affilation. The closest it comes is a coment by a reviewer of one of his works about the “failings” of the world’s religions.
Will you ever provide a direct response to a question? This one was an easy one. You could have provided several different answers, including “It isn’t any of my business.” But apparently direct, honest communication is not something you put much value in. Far more important to show off how witty, urbane and intelligent you are.
does one have to be guilty of all 13, or is employing at least 10 of the 13 – as you do – enough to qualify?
Tomorrow I will be at the Met Office archives. I am trying to extend the CET instrumental record back from 1660 and as readers of ‘The long slow thaw’ may remember I got back to 1538.
My research at the Met Office is concentrated on the period 1250 to 1450AD as I hope to identify the transition betweeen the MWP and LIA, thereby filling in much of the gap between 1538 and my intended goal of 1000AD.
I am hoping to translate a document on weather observations 1350 to 1450 which unfortunately is in its orginal French and Latin. Fortunately the other document in the series-1250 to 1350- had been translated 40 years ago.
Weather extremes were greater in the past than today, there were also periods of warmth that were at least as great. Below is a first attempt at a graph that combines known glacier advance and retreat, as this helps to put some constraints on CET research-there is good correlation betweeen glacier movements and CET as noted by such as Pfister.
http://climatereason.com/Graphs/Graph01.png
I had previously commented that I was unsure of my CET reconstruction around 1640 and 1530’s as this seemed warmer than I had expected. After further research it appears they are correct. Phil Jones also identified them, as did Lamb.
Looking at the many thousands of observations I have collected from personal research at a mumber of places ranging from The Met office archives and Library, The Scott Polar Institue in Cambridge, The library of Exeter Cathedral etc I do not recognise the temperature tendancy that the graphs in the article demonstrated particularly as regards the blade reading so much warmer than other periods..
Isn’t it about time that historical climatology and science -that currently likes to discount observations as ‘anecdotal’ but cheerfully uses other proxies- cooperated more closely so we can gain a more reliable climatic picture of the last 1000-2000 years?
That the MWP and LIA were real is perfectly obvious, that there is nothing unusual going on today should be equally so.
tonyb
Great undertaking, Tony. If there are no heavy transcribing probs, I may be able to help with translation if text can be sent to me. The CET is a real treasure, which is suddenly less than popular in some quarters. Whodda thunk?
Love your work.
mosomoso
French or Latin?
tonyb
Either one, Tony. If you can make out the words, the language shouldn’t be that inaccessible. Leave the Old French in its raw state if you’re transcribing it, and we’ll see how we go.
Mosomoso
Ok, I will transcribe a couple of random paragraphs. It’s quite long and if it can be translated I suspect I will need to ask permission to continue and obtain a photocopy, or at worst do transcribing over a number of visits.
Tonyb
If it’s just Latin or any form of French of the period it shouldn’t be hard. Code, abbreviations, professional in-talk could present probs, but the transcriptions won’t be wasted even if I’m not the man for the job. Odd that it hasn’t been done already.
mosomoso
As I mentioned earlier there are two pamphlets in the series. One was translated 40 years ago as part of a phd thesis, the other was untouched. I have asked and been told it was never translated but I will double check this before any large scale translation is attempted.
tonyb
Say, tony –
i often read “skpetics” saying that they don’t doubt that the earth is warming, and that it is warmer now, relative to the past few hundred years (they only question the extent to which that warming has been anthropogenic). Are you in disagreement with those “skeptics?”
Joshua, I notice you keep harping away on this while I continue to wonder what your point is. Why don’t you just come out and say what it is? Meanwhile, I must say that your posts continue to drift ever further away from anything that could be called relevant or interesting. I don’t know anyone this side of a loony bin who denies we’ve warmed since coming out of the LIA (by definition).
That said, you’re wrong when you say skeptics “don’t doubt that the earth is warming.” The operative word being “is.” I I’d say plenty of skeptics do doubt that. But skeptics aren’t members of an organized religion in the way alarmists seem to be. You talk as though there’s an official skeptics’ position paper somewhere. Where do you get that idea?
Joshua
I don’t doubt that the earth is warmer than the LIA, which is when many records began. That it has become progessively warmer since around 1680 I also don’t doubt, with the caveat that there are some periods (around the 1730’s) that appear to be around as warm. Why that shoud be I dont know, but we seem to be fixated on GISS since 1880 which appears to be a staging post of increasing temperatures, NOT the starting post.
Do I think today is warmer than the 1640’s or the first part of the 1500’s? I don’t know. There were some very interesting arctic expeditions taking place around both dates and undoubtedly it was a warm period. Talk of an ‘anthropocene’ or extreme weather is not borne out by the facts.
tonyb
Thank, tony –
So for those periods that you think may have been warmer – say the 1640s or the first part of the 1500s, do you have any theories about the natural phenomena that would be explanatory? Assuming that you have identified some, do you see evidence of those same factors in play in the mid-late 20th century?
PG –
Thanks, once again, for reading. I can understand what a sacrifice that is for you, given that my comments are so far away from anything that could be considered relevant or interesting.
I am deeply touched that despite the unpleasantness of that task, you yet manage to summon up the strength to persevere in directing such a high % of your comments here at Climate Etc. to instructing me about the irrelevance and uninteresting nature of my comments.
I can’t be completely certain that your efforts will ever pay off with any kind of change in my posting behavior – but it’s worth a shot, and in the meantime you should know that I do always find your comments towards me to be quite amusing.
Did I not already know Joshua, I’d find these questions of his entrancing. And so, they still entrance me. These are skeptic’s questions.
===================
Joshua
Now if I came up with theories it would spoil the fun of those here who like to produce computer models wouldn’t it? :)
For what its worth, we can clearly see that weather varies greatly from decade to decade (see my previous graph) sometimes one decade is astonishingly different to the one before or after it. Why should that be?
Well, reading the observations it is apparent that weather gets ‘stuck’ (technical term) in a certain pattern, sometimes for many years. I think the wind direction is important in this, and sometimes this becomes more predominant for long periods from one direction than another. For example Britain traditionally has extended periods of warmer westerly winds, but at times these get replaced by cold easterlies (warm in summer). The jet stream effect can also be clearly seen in the weather observations and this is a major factor if again it gets stuck for any length of time. The warmth of the ocean/currents clearly has an impact but I can’t pick that up from observations.
I remain ambivalent about the effects of sun spot activity.
tonyb
tony –
Seems to me that your interest is in global temperatures, (even if from what I’ve seen, your data collection is heavily concentrated on a small % of the earth’s surface).
As such, wouldn’t changes in wind direction likely be a regional influence and not a global influence – kind of moving around which areas are “stuck” from one part of the globe to another without changing the overall temperature balance of the globe? Unless, of course, you have some sort of metric to quantify some kind of “global wind total” (another technical term) – and even then you’d need some sort of theory for explaining the mechanism for changing “global wind.” Seems to me that there’s still an energy balance problem in play with moving from the data you’ve collected to interpreting how it might relate to AGW.
Now sun spot activity might be a different story. Have you come across any historical data that might tie changes in sun spot activity to your observations on (mostly regional) patterns in temperatures?
So kim –
If I understand that comment correctly, (in your view) it is not the nature of the questions that makes a skeptic, but your interpretation of their conclusions? (Without evidence, I might add.)
If so, interesting.
ClimateReason,
Why don’t you do real science? It’s not hard. If you want to take a look with what you can do with wind statistics, go look at my latest post at
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com
This is from a couple of days ago so is pretty fresh.
What you are doing is comical.
Dang, you broke the spell.
===========
Webby
Fortunately such people as Dr Hansen and Hubert Lamb have done a lot of work already on historic wind reconstruction so I have no need to duplicate their work.
tonyb
Heh, tony, the sunspots themselves are ambivalent, that’s why they’re going all Cheshire grinning on us. It’s so that we can understand them, and of course, they themselves. I’d grin too. Understanding, at long last!
===================
Joshua
Many leading scientists believe that CET is a reasonable (but not perfect) proxy for Northern Hemisphere and Global temperatures, presumably precisely because of our geographic position and the resultant weather patterns/wind direction.
You said;
“Now sun spot activity might be a different story. Have you come across any historical data that might tie changes in sun spot activity to your observations on (mostly regional) patterns in temperatures?’
The trouble is that even in the LIA you can have one warm year juxtaposed to a cold one. So did the sunspots affect one year but not another? Iremain to be convinced, but an article on sunspots by an appropriate expert would make a good discussion topic here if Judith is listening.
tonyb said, “The trouble is that even in the LIA you can have one warm year juxtaposed to a cold one. So did the sunspots affect one year but not another?”
It looks more like the orbital force change has more impact that solar cycle changes, especially in the North Atlantic region. Higher and lower tides change the currents and ice stability. I have seen some studies that include the lunar tidal cycles, but I haven’t found one that combines solar and lunar tide changes for that far back in time for the North Atlantic.
Tony – this probably silly, but has anybody done a proxy-based reconstruction of the CET?
Climate reconstruction from tree rings: Part 1, basic methodology and preliminary results for England
JCH
CET is the worlds most examined temperature record so I am sure someone somewhere has done what you suggested. Can’t say I’ve seen it though
tonyb
That paper is behind a pay wall, but so far it is the only one I’ve found that might have a proxy reconstruction. It would be interesting to see if there is a divergence problem. I would expect there would be one.
JCH
I note your comments about the paywalled item on tree rings. It seems to be this one;
“ http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/pubs/byauthor/wigley_tml.htm
“Climate reconstruction from tree rings: Part 1, basic methodology and preliminary results for England.” Journal of Climatology 3, 233-242 (R) “
It was within a book called ‘A slice in time.’ which by one of those extraordinary coincidences I came across when carrying out research at the Exeter Cathedral library last May when looking for material for ‘The long Slow thaw.’ Here is a section from my notes at the time;
——- ——— ——- ——
Tree rings-Saw two reports from English Heritage undated but probably from around 1999/2000
Tree rings in Cathedral to be dated and measured against English template from Midlands dated from 882 to 1810
Two graphs drawn. Earliest records 1810-low and 1820 high. Great peaks-favourable weather around 1825 to 1855
Low points around 1860. Similar sets of peaks 1875 to 1890. Little variation from then until the last record taken from trees around 1975. (see my hand drawn graph)
All above taken from timbers from Law library and 2 buildings on the Close. Similar set taken from timbers of Archdeacons house dates from 1186 to 1404. The report seems primarily concerned with dating of timbers but mentions broad and narrow rings as representing climatic conditions-but notes younger trees such as oaks grow differently to older ones and local conditions affect them. Also depends on growing season-April to October in Exeter but differs elsewhere. Good growing seasons have relatively wide rings, poor growing seasons have very narrow rings and average rings in average years. Accurate to around 40 years.
See books ‘Tree ring dating and archaeology (bailie 1982) or ‘A slice through time’ (bailie 1995) Obviously at that time tree rings were considered primarily as a tool for dating timbers and the climatic information was secondary and imprecise.
———– ——- ——– ——
What was of interest to me was that at the time of the Exeter report the Mannian promotion of tree rings to superstardom had obviously not filtered through. I will see if I can get a copy of the book from the Met Office library
tonyb
Tony, I suggest that you start at 1200 rather than 1250, as 1251 is a changepoint in some proxy datasets
Steve
Thanks for your advice. I intend eventually to work back to 1000AD so I can make direct comparisons with such studies as those by Dr Mann. There is a lot of material out there, some better than others. I note the 1251 proxy change point.
tonyb
Tony B
Am looking forward to reading your study on this when you have completed it.
This is extremely important work, as it could finally give us a real insight into the climate prior to the 16thC, which we have only had through questionable paleo-climate reconstructions of proxy data.
Keep up the good work.
Max
Tony, keep up your excellent work. Is it recognised as such professionally in the UK or elsewhere? Does it enter into the public or scientific CAGW debate?
Faustino
Thank you. My work is considered ‘anecdotal’ (although I do try to merge it with scientific papers) and is a rather unfashionable branch of research at present, although there are a number of good professionals in the field.
Prof Phil Jones produces some great work, although probably the late Hubert Lamb surpasses any modern researchers and would have had a field day with the internet and the many new sources of information coming to light. The trouble is that the vast majority of historic printed work is not digitised. If its not digital it doesnt exist and therfore its not going to be found by most researchers.
tonyb
The stratigraphy of information has a discontinuity there.
==============
That is an understatement.
Qualitative research has little basis in the scientific process. The lack of objectivity prevents anyone else from making quantitative comparisons and verifying the work or even determining error bars. It turns into a subjective analysis, completely open to interpretation.
The rules are different for schleptics. If it was up to them, they think this is PhD caliber work, much better than the approach that Marcott is stuck with. No wonder Faustino is impressed by it, as the social sciences is loaded with this kind of stuff.
WHT
In considering the value of using historical material the sceptical question first needs to be asked as to whether there is likely to be documentation/records available that let us look in detail at events that happened many hundreds of years ago and combine them with scientific material in a structured fashion that can elevate them above the easily dismissed ‘anecdote’ which –whilst often interesting in themselves-tend to be one off snapshots that are not corroborated from other sources.
Those interested in learning something of the nature of historical climatology and how material is compiled might find this comprehensive article on the subject interesting.
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~rjsw/papers/Brazdil-etal-2005.pdf
When sufficient data becomes available ‘anecdotal’ information such as contemporary observations, historic records etc is translated into data following the methods detailed by , for example, Van Engelen, J Buisman and F Unsen of the Royal Met office De Bilt and described in the book ‘History and Climate.’
tonyb
Keep up the good work Tony. The hockey stick issue is a glaring example of incorrect splicing of data with vastly differing resolutions.
Where is this rulebook?
Rulz, rulz? Web don’t need no need for rulz.
=======
Tony, thanks for that link, looks interesting. As Webby notes, it might be more accessible to me than much of the climate science material.
Webby
Tony is correct in writing that his line of work (historical documentation of past climate) is an “unfashionable brand of research at present”, but IMO this no way detracts from its significance.
You are wrong to equate it with the more “loosey-goosey” socio-psychological stuff that gets published as climate-related research (some of which we have seen featured on this site in the past).
The two are completely different fields (an I’d agree with you on the irrelevance of the socio-psychological gibberish).
Written history is an extremely important record of the human species, arguably the most accurate one we have.
Archeology is another science that uncovers riddles of our past, but it usually covers periods that are more distant in time and precede a written record. And it leaves a lot more open questions than a written historical record.
Paleo-climate reconstructions are even more dicey, as they often become nothing more than subjective interpretations of proxy data of questionable accuracy over cherry-picked periods of our distant geological past, applying argument from ignorance in establishing a preconceived attribution of some parameter to the reconstructed climate – in other words, not much better than reading tea leaves.
Unfortunately, this segment is “getting all the bucks”.
But, as we see, it has spawned discredited studies, such as the Mann et al. hockey stick, or apparently flawed studies, such as the Marcott et al. copy “shtick”. And I’d wager that there are a lot more “shticks” out there in paleoclimatology that just haven’t met their “Steve McIntyre” yet.
So, hats off to Tony and his work. Let’s hope it shines a bit of light on our past climate, which the theoretical physicists have missed.
Max
Hey Max, how is that manipulation of data coming along?
Basic mathematics says that if a function doesn’t have an inflection point then the log of that function won’t either, and vice versa. I can prove it in two lines of calculus.
I like how all the skeptics close ranks around their tribal members while MiniMax creates all these peaks and valleys in the data to make the correlation look bad.
Don’t act so clueless as your manipulation is much easier to spot for an amateur.
Just wondering where “flawed science” ends and “fraud” begins in climate research. In most ordinary branches of science, tampering with data like this would be called fraud without any hesitation.
“fraud without any hesitation” seems to be not unknown in this field.
Cee de Valk
Scientists take up a certain position and are reluctant to retreat from it. I would never use the word fraud, but some may be ‘over enthusiastic’ in trying to prove their point.
tonyb
Well I’m inclined to believe in their good intentions too, but intentions are not relevant for deciding whether something is fraud or not. Framing these discussions in a moral setting is not helpful in my opinion; I’d rather just look at what has been done. There must have been reasons to deviate from the procedure and results of Marcott’s thesis, it cannot have been an accident because the difference is so obvious (whether you call it robust or not). And deliberately modifying your source data (obtained from others) without describing what you did and why you did it is normally called fraud. Even in medical research. Without such fairly basic standards being maintained, how credible is the work published in your discipline?
“And deliberately modifying your source data (obtained from others) without describing what you did and why you did it”
That’s nonsense. They said exactly what they did:
“The majority of our age-control points are based on radiocarbon dates. In order to 66 compare the records appropriately, we recalibrated all radiocarbon dates with Calib 6.0.1 using 67 INTCAL09 and its protocol (1) for the site-specific locations and materials.”
They listed their age control points, the authors’ original dating, and their revised dating.
It isn’t even source data. The authors use calibration programs too. Marcott et al just used a standard one for all proxies which was in many cases more up to date.
Really?
BREAKING CLIMATE-CHANGE SCIENCE NEWS:
the WHEELCHAIR supplants the HOCKEY STICK
On sites that include:
• Jos Hagelaars’ Klimaatverandering, and
• Bart Varheggen’s My View of Climate Change, and
• Eli Rabett’s Rabett Run
The instantly-iconic broad-band Wheelchair Graph has supplanted the outdated Mann/Marcott hockey-stick!
The new icon of consensus climate-change science is proving to be a tough challenge to demagogic denialism’s quibblers, cherry-pickers, astro-turfers, and smearers … who find themselves playing a frustrating medieval game !!!
The redoubtable A-Team has now provided a provocative scientific supplement to the WheelChair: Post-Holocene Geological Divisions (proposed).
Key Question Is the short-sighted willful ignorance of demagogic denialism disastrously propelling humanity through the “Dumbassic Age”, first via the “Anthropocene”, and then via the “Endocene”? The world wonders!
Fan, having last used a clunky, very heavy, bone-shaker wheel-chair in the 1960s, I recently borrowed what was by comparison an F1 lightweight technological marvel to scoot round the Prado exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery. I don’t think that there has been a similar rate of technological advance in hockey sticks, so I’m sure that the wheelchair graph must be an improvement. Mann must be gnashing his teeth, a “Why didn’t I think of that?!!!” moment.
Dang, broke my “never reply to Fan” resolution!
That, is Willard bait but allow Eli to play The difference between the heavy lumber Eli used to wield and today’s wonder weapons, is like the difference between pine and polymers:)
No wood, no good.
My conjecture is that this highly questionable re-analysis occurred during peer review because a reviewer, perhaps even Mann, objected that the results did not support the hockey stick. The review correspondence might be quite revealing.
Most interesting is what made Dr. Marcott into Mr. Hide.
=======================
You’d better Seek the answer.
Mann got an entire institute at Penn State as a reward for the hockey stick. That is a powerful message.
http://www.essc.psu.edu/ Mann is Director. Note his many awards. Hockey sticks pay.
Hey Fan,
There’s an interesting post over at your hero’s Anthony W.’s site concerning Hansen’s 1988 predictions, with an analysis of how well they’re stacking up against real world data. Graph taken from RealClimate.
Of course, Real Climate shamelessly pretends all is well in AGW Fantasy LAnd, their ongoing position continuing to be, “who are you going to believe, us or your own lying eyes?”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/20/how-well-did-hansen-1988-do/
What’s New? Appreciation that (in the long run) Hagelaars’ WheelChair is real
Thanks for reminding Climate Etc readers that (in the long run) demagogic denialism’s quibbling, cherry-picking, astro-turfing, and smearing all are irrelevant … eh PokerGuy?
Of course, thoughtful citizens and institutions have understood this for a long time … right PokerGuy?
Thanks for the response Fan, but instead of just snorting ClimateEtc’s propaganda like some sort of warmist drug addict, I suggest actually looking at the graph. TRy it fan, it will only hurt for a second or two.
The truth will set you free, eh Fan of *more* discourse?
LOL … PokerGuy, suppose that long-term climate-change science was nearly perfect (up to decadal scale fluctuations) …
Then climate-change predictions would be half too low, half too high, eh?
And that near-balance between too-low and too-high climate-change predictions is what we observe, right PokerGuy?
Conclusion Demagogic denialism’s quibbling, cherry-picking, astro-turfing, and smearing nowadays serve chiefly to demonstrate that (in the long run) … Hagelaars’ WheelChair is real!
That’s plain common-sense, eh PokerGuy?
All I can say my dear Fan is that if sheer insistence that something be true were enough to make it so, I’d have ten million dollars in the bank, and a harem full of lovely, insatiable women.
Seriously though Fan, here’s a hypothetical. Suppose the Grand Poo-Bah himself, James “turn up the heat and let ’em sweat” Hansen, issued a statement to the effect that he was wrong after all, and therefore taking it all back.
“The skeptics were right as it turns out,” says Hansen. “Climate sensitivity has been shown to be much lower than I’d anticipated. There’s no hot spot, and the heat isn’t missing because it wasn’t there in the first place. In fact, I’ve decided the Co2 is actually beneficial, and at much higher levels than we have today. I’ve contacted Anthony Watts, and he’s graciously agreed to work together with me to spread the word.”
Nice to dream, eh FOMD??
But Fan, I honestly don’t think that would be enough for you. I think you’re going to be passionately convinced of this stuff until the end of your days.
The world wonders, eh Fan of *more* discourse?
Hmmm … most folks would seriously foresee that Hansen’s statement would (like Hansen’s prior statements):
• have multiple co-authors,
• be carefully reasoned,
• be clearly explained,
• be thoroughly referenced,
• be respectfully phrased, and
• give suggestions for further work.
Any such Hansen statement would repay serious consideration, PokerGuy!
Just like prior Hansen statements have been well-worth serious pondering, eh?
pokerguy the WUWT article glosses over a lot of things. For a better look at Hansen’s prediction go read the skepticalscience piece on it, it covers it in a lot more depth. For example WUWT did not mention which scenario the real world has followed (hint: it’s not scenario A)
lolwot,
You have that right. The number of skeptics that haven’t a clue about the effect of noise and fluctuations on the data set is incredible.
These “noise riders” will only get embarrassed when they get bucked off the curve.
I know enough about time series with limited data to not read too much into periodicities, yet all when has to do is some simple comparisons on the residual temperature anomaly against noise models and one can see what role it plays. This plot is the residual noise after removing a 3C doubling CO2 sensitivity trend from the BEST data:
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/9962/bestresidual.gif
Why use the BEST? Because it is modeling fast transients in sensitivity,
Also perplexing to me is the adjustment of the sensitivity based on recent downward fluctuations. Somebody got roped into calling these things “pauses” whereas they look more like noisy fluctuations.
All the volcanic disturbances and ocean cycles when put together create a form of red noise that is simply modeled as an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck random walk process.
I wonder why this topic isn’t studied to death considering the theme of the blog is uncertainty quantification.
An inability of the proponents of a cause to even admit one misstep, one mistake, one error. All the evidence in the world that they bring forward is supposed to be taken as wrote and good and correct and irrefutable. Human Caused Co2 Induced Global Warming Climate Science brings a return to the dark ages. Infallible, untouchable and certainly not to be questioned by the unwashed, “they” decide for us what truth is and we will be forced to do as they declare because “they” are closer to God than thou.
I often have the same thoughts pd. They’re never, ever, ever wrong, about anything. How can that be? In itself, that’s pretty damning for any objective observer
Too long double or nuthin’.
===========
As one of the great unwashed (and in a population of 4 billion, every single one of us is one of the great unwashed on at least a few thousands topics), I find myself more and more inclined to listen to opinions and to hold back my own. Because as a reflection of society as a whole, the louder and more bombastic someone offers up their opinion, the less inclined I am to believe them (unless they are particularly compelling or the loudness is associated with some form of impending doom – WATCH OUT!). And so it is with climate science, the louder the story, the less likely it is to be believed. And since climate changes so slowly, I feel we are all entitled to take our sweet time before we embark on some project of changing a massive and heretofore somewhat successful global society. And so now what should come down the pike but another study purporting to show “unprecedented” warming that is broadcast by mass media, attended to with press releases and published by the most widely circulated journal and it turns out to be shoddy science at best or a fraud at its worse. I am generally a loud person, but the world around me is so loud that it teaches me what my own failings are. If only the entire heterogeneous Human Caused Co2 Induced Global Warming Climate Science mass would get some humility and start speaking with their inside voices.
Not very mindful, the mindlessness of it all.
===========
“they” are closer to God than thou … Only because they wear elevated shoes and are supported by hyper-inflated egos.
“All this makes Mike’s Nature trick seem straightforward.”
But the more I read, the more often I seem to discover these kind of gymnastics which frequently can be condensed down to:
‘Take some imprecise measurement that has [Time] on the x-axis, and find an excuse for shifting the data either to the left, or to the right.’
This is a most powerful “tool” in that it would also allow the arrow of time to be dodged if, say, one was confronted with CO2 inconveniently rising before temperature in the empirical data.
To state the obvious, and probably what everyone is thinking, but not saying.
Did the authors interactively manipulate the data records until a HS popped out? Then seek a justification for said data processing post mortem?
I’d really like an honest answer to that one, but I doubt I will ever get it. Maybe the answer “yes” is the only answer my biased view would be willing to accept as truthful.
I’m showing my age, but the phrase “DOS ain’t done till Lotus doesn’t run” comes to mind.
It is an interesting question. My belief is that they did not have to fool around, but rather could just decide in advance which proxies to re-dat. It is pretty easy to do from the charts in figure C7, pages 200-203 In the thesis.
What I don’t understand is how they thought this would not be caught out when Science demanded the data file for the SI, the thesis is publicly available for comparison, and many of these proxies are publicly archived for independent scrutiny. And when, for example, important 2043 (pulling the MWP forward to the 20th century) was explicitly core top dated in the reference and in the NOAA archive.
I have been following for part of the discussion at Climate Audit. Based on that I think that the upstick is purely an artifact of the method. To be more specific, what seems to cause it, is as follows.
1) The proxies are calibrated (i.e. given a zero point for the temperature scale over the period 2500-3500 years before present.
2) Therefore the proxies lead to quite different temperatures in the 19th and 20th century.
3) The proxies end at variable dates before the last year presented in the analysis (1940)
4) During the last decades before 1940 the number of proxies is very low. The average is calculated from this small and diminishing number of proxies.
5) Whenever the number of proxies goes further down when the year 1940 is approached, the average may jump suddenly, because the proxy dropped may have had a very different temperature from the mean of the remaining proxies.
6) Based on that the temperatures may go suddenly either up or down at any of the latest time steps. That tells nothing about the real temperature behavior.
The authors tell that the latest period is not robust. In my view they should have left the last decades out of the paper and and perhaps 1900 or even earlier.
There has been redating. The nature of the data is such that redating is a well justified procedure. Redating changed strongly those decades that should have been left out of the paper.
Pekka, that is pretty much a perfect summation. The averaging period they used though could have made a more interesting paper since they include paleo ocean data with the “seesaw” effect. The deep ocean lags the surface by about 1700 years and the northern extent oceans are out of phase with the southern extent oceans. You can get a pretty wide range of “Average” with either an uptick or downtick depending on your mood.
Mixing surface air, SST and deep ocean temperature proxies makes fruit salad or Ambrosia if you prefer..
What about the confidence interval though. If you look at the GISS the difference in the annual mean of 1945-50 is 0.3 degrees, and between 1950-53 its also 0.3 degrees.
The CI for the ‘new’ reconstructed global is mean +/- 0.17 degrees. You could detend the GISS instrument estimation of global temperature and it would be wider than the detrended data in this ‘Science’ paper.
Doc, When you mixed apples and oranges, confidence intervals are meaningless. If the paper had used the actual confidence intervals of the reconstructions, there would be a plus or minus 1.5 C gray cloud that would have buried that hockey stick.
That tells nothing about the real temperature behavior. … – Pekka
Pekka – are there lines of evidence that are robust with respect to the self-inflicted gaps in the reconstruction you are suggesting should be made?
JCH,
I don’t understand your question.
The problems in extending the analysis to 20th century and even to 19th century are mainly due to the nature of the proxies. Those problems lead to the small number of proxies that cover these periods. Filling missing data is also impossible at the ends of the periods. Filling gaps adds always to uncertainty but it may still be worthwhile away from the ends as it makes the rest of the analysis much easier.
One particular problem explained convincingly by Steve McI and by Richard Telford in the discussion at CA is that the the modern end of the alkenone proxies is commonly assumed that they extend to 1950. This assumption is known to be suspect and often seriously wrong, but it does not affect those applications where the data is mostly used, i.e. studying periods more than 1000 years in the past. It’s obvious nonsense when the analysis is extended to 20th century. Telford stated (emphasis mine):
steven mosher | March 19, 2013 at 11:06 pm
There’s a technical name for those kinds of folks, Steven.
We call them “cowards”, and it is only necessary for them to continue their cowardice in order for climate science to continue its downwards spiral.
Cowards, Steven. The people you are praising are cowards. Perhaps you could comment on that.
And describing what they did as “chartsmanship”? Really?
There’s a technical name for what Marcott-Shakun folks have done, but it’s not “chartsmanship”.
It’s called either “outright fraud” or “unbelievable incompetence”, take your pick. And the sooner apologists like yourself realize that, the less you will look like their witting or unwitting accomplices.
Because right now, that’s what you give every appearance of being, an accomplice of Marcott and Shakun, trying to excuse their actions as chartsmanship.
“Chartsmanship”? Get real. I can think of a lot of less deceptive ways to describe their actions, but it’s a family blog …
w.
The Captain is watching you, willis.
What I don’t get Don is if you are really the brave war hero you claim, why do you keep picking on such a pathetic weak sister? It should be beneath you.
Did I claim that, howie? I am sure cowboy willis appreciates you taking up for him. He doesn’t have the guts to do it himself. Every time I see willis call somebody a coward, or a liar, I will remind him of his own failings. Get used to it, howie.
That’s too bad Don. I gather you are addicted to these pathetic boosts to your self esteem by picking on a child. Carry On Skipper
You have taken your gratuitous shot from the high weeds, howie. Feel better now?
+1
Willis I think Mr Mosher just wants us all to know what a swell guy he is hanging with the big dogs. Probably didn’t occur to him that they were cowards.
who said they all were “big” dogs? If they were all big dogs I would surely indicate this. I don’t consider myself a swell guy, just a guy. The chart is messed up. If pat micheals did it, I’d have the same reaction. fix the chart.
hell even when Goddard makes stupid mistakes I suggest that he fix the chart. No real point is trying to get at motives.. unless they fight fixing the chart.
Big dogs? Climate scientists? That’s a contradiction in terms. Governors, 4 & 5 star generals, senators, Fortune 500 CEOs, president, high ranking cabinet members, billionaires… those are big dogs. Pro ball players, some hollywood actors, directors, and producer might be big dogs. Not climate scientists. The science is kind of cultish. More people recognize the term Scientology than Climatology fercrisakes.
Willis, cowards are guys who fake suicides. Cowards are guys who praise liars and conmen.
‘So I was half drunk by that time, I said OK, well, we’ll just blackmail the Japanese Ambassador into giving you guys a piped water system. And when he asked what I was babbling about, I explained to him the devious plan that had somehow sprung full-blown into my brain when he presented the problem.”
“Whenever I think that I’ve done bold things in my life, I think of My-mummie audaciously and cleverly bluffing her way in, all the way up to the top to see the King of Egypt himself, Farouk the First, in order to save dying children … and I realize I’ve done nothing, really, nothing at all …”
Now of course, I would not describe it this way. I would call it noble cause corruption. Kidnapping reagan? noble cause corruption.
Faking suicide to get out of an evil war? noble cause corruption.
blackmailing a the japenese ambassador to get water pipes? noble cause corruption. Bluffing and lying to save children. Noble cause corruption.
Basically, I don’t find your in a position to moralize or get on your high horse. I would think your love of bluffers and tall tales would give you more sympathy for the devlis.
Mosher, Science is close to the top journal in most fields. My institute give a cash prize for researchers who get published in Science.
This paper went to referees, picked by the handling editor, and they accept this piece of ‘Chartmanship’.
It is quite clear that the referees were at best complete unable to function in their gate keeping role. The referees were incapable of using Excel to examine the line-shape of the proxies which end in the near past.
The referees were either too stupid to review this article or too corrupt to investigate the origins of a line-shape that pleased them. In either case the Editorial board of Science should examine the whole of their policy on publishing ‘Climate Science’ as the handling editors are incapable of finding referees who know their cūlus from their olecranon.
@DocMartyn
+1
Let me suggest for you a more charitable interpretation, Willis Eschenbach!
Please reflect on the many folks who have been politely and respectfully assisting you to a broader scientific and moral understanding of climate-change:
• Steve Fitzpatrick is patiently teaching you basic thermodynamical principles,
• Steven Mosher is helping you to a broader appreciation of climate-change,
• Jos Hagelaars is giving you a unified overview of long-term climate-change, and
• the Vatican is reminding you of moral responsibilities associated to climate-change.
You are fortunate to have all these people helping you, eh Willis Eschenbach?
Perhaps you should repay them with the rationality and respect that they are showing you!
Fan, I suppose you do not know the meaning of the word ” Toomler”. Look it up and see if it fits.
Fan,
Statistical mechanics and thermo are apolitical. I don’t like to have people making unchallenged nutty claims which only muddle reality and mislead the untrained about what is physically possible. Willis is for sure too prickly by half when faced with criticism, but he seems to be sincere and to honestly care about people, especially poor people. In general, I like and even admire him, but I would be more comfortable with that admiration if he were a just bit more careful in his technical analysis.
Willis
And, to follow Fanny’s advice to you, you should also be thankful to Fanny, for showing you how to shovel the s**t elegantly with beautiful decorative smileys to mask the odor.
To paraphrase: Perhaps you should repay Fanny with all the respect he/she is showing you.
Max
Agreed 100%!
And yet even Willis’ compassion has curious blind-spots. For example, his stories of South Sea island life are warm and funny. And yet, how many decades have passed since Willis visited these outer islands? Because nowadays, the communities living on these sandy low-lying outer islands see the oceans rising/lands eroding with their own eyes (the now-submerged WWII runways precisely at at 7°22’34.86″N, 143°54’28.42″E for example).
For all of Willis’ good points, his understanding of climate-change has three limitations:
[1] lives in the past,
[2] feeble grasp of the basic science, and
[3] doesn’t realize [1-2] (Dunning-Kruger effect).
Willis, yah need to return to the Outer Islands, where you can verify these things with your own eyes (that’s how I learned them).
`Cuz the world has changed, Willis! And your understanding must change with it.
fan,
Willis excellent post at WUWT on floating islands examines the
real reasons low lying atolls like the Maldives are endangered,
not from CO2 and rising seas. Coral atolls are essentially
floating islands that rise as the sea rise. They exist in a delicate
balance between erosion by wind and water and production of
new sand. Over fishing of the Parrot fish and other beaked fish
that grind and excrete the coral as new sand is a major problem
of ‘sinking’ islands. Taking too much frashwater from the ‘lens’
on which the island floats is another problem.Read Willis’ article
fer yrself, fan. BC
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/27/floating-islands/
You ain’t visited the FSM Outer Islands recently, have yah Beth? They ain’t easy to get to … there’s no regularly scheduled service of any sort.
Fan, I’m sure the Woleai islanders (http://goo.gl/maps/Q3qmD) will be intrigued to learn that they’re living underwater
As a typhoon approaches, every Outer Islander does this calculation:
• begin with sea-level, then
• add the island elevation (a few feet).
• subtract the storm-surge (of several feet).
If the total is positive, you and your family live …
… if the total is negative, then you and your family (and everyone on the island) all die.
People who don’t do this calculation should not mock those who do, eh phatboy?
Because I can testify (from personal experience) that on the low-lying Outer Islands, when wind and water are rising, no-one is laughing.
Conclusion Willfully ignorant mockery is a particularly stupid form of demagogic climate-change denialism.
Hopefully you (and other demagogic denialists) on Climate Etc have learnt from this calculation, Phatboy!
Your point being?????
I suppose you’re now going to tell us that the coral atolls were 42 metres above sea level 10,000 years ago when the sea level was 40 metres lower?
Oh yesirree! Never let the facts spoil a good fairy tale, eh Fan?
Phatboy’s latest post doubles-down on willful ignorance.
Aye, Climate Etc lassies and laddies … doubled-down ignorance is symptomatic of denialist cognition …
$latex \scriptstyle\rule[2.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\,\boldsymbol{\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\frown}\,\spadesuit\,{\displaystyle\text{\bfseries!!!}}\,\spadesuit\,\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\frown}}\ \rule[-0.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}&bg=bbffbb&fg=008888&s=1
You mean Ngulu of course.
From Wikipedia:
(my bold)
Now you, fan, would have people believe that the whole place is underwater, and only so since the advent of AGW.
Is there no depth you wouldn’t sink to, eh fan?
You don’t get it, do yah Phatboy?
There’s *no* land at those coordinates … just a submerged atoll … known only to Outer Island fishermen … that was drowned by rising sea-levels.
It’s visible from a canoe as a lighter-color patch of ocean … that is all.
A US nuclear submarine did have a memorable encounter with an uncharted one, however.
Get a clue please, Phatboy! When atolls drown, people drown … it’s not complicated.
Yes indeed fan, that deeply submerged reef is known to the Outer Island fishermen, as it was known to their fathers before them, and their fathers before them…
And all you have to counter is a completely irrelevant account of a submarine colliding with an undersea mount at a depth of 160 metres!
Time to change the record, eh fan?
You still don’t quite get it, PhatBoy.
Large portions of that once-dry now-drowned atoll extend to within two feet of the surface (e.g, Google Earth 8°21’39.18″N, 137°29’17.83″E).
That’s what all of the present-day Outer Islands are slated to look-like, eh?
Hopefully your understanding has deepened, phatboy!
If not, at least your posts have provided Climate Etc readers with a paradigmatic example of the sustainment of denialist cognition!
Yes, most of the reef is deeply submerged, and some of it is above the surface – which means that parts must by definition be just below the surface – surprise surprise, eh fan?
Why don’t you quit before you make a complete idiot of yourself, instead of trying to score points by coming up with an endless stream of utter irrelevancies?
Because, fan, if there was any substance to your scare stories of widespread instances of communities disappearing beneath the waves, these would be very well documented indeed!
Isn’t that so, fan?
LOL thank you for further outstanding examples of the remarkable tenacity of denialist cognition, PhatBoy!
fan, your feeble attempts are increasingly being seen as desperately transparent.
Doggerland indeed! What can he come up with next?
The world waits in fevered anticipation, not so, fan?
A fan of *MORE* discourse | March 21, 2013 at 7:29 am
I would also be a lot more comfortable with YOUR analysis if you were a lot more skeptical of nonsensical conclusions. Yes, sea levels have risen since WWII (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trends_in_global_average_absolute_sea_level,_1870-2008_%28US_EPA%29.png), but there is no possibility that flooding of WWII runways was caused by a 5″ rise in sea levels since 1946. There are large differences in regional rates of rise which have nothing to do with the overall average rise, at least not beyond that 5″ overall rise since 1945. So accuse Willis all you want of living in the past. It seems to me you are living in a world which accepts rubbish data uncritically. I try to look critically at all claims, and the more surprising, the more critically. I suggest you look especially critically at data which supports your current personal beliefs. You strike me as someone who ought not be accusing people of suffering from the Dunning Kruger effect.
LOL … Drowned Doggerland Denial (D^3) establishes an unsurpassably irrational standard of denialist cognition, PhatBoy!
Steve Fitzpatrick, your theoretical argument does not take into account that sea-level rise-rates are nowhere greater in the western equatorial pacific.
Not to mention, I’m reporting my personal confirmation of what the pacific’s Outer Islanders see with their own eyes: the ocean is eating the land.
That is a sobering reality, eh Steve Fitzpatrick?
fan, Doggerland drowned 12,000 years ago.
Everyone can see that.
Not so, fan?
As yes … in retrospect, it’s observationally obvious and theoretically elegant … the Woleai runway is submerged because the rapidly rising western-pacific sea-level has acted to raise the island’s Ghyben-Herzberg water lens.
Conclusion It’s a freshwater lens that has risen to pool on Woleai’s runway.
Needless to say, I never thought to taste that water! So thank you, Steve Fitzpatrick, for helping to create this elegant unification of citizen climate-change observation with fundamental climate-change physics!
fan, having dug oneself into a rather deep hole, the sensible optionwould be to stop digging.
Isn’t that right, fan?
Be of good cheer, PhatBoy, because Faustino and Willis are keeping you company in that hole!
fan, I wish to give you my heartfelt thanks for seeing fit to become such an excellent ambassador for the sceptical side.
‘Cos fan, with enemies like you, who needs friends, eh?
Isn’t that right, fan?
@phatboy
It would take a heart of stone not to read AFOMD’s incoherent witterings without succumbing to hilarity.
He’s the scpetics best recruiting sergeant.
BREAKING NEWS It appears that Climate Etc stalwarts like Faustino and Steve Fitzpatrick have abandoned the foxhole of willfully ignorant climate-change denialism.
That foxhole-of-willful-ignorance was getting kinda cramped, eh folks?
`Cuz plenty of sobering scientific reality coupled with sobering economic reality has been seeping into the bunker, eh?
But do not worry irredemptibles like Latimer Alder and PhatBoy and Eschenbach are still hunkered-in-the-bunker! The bunker-of-willful-ignorance will never be totally empty, will it?
Willis Eschenbach
What is “chartmanship”?
One definition is:
ClimateObserver goes a step further in its definition:
http://climateobserver.blogspot.com/2009/08/chartmanship.html
OK. So the intention is to “mislead” (i.e. to “lie”)
Yet this is achieved “without actually cheating”?
In my book, this is an oxymoron, because “misleading” = “cheating”.
But let’s take a classical example from IPCC, the infamous FAQ 3.1, Figure 1 in the FAQ section 3.1 of Ch.3, AR4 WG1.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3221/2534926749_f2be35e86f_o.jpg
This shows the HadCRUT3 temperature record since 1850 with linear trend lines, which all end in 2005, but which begin at different years, covering time periods of 150,100, 50 and 25 years.
As would be expected in a rough sine curve like the temperature record, the shorter the time period, the steeper the slope.
The footnote states (bold type by me).:
Here we have a classical case of “chartmanship”. The misleading statement in the footnote was that the chart indicated accelerated warming, when in actual fact it does not.
A similar chart with lines starting in 1906 (IPCC’s start of the 20th Century) with the ends in 1955 and 2005 would show a steeper first line than the longer second line, but this would not “indicate decelerated warming” over the 20thC.
I agree with you that “chartmanship” = “misleading” = “cheating” = “lying” and there is no place in a scientific report for deliberate lying.
But, hey, this is not the only example.
Max
Thanks, Manacker. The difference between chartsmanship and what these jokers have done is that chartsmanship involves how the data is displayed. But it doesn’t involve screwing with the data.
That’s what they have done, and when you mess with the data, you’ve gone way beyond chartsmanship …
w.
Manacker screws with the data, Willis something else. In triplicate.
Yo sho have punkt everyone.
re; willis calling others cowards
pot:kettle:black
David Springer
I have not seen evidence on this site that Willis acts like a coward.
He seems ready to take anyone on.
Have you seen other behavior?
Or are you reaching back to something from the distant past that is totally irrelevant here and now?
Just curious.
Max
Dishonorable service to his country. He was afraid of going to Vietnam so he faked mental illness to get out of it. Some other young man had to go in his place. That is cowardice. Don’t matter how long ago it was a tiger can’t change its stripes. The deed is done. The draft continues until the required number of boots are on the ground. A brave man filled in for him.
I could have a modicum of sympathy if he’d fled to Canada and given up his American citizenship. But here he still lives with someone else’s blood paying his tab. He isn’t fit to be an American.
“Redating changed strongly those decades that should have been left out of the paper.”
Right, Pekka. The redating was done deliberately to strongly change those decades into the blade of a hockeystick.
My understanding is that the only sensible thing to do with the most recent decades included in the paper would have been cutting them off.
Steve McI. presents plausible arguments that that part of redating that did influence strongly the latest datapoints was erroneous, but no redating would make them significant. Thus they should have been dropped from the paper, which would have made also these questions on the details of the redating procedure moot. (The questions raised by Steve McI. extend in one case 1000 years to the past, but the larger number of proxies lessens the influence of that over earlier periods.)
So why do you think that they did not do the only sensible thing, Pekka? Are they that stoopid?
I may have my own speculations, but I have no support for them. Thus I don’t write them out.
Pekka,
You are a gentleman and a scholar.
What would a gentleman and scholar do? Why read the ClimateGate files, and end the speculation.
======================
You are making exactly the same error as everyone made with the “hockey stick”. The blade of the hockey stick is the instrumental record. In this case, the sharply rising back of the wheelchair is the instrumental record and the CMIP5 A1B models. The key area for joining Marcott to these is 1800-1900.
The best place to look at the data and the issue is a series of posts at Nick Stokes’ Moyhu
That has been a point of discussion. The graphs are drawn at a scale that makes it impossible to tell what it’s showing over a few decades. I have found the arguments that conclude that the uptick is an outcome of the analysis compelling. The data as presented after redating supports that conclusion.
The conclusions that can be drawn from the comparison of recent instrumental data with the paleodata are a separate issue. One may compare the empirical paleodata with recent observations and one may compare also with projections to the future. The authors have done that as well in some discussion of the results, but their graphs don’t present such a comparison as far as I can judge. Neither should they put the instrumental data to this graph. In particular they should not add there anything without telling exactly, what they have done and how they have aligned the scales.
It’s so crowded over there (sarc). Can Moyhu accomodate more than a half dozen participants?
Pekka , the uptick is irrelevant to the analysis (btw there is a good conversation on this over at Bart’s with Bob Brand carrying the load) just as the blade part is irrelevant to the hockey stick proxies. That is the instrumental record. What is important is how the proxies form the seat of the wheelchair giving us a temperature record that is free of the need to calibrate against instrumental records.
The nonsense about the thesis not having 100% of the information in the paper is just that. A couple of years have passed. Science lurches forward, or perhaps McIntyre and Watts hallucinate that Marcott should have used his time machine to go back and change the thesis.,
Herr Rabbett, let’s assume you are correct (which you are most assuredly not), then I call on you to announce a full scale retraction of all of the hysterical press releases by the authors, the NSF, the journal, as well as the MSM. Willing to do that, eh Rabbett.
Eli
I fully agree that the uptick is irrelevant for the scientific content of the paper. Thus cutting it off had not reduced that scientific content (but might have had an influence on getting it publish in Science, who can be sure of that).
To me this is just one more example on the principle that scientific papers should make it very clear, what their real outcome is. A paper may contain additional speculative comments on the further relevance of it’s new results, but such comments should be kept well separated.
I know from own experience from distant past that violating that principle may be helpful in getting the paper published in most prestigious or most widely followed journals (in my case Physical Review Letters was more widely followed than full article Physical Review. Some questionable overstatements helped in getting papers to PRL, as I learned from a somewhat older colleague). Even so I disliked the overstatements then and I dislike overstatements and unjustified additions to the papers now.
Eli
The biggest problems with the “blade” were that it spliced “apples” onto “oranges”, after first deleting the “oranges” that were trending the opposite way from the “apples”.
Ouch!
Then, of course, there were the statistical problems with the shaft, exposed by McIntyre and McKitrick, confirmed by the Wegman committee and then validated by the NAS panel under oath.
IOW it was a total piece of junk, blade plus shaft, as is the IPCC AR4 claim of unprecedented late 20thC warmth for 1,300 years, which rests upon it,
To attempt to breath life back into a piece of this corpse is folly.
It’s dead. Let it R.I.P.
Max
Pekka, the problem with Marcott is a little more complicated, because the within the confines of the paper, all is well. The trouble is that the author then held court with the press, and said things that weren’t in the paper, and weren’t supported by the paper.
So all is more-or-less well with the paper itself, but not with the misleading and unsupported statements made to the media. You can exonerate the paper until you’re blue in the face, but it doesn’t deal with the misleading statements made to the press separately.
> spliced “apples” onto “oranges
I’d rather splice apples onto apples.
But would I really be splicing, then?
Good suggestion, rabbette. Go to Nicky “Racehorse Haines” Stokes, for the best look at the data and the issue from an impartial perspective. You people are rally funny.
Some bunnies, not Eli to be sure, would suggest that Don use a spell checker. Eli postulates that the problem lies deeper.
Eli Rabid, forget about Stokesy. Go with McIntyre – he is more competent than the top ten “climate scientists”, even with half his brain tied behind his back. You’ll look less foolish later on.
Bob,
Steve McI is smart and he studies seriously the issues he chooses to study. Those issues are, however, not necessarily the most important ones for climate science as a whole. Therefore following only or mainly CA may be seriously misleading.
I would expect that Steve Mci is perfectly willing to accept that this may be the case. That’s at least my impression from what he’s writing. He wants to understand issues of statistical analysis in climate science papers based on the intellectual interest of those issues. (That applies to his present work. Other factors may have been more essential years ago.)
Andrew holds grudges.
Not me, but some other Andrew.
Andrew
I do not.
Andrew
@pekka
You say
‘Steve McI is smart and he studies seriously the issues he chooses to study. Those issues are, however, not necessarily the most important ones for climate science as a whole’
I disagree. The most important thing for me about McIntyre’s work is that – almost wherever he looks – he finds and documents evidence of ‘shoddy work’ among people who really should know better.
It may well be that insiders do not find his subjects to be particularly relevant to their day-to-day work, but as it shines a piercing light on the field of climatology as a whole, it is way more important overall than today’s talking point du jour or tomorrow’s new reconstruction with or without a hockey stick or whatever else is grabbing the climatologists attention at any point.
And the most important thing that he reveals is not there. It is noticeable by its absence.
Every time he shows up ‘sharp practice’ – obvious even to those with the meanest of scientific understanding – there is a deafening silence from fellow practitioners. Occasionally they are motivated to produce some sort of defence against his searing gaze, but mostly we just hear nothing at all. No condemnation. Nobody having the guts (or desire) to say that the work is wrong or incorrect or should be withdrawn. Just an omerta worthy of the mafia.
For those of not in academe, we view this phenomenon and wonder why they tolerate the few rogues that break the rules. Or stretch the rules to breaking point to accommodate them.
For those of us with professional training in other fields, we most emphatically do not want bad apples in our profession. Their bad work taints us all and makes all our lives more difficult. We do our best to get rid of them.
But climatology is different and the cynic might come up with all sorts of hypotheses why they are tolerated. And none of then reflect well on the field.
So follow McIntyre and McKitrick and Jean S and Keenan and omnologos and Eschenbach and all the others skilled in showing up the dodgy practices of climatology.
And when they all run out of subjects to write about – and when fellow climatologists start to condemn rather than condone the rogues – you an be sure that it is a field full of reliable work done with integrity.
Holding your breath while waiting for this to happen is not recommended.
People may do shoddy work on main issues, but they do much more shoddy work on side issues. This paper is a obvious example of putting less care to issues that are not at the core of the research being done. The paper is about temperatures of holocene, not about 20th century.
Latimer Alder
+100
Pekka Pirila,
You have just provided another example of the orthodoxy trying to defend the indefencible.
Latimer @6.18: it is for such reasons that many like me who haven’t the capacity to be fully across the science have no faith in warmist claims: so much work has been shown to be shoddy, faulty or plain wrong, but the proponents just circle the wagons and blaze away at McIntyre et al. (Not THE Al, unfortunately). Reasonable people are reluctant to accept the claims of such a group, addressing which have had and will have far-reaching negative consequences. If climate scientists en masse were wedded to integrity, they would whole-heartedly embrace McIntyre and respond positively to his work. Then we might give them more credence.
@pekka
‘People may do shoddy work on main issues, but they do much more shoddy work on side issues.’
You illustrate my point.
I’d like my climatology to be done to a high standard throughout. We pay you guys good money and give you satisfying careers. In return we’d like good quality work.
But you seem to be quite unconcerned that that lots of it is shoddy. You condone rather than condemn the poor stuff.
And then you and your colleagues get annoyed that we have the effrontery to ask awkward questions about the work and the conclusions rather than just accepting everything you say without reservation.
I doubt if I’m alone in putting ‘Trust us, we are climatologists’ in the same category as ‘The cheque’s in the post’, and ‘I’m from head office, I’m here to help you’ . For the avoidance of any doubt, this is not meant as a compliment.
It’s a bit hard to cast Nigel as Diogenes of Sinope although there is some resemblance.
Pekka,
First off, the 20th century is part of the Holocene. There is no valid reason to exclude it from the rest of the record.
I do not understand why you consider Marcott et al paper to add anything to our understanding of the Holocene. Any perturbations in the record have been averaged out. It might be of value to conclude the 8.2 ka event only impacted the NH. It is of little value to suggest it never happened.
Do you believe this work would have been published in Science if it had only included the Holocene up to the 19th century? If yes, why?
I really cannot say whether the results of the paper were of wide enough interest for getting published in Science. What’s certain is that the uptick in a couple of figures did not add to the merits of the paper.
Don
Eli is right, I think you meant to say:
‘You people are really furry.’
Tonyb
:-) :-) :-)
Ear! ear! to that.
So can Ms. Rabett
Or “You people are really fuzzy.”
Or at least your logic is.
Helps when the issues are difficult.
In the search for an honest man – avert eyes here ^
Oh, no! The effete rabette, who refers to himself as Eli, is going to ding us for typos. Do you wear your ears, when you are lecturing your hapless students?
Elmer Fud is giving the waskilly wabbit bofh bawwels.
Will he choose to provide his advice on spelling before or after he has mastered the first person singular?
If after, then I think we need be in no urgent fear of correction.
If before, then the relevant text is Matthew 7.3
‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’
Eli finds agitating bags of wind good sport.
Eli isn’t capable of more challenging sports.
The waskilly wabbit finds breaking wind good sport?
(Didn’t know wabbits had it in them.)
Eli will be kind to manaker.
Look on the bright side. While it WAS a doctoral thesis before it was a paper in Science at least it WAS NOT a press release before it was a Science paper.
Not formally. But practically, it actually was.
Look folks.
Rud Istvan has just demonstrated beyond anyone’s doubt where someone has “put some lipstick on this pig” before publishing it.
Editors do this (in order to increase sales or get some desired point across).
Authors usually know about it and agree (why not, especially young authors who seek acknowledgement and recognition from the system?)
Did the “lipstick” end up giving a false picture of the “pig”?
The evidence cited by Rud appears to show it did.
So it was data manipulation.
– Why was it done?
– Why did the authors agree to it (assuming they did)?
These are the remaining unanswered questions.
Max
Some questions don’t need to be “answered.” As the scorpion told the frog, that is simply their nature.
There have definitly been two recent periods of atmospheric warmimg: 1910 – 1940 and 1970 to 2000, although the second was an oceah transport delayed version of the first. One of our contributors did succeed in eliminating the first by heavy smoothing of the time series and others may have done the same. It is easy to eliminate a real event by heavy smoothing and justifying that by saying it was noise.
Mosher said with a straight face:
It was the beginning of the interglacial. For many of those years it would have been impossible to be as warm is it is today. We are still in an interglacial period and are leaving the last glacial period further behind and with it the cold of that time. But since you don’t seem to like the current global temperature (what is it, btw?) what should it be or would it be had human kind suffered complete annihilation by runaway prion infestation and why would that be better than what it is given humans are here and doing well?
Include in your math the fact that even without human contribution, the rate of natural CO2 growth would have brought us to the current level not terribly far into the future and then beyond Hansen’s tipping point not long after that.
We will ignore for the purpose of this discussion that such natural catastrophic instability has been going on for millions of years and will continue.
we are close to be as warm or warmer than it has been in the past 12K years.
That is why there are about 7 Billion of us. Unfortunately, our number will reduce when the cooling solar cycle starts.
We must be greatfull to the current grand maximum.
Another skeptic convinced that he can predict the climate.
Naw, Steven, but his guess is as good as that of the IPCC, who also are “convinced that
he[it] can predict the climate”Max
dp, if the same method was used for the past 800k years and included sst paleo, we would be as warm as it has ever been in the past 800k years. It is warmer because it is not an ice age. It can’t help but be warmer.
The question has always been how much warmer and much warmer can we realistically expect? Once you reach the top, it is hard to get much higher.
@Pekka Pirila
You say
Steve McI is smart and he studies seriously the issues he chooses to study. Those issues are, however, not necessarily the most important ones for climate science as a whole
But neither are the issues the climate scientists choose to study the most important issues.
The climate scientists study temperatures and trends and statistics and photons and energy balance and butterflies and how climate effects the sex of apes and a whole host more as listed in this “A complete list of things caused by global warming”: http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm .
It’s all a great big “So What? because climate scientists, in the main, do not study what is important for informing policy. And the work of the few who do, is biased by their ideological beliefs – e.g., advocating irrational policies to justify mandating and subsidising renewable energy and imposing carbon pricing schemes. The work has not been done to justify the policies advocated by the CAGW orthodoxy.
Importantly, climate scientists are not interested in doing the work that is relevant so the work is not being done.
For consistency I would say lets treat this like we did the mistake found in the paper co-authored by Anthony Watts last year.
Ie lets just ignore it. Chalk it up as a mistake. There’s no need to retract anything said, or to question whether the mistake was due to incompetence or dishonesty.
lolwot, I agree, but that means not citing it and not using it to play up to the media. The problem with mistakes in the big glossy magazines tend to be the gifts that keep on giving.
Right lolwot, just a mistake, They made a mistake when they contacted all the usual journalists who could be counted on to write frightening articles about hockey sticks and the warmest this, and the unprecedented that, and the imminent threat to civilization as we know it.
“Lead author Shaun Marcott of OSU told NPR that the paleoclimate data reveal just how unprecedented our current warming is: “It’s really the rates of change here that’s amazing and atypical.” He noted to the AP, “Even in the ice age the global temperature never changed this quickly.”
Ooops. Marcott just made a mistake when he failed to communicate to the fawning media that the hockey stick effect was not robust (by his own admission)…And that doesn’t even begin to touch his many errors within the study.
It’s all a mistake. Sorry. Sorry for the inconvenience. Never mind.
Sorry.
Even after writing the above, I’m still shaking my head. I really think most of you guys are full on bonkers. There’s not an alarmist on this site who wouldn’t make an interesting case study in psychopathology.
The disturbing aspect to me was the NSF grant officer going out in public and hyping the invalid conclusions to the media. It made the incentive structures operating all too naked.
Lets look at the differences.
1. The issue was an oversight, failing to look at both RAW and TOBS.
2. The oversight was noted and Zeke and I were thanked, publically THANKED for pointing out the oversight. They said our names.
3. Nobody questioned zekes motives or my motives in looking for errors.
ITS WHAT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO DO! mcintyre is SUPPOSED to look for errors, and science is improved when he finds them REGARDLESS of whether they are material or not. he should be thanked, acknowledged and thats the end of it. What part of THANK YOUR CRITICS dont people get.
4. Anthony, McIntyre and I still talk about the paper and I look forward to seeing it published. My my grown men can disagree and still talk. Why
cant marcott simply call Steve McIntyre and explain what he did. Crap, I get emails from all around the world from folks asking me about BEST.. I dont do oposition research on them, I try to answer their questions even though I consider the code to be answer enough.
As far as I see it some folks in climate science have missed a grand opportunity to enlist the help of a very sharp man.
Steven Mosher | March 20, 2013 at 11:00 pm |
Rud Istvan is, without question, one of the sharpest businessmen to have expressed an interest in climatology. He’s no Steve Mosher, but he’s sharp.
It’d be great if the back-and-forth continues, and especially agreeable if it went forward with courtesy and goodwill.
Anyone care to try to broker that engagement?
mosher –
Some observations.
Stevie-mac attributed tribalistic statments to Marcott when (as least as I’ve seen, and I’ve asked) the evidence isn’t there.
Anthony and others big-time hyped a flawed paper.
There was hostility from the “skeptic” tribe to the criticism of Anthony’s paper.
There’s no shortage of bad form, lack of charity, and tribalism on either side of the divide.
> As far as I see it some folks in climate science have missed a grand opportunity to enlist the help of a very sharp man.
Truly “reading the blog” might even have sufficed.
Steven, global warming crusaders don’t want the science improved. They want it accepted at face value. If there’s any improving to do they’ll improve it themselves.
The Marcott debacle is a demonstration of corruption in climate science. It’s not a mistake. It’s a deliberate deception. Marcott’s doctoral thesis is the unbuggered paper. The Science piece was that thesis unscrupulously manipulated to produce a propaganda piece and Science magazine was a willing accomplice.
Mosh has been involved in an impressive data mining effort, and one on which I have been analyzing on my own.
I am curious about the climate sensitivity used on the simple model fit used here:
http://berkeleyearth.org/results-summary/
I have a feeling it is using a 3C sensitivity for doubling of CO2.
Steven Mosher- You have my standing ovation for this post.
WHT –
I have a feeling it is using a 3C sensitivity for doubling of CO2
Yes. Using BEST’s recommended Beta value of 4.47
4.47 * ln (2) = 3.1C
blueice2hotsea, I don’t think it really makes sense to do that calculation. BEST used CO2 as a proxy. People talk about the sensitivity of CO2 as CO2 rather than CO2 as a proxy. Conflating the two doesn’t make sense, and that’s what happens when you do a calculation like yours.
Of course, BEST was asking for confusion when they did the same calculation and compared it to other sensitivity estimates for a doubling of CO2. That begged for confusion. It also rendered their results basically meaningless as they didn’t discuss CO2’s relationship to what it was proxying. A person could figure out that ratio, multiply BEST’s sensitivity by it then consider the issue of timing (transient versus equilibrium sensitivity)… but why should someone have to go through that just to be able to get a meaningful result from BEST’s paper?
Then again, their curve-fitting sucks anyway. Their manual manipulation of their volcanic record to add a volcano is understandable (though their failure to disclose it is not), but their failure to do any testing of their fit is not. The most obvious example is their volcanic fit is highly dependent upon the period used. You get a dramatically different value if you exclude earlier years from the fit. That’s troubling as those earlier years have more uncertainty than the newer ones.
Personally, I think if adding less accurate data causes significant changes in your results, you should question your results. BEST’s fine statistical team apparently doesn’t even think about the matter.
Brandon
“however, nearly all such forcings follow a similar time evolution, and because our fit is so simple (a linear superposition of known curves) there was value in keeping the number of parameters small. For the analysis that follows it is not meaningful to distinguish between anthropogenic forcing that has similar time histories (We tried, for example, including a historic term for methane; the resulting fit was virtually identical, and the data was insufficiently precise to determine the relative components of CO2 and methane).”
In english that you might understand: we fit combinations of all forcings.
it did not improve the fit. C02 is a proxy for all forcings. adding variables that dont improve the fit is not a good thing.
WRT the correction of Gao. That small correction is clearly called out in the supplementary material http://berkeleyearth.org/xls/forcing-comparison.xlsx
Many folks try to put too much weight on this particular result
we write:
The temperature “forcing” of volcanic aerosols is a complicated function of latitude, altitude, season, and particle size; see Kelly et al. [20]. However, the fit presented here can provide a rough estimate. We observe a response of -1.5 ± 0.5°C per 100 Tg of atmospheric sulfate emitted. The 95% confidence interval quoted here is primarily influenced by the uncertainties in the temperature data; however we also allowed the magnitude of each eruption to have a 1-sigma error of ± 15%. A more sophisticated analysis of the forcing and the details of the climate response may be able to improve upon the crude estimate offered here based solely on the linear combination fit.
“In the simple linear combination, the anthropogenic factor, log (CO2), has a weight equivalent to an effective response of 3.1 ± 0.3°C at doubled CO2 (95% confidence). However, this parameterization is based on an extremely simple linear combination, using only CO2 and no other anthropogenic factors and considering only land temperature changes. As such, we don’t believe it can be used as an explicit constraint on climate sensitivity other than to acknowledge that the rate of warming we observe is broadly consistent with the IPCC estimates of 2-4.5°C warming (for land plus oceans) at doubled CO2. The purpose of the anthropogenic term is merely to show that our extended temperature reconstruction is consistent with an anthropogenic explanation, and not to try and detangle the details for those changes. However, more detailed studies of how our land-surface temperature history compares to the various forcing and expected responses should ultimately help constrain parameters critical to the understanding of climate change.”
Let me see if I can explain what that section of the paper does from my perspective. The question comes “is the data before 1850 any good?”
I know of a few ways of checking that, the easiest in terms of the scope of the paper was to check for consistency with other known science.
1. Is it consistent with the volcano record
2. Is it consistent with what we know about sensitivity
There are some other more sophisticated ways t
o approach the problem, but within the scope of the paper those simple questions could be answered.
For some people this consistency amounts to proof that humans caused the warming. To others, that science is true independent of what we show here.. icing on the cake as it were.
Thats why Muller could look at it and be surprised at the fit and other folks like me say “hey we knew that”
Of course if you dont believe in C02 effect then this consistency will be proof of nothing.
Isnt that funny how the same evidence can be seen so many different ways
Steven Mosher:
Why are you saying this? Despite the implication you make (“english that you might understand”), what you say is perfectly in line with my descriptions of BEST’s work. It seems you’re insulting me for not understanding something because you don’t understand what I said!
This is at least the second time you’ve done this on this very issue. I pointed out the same thing before. Your response? Non-existent. You consistently misrepresent me in a mocking tone. It’s stupid, and it makes responding to you seem like a waste of time.
Heck, the only thing I’ve actually said that you responded to was the issue about the modification to the Gao record. That’s remarkable given how much you wrote.
If you want to have a discussion, quote my words and respond to what they say. Otherwise, don’t bother.
BrandonShollenberger –
Yes. Thanks for the correction.
BEST is using CO2 as a proxy for total anthropogenic radiative forcing, which they estimate to be about 10% greater than CO2 alone.
So, how do you feel about guessing 2.8C as their CS “estimate”? (1.68/1.84 * 3.1)
Or perhaps Steven Mosher will help out here.
I guess I should respond to the Gao point. Mosher claims a modification “is clearly called out in the supplementary material” for his paper. The problem with this is twofold. First, the file he links to says the correction is made “per Gao et al.” There is no reference given for who Gao et al is. That might seem like a pointless comment since Gao et al are referenced by BEST. It isn’t. Comments Mosher and Zeke have made indicate that reference is actually false. They say the correction comes from Gao, a single author of the paper, in personal communication. That is not Gao et al.
Second, there is no link to the supplementary material in the paper. There is no discussion of it in the paper. There is no indication it even exists. There is no way a person would go from the paper to that file and see the change “clearly called out.”
But what if one goes to the Papers page of the BEST website? There is no discussion of the supplementary material there. How about if you follow the link the site gives for the paper? There is no discussion of the supplementary material there. In fact, when I follow that link, I don’t even get directed to the paper. All I’m shown is a page with two other papers listed.
Is it possible to find the supplementary material for the paper? Yes. Is it possible to find out about the “correction” they applied to the record? Yes. Is it something a reader could reasonably be expected to do? No.
This is a minor issue compared to the complete lack of testing by BEST on their curve fitting (they didn’t not even do basic in-sample testing), but even on it, BEST does a bad job.
Blueice2hotsea, “So, how do you feel about guessing 2.8C as their CS “estimate”? (1.68/1.84 * 3.1)”
Since they used CO2 as a proxy for all forcing, it shouldn’t change the sensitivity, just the beta for CO2 doubling. As best I can tell that constant isn’t, it is temperature dependent and the temperature it is dependent on is the source of the estimated DWLR. That is why I find the shift in diurnal temperature range so interesting.
Wow. Things just get better. I found a correct link for the paper we’re discussing. It has a link for the paper titled, Supplementary File. The link goes to a totally different file than Mosher provided.
The “correction” may have been “clearly called out” in one file, but it’s difficult to imagine how a reader of the paper is expected to find that file.
Oops. Steven Mosher did reply. And it would appear my 2.8C guess is also wrong as BEST is land-only.
Anyone have a guess as to what 2.8C land-only implies for global CO2 sensitivity?
No takers? Ok here’s a naive estimate.
Assume a 2x land sensitivity (during satellite era) and 29% land weighting:
2.83 * 0.29 + 1.41 * 0.71 ≈ 1.8C
As Cap’n Dallas pointed out, sensitivity is temperature dependent. So 1.8C would be an instantaneous BEST guess subject to annual revision!
As always, if I am a fool, then let Socrates speak. thanks.
blueice2hotsea, I’d have to check the data to see if your 10% estimation is right. Assuming it is right, we have to consider several things when looking at the 2.8 value. First, as you point out, BEST is land-only and we generally talk about global sensitivity. This will likely bias it high.
Second, BEST’s result is not for an equilibrium sensitivity. That means it will be biased low. Third, land’s response function is different not just in size, but in time. Since it will respond faster to a change in forcing, a transient sensitivity for it is not directly comparable for one of ocean or land+ocean.
It’s difficult to go from BEST’s results to what you’re discussing, and that’s without even considering the uncertainty in the forcing history. I wouldn’t care to try it.
By the way, I stepped out for an hour to eat dinner. You’re so impatient!
Chewie ought to chew on this blog post I put together:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/stochastic-analysis-of-log-sensitivity.html
The land temperature record is exceedingly important. People like Chewie that don’t have much experience with physics seem to think that heat is something that can naturally organize itself. Not so — what we are seeing with the land temperature records ala BEST is the effect of the fast-transient of the climate sensitivity. This is the value that the slower ocean will eventually reach if we can wait long enough.
The physical analogy is that you have a computer chip, but the chip doesn’t have a heat sink attached directly to it, but instead is coupled through a relatively poor thermally conductive path to a huge heat sink. The huge heat sink doesn’t matter as the path is preventing the heat from dispersing as fast as it can, so the land always leads the way. I consider it less useful to look at mixed ocean and land signals.
Brandon,
You are welcomed to write a comment and explain how you were befuddled. The paper in Chief does not comment on fixing the Gao record. That’s called the edit room floor. The correction is called out in
the data pages we supply for interested folks. the paper directs people to the web page. When people cant find things they write me. Sometimes they even urge college students to write in their place.
You have the data. The equations are all there. No FOIA required, no tedious back and forth, I’ve pointed you at this before.
Here is a hint. You are no steve mcintyre.
Thanks Brandon.
The correction to Gao et al, somewhat insignificant, came from a correspondence with several people, among them Gao.
1. the mistake made was acknowledged
2. They thanked us.
3. We had a choice
A) use data that was bad, provable bad. In which case you would bitch
B) wait for Gao to fix it and write a paper.. maybe never
C) fix it per his instructions, which we did.
4. We had an obligation to disclose this fix. That obligation is met. Not to your satification, but life is not burger king and you dont get things your way. had it been substantial, it would merit a sentence in the paper.
5. a series of communications between a few people resulted in a fix. ‘Gao et al’ doesnt describe that very well. I’ll change that for you if you like.
Webster, You have to know where you start before you can know where it is going to go.
Since the Antarctic is thermally isolated, you have a larger southern sink than northern sink. Since CO2 does not add mass to the atmosphere, the warming in the NH at peak levels tend to relieve itself to space via SSW events. Now if you can figure out how much of the warming is due to CO2 and how much is due to longer term natural ocean “sloshing” around, then you can come up with an educated estimate of impact due to CO2. Without knowing the initial conditions, you are mathturbating.
” The dominant forcing factor appears to be precessional insolation; Northern Hemisphere summer insolation correlates to at least the early to middle Holocene climate trend. Spectral analysis reveals centennial-scale cyclic climate changes with periods of 1220, 1070, 400, and 150 yr. The record shows good correlation to East Antarctic ice cores and to climate records from South Georgia and Bunger Oasis. However, the record shows out-of-phase behavior with regard to climate records from the western Antarctic Peninsula and the Peru-Chile Current; such behavior hints at a climatic divide through Patagonia, the Drake Passage, and between West and East Antarctica.”
Since I was just comparing a few Atlantic Paleo reconstructions.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Z63aHQbkBew/UUy2UAR1mnI/AAAAAAAAHio/p66RH0n6ODQ/s887/Atlantic%2520SST%2520reconstructions.png
The Nielsen et al. is in red and has been climbing since 2500 BC, The Ruehlemann tropical has been climbing slowly since 9000 BC while the Bendle sub atctic has been falling since from 8500 BC. There are extremely long internal lags due to the vast thermal capacity of the oceans and the asymmetrical distribution.
You really should check out some of the GFDL papers.
Steven Mosher:
Because I participate on blogs and have engaged with people involved in the project. If not for that, I wouldn’t have them. You’ve consistently promoted certain standards about providing data and code with papers that BEST has not met with this paper.
On what basis do you say it was a mistake? The Gao record does not reflect a particular volcano. That’s true. However, Gao et al attributed that to a flaw in their data, not a mistake. Calling that a mistake misrepresents the issue in a way that hides a problem.
I would not “bitch” if you had used the Gao record as provided. You’re making this up. You are flat-out fabricating claims in order to portray me in a negative light.
As I’ve discussed, there is no traceable connection between the disclosure and the paper. There is no way a reader of the paper would be directed to the disclosure. The fact one can find a file on the BEST website does not make it adequate.
By the way, you should be careful saying BEST had a choice. Shoddy information sharing aside, BEST chose not to do anything resembling adequate sensitivity testing for their curve fitting. As I’ve discussed (and shown elsewhere), its fitted parameters are not remotely robust. And depending on the period used to calculate the fit, the modification to the Gao record can make a significant difference.
But you guys chose not to do simple testing for issue like that.
Brandon
‘which case you would bitch
I would not “bitch” if you had used the Gao record as provided. You’re making this up. You are flat-out fabricating claims in order to portray me in a negative light.”
###############
Brandon. it is pretty clear that you havent read Gao.
They clearly state that the record was missing the volcano in question. They clearly state the value one should use. We cite Gao et al for a reason. That is the source of the correction. Of course to confirm this we communicated with them.
1. The correction is called out in the text of Gao.
2. You never checked that.
3. We checked that by writing to him.
4. We corrected the file PER HIS INSTRUCTIONS, we noted the correction in our datafile and supplied the reference: Gao et al, And I’ve told you we also communicated with him. Thats called double checking.
So, when you get around to reading Gao, you will see that you are no steve mcintyre.
Steven Mosher:
Fascinating. You figure I what, downloaded it to my computer just for fun? I can’t prove I read it, but I can take a screenshot showing when I downloaded it. Oh wait, you’re just saying this as a lame way to try to discredit me. It’s funny as you said this about the paper:
Gao et al did not say this. Their paper doesn’t say there was a mistake made. Their paper offers a very clear reason the El Chichon volcano doesn’t show up in their record, and it has nothing to do with a mistake. I’ll quote Gao et al:
It was missed just due to a limitation of their data. There was no mistake. You’ve completely fabricated that claim. You fabricated a claim about a paper while claiming I clearly didn’t read the paper.
I clearly did read the paper. That’s why I represented it accurately. That’s why I didn’t spread misinformation about it. That’s why I didn’t accuse people who discussed it accurately of not reading it.
I may be “no steve mcintyre,” but I’m a hell of a lot closer than you.
By the way, Gao et al did not “clearly state the value one should use.” They didn’t even say their record should be modified. All they said is they tested an approach with a different record because El Chichon was missing from there’s:
This doesn’t say any modification should be made to their record. It certainly doesn’t “clearly state the value one should use” for the El Chichon volcano. In no way does Gao et al support anything Steven Mosher is saying.
Mosher attacks me and defend BEST with what is tantamount to lies. I hope the other members of the BEST team are better than this.
brandon –
Just curious – do you think there is a substantive difference between lies and and what is “tantamount to lies?”
If you think there is, then is the difference similar to the (apparently you think substantive) difference between ad homs and “you make no sense” or “you’ve offered falsehood after falsehood” or “you also hand-wavingly offer” etc.?
Heh, Joshua is ‘tantamount to pertinent’.
==========
Joshua:
Definitely. I’ll offer a parallel from criminal prosecution. Unintentional homicide is usually not considered murder. Because of that, it carries a lesser sentence. There are exceptions though. When the defendant’s “depraved indifference” causes a homicide, he or she can be prosecuted for murder.
The idea behind that is unintentional acts can be as bad as intentional acts in some cases. In Mosher’s case, he may not be aware that what he says is untrue, but he shows extreme recklessness and indifference in regard to the validity of what he says. That makes his behavior as bad as lying, but it doesn’t mean he knows what he says is false.
An ad hominem uses an attack against a person to discredit an argument the person makes. Each of the quotes you offer (I believe) comes from comments I’ve made. In those comments, I did the opposite. I took a response to an argument the person made and used it to discredit the person.
In other words, I did the exact opposite of an ad hominem argument. I don’t see that as being similar to the the difference “between lies and what is ‘tantamount to lies.'”
Brandon –
So, what you’re saying is that there are two basic possibilities. Either he could be acting extremely recklessly and indifferently to the validity in his opinions – effectively the equivalent of lying (tantamount to lying) or he could be outright stating opinions that he knows to be false.
So let’s look at what you say next:
So if I understand you correctly, you think that saying that Mosher is either (a) reckless and indifferent to validity or, the equivalent of lying or (b) stating opinions he knows to be false (i.e., lying) is not “tantamount” to trying to discredit his arguments by discrediting him as being being reckless and indifferent to validity or knowingly making false statements?
Now in response to that argument, I might be inclined to say either: (1) that argument makes no sense, or (2) you make no sense. I would consider either to be “tantamount” to an ad hom (i.e., the effect is the same as an ad hom).
As such, I will simply say that I disagree with your analysis. In my view, saying that someone is either reckless and indifferent the validity of their arguments (i.e.,the equivalent of being a liar) or knowingly stating outright falsities (i.e., a liar), is certainly “tantamount” to discrediting their arguments by attacking them personally.
As an aside…
I am confused by the syntax of that statement. Whose “response to an argument the person made” did you use to “discredit the person?” Your own response to their argument?
Seems to me there could only be three possibilities: (1) you used your own previous “response to an argument the person made” to discredit that person, (2) you used a third person’s “response to the argument the person made” to discredit that person, or (3) you took that persons own response to their own argument to discredit them?
If the third choice is the one you were describing, could you explain how a person would respond to their own argument? If it is the second choice, could you identify the third person involved? If it is the first choice, then could you explain how you used your own previous response to that person’s argument to then discredit that person?
brandon –
Re-reading that statement, it occurs to me that maybe you meant to say “I took a
response toan argument the person made and used it to discredit the person.Nonetheless, I am still confused by the argument that you aren’t seeking to discredit a person’s argument through the (acknowledged) act of (as least in your mind) “discredit[ing that] person.”
Brandon – consider the following approach to debate:
You make arguments that make no sense. In fact, you just made an argument that makes no sense. In fact, the argument you just made is proof that either you make arguments that show you to be reckless and indifferent to logical validity (tantamount to lying) or you that you lie.
And compare that approach to one expressed in the following:
Brandon, I disagree with your analysis and here are the reasons why…..
What is the effective difference between those to approaches to debate?
Joshua (edited to simplify):
Correct. I discredited his arguments. I then used that to speak about him. I built upon the problems with his arguments to make a point about him.
I have no idea how you think your (1) here is even close to ad hominem. Saying an “argument makes no sense” is attacking the logic of the argument. It’s not using anything about the person making the argument to discredit the argument. How do you define ad hominem?
I guess I should have said “my response” instead of “a response.”
Given the first “approach” is a gross caricature of what I do, there are many effective differences. It’d be pointless to list them as it’d be arguing a strawman. You didn’t even include an ellipsis to indicate reasons were given in the first approach like you did in the second.
Do you really think your portrayal of the first approach is fair? If so, I don’t think there’s any way we can hope to make progress.
lolwot
IOW “fuggibaboudit”.
Good advice.
Too bad IPCC did not follow this advice in AR4 after the Mann “shtick” had been scientifically discredited.
These studies, even when they are shown to be flawed, live on forever (if they convey the desired message – and this one, like the Mann “shtick”, does, in the eyes of IPCC).
Max
One that was actually published or the one he is still working on. Serious question.
lolwot,
So if this were poker and you caught the other guy cheating, you say, ok past is past, we can ignore it – after he has taken your money?
You do not get the opportunity for the public spotlight and then afterwords quietly acknowledge to a tiny circle of friends that you were in serious error.
You know, a real follower of the sport of hockey knows a referee who blows the whistle too often just gets in the way and ruins the game for everyone, while generally resulting in more fights.
All this hyperventilating over-the-top point-missing microanalysis, true or not, seems a bit unhealthy, and certainly to be feeding into the unhealthiest tendencies of some denizens.
And what, in sum, do we see wrong with Marcott’s Science article? It differs from his thesis?! So what? That’s common practice.
It employs ambitious methods to link the paleo proxy and model and instrumental trends in a single informatic?
What is wrong with informatics? It’s the single largest trend on the web, after Twitter. How do we know this? Well, there’s informatics showing it.
Rud Istvan, you’re better than to waste your time seeking to critique a mere informatic, as if it meant anything that wasn’t already patent from a hundred studies. Produce some new research. Get it peer reviewed. Published.
Y’know.. like science.
BartR, I agree. Really, we should ignore 99% of the climate science stuff and get back to doing business.
captdallas,
Unfortunately we cannot afford to ignore 99% of the climate stuff because they are using it to justify government interference in our business.
However it does look like we should ignore 99% of what Bart R is posting because he made it abundantly clear that he is unfamiliar with Marcott et al, climate science, the peer review process and the game of hockey.
In peer review, the people doing the reviews are called referees. If they blow the whistle too often it prevents a paper from being published. If they don’t blow the whistle, all kinds of cheap shots get into the journals. A person or team wins the game if their paper gets published. It’s a major league game if it is published in Nature or Science. If they are lucky they will get written up in the sport pages.
In hockey, referees are trained and certified to ensure a certain standard in game play. In climate science the referees are not necessarily familiar with the subject, have strong opinions about who may be allowed to win and on occasion promise to change the peer review process to ensure some people will not get published.
Steve McIntyre et al are not in the game. They are like commentators reviewing the game as it was played and pointing out the penalties not called by the referees thereby throwing the game. At least Marcott et al allowed their game to be videoed for review unlike Mann et al who still won’t even release the verbal play by play. The video doesn’t show all the corners all the time, so it’s still not totally clear what went on.
It is clear that Marcott et al were offside numerous times moving the data back and forth across the blue line without a word from the linesmen. Any goals points they might have scored were all kicked in after a hand pass.
And just in case Bart R is reading this… Marcott et al did not create their blade using the modern instrument record. They did it by moving individual data points in individual proxy records until a blade emerged out of the dross
Jeff Norman | March 24, 2013 at 2:59 pm |
However it does look like we should ignore 99% of what Bart R is posting because he made it abundantly clear that he is unfamiliar with Marcott et al, climate science, the peer review process and the game of hockey.
Did you want to list other things I’m unfamiliar with, or did you want to go back, read what I actually said, and compare it to what you got out of it in your haste to commence ranting?
Am I familiar with Marcott et al? I’m familiar enough to have dismissed the last 120 years of the infographic in question as entirely unreliable without further development or resolution of apparent discrepancies, and to understand you can tell nothing about the frequency of sub-century spikes directly from millennialy smoothed ensemble averages. But you clearly missed that, as it wasn’t the first thing your eyes fell on. Also, Marcott’s so new to published papers, it’s impossible to track citations of his work directly — though I expect this paper and follow ups will explode very quickly with adaptation of his methods. You might want to check the citation index instead of Marcott’s thesis advisor.
I don’t pretend to know anything about climate science. My entry in the denizens page says so. So what? Other than that of the two of us, I’m the one not pretending it all over the interwebs.
You might be interested to learn I am not a fan of the current peer review process. I’ve been saying so for many years. It’s not transparent, it’s inefficient, it encourages lax and deceptive practices while slowing the progress of research and of communicating findings. There are ample better tools for publishing science than are used by Science. How did I form this opinion? Certainly not by guessing about it from outside the process.
And I learned to skate before the age most toddlers learn to walk, from a former professional hockey player, my father. Though I don’t pretend to any particular affiliation with the game.
In peer review, the people doing the reviews are called referees. If they blow the whistle too often it prevents a paper from being published. If they don’t blow the whistle, all kinds of cheap shots get into the journals. A person or team wins the game if their paper gets published. It’s a major league game if it is published in Nature or Science. If they are lucky they will get written up in the sport pages.
See, the logic of analogy is a funny thing.
You extend the analogy you’re handed, instead of confusingly supplanting it with another near analogy straw man and arguing that one. Your analogy is pretty and all, but it’s not the analogy Rud Istvan argued and I responded to.
Get your head in the game. This game. Not the one you wish you were playng.
In hockey, referees are trained and certified to ensure a certain standard in game play. In climate science the referees are not necessarily familiar with the subject, have strong opinions about who may be allowed to win and on occasion promise to change the peer review process to ensure some people will not get published.
We’ll never know what referees Science used for the Marcott article, on the balance of probabilities. Only the publisher knows all the referees, and they’re contractually and conventionally tight-lipped about identities, generally. If you find out who the real referees on the Marcott paper were, by all means let us know.
The referees are unlikely to be the same as his thesis advisor, and are likely to be in large part responsible for the differences between the thesis and the paper as published. Which would likely be the product of the referee’s expertise — which we can deduce is not small, to have led to such a significant (and so far as we can tell, correct) change.
Steve McIntyre et al are not in the game. They are like commentators reviewing the game as it was played and pointing out the penalties not called by the referees thereby throwing the game. At least Marcott et al allowed their game to be videoed for review unlike Mann et al who still won’t even release the verbal play by play. The video doesn’t show all the corners all the time, so it’s still not totally clear what went on.
Rud Istvan blew the whistle. He dressed himself up as a referee in a lawyerly bowtie, not as a commentator. He aligned himself with a team of McIntyre et al. This is not what commentators do. This is not what referees do, either, but it’s the analogy Rud imposed.
It is clear that Marcott et al were offside numerous times moving the data back and forth across the blue line without a word from the linesmen. Any goals points they might have scored were all kicked in after a hand pass.
What is ‘clear’ to you is all speculation, so conjectural and ill-supported as to be more defamation and malice than commentary. The conclusions ‘deduced’ by McIntyre, Istvan & team are anything but reliable, and while the situation needs resolution, it isn’t going to be resolved in a brawl.
And just in case Bart R is reading this… Marcott et al did not create their blade using the modern instrument record. They did it by moving individual data points in individual proxy records until a blade emerged out of the dross
The premise is exactly right. Marcott et al’s blade is a product of Marcott et al’s methods; that doesn’t exclude however that the modern instrument record played no role.
There are any number of legitimate ways to procure a blade in a curve. None of these are being considered in this witch hunt.
Well done, barty! You should get the CAGW Obfuscation Prize, this month.
Maybe more like an infomercial. Sham Wow comes to mind.
Except the sham wow shammy is functional.
Rupicapra rupicapra leaps from peak to peak of the rugged Carpathians.
===============
kim
help me out here. Would the last 15 years of this qualify as a hockey stick?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
tonyb
Yikes, tony, we aren’t cooling are we? For how long is this supposed to last?
=========
Kim
As its cooling so quickly does that disqualify it as a hockey stick? Perhaps its a cliff?
Imagine that there is a counter line going up as quickly as the official Met office figures (i.e Real world, not some imaginary global temperature) are going down. That would represent our energy costs in the UK. A potent mix-sharply dropping temperatures and sharply rising energy costs.
tonyb
If this was merely about the science,” y’ know “like [empirical] science,” you might have a point.
It’s about the corruption of science. It’s all in the Climategate emails, if you care to read about it.
“Informatics:” is that anything like propaganda?
pottereaton | March 20, 2013 at 10:42 pm |
“Informatics:” is that anything like propaganda?
I’m delighted you ask.
http://academic.cuesta.edu/acasupp/as/404.htm
While there’s a plausible charge of card-stacking in Marcott and certainly false (or exaggerated) analogy, Istvan (who called Marcott’s paper propaganda) has demonstrated nearly every technique of propaganda in his critiques.
Propaganda Techniques Score — Marcott:2; Arts of Truth: 7
Likewise, Errors of Attack, Faulty Logic and Weak Reference —
Marcott 3; Arts of Truth 10
More to the point, while Marcott’s Science article does appear to have some qualities that may pull it into the range of propaganda (and some in the media will certainly propagandize it far more than has yet happened), Rud Istvan’s postings and followership is so far over what would be commonly seen in writing as to be demonstrating tendency toward demagoguery:
http://www.drw.utexas.edu/roberts-miller/handouts/demagoguery
Polarization. Ingroup/outgroup thinking, slipperiness on crucial terms, “god and devil” terms, scapegoating, simplicitism, motivism, double standard, personalization..
Worse, this is basically an emprunt from CA.
BartR: thanks for the links on propaganda, but I asked you about “informatics.”
Here’s what I in my ignorance assume to be an informatic (you are the first person I’ve run across that uses the term as a noun, but I assume that is because you are trend-setter) that might shed new light on the assertions in your post above:
http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/19/bent-their-core-tops-in/#comment-406486
Note that McIntyre links to important posts by Tom Curtis at SkepticalScience.
> Note that McIntyre links to important posts by Tom Curtis at SkepticalScience.
Not without a sideswipe to “Mann and his associates”.
Thank you, Steve.
An informatic, formation from information + graphic, plural informatics; as distinguished from the field of informatics.
Also called infographic or infographics.
http://visual.ly/
BartR: I see. Iow, it no longer has anything to do with science and the proper application of the scientific method. It’s all about the presentation of information to achieve the desired effect.
That’s what I thought.
pottereaton | March 21, 2013 at 1:21 am |
Well, it’s not a traditional time series, and it hasn’t used commonly accepted tools of analysis that are well understood by the scientific community to produce a reliable foundation for further work, so as an ensemble it is more infographic than anything else.
And isn’t every purposeful communication presented to achieve a desired effect?
Bart R,, I already did what you suggest. Which is why I now have time to fool around with the likes of you.
Two fundamental, and several complementary, patents on improved energy storage materials for DLC Caps. Most recent British research says enabled market will be $11 billion by 2022.
New from first principals theorem calculating Helmoltz layer energy storage behind the patents, leading to new RC constant and energy/power density insights. World scale pilot line making the materials commissioned in Austria last October.
You should have Googled me and that before asserting your embarrassingly wrong ad hominems.
You would benefit from studying my ebook, The Arts of Truth.
You are as wrong as Marcott, just more easily proven so.
Disregards
Rud Istvan | March 21, 2013 at 12:46 am |
You mistake me. Your name was known to me long before your first post here. No Google required. I was, and remain, a fan of your accomplishments and acumen.
More to the point, why are you wasting time with me? Mosher’s put his finger on the pulse of a much better question, which is the opportunity to improve Marcott’s work.
With or without Marcott’s collaboration, you could be the next Muller, if you undertook a project like BEST for paleo-proxy informatics with that time you have to fool around.
And wouldn’t that be better than this, frankly, beneath you effort?
And why wouldn’t Rud publish books and promote his schtick in a technical sense of the word?
Y’know… like business.
Bart
You can’t be serious.
What happened here appears on the surface at least to have been a willful manipulation of data in a scientific report by an editor of a venerable scientific publication in order to sell a questionable preconceived notion (i.e. that it is unusually warm today in at least the past 1300 years or so – or even the past 10,000 years).
You pooh-pooh this as nothing, concentrating on the Marcott study, itself, which you agree “does appear to have some qualities that may pull it into the range of propaganda”.
Then you attack the “whistleblower” (or rather the person, who has gone out of his way to expose not only the errors in the study but also the editorial manipulation of the report by the Science editor).
Sounds to me like you are saying “the ends justifies the means” in climate science.
I disagree wholeheartedly.
Max
manacker | March 21, 2013 at 1:26 am |
Sadly, we’ve experienced in the past that what things sound like to you don’t always match what they are.
You have to go a very, very long way around the facts to call it questionable or preconceived that the current level of global temperature today is warm relative to the later part of Marcott’s reconstruction. Sure, it relies on consensus views outside of Marcott’s thesis, and it’s lamentable more clarity and better supporting citations weren’t used. And sure, by all means, call them on those problems.
You can also question the way Marcott et al jammed the ensemble into current times. I certainly think it bears more exploration and examination to prove the reliability of this approach.
The thing with whistles in hockey, the referee is supposed to be on equally courteous and dispassionate terms with both teams. Otherwise, it just brings the game into disrepute. When a referee does violate this creed in hockey, he certainly is not granted the whistleblower defense by the people in the stands, the players, or the people who run the league.
The traditional thing to do in science in such cases is to make your views known — tactlessly and bluntly — and produce better science in the field. It isn’t to let the referee run players into the boards and start brawling.
Rud Istvan’s response is only slightly over the top, in the two topics he very generously and quite capably delivered. The follow-up and followership? That appears more than slight.
And it is a waste, because so much better could have been done without the outrage and agitprop.
Bart R
Rud Istvan did a good job a) analyzing Marcott et al. and pointing out some problems in this study, and b) digging into differences between the “Science” article, which got published, and the paper by Marcott et al. prior to editorial revisions.
In this thread the subject is the latter.
I found it very interesting that additions were made to a scientific paper in order to add new conclusions, which were not evident in the original paper.
Didn’t you?
All the fancy wording, side-stepping and waffling on your part do not change the fact that something “smells” here.
If there had been no Climategate revelations, no exposed exaggerations and lies in AR4, no prior Mann hockey “shtick” fiasco, and none of the other ballyhoo and propaganda surrounding the IPCC CAGW pitch, I would have said, “OK, bad stuff can happen, but it is an unfortunate exception – let’s forget it and move on.”
But, as has been pointed out in poll surveys in the USA and elsewhere, many people no longer have confidence in climate scientists and their work (a US poll showed that close to 70% of the respondents believed that climate scientists are fudging the data).
So this kind of thing becomes:
“Omigosh! Not another bogus climate science report intent on bamboozling the public into believing we will have catastrophic warming unless we submit ourselves to a carbon tax!”
Can you see the problem here, Bart?
It is one of a general loss of confidence and trust, in some cases even outrage that scientists on the direct or indirect taxpayer payroll are trying to bamboozle the very people that are financing their work, so that any incident like this one becomes just more fuel on the fire.
The “loss of trust” issue, and the culpability of the IPCC “consensus process” have been discussed on this site on earlier threads. These are real issues, Bart.
I believe Rud Istvan’s posts, as well as many of the comments here and on the earlier thread, mirror these concerns.
This is not intended as an attack on you, Bart, but rather as an explanation how others perceive this whole issue, so you can better understand their motives.
Max
manacker | March 21, 2013 at 2:20 am |
You’re caught in a trap.
You can’t get out.
Because you’re snared by demagoguery.
Why can’t you see.
Promoting polarization so plainly.
When you smell imaginings this way?
We can’t get anywhere.
With propagandized minds.
And we can’t do Science.
Ingroup/Outgroup rationalizing.
So if old facts we know.
Get used in new ways.
Would you still post such personalization?
So here we go again.
With over-simplification.
You can’t tell WUWT’s made up from what’s Science.
So don’t demonize.
Dry the alligator tears from your eyes.
Stop accusing people of plots and lies.
When Max you know.
This double standard’s gotta go.
And Fallacies too, yeah. Yeah.
Bart R
Elvis lives?
Phew!
Max
Latimer Adler at 6:18:
10 out of 10. Nadia Comaneci and all that.
———————————————————
lolwot wrote @ 7:46 citing Watt’s paper as a comparison: “Ie lets just ignore it. Chalk it up as a mistake. There’s no need to retract anything said, or to question whether the mistake was due to incompetence or dishonesty.”
McIntyre didn’t ignore it. He expressed his displeasure at having been talked into getting involved. One of the few mistakes he’s made when it comes to sorting out the truth in climate science papers.
People will not read this paper nor do they care about the Holocene, they are told this paper shows recent unprecedented warming that supports the need to pass laws to curb CO2 output.
No one in the “science community” seems curious as to why this “uptick” was rammed into this paper for apparently no reason?
For all the expertise here, most here seem easily manipulated or indifferent and the fact that they can’t see it is the most worrying thing.
Pekka Pirila, you say:
“People may do shoddy work on main issues, but they do much more shoddy work on side issues. This paper is a obvious example of putting less care to issues that are not at the core of the research being done. The paper is about temperatures of holocene, not about 20th century.”
———————————————
What you don’t see is that this papers entire “purpose” is now the “uptick” and it will be used solely for this purpose. It IS now all about the 20th century in its new capacity.
The fact that it will not be challenged in the community because it “doesn’t affect the thesis” is really quite ingenious.
> [U]se it to validate Holocene-spanning GCMs.
This ought to satisfy Latimer.
His appreciation of models knows no bound.
Correct. Why is it ok to exaggerate ones own work and trumpet things in the media that are not actually the true conclusions of the paper?
I agree with and want to expand on Manacker’s reply to Bart R. above. Aside from the suggestions that there was a strategy to get rid of the medieval warm period and hide the decline – the most serious revelations of Climategate to my mind were that dozens of scientists thought Mann’s work was crap. But no one said a word publicly and they allowed the hockey stick to be used by the IPCC and in the media until it was quietly disappeared. This is why outsiders feel the need to police the field as those who should be are not.
And I say this as a PhD scientist myself who publishes (at the more leisurely u-grad rate) fairly regularly. Although some get annoyed when Feynman is quoted (or in this case paraphrased), in his essay on Cargo Cult science, he points out that one should always be the worst critic of their own work and it requires a particular kind of honesty at always looking at your own data in the worst light. I had an experience with this recently where there was a strong temptation, particularly by a co-author, to overlook some studies in the literature that seemed to not support our results. But since it was not the exact same system and we thought the work was poorly done we were tempted to ignore it. (This paper already had 50 references and was long and we could not keep expanding it). But I felt we should try to address it briefly. When I looked into it, I found the most interesting thing that actually supported my main conclusions in the best way possible even though on its face it had seemed the opposite. Any way, even if it had not supported my conclusions, I agree with Feynman that one is obligated to show one’s work completely, not whitewash it.
Bill | March 21, 2013 at 8:47 am |
I get the impulse to jump on the bandwagon — after all, it’s a technique of propaganda to exploit bandwagon jumping — and pretend what’s going on here is palatable to Science.
What does happen, has happened, in the past with articles like the one Science published is not so very different in a number of ways from what Rud Istvan, Steve McIntyre and others have done in blogs – bluntly point out deficits, tactlessly remark on flaws and fault, explore unreservedly whether any facet associated with an article or paper weakens its arguments. And that’s all great. It _should_ happen, and everyone who does that ought, as Steve Mosher points out, be thanked for their service to the publisher and authors.
What doesn’t happen is a campaign of demonization, simplicism, god/devil wording, double standard, fallacy, personalization, and every other technique of demogoguery run amok.
Look objectively at what’s been posted in Rud’s two topics and the comments below, and tell me you don’t find these behaviors in a way and to a level that does science no good.
These are mere concerns.
We ought to be thankful for concerns.
Open your heart, repeat after me:
“Thank you for your concerns.”
When it comes to my betting proclivities on preordination, I go with thermometers, and not the unlikely sinkhole otherwise known as the divergence problem.
Perfected proxies will have a blade. The flunkies don’t. By the time this is resolved, nobody at all will give a chit.
My favorite reconstruction.
jch
Just got back from the met office where I read that tree ring study relating to CET that you referenced.
I am not sure i see the point of the study, the most interesting thing is a graph showing reconstructed and observed temperature from 1830 to 1970 and precipitation reconstruction.
There are numerous periods when temperatures don’t calibrate at all, a few years where its roughly right, but is especially poor from 1925 to the end.
There is a note that rainfall reconstructions are noticably less satisfactory for very wet years-which has also been commented on by other tree ring observers.
Having sifted through thousands of observations again today from 1210Ad to 1450 AD i can only say the rainfall reconstruction is thereore virtually worthliess as boy was it very wet very frequrently! Also what a lot of extreme events there were- droughts, tempests, heatwaves, floods, you name it and it was far worse back then than today
tonyb
@bart r
Please provide specific examples of the failings that you claim are present in Rud Istvan’s commentaries.
I re-read them carefully and see no
‘ demonization, simplicism, god/devil wording, double standard, fallacy, personalization, and every other technique of demogoguery run amok.’
And the subsequent remarks by many commentators provide some robustly expressed criticisms, but nothing out of the ordinary for normal discussion among adult people with strong opinions who are capable and accustomed to expressing them. Maybe in acdeme there would have been more honeyed words, but that is merely style, not substance.
And it was the authors themselves who chose to leave the academic confines. They chose to issue a press release, conduct media interviews and gain headlines for their paper all around the world. They were not obliged to do any of these things. But they did them and in so doing they voluntarily stepped into the more vigorous discourse of the real world.
If they find the heat of this arena too much for them, perhaps they will choose to keep out of the kitchen next time.. Or realise that they can’t have their cake and eat it.
If they want the publicity and the kudos, the vigorous, robustly expressed scrutiny comes too.
Thank you for this request, Latimer Alder!
Answer Rud Istvan publicly embraced willfully ignorant denialism with “Nope. Nada. Nein.”
Ouch … Rud grossly fumbled that one … what is your next request, Latimer Alder?
Fan
Latimer asked you a specific question;
“Please provide specific examples of the failings [of] Rud Istvan’s commentaries.”
You don’t seem to have actually answered with the SPECIFIC failings. Perhaps you can enumerate them?
Whilst you are about it can you point me in the direction of Dr Hansens paper on rising temperatures since 1690? As you know Giss was only a staging post and not a starting post for rising temperatures and I am sure he will have addressed this reality. Thank you
tonyb
Regarding Rud Istvan’s failings Click the link, read, and think!
Regarding Hansen’s recent articles perhaps you have in-mind Climate Sensitivity, Sea Level, and Atmospheric CO2 … or references therein?
If you’re exclusively seeking to cherry-pick minor flaws, that focus is itself trait #13 of denialism, eh TonyB?
Ooops free-as-in-freedom Hansen linky!
![\scriptstyle\rule[2.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}\,\boldsymbol{\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}\,\heartsuit\,{\displaystyle\text{\bfseries!!!}}\,\heartsuit\,\overset{\scriptstyle\circ\wedge\circ}{\smile}}\ \rule[-0.25ex]{0.01pt}{0.01pt}](https://s0.wp.com/latex.php?latex=%5Cscriptstyle%5Crule%5B2.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D%5C%2C%5Cboldsymbol%7B%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%7B%5Cdisplaystyle%5Ctext%7B%5Cbfseries%21%21%21%7D%7D%5C%2C%5Cheartsuit%5C%2C%5Coverset%7B%5Cscriptstyle%5Ccirc%5Cwedge%5Ccirc%7D%7B%5Csmile%7D%7D%5C+%5Crule%5B-0.25ex%5D%7B0.01pt%7D%7B0.01pt%7D&bg=ffffee&fg=ff0088&s=1&c=20201002)
@A Fan of More Discourse
Since your response to requests for specific examples is merely handwaving unspecific generalities and vague broadbrush links to vague broadbrush complaints about abstract philosophical constructs, I’ll assume that this is yet another to add to the long list of subjects on which your monotonous ‘discourse’ includes no worthwhile content.
Latimer Alder, you have yourself not (as yet) addressed the key question: Is it scientifically plausible that the Hockey Super-Stick is real?
To Rud Istvan’s credit, Rud did *NOT* dodge and/or quibble in regard to this key question!
Good on `yah, Rud Istvan!
fan
no, you still haven’t answered the question about rud’s specific failings. please do so. Its a perfectly civil question originally posed by Latimer..
no, you still haven’t linked to anything that demonstrates Dr Hansens research on the 300 year warming period that turns giss into a staging post for rising temperatures and not the starting post.
tonyb
And JCH’s favorite reconstruction
Meets an army of crickets.
The favorite reconstruction of JCH was keen in my book.
I had to look up the original paper and found out how incredibly well they did on calibrating the proxy to instrumental temperature.
I think climatereason asked what’s the point. I assume that was a self-directed question as it implies that climatereason is wasting his time with impossible to calibrate subjective and qualitative data.
Latimer Alder
+1
JCH
Yep.
I also go for thermometers over paleo-reconstructions.
And, when the two show no overlap, I toss the paleos into the garbage.
Er.. that’s not only the last part – but the entire paleo study.
Is that the way you see it, too?
Max
Willard
There’s a typo in your last comment
That’s spelled “critics”
Max
webby
it wasn’t me who asked what was the point
tonyb
Latimer Alder | March 21, 2013 at 12:39 pm |
Probably shorter for both of us if you look at the plentiful examples of unselfconscious polemics, propaganda, fallacy and demagoguery in the posts of A fan of *MORE* discourse, and see if they remind you of anything in Rud Istvan’s replies.
Rud’s main posts, the topics themselves, are a bit more between the blue lines. (That’s hockey jargon for ‘less extreme’.) Therefore, it might be easier to start small. Perhaps look for examples where he allies himself with a team, as a hint.
But with A fan of *MORE* discourse, you don’t really have to worry about subtlety or nuance masking the agitprop.
Also, it may help that A fan of *MORE* discourse, isn’t on your side, which tends to improve objective distance.
> Perhaps look for examples where he allies himself with a team, as a hint.
Starting with adjectives might also a good idea, for instance:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/lewandowsky-strike-two/#comment-92030
Tony “I am not sure I see the point of the study” claims he didn’t say that.
Too objective for climatereason apparently.
He qualitatively didn’t say that. Quantitatively he did.
Webby
To a specific study cited by another blogger, which climatereason (Tony B) has recently read, he writes to this blogger:
To which you respond:
To which Tony B corrected you with:
In true form you become “a bit loose with the truth” when you respond:
But truthfully he didn’t say that (or even imply it).
Stop your bad habit of making stuff up, Webby – makes you look untruthful and silly.
Max
I’m not going to pay attention to a serial data manipulator, so Max you may as well go away.
I don’t see the point of what climatereason is doing. I see the point of the study that JCH linked to as it has revealed an accurate approach to calibrating proxies.
Webby
A lesson your momma apparently failed to teach you was that repeating an untruth many times does not make it true.
(Lenin and Goebbels thought otherwise, but their day passed.)
After falling into that trap again (a serial prevaricator?), you add:
Now, I realize that this is NOT the same as you ASKING me what the point is of what climatereason is doing, but I’m going to tell you, anyway (as I understand it).
As can be seen from the studies being discussed here, there is a lot of ballyhoo, plain ignorance and some outright skullduggery in paleo-climate studies attempting to demonstrate that current warming is unusual. Flawed statistical methodology, fudging the data, “hiding the decline”, editors adding the “blade” of a hockey stick to make current warming appear greater, etc. are all parts of this.
Yet there are historical records, which can give us far better information than these subjective interpretations of dicey proxy reconstructions.
But digging this information takes time, and as Tony B writes, there are no big research grants for this type of work, as opposed to the paleo stuff, which is supported by the multi-billion dollar big business called “climate change”.
So Tony digs through various historical publications, hoping to find reference to particular climatic conditions, crop records, sea logs, charts or records, etc.
This seems to me like painstaking work.
But I can see that it is a vital piece of the information we all need to know about our planet’s past climate, so that we can better understand our present climate plus any future trends we might encounter.
Too bad you have trouble understanding this or its importance in the overall scheme of things (maybe it’s just not nerdy enough for you)..
I do, and I say “hats off to Tony – bring us another interesting post”.
Max.
MAX
thanks for your comment.
I spent another full day at the Met office library yesterday going through the copious historic records available there. In particular I am seeking informsation to estend my CET reconstruction back from 1538. To do this I am trrying to discover the transition point betweeen the MWP and LIA as that would fill in a large part of the gap betwen 1538 and 1000AD my eventual goal.
That enables me to write ‘The Long Slow Thaw Part 2’ which will continue the comparison of thousands of observed weather references taken from each part of the year, with those of a few tree rings that send out any sort of signal only during the limited growing period.
To this end I hope to get translated an untranslated from Latin/French diary of conditions from 1350 to 1450. Its called research which point Webby doesnt seem to get.
One of the probable reasons for the dislike of history by certain people (despite cross referencing with scientific papers) is that it presents a different picture to the official viewpoint.
What comes over loud and clear from numerous commentators is that there were far more extreme events of every kind in the pre 1538 period than occur today. It wa a good year that didnt have some sort of extreme event. The most notable feature is the prodigious amounts of rain that fell for months on end, often causing well authenticated famine and destruction of mills, houses and bridges. For example one reference to famine is cross authenticated by records I discovered at Exeter Cathedral which lists the amount of corn/money given to the poor to alleviate famine.
Incidentally the first frost fair on the Thames I can find dates to 1309 (not the 1600’s) but then the weather picked up substantially.
tonyb
@bart r
In answer to my request for specific examples of
‘ demonization, simplicism, god/devil wording, double standard, fallacy, personalization, and every other technique of demogoguery run amok.’
in Rud Istvan’s remarks, I expected a simple catalogue of RI’s remarks that we could then judge.
Instead you write
‘Probably shorter for both of us if you look at the plentiful examples of unselfconscious polemics, propaganda, fallacy and demagoguery in the posts of A fan of *MORE* discourse, and see if they remind you of anything in Rud Istvan’s replies.’
I did look at some of Fan’s orotund and and cryptic contributions. I saw no parallels whatsoever with Istvan’s remarks.
Fan’s ‘work’ reminded me of an alcoholic I once knew who probably had once had a decent intellect but whose brain was so frazzled he could only provide occasional flashes of coherence among the rambling .
By contrast, Istvan’s writing is clear, direct, unambiguous and comprehensible.
I fear you chose a pair of very bad examples to do a comparison between.
And I am disappointed that you have not been able to come up with a single concrete example of the behaviour that you berate Mr. Istvan for. I was hoping in particular to see some spectacular ‘demagoguery run amok’. The best I can find is this
‘Hockey is a fast contact sport. The whistle has blown on an obvious high stick foul just 11 days after Science first published Marcott’s hockey stick’
which is a neat turn of phrase but hardly enough to bring blood on the streets.
Perhaps the rest is only in your imagination?
‘
Willard, what would a skeptic say? See the MWP and the RWP? Then you would be forced to say that it is only a regional reconstruction. I don’t see where it would solve anything.
Willard, “And JCH’s favorite reconstruction
Meets an army of crickets.”
That reconstruction is one of the better ones, but it is a summer regional reconstruction. The end point is likely about right, today is about as warm or warmer than the MWP in the Northern Hemisphere, but what about the SH and the oceans? Paleo ocean data indicates that the southern oceans have warmed since the LGM and the Tropical oceans have little change at all over any time scale. There are a number of scientists that support greater ocean impact on climate including 3C to 4C ranges of natural variability in the higher latitudes.
Picking “favorites” is part of the problem.
Willard JCH, I should add that the method for combining instrumental with reconstruction looks very reasonable since the reconstructions were uniform MXD joined with regional temperature with about the same variance, so i consider it more of a methods paper than a final reconstruction of the region.
Gentlemen,
A big THANK YOU for your comments.
BartR,
Please beware that Latimer oftentimes follows the Can’t Get No Satisfaction algorithm:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/33362796798
A very big THANK YOU to Latimer for inspiring this very important Procrustean bed.
***
If you wish to interact with such algorithm, I suggest you provide one example at a time. The reason is that some quibbling might happen, in the line of “yes, but is it really an instance of what you’re saying?” If that happens, I suggest you provide another example.
Then another example.
And another example.
However sour the conversation will turn out, you’ll have a collection of examples.
And I will waive a very big THANK YOU for that collection.
@willard (et al)
Providing examples (evidence) of your many assertions will suit me just fine.
I trained as a chemist. And chemists are among the most practical of scientists. ‘Show me’ is one of our watchwords. As is ‘prove it’.
So when I see some bold alarmist statement, I want to see the evidence behind it. Doesn’t seem too much to ask, especially about a subject that claims to be scientific.
And the remarkable thing is how successful it is at getting weird and wacky replies.
Occasionally the questionee provides a good summary of the evidecne and a convincing argument as to why it is relevant to the subject. Excellent. They have done the work and aren’t just talking crap.
Frequently the answer is ‘Google it’ – or some variation. Not Good. They might have a half memory of something that they dreamt or a man they met in a pub told them or that they though they might have read a long tome ago. But no real understanding.
A different one is ‘distraction’. Example ‘Go and look at a Fan’s writings then tell me if you think its similar to Rud’s’. Pretty pointless exercise, which does more to reveal the paucity of evidence than keeping schtumm would have. And the contrast between the two serves to show how good a writer Rud is ..and how bad is Fan
But the most egregious is the petulant toddler (aka Violet Elizabeth Bott) response
‘No. Shan’t. You’re annoying and a pest’
British readers of a certain age will no doubt be expecting the inevitable finale of
‘And I’ll thcream and thcream until I’m thick’
Deeply unconvincing. Anybody trying to make a case needs to have the facts and figures at their fingertips.
Latimer Alder | March 22, 2013 at 5:04 am |
Let’s use an earlier reference on this two-topic discussion than mine:
Trish Roberts-Miller’s on-line essay Characteristics of Demagoguery list of twelve key features of demagogy:
• 01 polarization,
• 02 ingroup/outgroup thinking,
• 03 scapegoating,
• 04 motivism,
• 05 personalizing,
• 06 denial and/o rrefusal,
• 07 false dilemmas,
• 08 ad personum arguments,
• 09 conspiracy theories,
• 10 pandering to prejudice,
• 11 bad science, and
• 12 anti-intellectualism
(discarding the addition of #13 (quibbling), for obvious reasons) taken from ‘A fan of *MORE* discourse | March 17, 2013 at 12:56 pm | ‘ and adding to it the sage counsel and testimony of ‘Steven Mosher | March 17, 2013 at 10:24 pm |’ :
..Tom Fuller called and asked what I found. In a nutshell: “Well Tom, there is no smoking gun of any major wrong doing. But I will say this. They engaged in every form of bad behavior that they accused the skeptics of.”
And what is the point of these lists. You care about the planet. I care about the planet. Does the list get you any closer to agreement about what to do? Especially when that list can be turned around on you?
Not a good tactic to demonize your opponent.. except to build solidarity within ranks.. So add item 14: makes lists of opponents bad behavior.
So, no. I lament that Latimer Alder’s definition of proof is so narrow as to consider only lists of opponents’ bad behavior valid. I’m not going to rummage through Rud’s trash receptacles to sustain a patent case. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; let a man figure out how to spot demagoguery for himself, he knows when his ocean resources are being plundered, his taxes are going to pay for fishing fleets, his labor to enrich fishmongers, and the fish he’s being handed a fraction of his own wealth disguised as charity by a slick marketer. Latimer, you’ve proven you can distinguish the irrelevant characteristics of Rud and Fan’s writing, which ought make the similarities stand out more, not less; you’ve shown you can sidestep entirely spotting demagoguery in both their writing, which shows a high degree of discernment on the topic, as this side-stepping is too apt to be accidental, so I cannot accept that the claim is not obvious to you.
The practical and profitable path is to build on this wonderful tool Marcott has developed, beat the flaws out of it, and use it to validate Holocene-spanning GCMs (now that we can contemplate such as technically feasible in the near future) by comparing their outputs — which modellers can make as granular as computers can handle, thereby answering such questions as how probable is it the current rise is the fastest in the Holocene period — through a filter that derives the probable curves of proxies. Or even to simply improve Marcott’s infographic curve as Muller’s BEST project improved on CRUTemp.
Building solidarity within polarized ranks of motivated cranks by pandering to prejudice, bad science, denial, conspiracy theory and ingroup/outgroup thinking? Not what I’m interested in.
I’m here for ideas.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/19/playing-hockey-blowing-the-whistle/#comment-304867
@bart r
You are taking an awful lot of words and some very convoluted routes before you come up with the evidence for Rud Istvan having shown examples of
‘demonization, simplicism, god/devil wording, double standard, fallacy, personalization, and every other technique of demogoguery run amok’
as you accuse him.
Let’s take a simple unambiguous one to make it easy for you.
You have claimed that RI uses ‘god/devil’ wording. Can you point to a place in his writing where he has done so?
If you can, then you have gone a little way towards confirming your accusations. But if not, (assuming that you have done a thorough search), then that part of the charge sheet must be expunged.
This is not conceptually difficult stuff. Somewhere towards the beginning of Evidence 101, I would imagine.
So there’s your simple challenge. Find a place where Rud Istvan uses ‘god/devil wording’ (your phrase) or alter your list of charges against him. One or the other.
To make it easy, he has only made the head post and eight subsequent short ones in this thread. I imagine you could read all of them in ten minutes or less.
I look forward to your answer.
Latimer Alder | March 22, 2013 at 2:41 pm |
http://www.persuasivelitigator.com/2011/03/god-terms-and-your-devil-terms-.html
God terms represent all of the words and phrases that you embrace, words that have an “inherent potency” in identifying what you support. Writing in the fifties, Weaver used the examples of “progress” and “freedom” as words that we took as unquestionably good. As you might expect, ‘devil terms’ represent their mirror image, and Weaver’s prime example of “communist,” has been replaced in our time by “terrorist” as the ultimate devil term.
You really don’t see any of this in such references to “Steve McIntyre and Judith Curry and Anthony Watts” vs. Mann?
In equating himself with some on one team, and Marcott with others on the other team?
Seriously, that goes over your head?
@bart r
Please provide specific references in Istvan’s writing which you would like to indicate to us as examples of this rhetorical device.
You are troublingly vague in providing any concrete evidence for your accusations.
I will point at this title:
> NRC’s artless untruths on climate change and food security
http://judithcurry.com/2012/03/22/nrcs-artless-untruths-on-climate-change-and-food-security/
and that will be all,
for now.
Willard
You point to another case where Rud Istvan deconstructs a “bamboozle” report by NRC from a year ago about the purported deleterious effects of future global warming (and higher CO2 levels?) on crop production, similar to his obliteration of the “super shtick” here and on the earlier thread..
This bogus study predicted 5% to 50% crop yield loss with 3C warming!
Rud Istvan does a good job of showing how silly this report is.
But one can do another quick “sanity check” on the NRC claims.
Over the period 1970-2010 we had the following observed changes:
1970
Population: 3.7 billion
Global temperature (HadCRUT3 anomaly, 10-year average): -0.12 °C
Atmospheric CO2: 324 ppmv
Global yields of major crops (million tons corn/wheat/rice): 788
2010
Population: 7.0 billion (up 1.9x)
Global temperature: +0.42 °C (up 0.54 °C)
Atmospheric CO2: 390 ppmv (up 66 ppmv or 20%)
Global yields of major crops (million tons): 1912 (up 1124 Mt or 2.4x)
In addition, global starvation rates were down significantly and (despite HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa) world average life expectancy increased from ~55 years to ~68 years (up by 13 years).
So I’d say this was a “win-win” situation for humanity (which theoretical analysts, like the NRC study, are just unable to visualize in their projections).
So thanks, Willard, for bringing up another good example of solid work by Rud Istvan to cut through the gobbledygook in these silly doomsday reports.
Max
Let’s do a quick sanity check on that
@willard
That is the best you can do? That is what all the fuss is about? A headline using the phrase ‘artless untruths’?
Wow! Colour me unimpressed. My heart rate has not changed and my blood pressure remains static I have not fainted and will not need smelling salts.
Could you not find something a bit more juicy? A little more red meat? Maybe in the refined and sensitive world of American academe this is enough to cause a flutter in the cheap seats…but we Brits are made of stronger stuff and can tolerate (and expect) a little more vigour in discussion.
> That is the best you can do?
No.
I don’t mind to play the quoting game:
Latimer will have to write more words than me.
We predict these words will be about his usual unsatisfaction.
***
Another example:
> This [alleged situation] is deeply concerning. It is an alternative form of what President Eisenhower warned about in his last speech before leaving office. Instead of a military-industrial complex, we have a UN sponsored, agenda rich government-climate research complex seeking to reorder the world.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/07/08/the-government-climate-complex/
Oliver could not have said it better.
> That is the best you can do?
No.
I don’t mind to play the quoting game:
Latimer will have to write more words than me.
We predict these words will be about his usual unsatisfaction.
***
Another example:
> This [alleged situation] is deeply concerning. It is an alternative form of what President Eisenhower warned about in his last speech before leaving office. Instead of a military-industrial complex, we have a UN sponsored, agenda rich government-climate research complex seeking to reorder the world.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/07/08/the-government-climate-complex/
Willard
You’re losing this one and beginning to look silly (trying to discredit Rud Istvan by citing earlier posts of his).
Some advice: Instead of attacking the messenger, try objectively attacking his messages instead.
(It’s a bit harder, but could be much more effective if well thought out and substantiated by a good argument.)
Just a tip.
Max
Yes, it is a subtle and nuanced thing to look hard at an author throwing a calculated shoulder however gingerly against the first domino in a polemic cascade.
Let’s look at how nuanced and subtle some of these practices may be, in a different and disconnected case:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/20/response-mail-on-sunday-great-green-con-climate-change
David Rose, politely, courteously, agreeably shared a cup of coffee with his neighbor, nodding and consenting about how something had to be done about CO2 levels, and then quoted his coffee companion out of context and reversing the sense of his source’s words in a way we know he has twice (or more) practiced on our host, and more than once on others in the past too.
See, it doesn’t take a lot to go from pleasantries — such as where Rud Istvan begins by congratulating the Marcott article for being instantly famous to with mere addition of superfluous single quote marks spurning it as instantly ‘famous’. You’re reading the machinations of a brilliant writer, well-practiced in his arts; you’re obliged to be more, not less, skeptical due the sophistication of your correspondent in the sense of confirming every statement and wondering at the choice of every punctuation mark and syllable.
It’s not a hockey game if one team shows up with hockey sticks and the standard equipment and the other team shows up with whistles and referee’s uniforms making questionable calls.
Don’t just blow and handwave and make up penalties. Put your helmet and visor on, and do science.
> Trying to discredit Rud Istvan by citing earlier posts of his.
Here’s what BartR talked about:
Y U do not read?
Thanks for playing.
@willard
Your complaint seems to boil down to the fact that in writing an opinion piece on a blog, people do not use the same style of writing as in academic papers.
Well knock me down with a feather.
Such a conclusion is completely new to me. I’d never have guessed it. Let me sit down and have a nice cup of tea to get over the shock. Perhaps I could even add a nice Rich Tea biscuit as well.
In today’s other shock news:
‘I think there is a lot to be said for some aspects of catholicism. It’s definitely worth another look’ says pope francis
Shock admission from Bruin – ‘I defecate in the arboreal sylvanity’
Breakthrough in astronomy – ‘Sun consistently rises in the East’ claims man from NASA.
> Your complaint […]
I have no such complaint.
I big THANK YOU for your concerns nevertheless.
Agreed … and many further examples can be recognized by applying BartR’s denialist demagoguery recognition template:
That is a very useful denialist demagoguery recognition template, BartR!
Sorry fanny, but it looks like the denialist demagoguery is winning out over the shoddy statistical shenanigans of the alarmistas:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324323904578370531351272200.html?KEYWORDS=dueling+to-do+lists
Wendell Berry’s solid common-sense conservatism easily beats the WSJ’s short-sighted selfish marketism, eh Don Monfort?
People who personify nature are almost always making a mistake. Wendell Berry is deeply confused I’m afraid.
You are confused, fanny. That wasn’t an editorial. It was a straightforward report on the results of a public opinion poll. The public is just not that worried about getting burned up by CO2. You are losing. You are letting Mother Nature down. If you really believe that the earth is in danger, you might consider the possibility that demonizing those you want to convince is not a good strategy. But you are having too much fun as a clownish pain-in-the-ass provocateur.
LOL … PokerGuy, it’s time to “tell the truth and shame the Devil!”
PokerGuy, have you, personally, read any of Wendell Berry’s essays, fiction, or poetry?
Because Wendell Berry’s works don’t personalize Nature! Berry’s dry-eyed conservative philosophy is the precise opposite … that it’s Nature that naturalizes us humans.
Thanks for making us Wendell-Berry-conservatives smile, PokerGuy!
Fanny
Nope.
It’s not there.
Looks like your “conspiracy” phobia is working overtime. Pop a pill and calm down.
Max
Fanny
BS remains BS, no matter how many cute smileys decorate it.
Max
I think this article is as important as the lastest FOI releases, if not more so. We can be certain that the news media will not disseminate this information. I think that all of the readers of this blog need to explain what has happened here at any and every media comment section that they can find. And they need to point back to this article and ask people to read it. Come on people, let’s not let the news media and agenda driven science control our lives. Let’s run them over and get the word out.
Depends on which news media.
Readers of Forbes, for instance, were treated to this:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/03/17/warmest-temperatures-in-4000-years-not-so-fast-global-warming-alarmists/
> After assembling a blue ribbon panel of experts to study Mann’s temperature reconstruction, Wegman […]
Hmmm.
You keep dropping bricks in climate science, willard, because someone made up that part of your mind for you. Audit yourself.
=====================
I quote James Taylor, kim reads “climate science”.
Speaking of audits:
http://moyhu.blogspot.ca/2011/06/effect-of-selection-in-wegman-report.html
I’ll tell Nick that his last fig has disappeared.
As I’ve pointed out multiple times, that post by Nick Stokes is highly deceptive. The majority of the visual effect he relies on is an artifact of an irrelevant methodological change. Specifically, the “selected” hockey sticks could only have a positive orientation. That’s a reasonable restriction as the orientation of them is irrelevant (a negatively oriented hockey stick would be “flipped” in a later step).
The “non-selected” hockey sticks displayed by Nick Stokes are not restricted in that way. This creates a large visual discrepancy. That discrepancy stems from an irrelevant issue, and it would disappear if the remaining steps were followed.
A simple analogy would be a process which uses the absolute value of its inputs in one step. The graphs created by McIntyre and McKitrick (MM) were for a previous step, but since they recognized only absolute values would be used, they went ahead and showed absolute values. Nick Stokes criticizes them one a different issue then, without saying he’s doing it, plots both positive and negative data. He then points to his results which largely rely on an undisclosed change and says, “Look, it’s different!”
If Nick Stokes didn’t like that MM only used positively oriented hockey sticks, he could have made an issue of it. He didn’t. Instead, he claimed to find a difference by making one change while not discussing the fact most of the difference came from a different change.
That is a lie by omission.
Let’s remind ourselves this interesting concept of “reproduction”:
http://moyhu.blogspot.ca/2011/06/effect-of-selection-in-wegman-report.html
Our emphasis.
While auditors are still wondering about the semantical nuances between reproduction is replication, it would be interesting to know in which sense Wegman conducted an independent inquiry.
To that effect, reading the correspondence between the Auditor and Wegman’s blue ribbon team might be useful.
***
Let’s remind Nick’s question:
Nick believes that with no selection and no decentering, the HS goes away.
The “centered, not selected” figure has returned, BTW.
Eli calls Tiljiander on Brandon
Eli calls Tiljander on me apparently because he’s the last person on Earth who thinks flipping Tiljander’s orientation didn’t affect Mann’s 2008 paper. Even Gavin Schmidt admits it does.
Wait… I can’t remember, did Nick Stokes ever admit it? The last I remember, he was finding excuse after excuse not to. Maybe Eli isn’t the last person?
Then again, is Eli even a person?
Thanks, B, I get to reprise one of mine when Mann’s boss spoke @ CU:
Brune in the Kettle,
Clouds hot with obfuscation.
Tiljander tea leaves.
Amac liked it.
========
> Then again, is Eli even a person?
An ad bunnynem.
Speaking of AMac:
> A schoolyard fight between members of two popular cliques with a history of mutual antagonism. Each driven by circumstances and likely egged on by their respective alpha leadership. Each drawing the entirely predictable support from the usual quarters […]. No teachers in sight, and no widely-shared lessons drawn, with respect to science or policy.
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/3291437578
kim, I’m afraid I mostly don’t “get” poetry. I never have. It makes it hard to enjoy your contributions too much.
Sorry!
Yes, I know. But I’m the one who should be sorry, for the unfairness, because I can sure appreciate you.
===================
Brandon, it’s positively oriented hockey sticks generated by noise of some description. So if you have a noise model that produces both positive and negatively oriented and flat hockey sticks and you throw away the negative and positive ones and tell everyone that the method produces positive hockey sticks, why yes, you have committed flim flam. If you tell the public that the method produces on average positive hockey sticks you have lied.
So which is it? Negative going ones don’t count somehow?
Eli Rabett, it seems you are trying to be more coherent than usual, but your lack of experience with such is causing problems.
First, I am relatively certain nobody would “throw away the negative and positive” anythings. As a rule, even a cherry-picker wouldn’t throw away everything!
Humor aside, nobody has done what you’re describing. McIntyre and McKitrick did not throw away anything. In fact, a separate figure showed the amount of positive and negative hockey sticks. That figure showed there was an even distribution, so your last sentence doesn’t apply either.
Quite simply, you’re describing something that wasn’t done.
Of course not. Nobody who has any knowledge of this topic would suggest they don’t. You’re either asking a completely irrelevant question, or you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Negatively oriented one do count. They count just like positively oriented graphs count. That’s the entire point: the orientation of a PC makes no difference in MBH’s methodology. Despite this, Nick Stokes rests almost his entire case on that irrelevant difference.
David and Willard
Yep.
And then a panel from NAS was asked under oath by a congressional committee whether or not they specifically agreed with the conclusions of the Wegman committee on the validity of the Mann hockey stick, to which the NAS panel agreed.
With this, the “shtick” was pronounced dead (scientifically) and buried.
But there are still die-hards out there who try in vain to pull it out of its grave and resuscitate it.
And IPCC keeps on preaching its conclusion of unusual 20thC warmth, long after it has been totally discredited.
Strange world.
Max
Willard
Or maybe his fig leaf?
Oops!
Brandon and kim
Wal, now, fer whut its worth, Ah ‘prishiate y’all both,even tho Brandon has chas-tised me a few times and kim has baffled the socks offa me from time to time.
Max
Willard
Or the hare in the soup?
Max
> And then a panel from NAS was asked under oath […]
Jerry North, MiniMax, Jerry North.
A panel don’t swear.
Perhaps Eli can recall to us what was agreed by Jerry,
which is not exactly what was being promoted
in the technical sense of the word.
Here’s where to look:
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-109hhrg31362/html/CHRG-109hhrg31362.htm
Essentially a cartoon,
***
Speaking of being under oath, here’s Wegman, commenting on a graphical element of his presentation during the Barton Hearings:
> [E]ssentially a cartoon.
Under oath.
Yup.
Acknowledgement. A very big THANK YOU to everyone who made this comedy of menace possible.
TL;DR version:
> [E]ssentially a cartoon.
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/1498489564
So Brandon, are you denying that Steve cherry picked the hockey sticks produced by noise and only published the results of the big positive ones?
Eli Rabett, that is nothing like what I said so I have no idea why you’d ask. I would think you could see the answer to your question just by reading what I said, but…
Pekka wrote: “The conclusions that can be drawn from the comparison of recent instrumental data with the paleodata are a separate issue. One may compare the empirical paleodata with recent observations and one may compare also with projections to the future. The authors have done that as well in some discussion of the results, but their graphs don’t present such a comparison as far as I can judge.”
Actually they didn’t do that. They neglected the fact that nearly all of their ocean proxies are estimated in deg C (not anomaly deg C but physical deg C). Thus they can be compared to modern ocean temperatures at the relevant locations: indeed many of the underlying articles report modern ocean temperatures from the relevant location and depths. (This should be mandatory information in all of the technical reports, but the reports are unstructured and the information is missing in far too many reports.)
But instead of reviewing this information systematically, they began their process by converting the data to anomalies centered in the mid-Holocene and then had to try to link the resulting averages to modern temperatures.
That is interesting Steve. I always try to look at my data in multiple ways so I really understand it. Not to try to reach a pre-ordained conclusion. Not that I’m saying people ever do this. :)
Steve,
I have learned a lot from your posts at CA and from the further discussion. Many of your points are fully convincing and many more plausible. What you write here hasn’t caught my attention there, but it makes perfect sense. There are, however, some obvious advantages in aligning the time series at some period covered by all time series. That allows for comparisons of time series of different overall temperature levels and that’s necessary for the use of average temperatures in the way they have done.
I cannot judge the core part of the paper. That seems to remain close to the third paper of Marcott’s thesis and little criticism has been presented on that. The advantages of their approach are significant for that part. The weak (erroneous) part is visible in the figures of the Science paper but not discussed at all in the paper beyond mentioning that the uptick is not robust and is strongest in Fig 1A which also shows that it occurs 50 years earlier than the equally strong instrumental signal. While the timing uncertainties enter again, it seems impossible that the very recent warming could be seen in the proxies. That alone should tell that their uptick cannot be an AGW effect. You have explained how the uptick is surely just an artifact.
Pekka: There are, however, some obvious advantages in aligning the time series at some period covered by all time series. That allows for comparisons of time series of different overall temperature levels and that’s necessary for the use of average temperatures in the way they have done.
Yes, it is necessary to convert the temperatures to anomalies for calculating the average temperature (difference/anomaly), but it is not necessary to do it as it is done in Marcott et al. The other way (and IMO the only meaningful way), and that is what I think Steve is also referring to, is first to convert each proxy to (local) modern temperature anomalies.
IMO, the authors missed a real, important contribution by not doing so. In most other multiproxy studies (using proxies like tree rings without clear physical connection to temperature), you need to link not only the base line but also the scale. Here, the proxies had been already converted (more or less independent of the instrumental record) to (local) temperatures, so it would have been enough to link them to the modern base line (for instance, to convert proxy temperatures to anomalies w.r.t. to the 20th centrury mean of the corresponding instrumental series). This way, they could have created a reconstruction, whose scale (variation) is truly independent of the intrumental record and is linked to modern temperatures. In the way Marcott et al performed the analysis, the connection to the modern temperatures is lost and can not be reliably restored later as the modern part is so scarse.
Pekka: That seems to remain close to the third paper of Marcott’s thesis and little criticism has been presented on that. The advantages of their approach are significant for that part.
Let me try to offer some (in what follows, I’ve neglected completely the “uptick” as you seem to also agree that it is an artefact). As explained above, the (reliable) connection to the modern temperatures is lost in the analysis. In other words, we do not know the position of the reconstruction w.r.t. 20th century temperatures. What remains is the scale (internal variability) of the reconstruction. However, as acknowledged by the authors, the resolution of the reconstruction is rather low (few hundreds of years). This is actually further lowered by their MC method, which, as they acknowledge, is a smoothing operation. So what we are left is a very smoothed curve of variablity within the Holoscene without a clear idea how the 20th century mean temperature is related to it. In other words, they have succeeded confirming the “sketch” in IPCC 1990 Figure 7.1B (whose smoothed version is “remarkably similar” to the Marcott et al w/o the uptick, h/t Steve):
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/ipcc1.jpg
IMO, that does not merit a publication in Science.
Keväisin terveisin, J
JeanS, “IMO, the authors missed a real, important contribution by not doing so. In most other multiproxy studies (using proxies like tree rings without clear physical connection to temperature), you need to link not only the base line but also the scale. ”
Exactly. With the range and timing of natural variability such a large question mark, they had a chance to do something new and valuable.
That may be an excellent project for team internet :)
The manuscript included in the thesis was marked “To be submitted to Nature”. It didn’t get published in Nature, but the authors must have thought that it was interesting enough for getting published in. There was nothing about the uptick but the the real substance of the paper was essentially the same as in the paper that got published in Science more than one year later.
Looking at the text of the paper they really give not significance for the uptick, it’s significant only in the figures. Expanding the Fig 1A that’s reproduced in the starting post of this thread, it can be seen, how little the uptick has actually to do with the instrumental record that’s also shown in Fig 1A for comparison. They are two different issues and the paper makes no contrary claims directly or indirectly. (Unfortunately they don’t tell explicitly that the two upticks cannot represent the same phenomena.)
The authors have referred on various occasions to the modern warming and projected further warming and compared that to the temperature variations in their results on Holocene. They discuss comparison with Mann’s reconstruction but only over periods that end before 1900. The really needed a Mann type reconstruction to have a long enough period for relating their temperatures to the more modern ones. That made their comment on the agreement with the Mann’s reconstruction meaningful. I don’t think that they can provide much support for the reconstructions of last 1000 or even 2000 years. Their data is too inaccurate for that, but the observed agreement is significant for their analysis as a bridge between their results and the instrumental ones. Taking advantage of that they can compare the Holocene temperatures with the present ones and with projections to the future.
It’s possible that the uptick in their data helped in getting the paper published. If that’s indeed so, the blame should be directed to Science and referees, but we don’t have any real evidence on that.
The alkenone proxies have an absolute temperature scale, but there must be major uncertainties in finding out the appropriate real temperatures they should be compared with. Thus it cannot be straightforward to use the present instrumental temperatures in the comparison. Some cross checking would certainly be possible, but that’s not the same thing.
I really don’t like that scientific paper contain information that cannot be properly supported by the analysis. Therefore I have written several times that the uptick should have been cut off. Steve McI. has shown convincingly that the errors of the analysis are so trivial that the authors should have realized that what they present in Fig 1A is not valid. Assuming that the core top corresponds to 1950 may be acceptable when recent times are not the subject of the analysis, but it’s clearly wrong when dramatic results are shown for the 20th century. That’s true also when that applies only to the figures, and not to the text or conclusions presented by the authors.
“Therefore I have written several times that the uptick should have been cut off.”
I suspect if they had done that the accusations would have instead been that they deleted the data off the end.
The brutal impact of the work is the pre-1900 holocene reconstruction itself which shows less than 1C difference between max and minimum temperatures over the holocene.
lolwot,
They had a valid reason for cutting off. At least they had, if they knew all the mechanisms that Steve McI. has figured out. Based on that it’s clear that the uptick does not originate in the data but in the simplifying assumptions that are commonly used with proxies that do not extend properly to modern times. Steve demonstrated that the whole uptick is almost certainly an artifact of these simplifying assumptions that turn out to be rather badly wrong in some cases. Without these errors introduced in the analysis, no uptick would be seen.
One might argue that even the erroneous part should be shown in the supplementary material. That would require some additional justification for leaving it out from the paper. It may well be that they didn’t look at the issue carefully as it’s really irrelevant for the scientific message of the work. That’s, however, an oversight at a level that’s not really justifiable.
I have criticized several papers of containing errors that are so obvious from the final outcome that it’s not really excusable that the authors have let them through. Making errors is unavoidable, but dramatic unlikely results should raise an alarm and lead to reanalysis. These errors are trivial enough to be found when given extra attention. (Such results should be noted as suspect also by the reviewers.)
“Thus they can be compared to modern ocean temperatures at the relevant locations:”
I don’t believe they usefully can. A legitimate criticism of their paper is that it produces a modern spike that the proxies are in fact unable to resolve. The dating is too uncertain; the frequency is too low.
But instrumental temperatures are such a spike. If the proxies can’t resolve that, then they can’t be standardised against it.
It would allow point comparisons. It wouldn’t allow trend comparisons.
No, point temperatures cannot be compared. The points are lost because they become an average over a long period of time. The comparison to an average over a long period of time is another average over a similar period of time. Stokes is correct.
David you have a point. There would be contamination of the sample and it would be an average of some period of time.
I’m not sure I’d call it contamination but that’s essentially correct. An instant proxy temperature is contaminated by the instant proxy temperatures surrounding it. The blade in Marcott is a 30-year spike. The handle can only resolve 300-year spikes. I’d call that comparing apples to oranges. An apple isn’t a contaminated orange. :-)
Eli: What is important is how the proxies form the seat of the wheelchair giving us a temperature record that is free of the need to calibrate against instrumental records.
That is simply not true. They needed to link their reconstruction to the modern temperatures somehow since thay had, as Steve said, converted the temperatures to the anomalies centered in the mid-Holocene. Ironically, they did the linking by forcing the mean of the reconstruction to match that of a paricular Mann et al (2008) reconstruction (EIV-CRU, which is land only reconstruction!) on the interval 500-1440AD! In other words, their units in the y-axis should really read “anomaly in degree C from Mann’s land only MWP mean -0.08”. According to my quick back of an envelope calculation, had they chosen their reference series to be the other land-only global series from Mann et al 2008 (CPS-CRU; yellow in the main figure of Mann 2008) your “seat” (and the whole reconstruction) would be lowered by 0.27 degrees. I guess (but I did not compute) that if you want to adjust your “seat” higher, you could choose, e.g., Loehle-McCulloch reconstruction as your reference.
More good points. Thanks Jean!
Surely this paper HAS to be withdrawn immediately? If Not Science AAAS should be disbanded
Adding red noise to accelerating warming curves is very interesting:
http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/8060/ourwtemperatureprofiles.gif
Bottom two charts are (1) no noise on an accelerating curve and (2) the BEST temperature record compared to a simple log(co2) warming.
Hard to obscure the hockey stick even though the noise will create plateaus, bumps, and pauses.
Yes, but MWP, Deming, an icon, tribing, RC moderation, Climategate, …
Here’s what happens when you add the recent warming, 2010 is marked on (3C warmer than 1855):
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/c4u-chart7.png
lolwot
Let’s do a “sanity check” on your last post.
You state:
You cite SkS, who cite GISP2 temperatures.
Let’s go to the source data instead of relying on SkS.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GISP2_ice_core_eng.svg
We see from the curve:
-1.2C “present” (=1993, when study was made)
-1.8C LIA low
-0.5C MWP high
-1.2C Dark Ages low
+0.5 Roman Optimum high
Splicing real-life thermometer annual data to ice core stuff is dicey, but let’s have a go anyway.
Since 1993 we have observed around 0.5C warming, which would put us today at:
-1.2C +0.5C = -0.7C
So today we are still 0.2C below the MWP high and a full 1.2C below the Roman Optimum high.
And only 0.6C+0.5C= 1.1C warmer than the LIA low (not 3C, as you claim).
Yawn!
Max
Max
The very warm roman optimum reminded me of this post
http://climateaudit.org/2006/08/07/green-alps-1/
Has anything new surfaced about it recently in Switzerland ?
Tonyb
Adding scale is also very interesting:
http://i.imgur.com/s19MOMd.jpg
Yep, obviously we are in big trouble…..
Graph is wrong, “you are here” points to 1855. We are in 2013. You might want to add the > 1C warming of central greenland to the end of that chart.
An attempt has been made here:
http://hot-topic.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GISP210klarge.png
can’t say if it’s correct but it must be closer.
lolwot
You’re wrong.
Look at the graph again. It ends in 1950, not 1855.
Difference between 1950 and 2012 (10-year trailing averages) is 0.5C.
Not >1C.
Just to set the record straight.
Max
max
if it finishes in 1950 then it will already include the two warmest consecutive decades in the greenland instrumental record the 1930’s/40’s
tonyb
The data the graph is based on ends 95 years before 1950, which makes it 1855.
There’s been over 1C warming in central greenland since 1855.
Lolwot is right. The data is here. Most recent point, 95 BP, ie 1855.
Nick, I’m interested in this controversy. Can you give me a reference?
Sorry, Nick, I see you have the reference. Upon looking at it, one thing puzzles me. It seems as if the last 250 years show a cooling. The graphs referenced above seem to show an uptick.
Isn’t this really a minor point? Even assuming lolwot is right, the recent spike is still a lot smaller than several ones earlier in the Holocene, even though just greater than the Mideval Warm Period, by a whisker, thus justifying “The Mann’s” Nobel Peace Prize. :-) By the way Shankun seems to believe that the ice cores don’t show sharp spikes. What kind of incompetant can possibly say that? Also there are a number of inconvenient aspects of this. Greenland seems to be slightly cooler now than in the 1930’s. Thus, the whole spike lolwot claims happened before CO2 could have possibly caused it. How do you explain that lolwot?
David,
“Isn’t this really a minor point?”
Well, the whole thing is silly. But this particular instance was introduced with:
“Yep, obviously we are in big trouble…..”
And so it goes. There seems to be a campaign of waving around people’s replots of this Alley data as if to show that there’s no modern warming. So it’s relevant that the data ends in 1855.
Here I am being shouted at by Don Easterbrook for pointing that out. But it keeps coming up.
But yes, you could be right that the present spike has not exceeded everything in the Holocene. The thing is, we’ve burnt about 350 Gtons C. There’s at least 3500 Gtons ot go.
OK, But didn’t the spike end in roughly 1940 and peak in the 1930’s before greenhouse gasses were significant? I don’t know, but it looks like some explaining is required.
I actually think this talk about recoverable fossil fuels and what our ultimate CO2 concentration will be is even more uncertain than the climate models. If you extrapolated wood consumption in Britian in 1600, you would have been in disaster quite soon. Also, at some point, solar in deserts becomes cheaper. One thing that does seem certain is that the biosphere is soaking up a lot more CO2 than people thought. Seems like about 50% goes somewhere else. We can always grow trees and sequester them in new houses.
Southern Oceans compared to wm-ghg, not much noise
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-RPNQwyr7nAs/UUtlVZ3nVHI/AAAAAAAAHiQ/J-6ttzFjjiU/s912/sh%2520sst%2520v%2520wmghg.png
No guessing at a “sensitivity”. Which takes the lead?
Why not let the free enterprise system spend what it wants to invent Climate Models that can predict the future and leave government out of it? The nonsense of a ‘greenhouse’ from the get-go is nothing more than allegory by Al Gore, et al., with CO2 as the Left’s Moby Dick–i.e., a dramatic tale about the evils of Americanism as told by scientific idiots that secular, socialist politicians find useful to fleece the sheep.
Wagathon,
Free enterprise would not spend on climate models. Science can and should look at issues beyond current economics. So some funds ought to go here as they go to archeology and Paleoclimatology. Interesting to the participants but not terrible useful to business, engineering or the economy in general. But don’t make decisions based on unproven hypothoseis
Weather forcasting can improve based on models improving regionally.
Science is fun and models are interesting and can be useful if they track actual results.
Scott
When we’re spending taxpayer money and borrowing from China and printing dollars we need to get real. If it was possible to really predict these things would it be government toadies leading the way? “I‘m enough of a businessman, says Robert Rosenkranz, “to know that the modeling and the use of the computer algorithms and forecasting the future is a very, very difficult undertaking. I mean, if one could predict the weather or patterns of storms even a year in advance it would be worth billions and billions of dollars.”
WebHubTelescope,
Could you elaborate on these graphs you are showing?
I don’t see the link with the hockey stick. With the blade maybe, but what is a blade without a stick?
“…what is a blade without a stick?”
A baseball bat.
Either way, it is a blunt instrument which is not ‘teasing’ anything out of the data (to use the favorite noun of those describing science which is not elegant but contrived).
verb :)
Larsp,
The only sociological study in play here is the projection and framing techniques used by skeptics to misdirect from their own inadequacies.
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/stochastic-analysis-of-log-sensitivity.html
Webby
Yep. Sho’nuff.
Max
Further to Steve Mosher’s and Willis Eschenbach’s disagreement…
I have sat through more than one Cardiovascular Journal-Club meeting in a University Hospital, where the Chair closed with a comment about how much fun it had been to trash a paper published in Science [Magazine].
One one such occasion a key piece of experimental evidence was within the domain of two or three post-docs in the audience who pronounced that it apparently contained a serious error commonly found with that particular technique, but they couldn’t be 100% sure based on the presented data.
Another member of the audience inquired why a reviewer/referee wouldn’t have picked-up on the matter. A faculty Professor, who appeared to be one of the mildest-mannered and smartest people in the room, declared with a resigned look on his face that “that is a question you just can’t ask.”
How much of the MSM realizes that many areas of science, like the rest of the world, contain minefields regarding what you can say and ask in a professional context without causing (possibly) career-damaging offense?
People like Steve McIntyre, coming from more engineering-oriented backgrounds, are more used to asking those types of questions. Or at least apparently more often than many influential climate-researchers are used to answering such questions.
I add that many “areas of science” do not have $$Trillion political-, economic-, and humanitarian-decisions riding on people asking the right question at the right time.
In fact I know of only one area of science that currently meets those criteria. Clinical decisions in medicine, or oil-field development, are not based on MSM celebration of shoddy Science papers, so it seems reasonable that the IPCC should be required to expect higher standards that may be commonplace in other disciplines.
michael hart sez:
That’s not science, it’s heuristics as practiced by corporations. Corporations interested in oil-field development have no interest in the underlying science, instead they want to exploit the resources in as fast and cheap a way as possible. Any science is a by-product, and its likely you won’t find that publicly available, as it automatically becomes IP or a trade secret.
That’s also why that particular discipline is wide open for being able to apply some real science to the analysis.
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/07/bakken-dispersive-diffusion-oil.html
(paper submitted)
I know the anti-scientists hate this, but some people are curious about mankind’s prospects for the future and if there are ways in which we can apply the scientific method to make projections. That partially explains the rationale for research in climate science and resource-based earth science, however that must trouble you.
wht,
At least oil companies are partially constrained by reality. If the oil doesn’t come out of the ground they won’t get paid. The consumer won’t buy a product that doesn’t exist.
I’m interested in some predictions for the future of humanity. The bad predictions are about as useful as religion, yet still claim to be ‘science-based’. Plus ça change.
What Felix Vasquez Jr. said when reviewing Life of Pi also applies to AGW theory in the modern world of Western academia–i.e., proponents of global warming endorse the notion of blind faith, and denial as a positive character trait.
@michael hart
That there are any questions at all that ‘cannot be asked’ gives the lie to all the junk we hear about the rigour of peer-review, the use of reproducibility and all the other stuff that is claimed to give published papers some standing.
If important fundamental questions are unaskable, then those points will never be addressed. They go by default.
We would not accept such a shoddy state of affairs in any other profession. And I would need a great deal of persuading that academia and academics are a special case and should be exempted from adhering to the same standards as the rest of us .
Yes, Latimer. I think there is a widespread misconception that being “peer-reviewed” makes something ‘correct’, when in fact it really means that it has only passed some minimal or cursory review contingent upon the time/abilities/resources of the reviewer or publisher.
Perhaps most abused or misunderstood is the 2-sigma 95% confidence level so widely employed. People periodically opine that a higher standard should be enforced. That still won’t make conclusions ‘correct’, but may eliminate more of the alternatives.
In defense of the status quo, I’ve learned from my betters that even a bad paper may (may) contain nuggets of value that the careful reader can extract. However, many others can be mostly neither new nor useful; filled with poorly collected or wrong data; or padded-out with misinterpretations and BS.
Thanks for that quick peek into the inner workings Dr. Hart. Pretty dispiriting precisely because it rings so true….
For the record, I am not a practicing physician (but do have a doctorate). The good thing about getting to work in such environments is that generally anyone is allowed to go and learn at the many public meetings that are held. Not enough people do, in my opinion.
I have noted cultural differences to the finding of errors and to committing errors.
Yeah, note R @ CA.
===============
How about between committing errors and admitting errors? Any cultural differences there?
Michael
You make very good points.
The difference between the (more theoretical) academic and (more empirical) engineering mindset is part of the problem, as you write.
As is the fact that CAGW has become a taxpayer-funded multibillion-dollar big business, and could well become a trillion-dollar business if global carbon taxes (direct or indirect) are ever implemented.
And there is a loose collusion of interests (not to be confused with a formal “conspiracy”, which I do not believe exists) of environmental lobby groups, corporations, industrialists, scientists, bureaucrats and politicians, all hoping to gain money and/or power from the CAGW hysteria.
Add the media darlings, who hope to gain publicity and the media, who love to sell disaster stories, and you have a powerful force.
The main counterforce is an increasingly large group of scientists and engineers who are rationally skeptical of CAGW claims and challenge them – plus the common sense of the general public.
But the most convincing counterforce is Mother Nature, herself – and if she gives us another decade of slight cooling or at least no warming, despite continued unabated human GHG emissions and concentrations reaching record levels, she will essentially have killed this strange form of delusion called CAGW.
So IMO we’ll have to wait and see. But, in the meantime, it is interesting and fun to debate.
Max
Sorry Fanny, I’m sick of trying to find the appropriate reply button..
1:You submitted into evidence the following quote by Wendell Berry:
“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
— Wendell Berry
2: I wrote that it’s a mistake to personify nature. It’s primitive thinking and dangerous.
3: You howled derisively : LOL PokerGuy, have you, personally, read any of Wendell Berry’s essays, fiction, or poetry? Wendell Berry’s works don’t personalize Nature! Berry’s dry-eyed conservative philosophy is the precise opposite … that it’s Nature that naturalizes us humans.
4: Now it’s my turn to howl derisively, or it would be if that were my style. Instead I’ll politely suggest you go back and read the quote that you put forth. “Nature is a party to all our deals and decisions”
“And he more votes”
“..a longer memory”
“and a sterner sense of justice.”
For someone who doesn’t pretend nature is a person, he’s on a pretty big roll there…
Sorry, should read “has more votes.”
True, true nature could care less and has the last say in any event no matter what us puny humans think about it.
Dear preachers of doomsterism
in public schools:
My message to you is written
in the geophysical record of
the Earth. Remember March 2011
and the power of nature in Japan
— of Biblical proportions — due to
an 8.9-magnitude quake, causing a
tsunami, with waves that reached
California within twelve hours,
moved the island of Japan by about
eight feet and shifted the Earth on
its axis by about four inches?
Compared to nature you are puny
little man. There is no global warm-
ing that cannot be explained by
nature. Temperatures and sea levels
have not needed man’s help
to rise and fall over the last 1,500
years and without being caused by
changes in atmospheric CO2 levels.
Who are you little man to tell me that
you believe current warming
is unusual?
~God
Don’t forget the Indosesian earthquake with 250,000 dead to add to the 24,000 dead in Japan. But surely we can spend some money to look into global climate changes. It seems warmer and dryer based on anecdotal experience. We can probe nature and try to model changes and then check against reality data. Just no big decisions on carbon taxes until models simulate actual measurements with accuracy.
Scott
Scott,
Add to that the Icelandic multi-volcano. One big burp and “warming” is likely out the window for some time to come.
And while it may not occur for a thousand years or more, the likelihood of it doing so is greater than the predicted calamities of climate change.
PokerGuy, perhaps you have mistaken Wendell Berry’s sophisticated “nature-as-voter” simile (which has overtones also of synecdoche) for a mere metaphor?
One wonders whether your posts disparage Wendell Berry’s brand of conservatism without the due diligence of having reflected seriously upon it?
All right … now it’s time to “confess the truth and shame the devil”, eh PokerGuy?
Pesonifying nature, pokeryuy? Say, it’s jest pathetic!
Beth
Pingback: Playing hockey – blowing the whistle | Climate Daily
Pingback: Playing hockey – blowing the whistle | Climate Daily
We live in an age of trash recycling, so it’s important to separate the garbage from the rubbish.
Mann’s hockey stick was “garbage” (as was confirmed by Mc & Mc, the Wegman committee and the NAS panel, even bofore the exposure of “Mike’s Nature trick”).
It appears that the edited version of Marcott et al. that was published in Science was “rubbish”.
I remember Jean S calling Tamino’s defense of the Hockey Stick ‘garbage’. And then Ian Jolliffe showed up.
==================
kim
Yep.
MBH is referred to as a “a piece of dubious statistics”
http://climateaudit.org/2008/09/08/ian-jolliffe-comments-at-tamino/
Polite.
But, the again, Brits are generally known for their good manners.
Minnesotans?
Max
Thanks, Max, I’d forgotten Ian Jolliffe’s point when he denied being a denier. He believed then, 2008, that the case for global warming rested on far better evidence than Mann’s Hockey Stick analysis.
Which asks for the questions. Where is that evidence, and is the long dead hockey stick resurrected for lack of any better evidence?
==================
kim
Could it be that all the Marcott ballyhoo plus the attempted resurrection of its long-dead and buried MBH predecessor are simply a clumsy attempt to divert attention from the observed fact that it has not warmed for 12-15 years despite unabated human GHG emissions and concentrations reaching record levels?
“Look, a puppy!” (as the left hand slips deftly into the pocket of the unsuspecting victim).
Max
So, with socialist-leaning regimes in developed countries around the world, these guys make up another hockey stick. Will they lose funding? No, the socialist governments want man-induced global warming to be perceived as real. . Will they lose prestige? No, they will be considered heroes by the climate science community a la Gleick. Will they be damned by the media? Of course not! We can sit here and whine, but they have won another round.
So why have the British suddenly limited the teaching of climate change to children until they are 14?
==============
kim
change of gumment?
(Gone forever is “90 days to save the planet” Gordie and his scary fairy tale spots)
Max
Well, I dunno. Perhaps a change within the government. Even the crack denizens of the Bish’s Palace are puzzled.
Maybe that conspiracist guy at the Met Office is up to some new devilment.
================
maybe the british ran out of black helicopters
kim, perhaps it has something to do with it now being officially Spring, and people here saying, “I can’t believe it’s not Winter”
“maybe the british ran out of black helicopters”
LOL!
Perhaps someone calculated the ratio of those with and without private generators.
===============
…or generated privates :-o
kim
it all started two years ago when the new govt decided to review the ever expanding national curriculum
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/12/climate-change-curriculum-government-adviser
it has taken until now to implement it although there is stiff opposition from green groups
tonyb
Oh, excellent, you’ve plumbed it.
============
er, pb plumbed it; cr chromed it.
=============
Speak of Richard Betts and up jumps devilment, surely co-incidence in this case. Inquiring minds, Bob Tisdale and others, want to know why the Met Office’s new decadal forecast only has five years. Do their following five continue the cooling of the first five?
===================
Re: blowing the whistle
Has anyone apart from me written a comment to Science?
Paul M
Is your comment to Science public?
If so, where can we all see it?
This is not a trick question. Am truly interested.
Max
Max, yes it is on one of the Bishop Hill threads a few days ago.
It’s on the second page of the ‘Marcott in Freefall’ thread, dated 3/15 @ bishophill.squarespace.com
=================
JC Comment: “This post is a follow-up to Rud’s previous post, which now has over a thousand comments. Again, I am not personally digging into the science aspects of this study, although I find the sociology of what is going on here very interesting. All this makes Mike’s Nature trick seem straightforward.”
To complete the sociology study is very interesting to see also the arguments of the people defending this study.
Look at the argument of some Jim D. above.
Jim D | March 19, 2013 at 8:27 pm | Reply
“Are the skeptics saying the temperature didn’t rise nearly a degree since the LIA, as Marcott said, or are they just saying Marcott is right for the wrong reasons? I haven’t followed the debate on this, but I think his temperature rise is about right compared to thermometers, especially for land areas.”
WebHubTelescope | March 20, 2013 at 1:09 am | is another such example.
These are just a couple of examples at the start of the thread, but continue through. Ignoring completely the facts discussed, ignoring the data itself which creates a hockey stick about 50 years before the actual increase in CO2 (!)
These persons are focused on their beliefs and do not want to contribute to the logical analysis. They are not interested in science, but in the message they have to transmit.
Really good material for a sociology study.
It is the equinox,
Spring in the northern hemisphere,
Autumn down under.
In the hedge rows along the river
fragile blossoms or
fruitful berries.*
Why do I think of hedging?
… Equivocation.
Meant ter add * berries? Wendell Berry naychur poetree :)
Yes Beth….Fanny seems to think that because Berry makes his personal appeal to nature metaphorical (well what else would he do, assuming he doesn’t want to get thrown in the loony bin?) that he doesn’t really believe it. Then what’s the point in using that kind of language. Gore would say he doesn’t literally mean “the earth has a fever” but in the important, propagandistic, public relations ways he certainly does mean it.
pokerguy,
‘The earth has a fever,’
the ‘sick earth’ pathetic fallacy,
Gore employing a literary device
fer political ends
is sort of …
pathetic.
Beth
I am not saying it was a mistake or not. I am pointing out the tribalistic discrepancy in an approach to:
-A paper published by press release
-Strange rush/timing of release which happened to meet two convenient dates.
–Results cited to a senate committee (one of the convenient dates)
-Error quickly found
If this was a climate scientist and the paper was considered alarmist, skeptics would be crying all kinds of fraud conspiracy theories and blue murder about that chain of events.
But because it was Watts et al there was a silent kind of “oh it’s just a mistake”.
Best bit though is:
–Paper results repeated to the “media” just last week
And again due to tribal nature this will be ignored by skeptics. Yet had a climate scientist dared repeat debunked results to the media the same skeptics would be demanding their head!
Steve Fitzpatrick | March 20, 2013 at 9:06 pm |
When you make vague, unsupported, uncited, handwaving allegations like I’m not “careful in [my] technical analysis”, you’re damn right I’m going to be too prickly by half, Steve, and you damn well deserve it for that kind of nasty attempt at character assassination
If you want to accuse me of something, at least have the balls to quote my words and cite my errors. You’re just throwing mud at the wall and hoping it will stick.
Not on me it won’t, not without quotes and citations.
w.
Willis, I write both as “a fan of Willis Eschenbach” and as one who throughout his life has been misunderstood, wrongfully abused and falsely accused, and as one who has suffered because of my honesty, integrity and analytical rigour amongst those who were self-serving and conformist.
Sadly, such things are inevitable, particularly for those of us, such as you and I, who march to a different drum, who are individuals whose often-different perspective draws on broad experience rather than received wisdom or popular views.
My experience since age 2 (1944) is that we cause for more suffering for ourselves from reacting to such provocations than from the original unwarranted slight. I hesitate to give unsought advice, but I’ll make an exception. Let the dross wash off you, don’t dwell on it or internalise, you know your own qualities, if others can’t perceive them or dispute them, leave the problem with them, don’t make it your own.
Faustino, Willis Eschenbach more than brings it upon himself. Just look at how he responded to Steve Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick said he admires Eschenbach, but He wishes Eschenbach “were a just bit more careful in his technical analysis.”
How does Eschenbach respond? He calls that a “nasty attempt at character assassination.” Fitzpatrick couldn’t have been any more mild with his criticism, and Eschenbach basically “flips out” over it. Not only that, but while he says Fitzpatrick should “have the balls” to quote his words, he distorts what Fitzpatrick said.
Eschenbach claims Fitzpatrick accused him of not being “careful in his technical analysis.” That’s not true. Fitzpatrick said he wishes Eschenbach would be a bit more careful. That is nothing like what Eshenbach claims. No matter how careful a person may be, he or she can always be more careful.
If you have “been misunderstood, wrongfully abused and falsely accused” throughout your life, you shouldn’t feel sympathy for Eschenbach. You should feel anger. Willis Eschenbach epitomizes that sort of behavior.
Faustino –
I have often admired your comments, but this comment seems rather bizarre. Obviously, I know nothing of your life and nothing of Willis’, but the reactions that Willis gets to his online persona are entirely in line with his online persona. Why would you think otherwise? As ye sow so shall ye reap.
I know nothing of him personally, but how you get from his aggressive, self-absorbed, judgmental, overtly narcissistic and attention-grabbing self-righteous holier-than-thou on-line persona to someone who is “misunderstood, falsely accused, and wrongly-abused,” is odd indeed.
This is an online forum where we all create, entirely, the reactions we get. No one here “suffers” except by their own creation, let alone “suffers” because of “honesty, integrity, and analytical rigor.”
Internet blog discourse thrives on the sense of victimization that accompanies the narcissistic injury, but my god man – do you really see poor Willis’ pearl-clutching about “character assassination” and take it seriously? Willis can never turn on a computer after tomorrow and never suffer one bit from anything that anyone has ever said to him through blog comments. His humorous self-victimization is entirely self-inflicted. It is no different for any of us here. If he wanted to change the reactions he gets, he could do so significant, immediately, w/o changing one iota of the technical content of his input. It is merely up to him to choose to do so.
Let me ask you – how many times have your engendered the kinds of online reactions to your comments that Willis gets from his? If there is a significant difference, and you receive significantly less hostile reaction, why do you think that would be so? Is it because he is so much more honest than you, with so much more integrity and analytical rigor than yourself? Can you really attribute those reactions he gets to those attributes you describe?
Well, B & J, I decided not to say to Willis “yes, you are too prickly by half,” but just to suggest an alternative to his frequent reactions to perceived slurs on his honour.
And, no, I don’t say that he has been “misunderstood, falsely accused, and wrongly-abused,” just that in giving him advice on non-reaction I can draw on my own experience to suggest what might be a better strategy than his often-strong reactions to criticism.
Ever the peace-maker (TM).
Overall, warts and all, I like Willis as presented online and suspect we have some similarities, although, as you say Josh, my approach here does not engender the reactions that Willis gets. Long may that continue.
I stand corrected.
Faustino:
Unfortunate abbreviation choice aside, I certainly understand this. One could agree with my view of Willis Eschenbach completely and still offer advice like you offered.
I just found it odd you’d (seemingly) offer sympathy for Eschenbach’s suffering of the very behavior he regularly engages in. Especially in response to him falsely portraying himself as suffering from that behavior while in reality, engaging in that very behavior.
For what it’s worth, it sure sounded like you were saying that. Even with you having said it wasn’t your intention, that’s still how your comment reads to me. I just don’t see how, “Sadly, such things are inevitable” isn’t saying that.
Not that it really matters. I may be missing something, or you may have misspoke. Either way, your intention is clear now. That’s what matters.
Faustino, I support your thoughts wrt Willis but on-line personas are a different kettle of fish as far as normal social interaction is concerned. Don’t worry about Willis or anyone else on this blog, they can look after themselves. The very worst type of ad hom is easily fixed by simply rolling the mouse wheel, which I’ve found necessary more often in recent times.
Teach him a lesson, willis. Fake a suicide attempt and blame it on his very mild criticism of cowboy willis. He will feel really bad. Do I need to provide a citation?
Gosh, Willis. Do you even have a fuse?
Well, I love ’em both, but I don’t think Willis knows Steve as well as I do. Let me introduce you two again, too bad about that Saturday Night Knife and Gun Club meet-up.
=========
ROFLMAO
You should go on stage, Willis..
There’s one leaving in ten minutes.
Willis,
I have to agree with both Faustino and Brandon.
I read Steve F’s comments and found them rather mild concerning you. Hell they were arguably mild concerning fan, even though it seems pretty clear Steve has a much lower opinion of fan’s contributions than he does yours.
You may feel you have something to gain by being so prickly and combative in this instance, but it is lost on some of us who do pay attention to your opinions.
A fan of *MORE* discourse | March 21, 2013 at 5:49 pm |
I understand your passion, Fan, but actually that’s not true. Despite rising sea levels, the majority of atolls have either stayed the same size, or grown in area. That’s how atolls work, Fan … Charles Darwin discovered that when the ocean rises, the atolls rise with it … read my post “Floating Islands, it’s all explained there”.
Regarding whether the coral atolls are in any danger, science says no way. See my post, The Irony, It Burns for citations, references, and details regarding the lack of any effect of sea level rise on atolls. It’s all there in black and white. I quote from the scientific paper:
And since the sea level has been rising over that 20 to 60 years, your claim is falsified. Read my posts, Fan. You’re missing the boat on this question.
w.
PS—Regarding your ignorant sneer at how long it’s been since I was in the outer islands, I was there in 2011 … you truly are pathetic, you know. You’re grasping for straws on this one, and arguing against both Charles Darwin and modern science. Coral atolls are under a host of threats, including mining coral for hotel construction as in the Maldives, and over-pumping of the freshwater lens, and killing parrotfish, and overpopulation almost everywhere.
But they are under no threat at all from rising sea levels. You’ve been sold a bill of goods on that one, read Darwin, read my posts, before making more claims. You’re just embarrassing yourself.
Floating islands, fan, as I referenced above @ 8.43am.
Bet yer still won’t read it, yer seem ter prefer equivocation…
Here it is ~1945.
JCH, I have visited that particular Outer Island airstrip (which still accepts missionary flights) and this different one too (which no longer does), and have been to quite a few other Outer Islands by various modes of transport … none of which were comfortable, scheduled, safe, or in some cases even legal. None of this was my idea … perhaps someday the causal agent of these adventures will authorize me to tell the tale, Willis-style!
Yea, I was looking at them and thought maybe there are two different islands in the photographs. In their last days a lot of WW2 sailors swam in those beautiful waters, and died days later in Kamikaze attacks in the waters off Okinawa. What is the name of the 2nd one?
The second island is Woleai (in one of its spellings).
The Japanese evicted the Woleai islanders to a neighboring smaller island (which had no taro patch), where many islanders starved. Woleai itself was bulldozed for an airstrip. The Americans bombed the airstrip heavily, then cut-off the supply lines, and waited for the Japanese garrison to starve (which they did, by the hundreds and perhaps even thousands). When the islanders returned after the war, they found the island carpeted with Japanese bones toward the end, the soldiers had been too weak even to bury their dead. The bones are interred within a fane, which still stands on the island, which bears a titanium plaque contributed by the families of the soldiers. Even today, more bones surface on a regular base, and these are interred within the fane. The fane itself stands on a sloping beach, which is eroding into the rising ocean, and already the fane itself beginning to lean toward the sea. Within another few decades, no living person will remember any of this sad history, the fane itself will dissolve into the rising ocean, and the imperishable titanium plaque will settle to the bottom of the sea. Woleai is a sober island.
AIRSTRIP INFORMATION
Dimensions: 1200 x 75 ft / 366 x 23 m
Surface: chip seal, in extremely poor condition, potholes & severe cracks, last surface work completed in 1992, no proper drainage, water pools on airstrip; AIRSTRIP CURRENTLY OUT OF SERVICE DUE TO UNSAFE CONDITIONS
Lights: no
Latitude: 7°22’36.60″N (estimated)
Longitude: 143°54’30.54″E (estimated)
As one who finds the majority of fan’s posts to be distracting and never on topic, I have to admit appreciating his comment above on Woleai.
It is both interesting and informative. If only more were like that.
Thank you timg56!
Yes, the Outer Islanders possess a remarkably sophisticated scientific and practical understanding (obtained via solar-powered satellite-dishes) of all six dimensions of climate-change.
Timg56, with further study and reflection, you may perhaps attain to a comparably mature moral and scientific appreciation as the Outer Islanders. So please continue learning and thinking, timg56!
fan,
I do fine at learning and thinking. And by mature and moral, you mean acting more as you do, I think I’ll pass. I’m better off modelling my behavior on folks like Ms Martin’s 2nd grade students at Highlands ES.
Greetings, Willis! Your scientific concerns are substantially addressed in a response to Steve Fitzpatrick’s well-posed query.
As for your less-rational concerns, there’s not much that anyone can do about them, eh?
Fan, and so speaketh the toomler.
I guess Fitzpatrick hit a nerve when he alluded to dedicated apologizers of global warming alarmism may be showing the The Dunning–Kruger effect … a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes, according to wiki.
This looks like a fancy way of labeling government climatists and their supporters as a bunch of unconscious incompetents. JC had a thread on that not too long ago–i.e., Leftists global warming fearmongers are on the level of ‘meta-ignorance’ of all unconscious incompetents who refuse to even consider the possibility of error, as follows:
Walker et al. (2003) categorize the following different levels of ignorance. Total ignorance implies a deep level of uncertainty, to the extent that we do not even know that we do not know. Recognized ignorance refers to fundamental uncertainty in the mechanisms being studied and a weak scientific basis for developing scenarios. Reducible ignorance may be resolved by conducting further research, whereas irreducible ignorance implies that research cannot improve knowledge (e.g. what happened prior to the big bang). Bammer and Smithson (2008) further distinguish between conscious ignorance, where we know we don’t know what we don’t know, versus unacknowledged or meta-ignorance where we don’t even consider the possibility of error. ~J. Curry
LOL … compared to the names that denialists call me, “tümmler” is a badge of honor! Sincere thanks are extended to you, Bob!
Congratulations to you Willis Eschenbach! It’s not easy to get to the Outer Islands … many of them have ship-service only once or twice per year.
Needless to say, sea-level rise-rates are spatially variable. Perhaps the Pacific Outer Island(s) that you visited are in an area of the Pacific in which the sea-level has been (temporarily!) nearly constant?
That would nicely explain everything, eh? Best wishes to you, Willis Eschenbach!
Fan I’ll break my “no reply” rule once again, but no more. Pacific atolls are the product of the growth of tropical marine organisms. Growth occurs in the upper ocean, and follows the rise and fall of sea-level. Gradual sea-level change is never a threat to atolls, and those who claim to fear that the atolls will be swamped surely have another agenda.
Faustino, your grasp of Outer Island climate-change reality suffers greatly because it is uninformed by practical experience.
A typhoon that obliterates a low-lying island, followed — possibly decades later — by a second typhoon that raises a sand-bar above the waves, leaves no humans alive in either location.
The common-sense point is that, in the Outer Islands, destruction from sea-level rise is *NOT* gradual, but rather is catastrophically sudden and unpredictable.
Moreover, the western equatorial Pacific is studded with atolls that already have lost the race with sea-level rise, in the sense that these atolls already have no land above sea level.
Hopefully these two considerations have acted to increase your common-sense appreciation of the implications of sea-level rise, Faustino!
The actual common sense point is that people shouldn’t live on these small islands. But they do and they pay the price that people with common sense can see coming – and it has absolutely zero to do with man-generated CO2.
Fan
What caused the sea level rise prior to the current sea level rise ?
Tonyb
The Vatican appreciates that Jim2’s selfishly short-sighted morality is (literally) toxic.
NASA scientists patiently answer TonyB’s question: Milankovitch insolation amplified by the CO2 greenhouse effect caused the Holocene sea-level rise.
Conclusion Both morally and scientifically, the chief ground-truths of climate-change are *NOT* complicated, eh gentlefolks?
Fan – don’t put words in my mouth. People who choose to live on the coast, in low-lying, flood-prone areas like New Orleans, and other known-problematic areas have to take responsibility for their decisions. Hurricanes have been happening for many thousands of years. If you choose to live in such a place, you pay the price yourself. The people living on low level islands need to take responsibility for their choice. They know full well that hurricanes occur and that their ancestors paid the price – just as they will.
Fan said
“NASA scientists patiently answer TonyB’s question: Milankovitch insolation amplified by the CO2 greenhouse effect caused the Holocene sea-level rise.”
Where precisely do they say that fan? I read yur link but perhps it is buried deep in there?
Are you saying it caused the Roman optimum sea level rise which I wrote about and referenced to you? Did it cause the MWP sea level rise? (next in the series you will be pleased to hear). Did it cause the modern sea level rise which strted around 1750 when the glaciers largely were in stasis or retreat?
Whilst we are about it I am still hoping for a link by you to a paper by Dr Hansen regarding the reasons for the temperature rise over the last 300 years, which makes Giss in 1880 a staging post and not a starting post. Thank you
Tonyb
TonyB, thank you for asking this question!
NASA’s precise answer begins with two sites:
• the history-oriented site Milutin Milankovitch (1879-1956)
• the data-oriented site Paleoclimatology: Explaining the Evidence
These lead to dozens of further NASA sites and hundreds of further scientific articles, of which a thorough, up-to-date, clear-written summary is provided by NASA scientist James Hansen’s free-as-in-freedom survey Climate Sensitivity, Sea Level, and Atmospheric CO2
Regarding Roman archaeology, NASA’s charter does not extend that far.
Thank you again, for so respectfully asking this crucial scientific question, TonyB!
fan
You are incorrogible. If you cant answer my question on reasons for previous sea level oscillations why dont you say instead of sending me on a wild goose chase of loosely related links?. It would save us a great deal of time.
What about attempting to answer the second part about the reasons for the 300 year long temperature increase. Surely Dr Hansen has written on this?
tonyb.
To pin him down, you’d have to stick one in a fan. Far more likely to hurt your hand than the fan.
==============
As a NASA scientist, Hansen’s research (quite properly) focuses chiefly on Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications, rather than the European (rather than global) temperature (rather than heat) historical (rather than instrumental) records that our your chief interest.
Still it appears that Hansen’s analysis is broadly consistent with yours? In particular, TonyB, what do your historical studies predict in regard to accelerating (or not) ice-melt rates and sea-level rise (both of which Hansen’s articles predict will increase in the coming decade)?
How likely is it, that Hansen’s predictions of accelerating climate change will prove correct in the coming decade, purely by chance?
Question Is James Hansen celebrated, chiefly because he has been lucky at guessing? If so, for how many more decades do you predict that James Hansen’s guesswork can plausibly continue to be correct?
The world wonders, eh?
Don’t forget the incredible correlation of rate of ice volume change with changes in solar insolation due to Milankovitch cycles:
http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/roe/GerardWeb/Publications_files/Roe_Milankovitch_GRL06.pdf
This is a little known paper by Roe, but to those who may share an interest in deductive modeling, I find the correlation and eventual fit striking and significant. Mind you, this is not the global effect of Milankovitch, but is one of those substantiating pieces of research that reinforces how important the forcing functions are.
If one of these Milankovitch cycles gets a positive reinforcement during a global insolation imbalance, the thinking is that this would trigger a more significant interglacial. That is at least the way I understand it.
Thats a correct exposition of the theory Webby. But, as Lindzen points out it shows that a local change in forcing can cause huge changes even though the total global forcing did not change. Where does that leave your dogma about forcings and global energy balance?
David Young, in that case the feedback is clearly ice albedo. While ice albedo is still part of the positive feedback now, there is not enough of it that is quickly going to disappear, but Greenland and Antarctica can contribute to this as they go dark on longer time scales.
Yes, the albedo feedback was critical to these changes. But the point is that huge changes can happen that have local causes and are totally invisible to the global energy balance method that is Webby’s bread and butter and often used by climate scientists to argue about forcings.
Yes, we are giving the system a big kick in the pants with the GHG forcing function and control knob. And that kick won’t make it cool.
It will start warming and the positive linear or nonlinear feedbacks will reinforce the warming. The system will then evolve until it hits a new energy balance.
Whose dogma are referring to FOO Young? That interpretation is certainly not my invention. The C in CAGW is trying to quantify these little understood positive feedbacks.
I call you FOO because you just want to add clutter to the discussion by suggesting that this forcing will cause a cooling. If it is a positive warming feedback, it is not playing into your hands, and is actually adding to the fat-tail probability of warming above the consensus mean value. I consider these own-goals on your part, and a mistakefor you to even go there. But hey, that’s all you know.
To stretch the sports analogy, you can’t seem to hit the knuckleball:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/stochastic-analysis-of-log-sensitivity.html
The ball is moving and fluttering while it moves, but is not going to reverse direction unless it meets a bat head on. You seem to think that it can.
Webby, Webby, I did not suggest that added forcing would result in cooling. My point is much more subtle, too subtle for your limited intelligence. The point is that distributions of forcings and responses are critical and those are not captured in your energy balance model. When will you actually respond on point and actually read what is said?
Yes, I look first at the baseline of the energy balance. Any other effects due to positive feedback (e.g. stochastic resonance, etc) will clearly make the outcome WORSE than the first-order energy balance argument! No way will it make it better!
Young, don;t you realize that you are a closeted global warming alarmist?
David Young, Webster doesn’t understand the importance of energy distribution and thermal inertia. He is a fast feedback, laboratory under controlled conditions kinda guy. He should partner with the guy that started A123 on their next ideal versus reality train wreck.
There are several papers on the delays in meridional and zonal ocean mixing that indicate 0.6 to 3.2 C fluctuations over 150 to 1700 year time scales which he carefully avoids to use the fast land response without considering the actually long term settling time frames and the underlying 0.639 C per century rise in Atlantic SST since 1900 or earlier. Until he actually tackles the real world issues, he is just a parrot for a failing cause.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/03/zonal-flux-using-oceans.html
There are areas that respond to global forcing faster than others. This part is quite clear from the data.
JimD said:
I like the analogy of the computer CPU with the heat sink attached directly to the surface of the chip. This is Scenario #1. In earth terms, it would be a place like Hawaii.
However, most land areas are only remotely attached to the ocean, which would be the analogy of a weekly thermally conductive path getting attached to the chip’s surface. This is scenario #2.
Of course, the CPU in scenario #2 is the one that will get hot and it will get hot faster. And as JimD said, scenario #2 also applies to the land as these areas are warmed directly just as the CPU is warmed directly, with a weaker thermal conductivity path away from the source.
Surprised that Cappy Dick, the HVAC guy, doesn’t understand this. But of course, he is not in the business of understanding. He is in the business of pranking!
I think of the analogy of parallel resistors. The current goes more through the lower resistor when a voltage is applied. The land supports the energy flow more as its surface temperature can rise more easily to provide an increased heat out to space. It is the lower resistor to the energy flow. The voltage is the forcing. The Arctic is even more extreme due to its albedo feedback, perhaps an even lower resistance than land.
Webster, Cappy Dick understands that but also knows that the CPU Temp can follow the sink. That is why I said you choice of sink was wrong, it is not the oceans it is the poles meaning you have to consider internal heat transfer in the thermal reservoir. Why that is beyond you is amazing.
.https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Fc5TThRGcvg/UU35ewdprsI/AAAAAAAAHk4/wRkNuteBw1U/s912/Atlantic%2520Zone%2520v%2520NH%2520surface.png
That is the Atlantic ocean part of your sink with the north half of your CPU.
Tony B
You ask Fanny:
This is the wrong question to ask Fanny.
Let me explain.
As a Hansen groupie, Fanny knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there could not have been accelerated sea level rise prior to industrial human CO2c emissions.
Hansen has explained it clearly for his faithful followers: human CO2 is the cause of all “deleterious” climate change leading to sea level rise “that can be measured in meters”.
And if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s simply because it’s still “hidden in the pipeline”, waiting for a blast of the heavenly trumpets to come rushing out and fry us all, defying all the laws of thermodynamics along the way.
(Who needs “thermodynamics” when we’ve got prophets warning us of “tipping points” and “runaway Venus effects”?)
IOW, accelerated sea level rise prior to industrial human CO2 emissions.
is just not POSSIBLE.
So how can Fanny explain something than cannot have been possible?
Max
Climate Etc readers are invited to peruse the recent survey article by Hansen, Sato, Russell, and Kharecha , titled
Climate Sensitivity, Sea Level, and Atmospheric CO2, for the assertions that Manacker ascribes to it! Instead Climate Etc readers will find the following, sobering, scientific analysis and conclusions:
For our descendants the key question is simple: what is that probability that Hansen’s scientific reasoning is correct?
The world wonders, eh Manacker?
The Marcott et al. conclusions that “Current global temperatures of the past decade … are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history” and “Global mean temperature for the decade 2000-2009 ….are warmer than 82% of the Holocene” are clearly contrary to measured, accurate, real-time data and thus fail the Feynman test, i.e., they are wrong. ~Don J. Easterbrook
So Easterbrook is still pushing his false GISP2 ice core graph.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/11/validity-of-a-reconstruction-of-regional-and-global-temperature-for-the-past-11300-years/
It’s funny that despite all the skeptics whining about chartmanship and graphs they have been totally unable to stop the likes of Easterbrook pushing this zombie argument. Are we to believe none of them spot the problem?
The issue here is that the GISP2 ice core data ends in 1855. To bring it to the present day so that he can compare the present day to the rest of the holocene, Easterbrook adds just 0.5C warming to the end of the graph.
What staggering is that he’s even supplied 20th century greenland temperature graphs in figure 2 which show about 3C warming since 1855. Not 0.5C as he’s plotted. His present day is thus more than 2C too cool.
If he plotted that extra warming he’d find his words coming back to haunt him as GISP2 actually conrifmed Marcott’s conclusion that “Current global temperatures of the past decade … are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history.”
lolwot
Naw.
It’s the GISP2 curve itself (not an Easterbrook rehash) that tells us we are still below the MWP warming today and well below that of the Roman Optimum and earlier warm periods.
Here is the GISP2 curve according to Wiki.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GISP2_ice_core_eng.svg
We see from the curve:
-1.2C “present” (=1993, when study was made)
-1.8C LIA low
-0.5C MWP high
-1.2C Dark Ages low
+0.5 Roman Optimum high
Splicing real-life thermometer annual data to ice core stuff is dicey, but let’s have a go anyway.
Since 1993 we have observed around 0.5C warming, which would put us today at:
-1.2C +0.5C = -0.7C
So we are still 0.2C below the MWP high and a full 1.2C below the Roman Optimum high today.
For a good summary, see Kobashi et al. 2011 (bold type by me).
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011GL049444/abstract
So we’re not there yet, lolwot, even though the models tell us we might get there by the end of this century.
(Yawn!)
You can calm down again.
And so can the hapless polar bears who did just fine during those earlier warmer times, thank you.
Max
Now some, not Eli to be sure, might point out to Manakar that GISP2 is not a global proxy. Others, still not Eli, might note that Greenland (that’s the G is GISP) was one of the areas that warmed the most in the MWP. Yet others might ask, not Eli to be sure again, what period you are defining as the MWP because that appears to jump about a bit in the game of climate telephone. But Eli will merely point out that Easterbrook is a crock. You would do as well to trust him on climate as Dick Cheney on Iraq having WMD.
Slam dunk, eh? March Hare Madness.
========
Still others might point out to Eli that this particular argument is about Greenland temperatures, not global temps
And they might further point out to the bunny that neither does the MWP come into this argument.
That is fine a long as people don’t use GISP to “prove” the MWP, which is what people are trying to do here.
Some might point out to the “cwazy wabbit” that the discussion above between lolwot and manacker has been about past Greenland temperatures, not global averages.
But, then again, “wabbits” are known for myopia (despite all the carrots they eat). And very limited reading skills…
Max
Jim D
To use central Greenland temperature proxies to prove a global MWP that was warmer than today would indeed be silly.
To cite central Greenland temperature proxies as evidence of a MWP in Greenland that was slightly warmer than today is a bit less silly.
However, to cite physical remains of medieval farms buried in the coastal Greenland permafrost as evidence of a MWP in Greenland that was warmer than today is pretty solid.
Physical evidence trumps paleo proxy data every time, Jim.
But Greenland is not “global”, I’ll agree (don’t think lolwot was making this claim, and I certainly wasn’t)
Max
manacker, clearly you have, rightfully, ignored the Easterbrook WUWT article that lolwot pointed to. But, yes, I agree it is irrelevant to a “global” MWP and Easterbrook should be told that.
Sorry, D Easterbrook is not even a crock
Here’s how some believers see it:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/global-temperature-change-the-big-picture/
Big picture?
JOshus obliviously writes: “This is an online forum where we all create, entirely, the reactions we get. No one here “suffers” except by their own creation…”
Lol Josh. And don’t forget to keep putting skeptics in quotes.It’s so endearing
If science cannot explain the planet’s historical climate, then how can they presume to predict the climate in the future?
If science cannot explain the historical climate, does that not indicate that the multitude of variables that affect climate interact in ways that are not yet understood?
Is it not possible that there are factors that affect climate that presently are not considered at all (intentionally or otherwise) in attempts of model climate?
In the past, has not the planet exhibited climate far more extreme (either warmer or colder) than present? If so, then why is today’s climate paradigm considered abnormal?
If one were to extrapolate the climate trend IN the middle of the MWP
wouldn’t one predict that the earth would literally burn up in a few decades or centuries?
Just a few questions from an ordinary, non-science person.
I would really , REALLY appreciate a response from someone, ANYONE, who can address these questions.
Thanks much !!
JA,
After a decade of reading and commenting on climate blogs I can only say that these are good questions that modern climate science chooses not to answer.
Andrew
JA
I gave this reply earlier which may answer some of your questions on extremes
http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/19/playing-hockey-blowing-the-whistle/#comment-304737
They are only the observations from the people of the time so obviously they shouldnt carry as much weight as a tree ring reconstruction.
tonyb
“In the past, has not the planet exhibited climate far more extreme (either warmer or colder) than present? If so, then why is today’s climate paradigm considered abnormal?”
The convinced are denying this, that there was climate change before Climate Change. The net ‘forcing’ is unknown (at any point in time), so any postulated CO2 forcing is arbitrary.
Edim the Balkan Balker sez:
Passive construction. I can only assume this refers to your own lack of knowledge.
You’re one of the deniers I am talking about Webby, arguing from ignorance. Logic and AGW don’t go well together.
> If science cannot explain the planet’s historical climate, then how can they presume to predict the climate in the future?
Science, whatever that means, does not predict the climate. It offers projections. And even if science could retrodict the planet’s historical climate, it is quite possible that it would still fail to be able to predict future climate.
All it can predict is that dumping CO2 in the atmosphere like there’s no tomorrow will have effects on the climate. We, as citizens, can decide to do something about it. Or we could remain here and wait for Godot.
A big THANK YOU for your question!
“Science, whatever that means, does not predict the climate. It offers projections.”
This sometimes seems to me a distinction without a difference, at least in practical terms. Certainly insofar as the alarmed public is concerned, these model projections are thought of as predictions.
And truthfully, I’m not sure I see the difference. Predictions are literally probabilistic these days ….80 percent chance of rain….And they are largely based on models..How does that differ from a projection?
A big THANK YOU for your concerns, poker guy.
Please refer to the IPCC’s glossary of terms:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_glossary.shtml
Amazing, how alarmists are almost uniformly nasty, condescending, and altogether hard to take. I wonder what accounts for that? And no, it’s not an oh so pious concern for our “ailing planet.”
Please send this kind of comment directly to Lew, poker guy.
He collects them.
It’s red zone defense, pd; go long for the EZ one.
================
“uniformly nasty”
Evidently not an appreciator of pro sports. There are rules for physical play but virtually none for the mental part.
So you dish it out as much as you take it. Anthony “Fat Tony” Watts telling Paul Krugman that he will “see him in hell”.
Also interesting that you make that observation, considering your skills with high-stakes poker. Intimidation is a long-term strategy no doubt.
Also, the projection/prediction schtick is now so old it is pathognomonic for a newbie too ignorant to be cognitively dissonant yet.
================
I like Mike, a caricature crabbily come to life. It wasn’t he, but another of Andy’s ’08 denizens whom I called ‘a bag of bones that cages your soul’.
===============
> I like Mike.
I prefer mike:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/30686592492
I miss mike.
willard (@nevaudit) | March 22, 2013 at 9:34 am says about science:
“All it can predict is that dumping CO2 in the atmosphere like there’s no tomorrow will have effects on the climate.”
Actually it cannot because the greenhouse effect you do no not mention but are invoking is a myth. How do I know this? It may be news to you but Ferenc Miskolczi’s peer reviewed paper proving this has been out now for two and a half years. Blame the global warming establishment for keeping you in the dark. In 2010 Miskolczi used NOAA database of weather balloon observations to study absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere. He determined that IR absorption had been constant for the last 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time went up by 21.6 percent. This substantial increase of carbon dioxide did not increase the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere as required by the Arrhenius theory of greenhouse warming. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. This explains a lot about our climate. There has not been any warming for the last 17 years as Pachouri of the IPCC himself has conceded while carbon dioxide is the highest ever and still going up. Obviously putting carbon dioxide in the air is not causing any warming, just as Miskolczi says. And those warming predictions from IPCC? They are all wrong. IPCC predicted warming of 0.2 degrees per decade for this century and got none. But their worst error is claiming that global warming exists. It so happens that AGW is critically dependent upon the existence of the greenhouse effect. Absent greenhouse effect there can be no anthropogenic global warming. IPCC has been loosely claiming that global warming has existed since the middle of the twentieth century. To start a warming by the greenhouse effect laws of physics require that you must simultaneously increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Looking at all possible warming periods since the end of the nineteenth century we find that there are none that meet this requirement. Same result follows from Miskolczi’s observations. Which means that the theory of global warming by the greenhouse effect is nothing but a pseudoscience used to deceive institutions and governments into irrational actions to stop a non-existent warming.
That is the reality you have to learn to live with.
Arno, having gone three rounds with the Miz, let Eli tell you that
a) it is equation salad
b) the data it depends on is a purposefully wrong choice of reconstructions and incomplete
Best summarized by Nick Stokes
I think Miskolczi’s paper could have been written in two sentences:
“The greenhouse gas theory that has been used for the last century is TOTALLY WRONG! The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.”
Seriously, if you are making a claim like this, you need a good argument, put with some clarity. You would usually write down a model with some unknowns, state some physical principles with their resulting equations, and derive relations which characterise the unknowns. M does this, but at least three of his basic equations appear to be totally wrong. They actually look like elementary errors. Or if they are right, it seems no-one can explain them.
So this is Black Knight stuff. OK the use of Kirchhoff may be wrong, not sure about virial or that pesky Eq 7, but can anyone prove this is wrong, or that? People just lose patience.
Details at the first link
A big THANK YOU for your handwaving, Arno.
I further would state that you should take a look at Miskolczi’s definition of optical depth, which is peculiar to say the least. He is only looking for CO2 effects in the window region of the IR spectrum. By design he won’t find it there with this definition.
We all missed that Jim D. Thanks
JA, you write “If science cannot explain the planet’s historical climate, then how can they presume to predict the climate in the future?“
You dont need to ask anything else. The answer is, they cannot. Nothing is happening with the world`s climate that has not happened before, and there is no evidence whatsoever that adding CO2, or any other supposed GHGs, to the atmosphere has any discernabke effect on climate.
Many years ago, people with names like Hansen, Houghton and Watson observed that global temperatures were rising, and CO2 levels were going up at the same time. They proposed a hypothesis that the two were connected, and the rising CO2 levels were causing the increased temperatures. It should have been obvious to them at that time, for precisely the first question you ask, that physics would NEVER be able to answer the question. Nevertheless, they persisited in insisting that theoretical estimations, with no empirical evidence to back them up, proved that CO2 was the culprit.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Mother Nature is refusing to cooperate, and it is becoming clear from the empirical data that CAGW is just a massive hoax.
Yes, yes, yes, Jim, but I much prefer ‘extraordinary popular delusion and madness of the herd’ to ‘hoax’. Sure, there are those who have bellowed mischievously, but in the main it was mistakenly. Not a hoax, a phantom.
==================
May not be a hoax but is just an incorrect hypothesis. Sad part is that except for Steven Mosher, moshpit, few on this blog seem open to discussion of facts and measured results. He may believe in CAGW but at least provides useful support and links.
Scott
Yes, a marvelous irony that such a skeptic can be AGW’s most effective advocate. It’s particularly poignant, since he’s always abhorred the ethics of the activists, and he’s never been a catastrophist. Sorry you got stuck, so, moshe.
=========
LOL … Myrrh’s theory is correct … the alien climate-change scientists will not rest until they have conquered and destroyed the very heart of civilization!
@Jim Cripwell
Its worth remembering that John Houghton is from a strong Welsh evangelical Christian tradition and makes no secret of his view that god will punish humanity for their sins. There are few sects better at finding new sins that one can commit (knowingly or unknowingly) and many new ways for the almighty to express his displeasure via his chosen vessels.
So for Houghton, the theory and his faith went hand in hand. For Hansen he too saw a heavenly analogy – with his work on Venus. How he managed to translate an atmosphere with 965,000 ppm of CO2 one with 380 ppm is a bit of a mystery…but he managed it.
Watson is a harder nut to crack. On the one occasion I have seen him speak (at the Guardian’s Climategate debate) he was a deeply unimpressive figure..ill-prepared and with little beyond platitudes to say. He and Hansen were at NASA together, so maybe that’s where the rot set in.
But somewhere along the line it seems that all three deliberately crossed the line from scientist to advocate. Having a theory that can not be falsified may not suit the purist but it is – for a short time at least – a way to power and status.
Wait’ll moshe figures out that any warming we can do will be a net benefit.
===========
JA, your questions are good!
If you are looking for in-depth, respectful, rational, fully referenced information that answers *ALL* those questions, it’s tough to beat:
• James Hansen (and many colleagues) Scientific Case for Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change to Protect Young People and Nature. Plain-and-simple!
• The American Institute of Physics Discovery of Global Warming: a Hyperlinked History of Climate Change Science gives full historical background. Deeply grounded!
• NASA’s web site Climate change: How Do We Know? gives a data-centric perspective. Hockey-sticks galore!
• The Vatican web site Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature works through the morality and economics (taking a long view, as one would expect of a church that has survived 2000 years!). Foresighted!
• The Yankee-farmer conservative point of view is well-represented by the Poetry Foundations’s Wendell Berry page. Outstanding!
If you’re seeking the undeniable comfort of willful ignorance and irresponsibility, conveyed by old-school demagogic abuse, demagogic denial, and plenty of astro-turfing, then sites like WUWT are pleased to give you exactly what you want!
PS The military-strategy point of view is well-conveyed by US Navy admiral David Titley’s I Was Formerly a Climate Skeptic
Climate-change enlightenment can be discomfiting JA … yet the false-comfort alternative of lazy selfish shortsighted willful ignorance is beneath most citizens’ dignity, eh? Fortunately!
“yet the false-comfort alternative of lazy selfish shortsighted willful ignorance is beneath most citizens’ dignity, eh? Fortunately!”
ONce again, fanny, you confuse yourself with appeals to values and morality. I’m a “bad” person because I see the science differently than you.
The world wonders if you can see the problem with that, eh FOMD?
It’s a feature from his perspective. Funny haha, eh? Well, funny summyting.
==========
A fan of *MORE* discourse | March 22, 2013 at 10:01 am | Reply JA requests “In the past, has not the planet exhibited climate far more extreme (either warmer or colder) than present? If so, then why is today’s climate paradigm considered abnormal?”
JA, your questions are good!
If you are looking for in-depth, respectful, rational, fully referenced information that answers *ALL* those questions, it’s tough to beat:
…
• NASA’s web site Climate change: How Do We Know? gives a data-centric perspective. Hockey-sticks galore!
[ http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence ]
Oh look hockey sticks galore by the same ilk trick Al Gore played…
Since all those great rises and falls in temperature in and out of interglacials, not shown, happened with carbon dioxide never above the 300 ppm it shows that carbon dioxide levels were irrelevant to these great rises and falls in temperature – 650,000 thousand years of showing carbon dioxide irrelevant as we go back into our Ice Age and every 100,000 years dramatically heat up into interglacials.
Go on Fan, put this carbon dioxide line back together with the temperature data which should accompany it…
and do get it around the right way.
Like all the so called ‘proofs’ for for AGW/CAGW, you have to condone science fraud and sleights of hand which is the only way that it can be ‘shown’.
The “hockey sticks” from the NOAA data are real, the Hansen and his Marcott apprentice hockey sticks are fake, fake, fake, as is this NASA presentation.
Shysters.
Myrrh conspiracy theory is correct … will they stop at nothing, those climate-change blanc-manges?
Yours truly, from the planet Skyron … FOMD!
Hi JA,
Good questions:
“If science cannot explain the planet’s historical climate, then how can they presume to predict the climate in the future?”
Let consider an analogy
Let suppose you kept a record of your weight from the day you ewre born until today. You’d see a bunch of wiggles, maybe some growth spurts, maybe some plateaus or dips where you excercised or dieted. But the record we have of your food intake, diet and exercise and genetics is incomplete. Still we know some things about how you gain weight. We know, all other things being equal, that if you stop eating you will lose weight. We know that if you sit on the couch eating pizza and watching judge judy you will gain weight. And we have some pretty good ideas that going forward if you consume more calories than you expend that you will lard up.
We can even make projections: If you consume 2000 more calories per day than you expend, you will gain X pounds.
Now, we are able to make that prediction because we understand the basics of your energy balance. Calories In – calories expended = fat stored. More or less. But we STILL cannot explain your unique history of weight. Partly because we just have the weight data and not the calories in or calories expended. And there is the issue of you just growing naturally. Does our ignorance WRT to explaining every wiggle of your weight ENTAIL that we cannot say “Eating more calories than you expend will more likely than not lead to a fatter you rather than a skinnier you.” It does not. Understanding the past is neither necessary nor sufficient to explaining the future. However, it helps
“If science cannot explain the historical climate, does that not indicate that the multitude of variables that affect climate interact in ways that are not yet understood?”
It indicates many things. Most importantly it indicates a lack of forcing data.
It does not follow that since we dont know everything ( how much did you excercise on oct 12 1978 ) that we dont understand the general truths and trends of weight gain. We dont know everything about anything.
Hibernation soon. Time to fatten up.
=============
Steven, you write “It does not follow that since we dont know everything ( how much did you excercise on oct 12 1978 ) that we dont understand the general truths and trends of weight gain. We dont know everything about anything.`
`
I agree with you. No-one has the requisite physics to prove that the hypothesis of CAGW is wrong. It is a perfectly reasonable and viable hypothesis, with lots of theoretical evidence to support it. That is not my beef with the IPCC and the rest of the warmists such as yourself.
What I object to is the claims of high probabilites (>95% and >90%) in the IPCC SPMs to WG1 of AR4. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-7.html With no empirical data to support the hypothesis of CAGW, these outrageously high probabilities are a load of scientific nonsense. The physics does not exist to show that the hypothesis of CAGW is correct.
Its all fine that Steven Mosher uses analogies to “instruct”, but analogies don’t provide any evidence that AGW is true. They just encourage you to use your imagination, and that is happening way too often in climate science.
Andrew
Jim Cripwell | March 22, 2013 at 12:30 pm |
Steven, you write ..`
I agree with you. No-one has the requisite physics to prove that the hypothesis of CAGW is wrong. It is a perfectly reasonable and viable hypothesis, with lots of theoretical evidence to support it. That is not my beef with the IPCC and the rest of the warmists such as yourself.
A scientific hypothesis has to be falsifiable, otherwise it is not an hypothesis. There is no hypothesis!
Myrrh, you write “A scientific hypothesis has to be falsifiable, otherwise it is not an hypothesis. There is no hypothesis!”
I suspect this is an interesting philosophical question. In THEORY, CAGW is falsifiable. If someone could measure the increase in CO2 from current levels, and prove that an observed rise in temperature was caused by this increase in CO2, then climate sensitivity can be measured, and CAGW could be proven or falsified.
In practice we do not have the technology to do this. But do we call CAGW not a hypothesis because current technology does not allow us to falsify it? Maybe someone will overcome the difficulty, and CAGW could be tested.
Jim Cripwell and Myrrh
It has been said that CAGW, as outlined by IPCC in its AR4 report, is impossible to falsify or corroborate with empirical scientific evidence from actual physical observations or reproducible experimentation.
But “impossible” is a BIG word.
The galactic cosmic ray cloud nucleation hypothesis proposed by Henrik Svensmark et al. is another case in point.
Just as for the CAGW hypothesis, the underlying mechanism has been demonstrated experimentally under controlled conditions. For neither hypothesis, however, does this experimental work provide empirical data to support and quantify (or falsify) the hypothesis that this mechanism actually exerts a climate forcing resulting in a perceptible effect on global temperature in our atmosphere.
But, unlike the case for CAGW, actual reproducible experimentation under controlled conditions simulating our atmosphere are planned at CERN to either corroborate and quantify or falsify the Svensmark hypothesis.
Once this work has been completed, we will (hopefully) have empirical evidence to tell us whether or not the demonstrated cosmic ray cloud nucleation mechanism really has an impact on our global temperature.
My question to the two of you: If this is possible for the Svensmark hypothesis (I am assuming the money spent at CERN will not ne in vain), why could something similar not be done for the CAGW hypothesis?
Billions are being spent on all sorts of peripheral work or sea levels, Arctic sea ice extent, etc. as well as model studies on CAGW, so why is no one working on the basics?
Is the underlying reason because CAGW proponents are afraid of what theses experiments will show (i.e. models are easier to control than actual physical experiments)?
I have a hard time erasing the suspicion in my mind that this might be the biggest reason why such experiments are not being considered, after all these many years of unresolved scientific debate on “anthropogenic climate change”.
What do you think?
Max
I think the scale may be too different, Max. We are finding to our dismay that the pitiful digital simulacrums we so grandly call Global Climate Models fail to authentically enough model the immense analog computer that is the earth’s heat engine and climate drivers.
==================
Max, you write “What do you think?”
As usual, I agree with you completely.
Manacker,
All the svensmark experiments could possibly do is provide an estimate for a GCR forcing figure, eg an estimate of wm-2 forcing per % increase in GCRs.
So understanding of CO2 is already ahead on this. The CO2 forcing being known as 3.7wm-2 per doubling of CO2.
Maybe the GCR forcing will turn out significant too. Or it will turn out to be something insignificant like 0.1wm-2 per 1 sigma change in cosmic rays.
lolwot
You have missed my point.
I am not talking about empirical evidence obtained from actual physical observations or reproducible experimentation, which corroborate and quantify (or falsify) the Svensmark GCR/cloud hypothesis or, alternately, the CAGW hypothesis as outlined by IPCC in AR4.
Neither of these two competing (or complementary) hypotheses have passed this test, as yet, although the underlying mechanisms for BOTH have been validated experimentally.
You write:
This is all based on results of model studies rather than on empirical evidence as defined above. You cannot cite the empirical evidence supporting the 3.7wm-2 forcing for 2xCO2. And even if such evidence existed, this would only suggest a 2xCO2 warming of around 1C, and therefore not support the CAGW premise as outlined by IPCC.
Forgetting all the ballyhoo and hype surrounding CAGW, we have two hypotheses, which may or may not be working separately or together.
Both are based on mechanisms, which have been validated experimentally.
But neither is supported by empirical physical evidence.
That’s where it stands today, lolwot, whether you personally happen to like it or not.
Max
lolwot
typo correction
I am
nottalking about empirical evidence…“This is all based on results of model studies rather than on empirical evidence as defined above.”
It’s based on experiments involving passing infrared radiation through tubes filled with gases. Analogous to Svensmark filling chambers with “clouds” and passing cosmic rays through them (I am sketchy on the details there).
Both only provide lab condition figures. You need a model in both case in order to extrapolate those figures to the atmosphere.
Like I said, CO2 is ahead of the game here, the experiments were done decades (century+?) ago. I don’t expect cosmic rays will turn out to produce as significant forcing as CO2 is currently doing.
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the
extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’
If real covers a multitude of sins. The real questions are to the limits of low frequency variability and how many ‘calories’ were in this in the warming from1976 to 1998.
Sins there are. A study a few years ago found the missing heat shown in CERES – they gave a net TOA flux that showed it should be warming.
They must of course have known that it was in all in the SW compnent as a result of cloud changes. It seems that data is data only if it agrees with your narrative – thus the corruption of climate science goes deep.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=77
Lord Cripwell of Cavendish sez:
Subtle move there, replacing AGW with CAGW and thinking no one would catch it. Not even Chewie caught this one.
It appears that Cripwell has been convinced of CO2’s role in AGW, and is now looking for evidence of its role in CAGW. That one will be tougher because most scientists think that CO2 is the initial driver and it is other factors, such as the possibility of methane outgassing and significant albedo changes and general uncertainty in outcomes based on uncertainty of priors that contribute to the fat-tail of CAGW.
Finally, the camel’s nose is in the tent.
WebHubTelesacope writes several things. Let me note them in order.
@@@@@
Subtle move there, replacing AGW with CAGW and thinking no one would catch it. Not even Chewie caught this one.
@@@@@
I have always maintained that AGW is real. I have always stated that CAGW is false. So, there is nothing new here.
Then there is
@@@@@
That one will be tougher because most scientists think that CO2
@@@@@
I dont give a tinker’s dam for anyone’s opinion. No matter what their qualifications are, or what positions they hold, I dont care what “most scientists think”. I only trust hard, measured, empirical data. And any “scientist”, who says what she/he thinks, and does not back it up with empirical data, is not, IMHO, a scientist. How many times do I have to say this before people know that that is my position?
Finally there is
@@@@@
Lord Cripwell of Cavendish sez:
@@@@@
This one I really resent. Why do people have to be so rude. I am Frank James Cripwell, I live at 121 Mountbatten Ave, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1H 5V6, 613-733-9601, bf906@ncf.ca. I am proud of what I write, and dont hide behind a cowardly pseudonym. I would love to know who the h*ll you are.
Royal time waster Cripwell.
You go on and on and on about requiring hard empirical evidence to verify that the CO2 AGW theory is real, and then say this:
Anybody can Google “Jim Cripwell” and “CO2” and find hundreds of places on this blog and elsewhere where you were searching for evidence of a “CO2 signal” associated with global warming.
Yet, now you assert that you have always believed this to be the case.
This was perhaps to be expected. I have always maintained that the vast majority of skeptics here are not real skeptics but pranksters of the highest order. They have no interest in getting to the bottom of the science, but have instead display an almost sociopathic interest in stringing people along.
Pranks always have to end with the prankster saying “Ha, fooled you!”
Well you got us, Crip, now you can run along. (Roll our eyes.)
Oh, and the feigned indignation as well!
WHT, you write “Anybody can Google “Jim Cripwell” and “CO2″ and find hundreds of places on this blog and elsewhere where you were searching for evidence of a “CO2 signal” associated with global warming.”
You are correct. What I have always maintained is the when CO2 is added to the atmosphere from current levels, it causes global temperatures to rise. That is AGW. The question is, how much do global temperatures rise? And is the rise sufficient to qualify as catastrophic?
The fact that there is no CO2 signal in any modern temperature/time graph does not show that AGW is wrong. It shows that any rise in temperature as a result of the additional CO2,cannot be detected against the backgrouid of natural noise. Acccording to classic signal to noise ratio physics, this means that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is indistinguishable from zero.
Your prank has now ended. You just said that you believed in AGW, and now you can’t go back and say that it is “indistinguishable from zero”.
The following graph is the change in the earth’s radiative spectrum from 1970 to 1996 due to trace GHG gases. The ‘Brightness temperature’ indicates equivalent blackbody temperature. The overall temperature of the emitting body has to adjust upward to maintain an energy balance to compensate for the photon wavelength bands that get filtered by GHG cross-sectional absorption. This is direct empirical evidence of the effect of CO2 and other GHGs on the temperature.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/harries_radiation.gif
from
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
The science will continue as climatologists and atmospheric physicists seek to reduce the uncertainty of this effect.
Cripwell, It will get increasingly tiresome as you are left to cheerlead for something that scientists have always pursued, that is reducing uncertainty of a known phenomenon.
WHT, you write “Your prank has now ended. You just said that you believed in AGW, and now you can’t go back and say that it is “indistinguishable from zero”.”
Complete and utter garbage. My logic is flawless. An increase in CO2 from current levels causes a rise in global temperatures that is so small that it cannot be detected against the background of natural noise. There is no CO2 signal. And if there is no CO2 signal, then the climate sensitivity of CO2 is indistinguishable from zero.
As to the rest of your irrelevant garbage. Your reference states “Our results provide direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth’s greenhouse effect that is consistent with concerns over radiative forcing of climate.” The key word is “consistent”. Sure it is consistent, but it is also consistent with all sorts of other things, including the idea that adding CO2 has a negligible effect on global temperatures. There is no direct measurement of climate sensitivity. There is no empirical evicdence that proves that when you add CO2 to the atmosphere is causes global temperatures to rise catastrophically. Zero, nada, zilch.
Until warmists admit to the obvious empirical data that proves that climate sensitivity has never been measured, we will go on having these fruitless discussions.
Jim Cripwell | March 22, 2013 at 3:27 pm | Myrrh, you write “A scientific hypothesis has to be falsifiable, otherwise it is not an hypothesis. There is no hypothesis!”
I suspect this is an interesting philosophical question. In THEORY, CAGW is falsifiable. If someone could measure the increase in CO2 from current levels, and prove that an observed rise in temperature was caused by this increase in CO2, then climate sensitivity can be measured, and CAGW could be proven or falsified.
In practice we do not have the technology to do this. But do we call CAGW not a hypothesis because current technology does not allow us to falsify it? Maybe someone will overcome the difficulty, and CAGW could be tested.
It really isn’t a philosophical question – it’s the difference between a hypothesis and a scientific hypothesis. Until they produce “..observations of nature (experiments). If a hypothesis does not generate any observational tests, there is nothing that a scientist can do with it.”
They cannot call it a hypothesis – it is taken as read, since this is a “science” argument, that a scientific hypothesis is meant, not any old ‘what can I dream up next through the looking glass with Al..’
It is for them>/i> to produce a real scientific hypothesis, which can be falsified, and until they actually get their act together and do so there is no hypothesis on which to hang any of the claims for AGW/CAGW.
manacker | March 22, 2013 at 4:03 pm |
It has been said that CAGW, as outlined by IPCC in its AR4 report, is impossible to falsify or corroborate with empirical scientific evidence from actual physical observations or reproducible experimentation.
Until such time as it is..
My question to the two of you: If this is possible for the Svensmark hypothesis (I am assuming the money spent at CERN will not ne in vain), why could something similar not be done for the CAGW hypothesis?
Billions are being spent on all sorts of peripheral work or sea levels, Arctic sea ice extent, etc. as well as model studies on CAGW, so why is no one working on the basics?
Is the underlying reason because CAGW proponents are afraid of what theses experiments will show (i.e. models are easier to control than actual physical experiments)?
I have a hard time erasing the suspicion in my mind that this might be the biggest reason why such experiments are not being considered, after all these many years of unresolved scientific debate on “anthropogenic climate change”.
What do you think?
Well, I’m convinced that is the case because when I looked at their basics all I found was clever manipulations to create the illusion of the AGW’s “The Greenhouse Effect.
And it includes this:
“Just as for the CAGW hypothesis, the underlying mechanism has been demonstrated experimentally under controlled conditions.”
– where has this been demonstrated experimentally for CAGW?
Every time I’ve asked for experimentation of this basic claim “The Greenhouse Effect” to be provided, after I’m told that ‘there are lots of experiments showing it exists’, I either get silence or general hand waving in the direction of Arrhenius/Fourier which show nothing of the kind.
So, what I would like to see is this basic information, which should be standard:
“for the CAGW hypothesis, the underlying mechanism has been demonstrated experimentally under controlled conditions”
Where is it?
Myrrh, you write “So, what I would like to see is this basic information, which should be standard:
“for the CAGW hypothesis, the underlying mechanism has been demonstrated experimentally under controlled conditions”
Where is it?”
Boy am I glad to see someone else writing, what I have been writing for years. From my experience, and I have discussed this very issue with just about all the warmist denizens on CE, you are NEVER going to get an answer. This issue all warmists will avoid like the plague. The evidence does not exist, and with current technology, it cannot exist.
But until this truth is admitted by the warmists, they will continue to quote irrelevant papers in the peer reviewed literature, and pretend that the IPCC is justified in stating, with confidence, the conclusions in the SPMs to WG 1 of the various ARs.
Jim Cripwell writes: “An increase in CO2 from current levels causes a rise in global temperatures that is so small that it cannot be detected against the background of natural noise.”
Devils advocate here. What empirical evidence do you have for this claim? How do you know an increase in CO2 from current levels causes a rise in global temperatures, however small? What evidence are you basing that on?
lolwot, you write “Devils advocate here. What empirical evidence do you have for this claim? ”
Good question. I do not have positive empirical evidence. All I have is negative empirical evidence. I cannot prove that there is no CO2 signal in any modern temperature/time graph. All I can say is that I cannot find one, and no-one has been able to demonstrate to me that a CO2 signal exists. If you can show me the CO2 signal in any modern temperature/time graph, then I would be forced to admit that it exists,
Cripwell says:
That has to take the cake. First of all, that would not be called negative evidence, it would be referred to as inconclusive evidence.
Secondly, this completely subverts your upthread statement that
You can’t have it both ways. To maintain that AGW is real means that you have to accept that a CO2 signal exists. If you don’t accept this, then what else is causing the AGW that you seem to believe in?
You are in a trick-box Cripwell, and there is no escaping it. Your buddy Myrrrhhh at least has the kourage of his krackpot konvictions and simply says all accepted science is garbage. You two have different approaches to pranking us, but it contributes equal amounts of FUD. Nice teamwork.
Jim Cripwell,
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:720/mean:360
How about accelerating warming? Would that be a CO2 signal. I think even Girma is convinced this is related to CO2 growth.
Jim: “Good question. I do not have positive empirical evidence.”
So surely by the very standards of evidence you insist on, you shouldn’t have stated that when CO2 is added to the atmosphere from current levels, it causes global temperatures to rise.
According to your own rules you can’t believe that.
Jim Cripwell
Give up on Webby, Jim.
He will not cite empirical evidence to support the CO2 greenhouse signal in our atmosphere, simply because he cannot cite such empirical evidence.
And this is quite simply because it does not (yet?) exist.
But he will keep trying to bamboozle you with big words and a lot of theoretical gobbledygook.
And, when all else fails, he will begin calling you names and accusing you of manipulating data, in order to divert attention from his failure.
It’s his “MO”.
Max
manacker, you may be right. I imagine Jim Cripwell looking at the rising curve I posted and saying to himself ‘no’ he doesn’t see anything even suggestive of CO2 effects happening over the century time scale. Denial in its purest form.
Jim D
You ask:
Howdat?
“Accelerated warming” is a signal of “accelerated warming” – nothing more.
And besides, Jim, in case you failed to get the world, accelerated warming stopped around 2001, despite unabated human CO2 emissions and CO2 concentrations reaching new record levels.
Did you somehow miss that?
Max
Webby, you write “You can’t have it both ways.”
I will take Max’s advice. I have answered you twice on this issue. You simply claim that I have written what I have not written. So, I will put you on my list of CE denizens whom I ignore.
manacker, the 17-year pause is factored into that running average and doesn’t even dent it, does it? I think it is completely canceled by the anomalously fast warming that occurred just prior to it in the 90’s. It pays to look at the long-term otherwise the transient wiggles can distract.
lolwot, you write “According to your own rules you can’t believe that.
Let me try Steven Mosher’s ploy of an example. Suppose my house in Ottawa already has 16 inches of insulation in the roof; which it does. If I add 1 mm of new insulation in my roof, it will certainly not increase my winter heating bill. It will, I claim, reduce my heating bill. Will I ever be able to detect the reduction in my heating bill, considering all the differences there are each year which affect the bill? My guess is that I will not.
So, yes, when you add more CO2 to the atmosphere, it will not reduce global temperatures. Will it increase global temperatures? All the physics that I know, convinces me that it will cause a rise in temperature. Can we detect that rise in temperature? I have not seen any evidence which proves that adding CO2 to the atmosphere from current levels causes global temperatures to rise.
If that makes me inconsistent, then I plead guilty.
Jim D
Aw, c’mon, Jim.
Your curve ends before 1970. I don’t know how you’ve manipulated the data to take out all the fits and spurts and wiggles and jiggles, but this curve tells us absolutely nothing about CO2.
On the “new perspectives” thread, Webby tried to claim an apparent correlation between CO2 concentration (ppmv) log(C1/C0) and dT (degC) change in temperature. Once he got called on it with real data, it was clear that there was no such apparent correlation at all. (So, in his style, Webby resorted to name calling and side tracks, in order to divert attention from his embarrassment.)
Correlation does NOT provide evidence of causation, as we all know.
But LACK of robust correlation provides pretty good indication of LACK of causation.
And it appears that this is the 8-ball that you and Webby are behind, despite a beautiful hypothesis and wonderful model simulations.
Like me, Jim Cripwell appears to be a “rational” (or “scientific”) “skeptic”, in the classical sense, so he insists on empirical scientific evidence to support a hypothesis or claim.
And this is what you and Webby have been unable to show for the CAGW premise as outlined by IPCC in its AR4 report..
It’s just that simple, Jim.
Max
manacker, it is a 60-year centered average followed by a 30-year average to smooth it more. The last points therefore do include the current period which seem to pale in the long term trend as you can see.
JimD: here, I fixed your graph
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/normalise
JimD and here you go with you over-smoothing:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/normalise/mean:720/mean:360/plot/esrl-co2/normalise
Myrrh
Correct me if I’m wrong, but here is how I see it.
CERN has confirmed with reproducible experimentation under controlled conditions that the galactic cosmic ray cloud nucleation mechanism, which is the basis for the Svensmark GCR cloud hypothesis for climate change, exists in the presence of certain naturally occurring aerosols. IOW there is an empirically established “mechanism”.
Laboratory tests have confirmed that H2O, CO2 and other trace GHGs absorb and re-radiate LW radiation (the so=called “greenhouse effect”), so that a “mechanism” for greenhouse warming has been established empirically.
In neither case has it been shown yet, based on reproducible experimentation or observation of actual physical data, that either of these mechanisms will lead to actual climate change in our atmosphere.
In the case of “Svensmark”, further reproducible experiments under controlled conditions simulating our atmosphere are planned at CERN to either corroborate and quantify or falsify the hypothesis that this mechanism can lead to significant changes in cloudiness and, thereby, affect our planet’s climate significantly.
No such experiments are planned (as far as I know) to corroborate the GH hypothesis or to provide empirical support for the CAGW premise, as outlined by IPCC in its AR4 report.
And I simply wondered why this is the case.
Max
PS My suspicion is that the proponents of the CAGW premise prefer to rely on model simulations, which can be more easily controlled, than to take the chance that actual physical experiments might falsify their premise.
JimD, here is an even better version to see that “correlation” you think is there. LOL.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:720/mean:360/from:1950/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/normalise
JimD, or this version. Wow, just look at that correlation!!!
Fun with graphs, eh Jim?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1950/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/normalise
Jim Cripwell applies the Cripwell Criteria, which given the tradition of CalvinBall and HumptyDumpty allows the evaluator to make up his own rules as he goes along.
Then like the juvenile Calvin, Cripwell takes his ball and goes home
Manacker
You really do shoddy work, and then try to cover it up by projecting your analytical failings on to others.
ksd, you can learn some charting lessons from Girma, and that is saying something.
Jim: “All the physics that I know, convinces me that it will cause a rise in temperature.”
So I am going to say: “All the physics that I know, convinces me that human CO2 emissions will cause several degrees global warming”
If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me, surely.
You can’t demand empirical proof for a conclusion when you don’t require it of your own conclusions.
Jim D | March 23, 2013 at 6:05 pm |
ksd, you can learn some charting lessons from Girma, and that is saying something.
—–
Funny, because several of those are your charts Jim so I guess you need some help as well.
Manacker: “In neither case has it been shown yet, based on reproducible experimentation or observation of actual physical data, that either of these mechanisms will lead to actual climate change in our atmosphere.”
No there’s a critical difference. We have the ability to calculate the radiative forcing caused by a given change of CO2. We don’t have that ability with GCRs.
In terms of competition CO2 is currently first as the largest known radiative forcing in the modern world. It’s quite a bit ahead of the competition in fact. GCRs aren’t even in the competition yet.
From a null position, given the distribution of the existing entrants, it’s unlikely that GCRs will take the lead. More likely, like most competitors it will assume a negliable forcing position somewhere at the back.
ksd, this was my one.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:720/mean:360
As you can see, even if you look closely at the end, which includes the 17-year pause in its 60-year average, we see it ascending unaffected.
Wow Jimmy, if you average the snot out of the data the pause of the last 17 years doesn’t show up. Imagine my surprise. By the way, looks like you’re using a 90 year average to me, hence why your data ends in 1970, eh?
Put me down as unimpressed Jim. But here is YOUR chart with the CO2 data. Not much correlation, eh?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:720/mean:360/from:1950/normalise/plot/esrl-co2/normalise
I also prefer shorter averaging times. This is a ten-year average overlaid, but the rise looks more impressive than the recent pause here too.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:120/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:720
manacker | March 23, 2013 at 5:36 pm |
Myrrh
Correct me if I’m wrong, but here is how I see it.
CERN has confirmed with reproducible experimentation under controlled conditions that the galactic cosmic ray cloud nucleation mechanism, which is the basis for the Svensmark GCR cloud hypothesis for climate change, exists in the presence of certain naturally occurring aerosols. IOW there is an empirically established “mechanism”.
Laboratory tests have confirmed that H2O, CO2 and other trace GHGs absorb and re-radiate LW radiation (the so=called “greenhouse effect”), so that a “mechanism” for greenhouse warming has been established empirically.
In neither case has it been shown yet, based on reproducible experimentation or observation of actual physical data, that either of these mechanisms will lead to actual climate change in our atmosphere.
At that level you have a comparison, but, that is not the AGW The Greenhouse Effect claim, the claim is that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere physically re-radiates upwelling heat from the Earth, thermal infrared aka longwave infrared, to further heat up the land and water on the surface, or, that carbon dioxide acts like a thermal blanket in the atmosphere trapping the upwelling heat from the Earth and so further heating land and water. This is what is claimed as the ‘hypothesis that has lots and lots and lots of experiments to prove it’, regardless that these are two distinct mechanisms and the experiments for either/both are never fetched. As Jim says, NEVER…
This, it seems to me, does not require the funding level of CERN to produce.., so where are they?
Where are the experiments they say exist to show that AGW’s version of greenhouse gases, which they say are the “ir imbibing mainly water and carbon dioxide”, can raise the temperature 33°C from -18°C to 15°C?
They have made specific claims here and they claim these claims are experimentally proved, which would go a long way to making GAGW/AGW a hypothesis.., but they produce nothing when the details of the “well proven by” experiments are requested.
What I am saying is that the very basic claims have not been shown experimentally, there is no proof that carbon dioxide can do what they claim, and, they can’t even agree on the mechanism of the claim. So which “hypothesis” are they defending for their basic “AGW The Greenhouse Effect”?
In the case of “Svensmark”, further reproducible experiments under controlled conditions simulating our atmosphere are planned at CERN to either corroborate and quantify or falsify the hypothesis that this mechanism can lead to significant changes in cloudiness and, thereby, affect our planet’s climate significantly.
No such experiments are planned (as far as I know) to corroborate the GH hypothesis or to provide empirical support for the CAGW premise, as outlined by IPCC in its AR4 report.
And I simply wondered why this is the case.
Svensmark brought in something new, which is fascinating, but that is step/s further on from the basics I’m requesting – I have never seen quantified, never been shown the experiments, which they say they have to prove that water and carbon dioxide are able to do what they say in either of their two claims made for these (blanket/backradiation).
PS My suspicion is that the proponents of the CAGW premise prefer to rely on model simulations, which can be more easily controlled, than to take the chance that actual physical experiments might falsify their premise.
Well, when I kept being fobbed off.., I found their basic claims about the properties and processes were imaginary, had no basis in physical reality at all. For example, the claims that “carbon dioxide is well mixed and accumulates for hundreds and even thousands of years in the atmosphere”, which they require to make their “hypothesis” plausible, is not possible.
What they did next is science fraud. They called carbon dioxide, and oxygen and nitrogen, “ideal gases”, and said they behave as per basic ideal gas description (pre Van der Waals), in other words, they have taken all the properties and process of real gases out of their “gases” and reduced them to hard dots with no mass, (no volume, weight or attraction and therefore nothing to be subject to gravity), and they say these travel at great speeds through empty space as per ideal gas, bouncing off each other in elastic collisions and so “thoroughly mixing” that they can’t be unmixed (without an immense amount of work being done, so for all practical purposes cannot be unmixed).
What they have actually done is taken out the whole heavy volume of the real gas atmosphere and replaced it with empty space populated by these imaginary “ideal gas”. They’ve hidden the atmosphere..
They go straight from the Earth’s surface to empty space where there is no convection but only radiation. Of course, they can’t explain how clouds manage to exist in this..
..nor can they explain why there is no rain in “their carbon cycle”, or how anyway a gas heavier than air can defy gravity to accumulate for hundreds and thousands of years.
What’s the heat capacity of an imaginary ideal gas with no volume?
They have no experiments to fetch, because their gases are imaginary to begin with.
Experiments would mean they would have to use real gases..
Jim D
Thanks for clarification
No question that you can iron out a lot of inconvenient bumps by this approach. The only question remains, “what does it all mean?” after doing so.
Max
Jim D
Of course it doesn’t.
Using 60-year averages, I would hardly expect a 17-year period (actually it is even a bit less than 17 years) to make much of a dent, especially if the cooling rate over the last period is quite small compared to the stronger warming rate of the preceding longer period.
Warming of ~0.16C per decade for almost three decades compared to cooling of less than ~0.05 per decade for a bit more than one decade.
Pretty obvious, right?
But that does not change the fact that the warming trend of previous decades has stopped and even reversed slightly for now, despite unabated human GHG emissions (Trenberth’s unexplained “travesty”).
It’s there, even if 60-year averaging tends to make it disappear.
Max
manacker, it means that the proponents of natural variability have to find something with this exponential-like shape over the last century or so, or maybe it is a less than quarter-wavelength section of some new multi-century several-degree oscillation that hasn’t been noticed before(?) but certainly looks well defined in this part of the record.
manacker, the 60-year smoothed curve is robust over the last century or so, and, I would suggest, a good predictor of what future smoothed temperatures would look like if extrapolated. Its only feature in the last century is an increasing gradient, which is a good match to what GHGs should be doing.
Jim D
You write:
This may be true for the ” proponents of natural variability” (as the cause for past warming), but does not apply to those (like Jim Cripwell and me) who are rationally skeptical of the CAGW hypothesis.
As “rational skeptics”, all we have to do is insist on empirical evidence to support any hypothesis of what has caused past warming and what the impact of this forcing is likely to be in the future.
And this empirical evidence is lacking, so far.
It is lacking for AGW, as it is lacking for natural variability (although non-anthropogenic factors is obviously the “null hypothesis”)
Your curve of correlation of 60-year averaged temperatures with a curve of observed CO2 concentrations that really only begins after 1959 shows a nice correlation after enough smoothing, but is no empirical evidence of anything (as I am sure you recognize).
It is up to the proponents of the CAGW premise, to support this premise with empirical evidence, not the other way around.
That’s the way it works, Jim.
It’s called the “scientific method”.
Max
manacker, you must be confusing me with Girma. I have not shown this curve with a CO2 curve, but admittedly it looks a lot like one.
Since empirical means measured, we are going to have to wait a few more decades for your empirical evidence. Do you have any credible projections while we wait, or should we just wait to see it unfold and react to things as they happen, assuming a no-change climate for planning purposes?
This is a hockey-stick thread, and given the 20-millennium “wheelchair” we see Fan keep posting, is it fair to assume that vertical back will go horizontal today (a wheelchair handle, I suppose)? Some might argue that the vertical back is empirical evidence already.
Another fraud produces another hockey stick.
Ho hum.
Willis if you are going to attack what I said, QUOTE ME EXACTLY. hehe. I love that you never practice what you preach. There is a lesson there for folks
for example:
“Mosher takes this to extremes, though. He claims he doesn’t need to stand up and be counted because … well, because I did something almost a half century ago Mosher didn’t like, and so Mosher is excused from taking an ethical stand … right …”
never said that. never implied that. In fact what I said was that YOU were the last person people should listen to about the ethics of the situation, since you have a history of playing fast and loose with the truth and since you have a history of praising liars and cheats.
I said nothing about who people Should listen to, I implied that they should NOT listen to you. Somebody else will have to make the ethical charge you want to make. You are not the best person to make that charge, you are one of the worst people to make that charge.
What w. did 40 years ago in a totally different situation has no bearing on the validity of his arguments in the ongoing scientific debate surrounding the IPCC CAGW claim today.
Why confuse one with the other?
To denounce someone for alleged moral turpitude 40 years ago and hence reject his scientific arguments on a totally unrelated subject today seems a bit too judgmental, even for those who may have reacted differently in the same situation 40 years ago.
But that’s just my personal opinion.
I find willis’ articles on climate interesting and thought-provoking, even if I do not always agree 100% with his conclusions.
Judge them at face value – not on the basis of some past behavior.
And fer Chrissakes forget all the psychobabble about what makes w. tick.
Stick to the topics and behavior here, not the persona.
Max
Max
Willis has annoyed me at times for various reasons, including a really rather unwarranted attack on our host about a year back. But then so has just about everyone else in the world, including myself. Especially myself. But so what? The man’s fighting the good fight as best he can. That’s all that really matters it seems to me. In most of the skeptics who hang out here, I recognize something of a kindred spirit. Hard to put into words, but it’s there. Glad to be among ’em.
“The man’s fighting the good fight as best he can. That’s all that really matters it seems to me. In most of the skeptics who hang out here, I recognize something of a kindred spirit. Hard to put into words, but it’s there. Glad to be among ‘em.”
I think the two words you are looking for are Tribe and Cause
It is far better to be a member of the tribe who supports the Scientific Method and intellectual honesty than the tribe of corrupt frauds who promote CAGW. And who are quite willing to let the old and the poor freeze to death because they can’t afford the energy needed to heat their homes due to the despicable anti-science, anti-human ideology of the greens.
As was said a long time ago, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem”. Willis is part of the solution to the corruption, lies, and economic catastrophe that is “climate science”.
You, lolwot, are part of the problem.
1. I never connected his running away from the Army like a little girl with his opinion on climate science. That’s a straw man. He called scientists like Marcott cowards. I and others said people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
2. You asked me if i was referring to something in the distant past because you didn’t see anything that would make you think coward today. I answered you. If you didn’t want the answer you shouldn’t have asked the question. Got it?
+1 Max
Well, I like moshe, too. We all have our imperfections.
It is likely that science will survive, this, its first grand challenge since the Enlightenment. I suspect its survival is aided by passion such as yours, Willis.
========
kim
Well I like Mosh and I like Willis and dont tell them but I quite like Fan and Joshua too
We all have our way of standing up for what we believe to be right and some are high profile with it and some aren’t. I wish I could have a pound for everyone who attacked my ‘anecdotes’ which are gleaned at considerable time and expense and is a considerable committment.
Hey, It would go some way towards paying my enormous green tinged energy bill and might help me to put some petrol in my car at some $10 us per gallon.
It would be nice to get some straight froward replies from certain people though or perhaps its a deliberate tactic to divert attention and waste my time.
tonyb
Vote for B
Scott
Off topic, but can anyone point me to any independent study on just how much energy bills have increased due to:
A green taxes for alternatives
B profiteering from energy cartels.
C commodity speculation
D increasing costs of finding the black stuff.
I know all 4 of them are happening but I don’t know the percentages. If item A is really small then we shouldn’t care so much about it because it might save us from item D. And if fury over item A is helping to disguise items B and C then a lot of right-wingers are getting mighty upset at the wrong people (unless of course they are helping items B and C). We all have our opinions but I’d like some facts for a change. I’d be disappointed if there were no facts or studies because it seems a fundamental issue to me.
Joshua, sounds like POTUS.
Now here is the funny thing for everyone to see.
1. you see willis setting rules: Quote me exactly
2. You see me Quoting willis EXACTLY. and I add a comentary
these are examples of noble cause corruption.
3. you see willis coming back, NOT quoting me and imputing
all manner of nonsense to me.
My point in quoting willis and calling it noble cause corruption was this.
Willis should understand what these people are doing because he has done it. Nothing more.
What people see is an actual demonstration of willis holding other people to a standard (quote my words) that he refuses to follow himself.
The parallel is striking and telling.
my suggestion:
Find the mistakes in papers. Point them out, leave the moralizing to saints, then again, most saints wont moralize. If you cannot resist moralizing make sure you do it with some self knowledge and compassion.
once upon a time Willis got to play the judge. he let two criminal youngsters go because the shame they would feel amongst their tribe members was punishment enough he thought. Go read the story, it demonstrates great compassion and human understanding.
perhaps there is a lesson there.
Steven Mosher,
You’ve commented on a lot on this thread, but what I haven’t seen you comment on is whether the Marcott paper should be corrected to remove the chartmanship or possibly be retracted.
The closest I can find to you writing anything derogatory about the Marcott paper was your comment on March 19, 2013 at 11:06 pm where you said:
Oops. didn’t work. I put it in. I know because I wrote the quote in my text editor and it’s there.
Only the first paragraph should be in quotes.
Anybody following Jean S, Steve McIntyre and others over at Climate Audit knows this paper lies on the ground with six gaping holes in it. Well, on further observation, there are a dozen holes.
====================
Well, in deference to Science, and to be numerate, precise and explicit; six gape and six have powder burns.
==================
Funny sensation. That is, to know something to a near certainty, and be unable to do much wrt informing those who would rather believe otherwise. Fan’s a beautiful example. Shuts her eyes, puts fingers in her ears, and when she’s done with that goes back to something resembling a perpetual make-out session with wendell berry. Interesting case study, Fan is.
I’d say this whole thing will keep the social scientists busy for a long time, except they’re some of the worst offenders…
The walking cognitive dead. Scared.
I mean scary.
Well, I’m scared. There be hippogryphs and dementors.
============
Had to look “dementors” up.
“The dementors are “soulless creatures[4]… among the foulest beings on Earth”. They are soul-sucking fiends who, as their name suggests, cause people who encounter them for too long to lose their minds.”
Best description of climate scientists I’ve ever seen.
this ended up in the wrong spot, so am reposting
hippogryph:
Ain’t never heard tell too much ’bout them “griffins”, but I look at the “hindquarters of a horse” ever time I plow the back 40 with ol’ Ned.
(Reckon it fits purty well fer some o them cli-ma-to-lo-gists, too.)
Serf in the turf
kim
Looks like this one met its demise much more quickly than the original shtick.
Is there a logarithmic correlation at work here?
Max
Steven Mosher, I am curious about your response to these questions too.
Scott
LOL … Bob Koss, your post’s presumption of “deception” rather “error” exposes its covert agenda as … yet another denialistic extraterrestrial [sp?] blanc mange impersonator!
Prediction You are *NOT* a Wimbleton-class tennis-player, are you Bob Koss?
No? Then it’s case closed, eh?
As if the authors of this second bogus-hockey-stick paper were too stupid to realize what they themselves did. Nice try, Fan. Or do you believe them to be so stupid? Or – are you so stupid as to believe they didn’t know what they did? Either way …
You’re obviously not a Wimbledon-class tennis-player, either.
If an anti-CAGW scientist had done work this shoddy, they would be crucified. It’s interesting to note who the apologists are.
Sadly no.
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Wow, just Wow! I’ve been reading Dr.Judith Curry’s blog from the very beginning but it gets increasingly different to weed through the garbage that’s piling up in her blog currently. I feel sorry for her that her blog is clogged up by so many keyboard warriors who excrete their varbage over and over again. Unfortunately it’s been proven here that quantity does not equals quality.
Re the Eschenbach and Mosher handbag fight, I can only feel vicarious shame, so embarassing.
As for the ever present Willis Eschenbach, one advise: “Less is More”.
“Handbag fight.” That’s a keeper.
agreed
This was more a ‘frying pan fracas’. It’s hot in the kitchen.
==========================
kim
“it’s hot in the kitchen”
Whadja expect? (Aincha heard of “global warmin”?)
Max
It’s freezing drizzle outdoors, but we cookin truzzles heah in ze cocina.
==========================
kim
When all else fails, try a pipin’ hot fondue washed down with jiggers of Kirsch to bring on internal global warming despite the travesty of unexplainable, atypical, anomalous cooling outdoors.
Max
LOL … handbag fight!
Yeah HP, I pretty much given up commenting anymore. Just a perpetual ping pong match.
Willis Eschenbach:
So sorry to ruffle your delicate sensitivities.
But,
This. Is. Not. Your. Blog.
Life is so unfair.
PS:
Say you are sorry for smearing the millions who did serve to cover up for your own failure to do your duty and I will leave you alone. It’s the right thing to do.
Deduction is the King of Reason. In pure logic, where all facts are known and all possible methods understood, a deductive proof — where one is practical — is definitive, being both possible to show true and valid.
Deduction however, is far more limited than the King is in chess.
In chess, the King may move only one space in any direction (except when castling), while all other pieces might move more than one space (pawns in their first move, and if they have achieved opponent’s home row by exchanging for any previously captured piece of their color).
In Reason, deductive proofs might fall to infinite regress, lack of understanding of methods, lack of knowledge of facts, or simply impracticality of exhausting the deductive cases.
This is why Induction is far more common, although Induction is never fully capable of being shown valid. Stronger or weaker inductive reasoning, or even inductive arguments of equal strength, may both be held true while reaching opposite conclusions.
Rud Istvan’s deductive argument — as it admits it is lacking in facts that cannot be obtained by argument alone – manages to be neither valid nor true. Marcott and Science might be expected to address Rud’s concerns, to answer how the spike was derived (I suspect Marcott applied some curtailment of impossible outcomes based on instrumental records), and certainly to provide readers of Science with an improved understanding.
However, on the evidence alone, the arguments of wrongdoing do not merit the degree of certainty expressed.
‘In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions. This rule should be followed so that arguments based on induction be not be nullified by hypotheses.’ Newton
In all cases climate is too complex to proceed from the general to the particular with simple narratives. This is the error that dogs all climate partisans. It is neccessary to proceed from the particular to the general – with appropriate qualifications.
Pekka Pirila repeatedly argues that the proxy data in Marcott et al which provides the uptick in later decades ought be excluded. IMO, convincingly.
Perhaps Istvan goes a bridge too far, or not. However, do you concede the main point? Or to put it another way. Would you defend the methodological chartmanship if it was used by Girma?
blueice2hotsea | March 22, 2013 at 9:08 pm |
I hadn’t seen Pekka’s posts before I posted my own opinion that there were deficits in the Marcott infographic; I’m largely in agreement with Pekka, except where Pekka’s knowledge exceeds my own by so much that I cannot comment at all.
But the question of whether this is the main point is something else I’ve seen Pekka address, too.
The little spike at the end?
Enh. I have reservations about it enough that I’m prepared to make no use of that section of the infographic until better examination tells us more about the behavior of endpoints on such an ensemble. I have suspicions that it arose from something other than the alleged pure data manipulation imagined above.
Marcott’s approach is very new in chartmanship; it uses a number of unproven elements, and adventures in ways traditional time series never have. It’s a rare gift of insight, and worth exploring to confirm, disconfirm, judge for its real merits and value in formal academic application. That’s the main point if we’re to take productive advantage of this paper.
But I don’t pretend to have the chops, or the resources, to attempt that exercise myself. I doubt if six denizens or lurkers here do. Well, maybe eight. But not a lot of commentary from those eight on the Marcott paper at Climate Etc. that I’ve seen. And the best qualified to comment haven’t commented much about making actual use of Marcott’s method, yet, that I’ve seen.
Early days yet. It’s normal and useful for criticisms to take up some of the time after the publication of groundbreaking work, before a new generation stands on the shoulders of the current one.
I’d ignore Girma, and remark that, in chess endgames, an active King is sometimes stronger than a Rook.
That was for TonyB, but also vote for your links a;nd information
Scott
For Mosher> what parts do you not understand?
there is a simple but very solid explanation (with deference to SM) of the Marcott fraud here
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/2013/03/introducing-the-marcott-9/
maybe stick *(pun intended) to Gleick type investigations you are very good at that but Atmospheric physics zero refer to Lindzen maybe
Mosher > What part do you not understand
there is a simple but very solid explanation (with deference to SM) of the Marcott fraud here
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/2013/03/introducing-the-marcott-9/
Huh,
Err I saw the marcott paper before any of the commenters here; saw it before my good friend steve Mc as well.
I was asked for my comment on the paper. Robert Rhode, Rich Muller and I discussed it. We all seized on the same thing: the uptick was bogus. The holocene result was nothing new. Robert of course went into more depth in his email to Revkin. That cricticism is independent of the shifting dates problem which steve Mc and I talked about before he published.
So.
1. I think the authors ought to release their code. Like all papers.
2. i doubt the uptick will withstand scrunity.
3. I’d love to hear the arguments for redating
4. I think the suspect results were promoted, while the solid confirmatory
work was not. Thats PR.
5. I would not use the word fraud lightly. I wouldnt use it at all
Steven, first thanks for your detailed post, along with the backstory. Very interesting.
You say:
I would agree wholeheartedly with the first four statements there, although I would hardly describe the blade of the hockey stick as an “uptick”.
Regarding the fifth one, I said from the start that the options were stupidity and cupidity. The problem I have is that Marcott wrote his PhD thesis and showed results WITHOUT some giant vertical temperature jump at the end.
To then take the exact same data, redate it radically, and publish it WITHOUT showing the corresponding graphic with the original dates from his thesis and WITHOUT noting in large print the effect is solely from the redating is … well, you can call that “PR” if you wish.
And very effective PR it has been, in that information that they knew (from Marcott’s thesis) was total bullshit has been accepted and promoted as science around the world … which I find fraudulent, although certainly YMMV.
But let me be charitable and describe it as “deceptive advertising”, which of course is illegal … call it what you will, it may indeed not be fraud as you state, but it is hardly honest.
He, like Michael Mann, is a newly minted PhD using his own NEW! IMPROVED! methods to push climate alarmism. To then say, as Marcott did, that the latter part isn’t “robust” is pathetic. This is not science in any sense, Steven.
He’s vigorously promoting alarmist claims that (only when pressed) he admits are not “robust”, meaning they’re worthless, results that you immediately knew were “bogus” in your words … if that’s not fraud, you’ll have to tell me why not, and what might be, and what you call his actions. They’re not PR.
Thanks again for your comments, we agree on four out of five, glad to see it.
w.
BTW Prof Muller must by now be having second thoughts on the whole AGW thing after his devastating criticism of the first one (Hockey Stick)
hockey sticks have nothing to do with the truth of AGW.
Mosher
The truth of AGW? I would be interested in you expanding upon what you believe this truth to be. I’ll make it easier for you. I’ll give you the truth as I see it and you can react accordingly.
1. AGW is real but we do not yet understand how much or even whether the earth will warm over the next 100 years. It is likely to warm, but at a rate lower than was considered probable in AR4
2. Worldwide CO2 levels will almost undoubtedly continue to rise for several decades regardless of US actions as 3 billion people worldwide currently without electricity or personal transportation will gain access to these items in the coming decades.
3. The best defense against the harmful impacts of adverse weather/climate change is the construction and maintenance of robust infrastructure. Some nations do this well but many make it a very low priority.
4. We have very poor data to determine what nations or regions will benefit vs. being harmed. It cannot be reliably determined if the net long term impact of AGW is positive or negative to humanity overall over the long term
5. Most proposed climate mitigation actions are highly ineffective from the perspective of any reasonable cost benefit analysis.
I’ll be interested in what you disagree with and why
moshe, hockey sticks have to do with the appearance of truth.
=====
Rob Starkey,
Excellent summary. I agree 100%.
I’d also add that the policies advocated by the alarmists would cause enormous damage for no gain. They are irrational. They would cause all pain for no gain.
I mean scary.
The more I look at the graph the more worrying I find it. It suggests the variability of the mean climate over the holocene has been less than I had thought. About 0.8C difference between the holocene max and the LIA.
I am also increasingly finding it hard to believe a similar warming period as the 20th century could be hidden in the lower resolution data.
It will be interesting to see more holocene reconstructions follow from this and differences being ironed out, in a similar fashion to the reconstructions that followed Mann’s original work and now provide a fairly constrained picture of the last 2000 years.
This is definitely a step forwards in the science.
I only wish Marcott had truncated the proxies before the hockey blade rather just pointing out they weren’t robust. Although I suppose if he had truncated the data and stuck the instrumental record on for valid comparison, skeptics would have accused him of using “mikes nature trick”.
I guess the only result that would have satisfied skeptics is if Marcott didn’t compare the reconstruction to recent warming. That’s impossible though because the central question at stake here is how recent warming relates to the past. Reconstructing holocene temperatures is no longer just acedemic when we are pouring 30+ billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere a year.
There are more. They are pretty much the same. google holocene temperatures under images to bag a few.
hippogryph:
Ain’t never heard tell too much ’bout them “griffins”, but I look at the “hindquarters of a horse” ever time I plow the back 40 with ol’ Ned.
(Reckon it fits purty well fer some o them cli-ma-to-lo-gists, too.)
Serf in the turf
Stephen W. Hawking is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
http://www.casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/en/academicians/ordinary/hawking.html
Thanks for this post Dr. Curry. For all his brilliance, Steve McItyre’s posts are a difficult read for this layman.
The Kim and Jim arguments are particularly interesting. In case Jim hasn’t yet seen the light, I’ll take a crack at explaining the implications of the debunking of Marcott et al.
As Jim mentioned of several occasions, the instrument record indicates a spike in the late 20 century. A strong correlation between the ocean core temps and the instrument record would normally strengthen the reliability of the historical reconstruction.
Unfortunately, the temperatures indicated in the samples selected for the Marcott thesis and the Marcott et al paper diverged sharply with the instrument record to the point of creating a reverse hockey stick graph. Therefore, the reliability of the entire reconstruction is highly suspect. Worse yet, no journal would possibly post such a paper.
When faced with such a dilemma the only ethical recourse is to start anew with a different set of proxies. Marcott and his colleagues choose a much smoother path to publication; I believe it’s called scientific fraud. It must be remembered that the samples used were compiled and dated by competent experts. Marcott et al changed the dates on several samples so the tail of the reconstruction would produce a hockey stick.
+1
Back to the topic of this thread. Interestingly the well known Swedish professof of ecology, Leif Kullman, has through his many years of studies in the Swedish Scandes come up with the sam theory as expressed in the Marcott et al. paper. On his website http://www.kullmantreeline.se he writes:
“The multimillennial trend toward a cooler climate was halted (temporarily?) around the turn of the last century. The temperature rose, of entirely natural causes, by around 1 degree C to a first warm peak in the late 1930s. Then there was a shift to cooler conditions for a few decades. After the end of the 1980s, warming, especially in winter, gathered new momentum. The temperature is now 1.3-1.4 degrees higher than at the turn of the last century. The last century has possibly been the warmest in 6000-7000 years. This is consistentently testified by tree lines and the history of glaciers.”
And Kullman is no warmist. He recommends reading the NIPCC report, John Christy and other skeptical scientists.
Climate agnostic | March 22, 2013 at 8:30 pm | Back to the topic of this thread. Interestingly the well known Swedish professof of ecology, Leif Kullman, has through his many years of studies in the Swedish Scandes come up with the sam theory as expressed in the Marcott et al. paper. On his website http://www.kullmantreeline.se he writes:
“The multimillennial trend toward a cooler climate was halted (temporarily?) around the turn of the last century. The temperature rose, of entirely natural causes, by around 1 degree C to a first warm peak in the late 1930s. Then there was a shift to cooler conditions for a few decades. After the end of the 1980s, warming, especially in winter, gathered new momentum. The temperature is now 1.3-1.4 degrees higher than at the turn of the last century. The last century has possibly been the warmest in 6000-7000 years. This is consistentently testified by tree lines and the history of glaciers.”
And Kullman is no warmist. He recommends reading the NIPCC report, John Christy and other skeptical scientists
My bold. He can’t know what he is talking about, or being disingenuous, there are countless studies showing the MWP was global and warmer than present and the Holocene Maximum even warmer than the following highs such as the Roman Warm and MWP, that’s why it was called the maximum, and the extent of past tree lines show this clearly.
For example here: Climate change and the northern Russian treeline zone
G.M MacDonald,* K.V Kremenetski, and D.W Beilman
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2606780/
“Abstract
The Russian treeline is a dynamic ecotone typified by steep gradients in summer temperature and regionally variable gradients in albedo and heat flux. The location of the treeline is largely controlled by summer temperatures and growing season length. Temperatures have responded strongly to twentieth-century global warming and will display a magnified response to future warming. Dendroecological studies indicate enhanced conifer recruitment during the twentieth century. However, conifers have not yet recolonized many areas where trees were present during the Medieval Warm period (ca AD 800–1300) or the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM; ca 10000–3000 years ago).”
And here: The Holocene thermal maximum and late-Holocene cooling in the tundra of NE European Russia
Salonen, JS and Seppa, H and Valiranta, M and Jones, VJ and Self, A and Heikkila, M and Kultti, S and Yang, HD (2011) http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1310214/
“Abstract
To investigate the Holocene climate and treeline dynamics in the European Russian Arctic, we analysed sediment pollen, conifer stomata, and plant macrofossils from Lake Kharinei, a tundra lake near the treeline in the Pechora area. We present quantitative summer temperature reconstructions from Lake Kharinei and lake Tumbulovaty, a previously studied lake in the same region, using a pollen-climate transfer function based on a new calibration set from northern European Russia. Our records suggest that the early-Holocene summer temperatures from 11,500 cal yr BP onwards were already slightly higher than at present, followed by a stable Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM) at 8000-3500 cal yr BP when summer temperatures in the tundra were ca. 3 degrees C above present-day values. A Picea forest surrounded Lake Kharinei during the HTM, reaching 150 km north of the present taiga limit. The HIM ended with a temperature drop at 3500-2500 cal yr BP associated with permafrost initiation in the region. Mixed spruce forest began to disappear around lake Kharinei at ca. 3500 cal yr BP, with the last tree macrofossils recorded at ca. 2500 cal yr BP. suggesting that the present wide tundra zone in the Pechora region formed during the last ca. 3500 yr.”
Etc., etc. My bold.
What we have here, in your post, is even more outrageous science fraud from the HockeyStick team supporters – not content with eliminating the MWP and LIA they are now attempting to eliminate the Holocene Maximum against all observational evidence to the contrary. Why?
They began eliminating the observed higher tree lines of the past greater warming periods to promote the original Hockey Stick Fraud, as I reposted here: http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/11/lets-play-hockey-again/#comment-302513
Several have posted similar observations on the “lets play hockey again” thread, you really do need to ask yourself why all this wealth of observed data is being supressed by warmists and warmists in sheeps clothing..
Myrrh, you write:
“What we have here, in your post, is even more outrageous science fraud from the HockeyStick team supporters – not content with eliminating the MWP and LIA they are now attempting to eliminate the Holocene Maximum against all observational evidence to the contrary. Why?”
I suggest you go to Kullman’s website, use Google translate and read what he has to say. The quote below shows clearly that Kullman is far from a HockeyStick supporter.
“The lack of natural historical insight of people in general contributes to the one-sided, simplistic and highly politicized discussion (IPCC), which today is going on in these matters. In addition researchers often fail when it comes to account for the uncertainty in the results and conclusions. One effect of this is that leading media almost completely abdicated from its critical and investigative task.
Nothing could be more appropriate today than to quote the world leading researcher J.R. Christy, who in an article in Nature (vol 463, p. 732) summarizes his views on climate science’s current level: ‘ The truth, and this is frustrating for policy makers, is that scientists’ ignorance of the climate system is enormous “.
I will here try to flesh out these starting points by describing how the last 100 years of warmer climate influenced the Swedish mountain nature. The aim is to highlight how these changes would appear in a broader historical perspective.”
I was responding to your direct quote from him:
“The temperature is now 1.3-1.4 degrees higher than at the turn of the last century. The last century has possibly been the warmest in 6000-7000 years. This is consistentently testified by tree lines and the history of glaciers.”
And I have given sufficient information to show this is contradicted by a wealth of studies re tree lines. My point stands, he doesn’t know what he is talking about or is being disingenuous, by the quote you give.
Linking him with John Christy, why?
Myrrh | March 24, 2013 at 6:38 pm
You are referring to two studies from northern Russia,
Climate change and the northern Russian treeline zone
and
The Holocene thermal maximum and late-Holocene cooling in the tundra of NE European Russia
Kullman’s studies are from the Swedish Scandes! Temperatures have not always been the same everywhere you know.
Kullmans texts can be read on his website http://www.kullmantreeline.com.
Climate agnostic | March 25, 2013 at 3:33 am | Myrrh | March 24, 2013 at 6:38 pm
You are referring to two studies from northern Russia,
Climate change and the northern Russian treeline zone
and
The Holocene thermal maximum and late-Holocene cooling in the tundra of NE European Russia
Kullman’s studies are from the Swedish Scandes! Temperatures have not always been the same everywhere you know.
I thought yesterday as I’d finished posting that I had perhaps been a little too harsh.., my apologies. The discussion I had recently about this had been irritating, so many examples in my research which showed the faked Hockey Stick cause was alive and well and now not just eliminating the warmer periods like the MWP and Roman, but taking it even further back and ludicrously even positing that temps now were rising higher than at any time in the Holocene, but the 6/7,000 year had been a first step to this, eliminating the Holocene Maximum by clever sleights of hand and word play. So my point remains, he has made a blanket statement which is at odds with the many studies which have built up our knowledge of this during the last century, by which the Holocene Maximum was first arrived at and which included growing data of following warming periods greater than present though not as hot as the Max. He has not taken these into account to make that statement, which he arrives at by his work showing conditions were hotter earlier in the Holocene by the fossil remains he’s found.
So, in wondering why he’s said this I think perhaps he is failing to consider the particular conditions in his area, glacier conditions v tundra. Glaciers in higher colder mountainous regions will be slower to melt even as temps rise, the lower tundra areas will respond more quickly to such changes and this is shown by the quicker responses in tree line to the lesser warming periods like the MWP at ground level further north from him, and not just fossil remains but old farming settlements uncovered, and so on. All he can really say is what he has, that in his area of glaciers the temps were higher during the early Holocene by the fossil remains of trees which subsequent cooling killed off, but he has not shown that temps were subsequently never warmer until present – these fossil remains could well have been uncovered during such times as the lesser warming of the MWP but conditions there not conducive to re-establishment of trees before the next cooling period arrived.
Since Willis is here, I’ll post in my defence something he wrote which goes a long way to explaining my short temper with anything I see as the current shenanigans from the Hockey Stick faux scientists: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/07/shakun-redux-master-tricksed-us-i-told-you-he-was-tricksy/
Not that this excuses my short temper, so apologies again.
Myrrh,
Apologies accepted!
I know this is a very controversial subject and emotions run high.
“Glaciers in higher colder mountainous regions will be slower to melt even as temps rise, the lower tundra areas will respond more quickly to such changes and this is shown by the quicker responses in tree line to the lesser warming periods like the MWP at ground level further north from him, and not just fossil remains but old farming settlements uncovered, and so on.”
I can fully agree with that.
“All he can really say is what he has, that in his area of glaciers the temps were higher during the early Holocene by the fossil remains of trees which subsequent cooling killed off, but he has not shown that temps were subsequently never warmer until present – these fossil remains could well have been uncovered during such times as the lesser warming of the MWP”
If the fossil remains had been exposed during earlier warm periods they would most likely have decomposed, depending on the duration of the warm period of course.
As for the Marcott paper, I have not read more than the abstract and a few reviews. And I’m not sure I would be able to understand much of it anyway. But what struck me was the similarity in Marcott’s and Kullman’s conclusions regarding today’s temperature.
As for the Marcott paper, I have not read more than the abstract and a few reviews. And I’m not sure I would be able to understand much of it anyway. But what struck me was the similarity in Marcott’s and Kullman’s conclusions regarding today’s temperature.
Which is what set me off.. However, looking further into Kullman’s work I found this:
Ecological tree line history and palaeoclimate – review of megafossil evidence from the Swedish Scandes
Leif Kullman Article first published online: 2 JAN 2013
DOI: 10.1111/bor.12003
“Historical tree line positions are viewed in relation to early 21st century equivalents, and indicate that tree line elevations attained during the past century and in association with modern climate warming are highly unusual, but not unique, phenomena from the perspective of the past 4800 years. Prior to that, the pine tree line (and summer temperatures) was consistently higher than present, as it was also during the Roman and Medieval periods, c. 1900 and 1000 cal. a BP, respectively.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bor.12003/abstract
Which contradicts the quote I took umbrage about – he’s saying that Roman and Medieval Warm periods were also higher than present..
So, I have no problem with him, but I do have with that original quote…
Myrrh,
You write:
“So, I have no problem with him, but I do have with that original quote…”
I have not seen Kullman’s new paper from which you quote but he seems either to have changed his mind or succumbed to pressure from skeptics who have heavily criticized his view on MWP and RWP. Let’s hope it is the first alternative.
In a previous paper from 2009, Post-Little Ice Age tree line rise and climate warming in the Swedish Scandes: a landscape ecological perspective,
he wrote:
“This trend has prevailed since the early Holocene and is largely consistent with Greenland ice core paleotemperature data. To the best of our present-day knowledge, the maximum upshifts of the tree lines seem to have reached slightly above the positions held during the Medieval Warm Period (AD 900–1300) and several preceding millennia.
Recent tree line evolution constitutes a truly anomalous event in Holocene vegetation history, possibly unsurpassed during the past 7000 years.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2745.2009.01488.x/full
CA, you keep recommending people to go read a certain website, http://www.kullmantreeline.se
It doesn’t exist.
So I googled your quote above, that starts “The multimillennial trend toward a cooler climate was halted …”
It doesn’t exist either.
I suggest that this is a metaphor for your ‘”scientific” claim that “the last century has possibly been the warmest in 6000-7000 years. It desperately needs citations …
w.
Willis Eschenbach | March 24, 2013 at 11:53 am
I posted the comment twice, second time: Climate agnostic | March 23, 2013 at 6:33 am | and in the latter comment I corrected the address to Kullman’s website which is http://www.kullmantreeline.com (not .se as I wrote in my first comment). Most of his texts are in Swedish so you have to use Google translate. That’s the reason for not finding the quote through googling.
Hello
It pains me that we are having this dispute about cowardice. In the interest of rationality let me point to an online dictionary
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coward
gives the definition of a coward as
one who shows disgraceful fear or timidity
If one wants to call someone a coward, perhaps one could show how this definition applies to a particular situation
klee12
Back to the topic of this thread. Interestingly the Swedish professor of ecology, Leif Kullman, who has observed climate change in the Swedish Scandes for some 40 years writes this on his website http://www.kullmantreeline.com:
“The multimillennial trend towards a cooler climate was halted (temporarily?) around the turn of the last century. The temperature rose of entirely natural causes by around 1 degree C to a first warm peak in the late 1930s. Then there was shift to cooler conditions for a few decades. After the end of the 1980s, warming especially in winter gathered new momentum. The temperature is now 1.3 – 1.4 C higher than at the turn of last century. The last century has possibly been the warmest in 6000 – 7000 years. This is consistently verified by tree lines and the history of glaciers.”
Kullman is no AGW alarmist. He recommends reading the NIPCC report and refers to skeptical scientists like John Christy.
More about professor Kullman: http://www.emg.umu.se/english/about-the-department/staff/kullman-leif
I’d say you’re mistaken. I’m a liberal dem. Have been my whole life. I was well on board with AGW until climate gate. I opened my eyes. You might try it some time.
Ah, ‘The Cause’. Like this ‘Cause’?
Mann:
By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year
reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that
reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.
Mann:
They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic
example, referring to the J. Cimate paper (which should be finally accepted
upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a
bit.
Mann:
I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s
doing, but its not helping the cause
Lest we forget, when all of McIntyre’s corrections were taken into account and included in a later IPCC report, the net effect of corrections was about a 2% change in about 2% of the time period in one single curve out of dozens.
Mann’s self-corrections amounted to a larger change.
The corrections made based on the findings of others amounted to still larger changes.
And the final conclusion? Unchanged.
Of course, on the Marcott infographic, a 2% change in the 2% of the timescale folks are concentrating on might slightly alter.. absolutely nothing in the overall key conclusions, either.
But then, Science isn’t the IPCC.
bartr, there is a bigger impact than that. The combination of all the proxies with the mid-holocene baseline smears the relationships between the northern and southern oceans. There is a document “seesaw” effect due to lags in ocean mixing that produces the irregular “pulses” like the RWP and MWP plus the Younger Dryas and LIA.
The inertial ocean lags are a key component which should not be smoothed out of existence. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1324186/
” The dominant forcing factor appears to be precessional insolation; Northern Hemisphere summer insolation correlates to at least the early to middle Holocene climate trend. Spectral analysis reveals centennial-scale cyclic climate changes with periods of 1220, 1070, 400, and 150 yr. The record shows good correlation to East Antarctic ice cores and to climate records from South Georgia and Bunger Oasis. However, the record shows out-of-phase behavior with regard to climate records from the western Antarctic Peninsula and the Peru-Chile Current; such behavior hints at a climatic divide through Patagonia, the Drake Passage, and between West and East Antarctica.”
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/contributions_by_author/nielsen2004/nielsen2004.txt
Remember there were two estimates combined to produce the IPCC range, Manabe with the GFDL and Hansen with GISS. Manabe included a more detailed ocean model which appears to be more correct.
captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2 | March 23, 2013 at 11:51 am |
The correspondent seeks something of the reconstruction that the reconstruction could never by itself deliver, and further speculates about hints like a fingoist on evidence that can’t be adequately confirmed what might have happened were this imagined data to demonstrate something more to the correspondent’s liking.
No sale.
Even if the reconstruction-spanning GCM ensemble I propose were run against just the Mann proxy reconstruction (ie using the Mann reconstruction in validation to parameterize and constrain the GCMs), it wouldn’t be very robust, so would tell us relatively little.
Now, the Marcott ensemble approach with the whole Holocene on the infographic, with some six dozen distinct parameters to constrain PDFs derived from the GCMs.. _that_ would be exciting indeed.
It would let us see the probability that the current instrumental data is unique in the Holocene, or commonplace, as GCMs can produce so much granularity as you have processing power. No single GCM run would produce the real historical record of course — that’s completely lost to us and can never be recovered — but PDFs for that records of the quality we could see with this approach are a pretty good second best.
willard –
Agreed. Then the question would be whether, if I say that Brandon is either reckless and indifferent to validity (tantamount to lying) or an outright liar, am I focusing on brandon or his arguments as the topic?
You’d be shifting the topic to Chewbacca, Joshua.
When this topic is being established, the ad hominems against him could function as arguments.
There is no defense against personal attacks. By parrying the attack, you accept to become the topic of the discussion.
This is the only way to get swarmed by Goblins.
Bart R, lest we forget? How do we forget something that isn’t true? Are you worried we will discard some delusion only you hold?
Would Chewbacca argue by rhetorical question at genial Lucia’s?
Nope. At lucia’s, I’d say Bart R appears to be a delusional fool who is making things up. Banning rhetorical questions means I have to be more blunt there.
A very big THANK YOU for considering you’d be blunter at genial Lucia’s.
We can now see all the difference it makes.
Lucia’s might be improved by evenhandedly applying such standards of evidence.
In my own experience, and auditor is obliged to report on the effect of their audits.
Do you happen to have Steve McIntyre’s report on the impacts of his audits?
What, in Steve McIntyre’s documented and evidence-based view, is the net impact of his input to the IPCC’s hockey stick graphs?
Please, I’d like to know, having seen discussions among qualified chartsmen about the net 2% over 2%.
Bart R, for a person making as many claims as you make, you sure don’t offer much evidence. Or for that matter, any evidence.
This is an interesting claim (via implication) of bias on lucia’s part that you offer no evidence for. In fact, you don’t even say who lucia is supposedly biased toward. It is difficult to judge the merit of an accusation when not only is no evidence for it provided, but the accusation isn’t even fleshed out.
Personally, I think any reasonable person who visits lucia’s site with any regularity will agree she doesn’t show bias in regard to the use of rhetorical questions. In fact, you’re the first person I’ve ever seen suggest otherwise.
You mean, where he has consistently said things like X reconstruction is without merit? Or where he says we don’t learn anything from Y reconstruction as its conclusions are not supported by the data? I can’t say I have a single collected “report on the impacts” of everything he has done, but I can point you to plenty of discussions of the impacts of many individual things he has examined.
Tell you what. You direct us to such a discussion, and we can go from there. I’d love to see someone other than you claim things like “all of McIntyre’s corrections were… included in a later IPCC report.” I’d love to see where these delusions stem from.
Heck, the only IPCC Assessment Report since the Third one (TAR) was the AR4, and it included Mann’s PC1, a key focus of McIntyre’s criticism of Mann’s original hockey stick. How could anyone believe what you’re saying when even the most basic of fact-checking would show you’re wrong? And that’s just about what McIntyre has said/done. Don’t even get me started on things like:
I can’t even begin to figure out where you get your ideas from. They seem completely divorced from reality.
Brandon Shollenberger | March 24, 2013 at 3:25 pm |
A professional auditor’s report of 2007 will invariably have a section to evaluate how the audits of 2006 and earlier were responded to in 2007.
Audit report of 2008 will invariably have a section to evaluate how the audits of 2007 and earlier were responded to in 2008.
Where is this section in Steve McIntyre’s audits?
Where has Steve McIntyre explicitly detailed by line item in IPCC reports how his audits have actually affected IPCC conclusions in Mann hockey stick graphs?
Forget all the rest. Just the Mann hockey stick in the IPCC reports. Only things that can actually be measured, showing what they would have been without the audit and what they are as a result of the audit.
No vague or unconfirmable handwaving.
What is the net, provable, effect of McIntyre’s audit on the conclusions of anything, ever?
A professional auditor keeps track of these things, and makes a point to clearly communicate them regularly.
And if you don’t know where I get this from, you haven’t been following terribly closely, then.
Which is surprising, given you were a participant in this discussion earlier (http://judithcurry.com/2012/07/13/no-consensus-on-consensus-part-ii/#comment-219899) and ought have had time to arm yourself with facts.
So. Have you armed yourself with facts in the past eight months? Looked up citations to confirm your opinions or support your assertions?
Because I don’t see any yet.
Bart R:
Please tell me you are kidding. Steve McIntyre is a single individual examining issues as a hobby. The standard you suggest is completely unreasonable for what he does. The word professional in the phrase “professional auditor” should clue you in. McIntyre isn’t getting paid for this so holding him to the standard of someone who is is ridiculous.
Uh… you mean, the earlier discussion where you made hand-waving claims about the impact of McIntyre’s work that were completely wrong, just like your current ones are? The one where you offered absolutely no evidence for the position you are once again advancing? The one that is almost exactly the same as our current one?
What am I supposed to have “followed terribly closely”? You said things that were completely untrue, offered no evidence for them, and never even tried to support them when challenged. As far as I see, it’s the exact same as now. As you say:
I sure don’t see you doing this. Despite being repeatedly challenged on your claims, you do nothing to support them. I, on the other hand, have written at length about Mann’s work (as well as other “hockey sticks) and the criticisms thereof. I have held detailed discussions, and I have even written 10+ page documents discussing matters.
And in every case, I have consistently responded to any request for evidence or source in as much detail was necessary. I’ve often provided such references without being asked. You’ve done jack. But please, keep telling us:
I can get giggles every time I think of the contrast between willard’s auditing and StevieMac’s auditing. The English language has a wonderful way with its words.
===========
Brandon Shollenberger | March 24, 2013 at 6:29 pm |
Feel free to treat either of the following two approaches as ways of establishing the net effect of MM03 & MM05a&b & multiple florid defenses of MM0X by its authors:
1. a.) Read the response of the key source material in question, the central line of investigation of McIntyre & McKitrick:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6s6-6.html
McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) reported that they were unable to replicate the results of Mann et al. (1998). Wahl and Ammann (2007) showed that this was a consequence of differences in the way McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) had implemented the method of Mann et al. (1998) and that the original reconstruction could be closely duplicated using the original proxy data. McIntyre and McKitrick (2005a,b) raised further concerns about the details of the Mann et al. (1998) method, principally relating to the independent verification of the reconstruction against 19th-century instrumental temperature data and to the extraction of the dominant modes of variability present in a network of western North American tree ring chronologies, using Principal Components Analysis. The latter may have some theoretical foundation, but Wahl and Amman (2006) also show that the impact on the amplitude of the final reconstruction is very small (~0.05°C; for further discussion of these issues see also Huybers, 2005; McIntyre and McKitrick, 2005c,d; von Storch and Zorita, 2005).
b.) Read the papers mentioned: MBH98, WA07, MM03, MM05abcd, Huybers05, vSZ05;
c.) Consider how much is measurably altered from TAR to AR4 based on IPCC’s response herein due MM03 & MM05abcd combined. It ain’t much, and the IPCC provided ample supporting reasons why.
d.) Consider adjustments and amendments between TAR and AR4 based on Mann’s work independent of MM0X. It’s more than MM0X achieved.
e.) Consider adjustments and amendments between TAR and AR4 based on the works of all others cited. It’s more than MM0X achieved.
Or:
2.
a.) Google “citation index Mann Bradley Hughes”
b.) Click on “Cited by 1477” to get to http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=15322685363794269837&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&ei=CSRRUfrtA-SKjAKI_ICoDw&sqi=2&ved=0CDUQzgIwAA
c.) Evaluate the influence of MBH98 by count of cites of cites, general reputation of authors who cite, number of cites of said authors’ other works, diversity of cites, discounting self-citation, non-peer-reviewed cites of lesser merit, cites that discredit the original, etc.
d.) Google “citation index McIntyre McKitrick”
e.) Click on “Cited by 169” (notice how this is a tiny fraction of the direct cites of MBH98) to get http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=7772428529350986226&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&ei=SyVRUafqAoj3igLbtYCAAw&ved=0CDAQzgIwAA
f.) repeat step 2.c.) replacing MBH98 with MM03.
g.) The influence of MBH98 remains, before and after MM0X and discounting self-citation, citation where the only reason to cite is to discuss sociology of eccentrics, non-peer-reviewed citations of lesser merit, and citations that discredit originals and you find MBH98’s CQ is orders of magnitude greater than MM0X’s.
This is an easy and routine exercise in determining the general influence of a work in a field.
It doesn’t tell us who is right or who is wrong. It merely tells us whose work has been found credible or useful, and whose work has been found useless.
So, where does Steve McIntyre report this? The excuse that he’s a hobbyist clearly won’t wash, as MM’s self-cites show ample time and energy to track and respond to citations when the authors want to.
This is shoddy audit work by the authors.
Bart R, you made a specific claim that “all of McIntyre’s corrections were taken into account.” Steve McIntyre has commented on many different paleoclimatic reconstructions. Your latest comment only refers to (some) things he has said about one reconstruction. As such, nothing you’ve said could possibly support your claim. This is the first point you fail on, and it is enough to damn you on its own.
You defend this claim by suggesting we compare citation counts. You acknowledge that measure “doesn’t tell us who is right or who is wrong.” If it doesn’t tell us who is right or wrong, it cannot weigh in on your claim which was a specific, scientific claim. Your measure could only be relevant to something we are not discussing. This is a second point you fail on.
You also hand-wavingly offer d and e, claiming “adjustments and amendments” were made for the AR4 without citing a single one. These are the “corrections” you earlier claimed had been made, but the reality is they don’t exist. You’ve simply fabricated this claim. This is a third point you fail on.
The fourth point you fail on is you quote the IPCC report as gospel, saying it “ample supporting reasons why.” The IPCC report didn’t give any reasons why “all of McIntyre’s corrections” “ain’t much.” All it did was mindlessly cite a couple papers as disproving McIntyre’s criticisms. That does not support what you claim, even if we completely believe those papers.
The fifth point you fail on is the most amazing. You had claimed “all of McIntyre’s corrections were… included in a later IPCC report.” In reality, the report did not include such corrections. All it did was cite papers arguing such corrections were unimportant.
There are several other points I could go into, but there’s no point. You’ve done nothing to support your claim. You haven’t identified a single change made in response to McIntyre’s “corrections.” Following from this, you haven’t demonstrated the effect such a change has had. And since you haven’t done that for even a single “correction” from McIntyre, you certainly haven’t done it for “all of McIntyre’s corrections.”
You haven’t just failed to support your claim. You’ve offered false evidence for it. You’ve made multiple false claims to try to support it. You’ve offered falsehood after falsehood in an attempt to paint Steve McIntyre in a negative light. You even wrap up your comment with a mind-bogglingly fallacious argument:
You sought to hold McIntyre to professional standards. I countered by pointing out he isn’t doing this professionally. Your response is basically, “He has the time and energy to meet those standards.” So what? The fact somebody could meet a standard doesn’t mean they have to. It doesn’t even mean they should.
That’s a fitting conclusion to your comment as the misrepresentation in it well represents the blatant and ridiculous falsity that permeates your comment.
I’ve provided a resource which details the exact effect problems with Mann’s hockey stick(s) had. It includes links to all the material you could need to confirm what it says. It’s written in simple language that anyone could understand. It is available for anyone to read to understand my case. You should read it. You’ll see some discussants are willing to do more than just quote people saying things they “like.”
Brandon Shollenberger | March 26, 2013 at 1:35 am |
1. Actually, the full specific claim was “..when all of McIntyre’s corrections were taken into account and included in a later IPCC report, the net effect of corrections..”
See how the context changes the meaning. In this case “all” is clearly in the context of the original IPCC report, not everything Steve McIntyre ever said anything about. You’ve made an absurd assertion, impossible to ascribe to honest reading on its face. I believe some call this your “parsomatic”. It is a form of straw man argument you procure, and nothing that fails or damns anything, other than the waste of time of having had to read it.
.. and I note your reply came in under an hour. That’s an excitingly brief time to have read my comment, followed both or either of the courses of reading required to understand and evaluate it, and write your own rather fulsome (though still missing key bits of context from where you quote me) elegy. I believe you did not sincerely consider my explanation before going ahead and trashing it parsomatically.
2. If it doesn’t tell us who is right or wrong, it cannot weigh in on your claim which was a specific, scientific claim.
My specific, auditable claim was that MM had negligible impact. Not whether MM were right or wrong (though it’s patent they were more wrong in more ways than Mann was, although Mann admitted his work was flawed before ever hearing of McIntyre & McKitrick, which for a guy with as much of a kneejerk tendency to get defensive about his work is worthy of remark). Whether MM had any impact of note is what I was talking about. How you got where you did from where I started, not my responsibility, as it’s not where I led.
And what’s with the dramatic language and ad hom?
3. And you want me to underline and cite verbatim which differences in AR4 might be in each case? Go read AR4 Chapter 6, which I linked and quoted, for the answers, as it’s just too much detail to transcribe the entire contents of everything commented on to satisfy irrational standards of what you consider valid proof.
4.) Tiresomely ignores the substantive reasons given by the IPCC and quoted in my comment. If you can’t be bothered to read the quote, or can’t understand it, your excessive requirements in your third point are clearly superfluous. Even when the citation is direction quoted, and an explanation of what it means is set out, you miss it.
5.) Yeah. The corrections were indeed included, those that passed review and withstood scrutiny. vSZ set out what the adjustments were. Which you’d have known if you’d done the reading necessary to understand the case being made.. which would have taken longer than 50 minutes less time to whip off a snarky tirade.
And not to quibble, but you say there are other points you won’t go into, then go into other points timewastingly.
Write more or stop. Decide. Stick to the decision. Doing both just looks ill-thought out.
Also, I don’t seek to hold Mr. McIntyre to professional standards. I simply illustrate that his contribution doesn’t meet the standards of an auditor, when it’s the one single claim to fame he is lauded with.
People say all sorts of things about the guy. He’s a nice guy. He’s a smart guy. Good family values. Decent writer. Successful in business. Those things are true. “The Auditor”, “Math genius”, “Climate guru?”
I see no credible evidence for these claims.
Neither do you, or you’d have brought it.
Bart R:
Bull. While you claim to provide “the full specific claim,” you leave off this part, “in one single curve out of dozens.” You made an issue of how many curves were changed as a point against McIntyre. This means they are relevant to your claim. That means everything McIntyre said about thoes curves is relevant to your claim.
If McIntyre’s “corrections” in regards to other curve had been “taken into account,” you could not have made an issue of the fact only one curve was changed. You did. This means your accusation against me rests entirely upon you misrepresenting your own claim.
You’re free to believe whatever you want. Anyone who has paid attention to what I say on this topic would likely believe otherwise though. They would probably figure I had already read every one of those papers. Seeing as I’ve discussed all of them before, they’re probably right.
You are again misrepresenting your own claim. You specifically claimed McIntyre’s corrections were “taken into account.” If the people responding to McIntyre were wrong in their responses, they could not have taken into account his corrections. That would make whatever impact MM had irrelevant to your claim.
There was no ad hominem. Please don’t make things up.
If you’re going to make a claim, you should be willing to provide evidence for it. You haven’t. You haven’t shown a single example of what you claimed. You say “Mann’s self-corrections amounted to a larger change,” but you don’t even show any such corrections exist in the IPCC report. The same is true for the supposed “corrections made based on the findings of others.
I specificially say there is no substantive reason given by the IPCC. This is an easily examined point. All you had to do to show I am as unreasonable as you say is show the substantive reasons you claim were provided. You didn’t.
The reality is I read the quote. I understood the quote. You didn’t.
Bull. No corrections were included. The graphs were not changed. You are making things up, just like you are making up the idea that I haven’t “done the reading necessary to understand the case being made.”
That’s exactly what you did. You specifically criticized McIntyre for failing to meet the standards of a professional auditor.
I’ve offered you a resource which shows the effects of McIntyre’s criticisms are far greater than you claim. You’ve done nothing to respond to it. You’re either unaware of this or you are lying. Either way, you are wrong.
> Write more or stop. Decide. Stick to the decision. Doing both just looks ill-thought out.
Chewbacca’s parsomatic efforts save him from reading the blog, a task bender implores auditors to do.
If Chewbacca knew his auditing playbook, he’d know that the usual line here is to raise a correction concern:
My own response to this counterfactual would be this other one: if that makes auditors waste their time, why should they?
Brandon Shollenberger | March 26, 2013 at 11:26 am |
There was no ad hominem. Please don’t make things up.
From Brandon Shollenberger | March 26, 2013 at 1:35 am |
.. you fail .. and it is enough to damn you on its own.
You defend..
You acknowledge..
You also hand-wavingly offer ..
You’ve simply fabricated this claim.
..you quote the IPCC report as gospel..
You’ve offered false evidence for it. You’ve made multiple false claims to try to support it. You’ve offered falsehood after falsehood
.. the misrepresentation in it well represents the blatant and ridiculous falsity that permeates ..
And even in the same comment:
You’ve done nothing to support your claim.
..All you had to do to ..
You are making things up, just like you are making up the idea..
You’ve done nothing to respond to it. You’re either unaware of this or you are lying.
Do you even understand what ad hominem means? It’s plausible you missed the ad hom in the earlier comment you made because it was so buried in straw man and argument by assertion (which you may need to look up, too), and a dozen other forms of fallacy, but within the same comment as you deny doing it?
Bart R, it’s interesting you’ve decided to completely drop all discussion of the issue this exchange was about in favor of discussing supposed ad hominems. I suppose that means you’re done even pretending to try to engage the points I make. That’s probably best given you’ve simply fabricated things.
Better than you, that’s for sure. You just claimed “You’ve done nothing to support your claim” is an ad hominem. Heck, you even said, “You defend” and “You acknowledge” are ad hominem.
I have no idea what you think an ad hominem is, but it seems impossible to have any sort of debate without engaging in whatever you have in mind. How in the world are people supposed to refer to each other’s arguments if they can’t say things like, “You defend your position by saying…” or, “You acknowledge my source is right about…”? Are we just not allowed to use the word “you”?
If you want to pursue Latin lessons, we can. It’s completely off-topic, but you’re welcome to make a fool of yourself with whatever topic you want. I’d prefer to discuss scientific matters, like the fact Mann’s hockey stick lacked any statistical skill and thus had no validity,* but… it’s your call.
*This is McIntyre’s most common criticism of MBH. It’s also something you can’t “correct” for.
Brandon Shollenberger | March 27, 2013 at 10:19 am |
..it’s interesting you’ve decided to completely drop all discussion of the issue this exchange was about..
And again your response emphasises my decision and not the content first. See the difference “your response”, not “you’ve decided”. About the issues and ideas and claims and comments and remarks and responses, not about the person making them. It’s hardly interesting to see remarked one of the major fallacies and most persistent polemic tricks in a thread. It’s pretty much, given the extreme levels it’s risen to in the remarks in the thread, obligatory to look at and address.
in favor of discussing supposed ad hominems.
Supposed? Either a comment focuses on the ideas, or it focuses on the people with the ideas. Well, it’s not a discussion terribly focussed on the ideas, then, if it damns and fails and characterizes the participants instead of the ideas. These are patent.
I suppose that means you’re done even pretending to try to engage the points I make.
And still ad hom. A comment about a comment isn’t a disengagement in a thread. It’s addressing an issue that must be resolved as it is so fallacious as to hinder engagement. If the thread descends to nothing more than spiralling fallacies in response to every honest point offered in good faith, then it isn’t the good faith that’s caused the disengagement.
That’s probably best given you’ve simply fabricated things.
And again, this merely asserted fabrication is fabrication claimed but not very well established. How could it be, as there was no fabrication?
This straw man technique is well known. Poison the tree by asserting a fault in an argument, and ascribing the fault to the author. Handwave that thereby all fruit of the same tree is thus poisonous. It’s a familiar and obvious play, irrelevant to the ideas and contents of comments. It’s what is advised by debate team coaches when they know the counter arguments cannot succeed on their own merit.
Do you even understand what ad hominem means?
Better than you, that’s for sure. You just claimed “You’ve done nothing to support your claim” is an ad hominem. Heck, you even said, “You defend” and “You acknowledge” are ad hominem.
See, here we see how patent the ad hom is, as this response cherry picks out the lesser patent examples to use in a weak tea claim.
I have no idea what you think an ad hominem is, but it seems impossible to have any sort of debate without engaging in whatever you have in mind. How in the world are people supposed to refer to each other’s arguments if they can’t say things like, “You defend your position by saying…” or, “You acknowledge my source is right about…”? Are we just not allowed to use the word “you”?
See, if a remark is aimed at the speaker rather than the speech, the writer rather than what is written, it is by nature in some degree ad hom; whether the ad hom nature of a remark makes a case fallacious has to do with the degree the remark dominates the focus of the argument. Once ad hom rises to the level of fruit-of-the-poison-tree attack, it’s definitely a fallacy. Is the discussion about the original ideas, or about mud-slinging and the character of the participants?
That’s obvious by now.
If you want to pursue Latin lessons, we can. It’s completely off-topic, but you’re welcome to make a fool of yourself with whatever topic you want. I’d prefer to discuss scientific matters,
Yeah, by a ratio of about 10:1, the words in the thread indicate a marked discrepancy between the ambition to discuss scientific matters and the discussion.
..like the fact Mann’s hockey stick lacked any statistical skill and thus had no validity,* but… it’s your call.
See, this ‘fact’ is an assertion, and a discredited one. In theory, possible, but when tested repeatedly, the claim “..lacked any statistical skill..” has been shown to be false. As the premise is false, the conclusion, “..had no validity..” is itself invalid. Further, in this case, we can conclude McIntyre’s claim is false.
*This is McIntyre’s most common criticism of MBH. It’s also something you can’t “correct” for.
Be pretty hard to correct for anything that isn’t true in the first place.
But it’s not what this thread is about. There are plenty of wrong ideas that are still held, or not yet disproven; this thread, the original claim, was that Steve McIntyre’s failed to self-audit his claims even so far as to maintain an index of the influence of his auditing. (Note that yes, this is a partly ad hom claim, but it’s about the faults in the ideas, not in the person.)
When we go to actual citation indexes, we see one reasonable explanation for why these figures are hidden instead of regularly posted: they heavily discredit the criticism in MM0X.
> whether the ad hom nature of a remark makes a case fallacious has to do with the degree the remark dominates the focus of the argument.
I’d rather say the fallacy obtains when the topic shifts from the argument to its utterer. When an argument invokes an authority and appeals to this authority, as Chewbacca’s doing right now with the Auditor, questioning that authority is quite kosher.
This should be enough the reconcile the beginning and the end of Bart R’s comment.
Bart R, thank you for establishing you don’t know what ad hominem arguments are:
Ad hominem arguments are arguments by which a person is attacked to discredit their arguments. What I do is the opposite. I attack your arguments, and I use that to discredit you. It’s the difference between these two sentences:
– You’re a moron, therefore you’re wrong.
– You’re wrong, therefore you’re a moron.
Moreover, I can target you with as many comments like, “You’re an idiot” as I want without ever saying a word to address your arguments. Personal abuse like, “You’re a blathering fool,” only becomes an hominem when it is tied to an argument. Abuse for abuse’s sake, like randomly telling you, “You’re a imbecile,” is not ad hominem.
I get that Latin is fairly difficult, but please try to learn the difference between, “Your comments call into question your teachers’ decision to pass you” and, “The idiocy of your comments is so great only a fool would listen to your arguments.”
I hope the humor of this comment is not lost on you. You accuse me of arguing by assertion while arguing by assertion. Of course, I’ve actually offered support for my assertion via well-documented arguments that show even papers you’ve promoted show I’m correct.
(I’ve also shown Michael Mann acknowledges his original hockey stick is not robust as he had claimed in his paper. Steve McIntyre argued exactly that for years before Mann admitted it. I’m curious where that “correction” was supposedly taken into account since you say all of them were.)
willard –
Sorry – this was mis-nested:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/19/playing-hockey-blowing-the-whistle/#comment-306478
‘My own response to this counterfactual would be this other one: if that makes auditors waste their time, why should they?”
1. because they don’t see it as a waste of time.
2. because even if they do see it as a waste of time, its their time to waste.
3. they enjoy a good waste of time. I know I do, its like playing bingo
when you are an old fart
basically auditors are asking you to change something that they find important that you claim is unimportant. If we practice charity and put ourselves in the shoes of the person who claims it is unimportant, then
we are at loss to explain why not change what doesnt matter to us.
Possible answers: it doesnt matter and we are too proud to admit
of any mistake. it doesnt matter and we are too lazy to change it.
It doesnt matter, settles everything if we say so.
Wow! Five in a row! Thanks, moshe U go, rok U.
============
> because they don’t see it as a waste of time.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site%3Aclimateaudit.org+%22waste+of+time%22
> that you claim is unimportant.
Citation needed.
> I attack your arguments, and I use that to discredit you. […] Personal abuse like, “You’re a blathering fool,” only becomes an hominem when it is tied to an argument.
Chewbacca strikes again.
And in case that was no clear, “they” does not refer to the practitioners of the auditing sciences.
That the practitioners of the auditing sciences enjoy a good ClimateBall game, and therefore waste their time, is a well enough established fact.
> You’re wrong, therefore you’re a moron.
More exactly:
> The word I’m putting in your mouth are wrong, therefore you’re a moron.
Oftentimes, Chewbacca would rather say:
> What I make you say makes no sense, therefore you’re a moron.
sorry willard, thats an extremely bad google as it pulls up many things that are utterly unrelated to the topic at hand. try doing a spot check.
Second, do you think solving puzzles is a waste of time or fun or a way to pass the time?
‘I’d rather say the fallacy obtains when the topic shifts from the argument to its utterer.”
you are a time waster willard.
Boy. You gamers sure love your word games. I don’t doubt it’s quite useful “training” for the next time when you have a chance to make a brutal dish on an opponent whom you have pawned. lol
> I regard these battles over data as a total waste of time.
http://climateaudit.org/2012/07/01/lonnie-and-ellen-serial-non-archivers/#comment-341826
A big THANK YOU for your concerns:
The idea you’re exploring is:
Res ipsa loquitur.
> Science isn’t the IPCC.
Iconic, isn’t it?
captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2 | March 23, 2013 at 11:51 am |
there is a bigger impact than that.
I agree, but not in the sense I was discussing.
Now that we’ve clearly established, with detailed explanations, that the putative, the presumptive, the claimed impacts of MM0X — to correct TAR — were so negligible as to round to zero, it ought be time to reflect on the actual impact of MM0X’s nonsuch audit outside scientific conclusions.
McKitrick used MM0X to sustain the lobbying of the Fraser Group on behalf of the tar sand industry in Ottawa to influence the Canadian government to not merely drop out of but also actively sabotage Kyoto in international talks, while also subsidizing and using its full diplomatic weight to promote tar sands.
McIntyre has appeared as witness before gormless political committees as if his work merited being considered scientifically influential.
This self-promoted shoe-horning of inferior work to gain foothold in policy decisions is the true and only purpose of MM0X, and of ClimateAudit..
Of course, generating FOI carpetbombing campaigns, exciting campaigns for EIGHT inquiries into the soggy Climategate firecracker, all of which exonerated the science (though some quite rightly found some slight fault with the conduct of administrators), and wasting a lot of the time of people with actual science to do.. that’s all gravy.
Now, you can call it a focus on knowledge frontiers or whatnot, but it’s pure manipulation for impure motive.
In the same way I walk quickly away from a homeless schizophrenic yelling on a street corner, rather than trying to explain to him tha there is no one there, I skip quickly past “a fan of more dis……’s” comments. No one here can help him. It is too bad that at a public meeting even a raving lunatic can get up and speak while everyone looks at their shoes and waits for it to mercifully end.
Additionally, “you can’t reason a man out of a position he never reasoned himself into.”
Perhaps he should be banned for poor etiquette and abusing the rule of speaking too often and too foolishly. Even the highest respect for free speech requires speakers to take their turn, to not repeat themselves endlessly and to not take themselves hyper-seriously.
I don’t know the answer, other than it is a pain to have to skip so many comments and the responses to them. I am not sure I can continue to read this because the vocal presence of such an obviously attention-seeking nutball detracts from the credibility of the discussion thread.
I suggest not responding to him anymore, as that would represent a marked improvement to the discourse.
My comment is aimed not at making an ad nominee attack, but rather at an issue that bears on the fundamental quality, usefulness and credibility of these threads. And when there is a schizoid taking up excess airtime at the city council meeting, someone should at least mention it for the sake of addressing the counter-productive imposition.
I believe ruining the discourse is what John Sidles a.k.a. “a physicist” a.k.a. “Fan of more discourse” is out to accomplish. He’s a fan of more meaningless discourse to be sure. Driving you away is what he wants. Don’t give it to him.
I doubt even he knows what he aims to do — dysfunction is a force of it’s own. I’m sure I will stay engaged, but propaganda is winning, and there is no historical reason to believe this mass foray will end any better than previous ones — i.e., the cataclysmic destruction of human life by other humans. It is sadly “in our nature” and I fear ineluctable.
I don’t think they understand that we will take our chances for now with a highly unpredictable outcome of the future climate compared with the utterly predictable destruction and catastrophe that will result from this totalitarian course of demagoguery, fear-mongering and lying which arises from the human character’s weakness for the love of power.
P.S. Obviously, I meant ad hominem (not ad nominee) above, my iPad autocorrected a typo.
amen to that.
BREAKING NEWS Marc (and David Springer too), your concerns are now being addressed on a brand-new public communication channel that has been opened by Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice weblog
The 21st century Enlightenment extends its open and heart-felt welcome to you, Marc and David. May you learn and prosper by it, and thus may peace come upon you, and upon your descendents.
Marc,
A big THANK YOU for coming out of the lurkering dark to pile on Fan!
willard,
You should be more decerning with who you hang out with.
timg56,
Thank you for the advice, but please bear in mind that my discernment makes me hang out with you.
OK Judith I am out of here. You could keep the discussion more on track if you would comment once in a while. But it’s your blog and your time. No hard feelings.
Now see that the climate catastrophists don’t care if the blade is an artifact because they think it’s ok anyway to just graft on the high res (though still crap) temperature record on the end of a low res (even crappier) proxy record That is, they don’t have a clue how science usually works. So it is pointless to argue anything from a scientific standpoint: They just stick their fingers in their ears and chant that if you don’t believe in thermageddon you must be evil.
But implicit in this splicing-is-ok argument, is that seemingly the catastrophists also now believe the entire rise of temperature from the little ice age is manmade! That’s way beyond the IPCC who just said it was from the middle of the last century (based on computer models of declining natural variability now of course known to be false).
Also amazing is the sheer ignorance of error bands. Most folk in other fields take error seriously but in this field it is either totally ignored or faked (in reconstructions of the past) or, in complete contradiction, the huge error margin of model ensembles just clipping the huge error margin of observations somehow (in climate science only I stress) “proves” the models are not totally crap. All this serious academic incompetence would be funny if it wasn’t eating up the science budget and causing bad policy.
There are two tribes of dogmatists here; neither interested in ideas that don’t support the entrenched position that they seemingly learned at their mothers teat. I see it as the Mother Earth cult versus the Invisible Hand cult. Why there are so few independent truth-seekers despite no apparent lack of education on either side, remains the most frustrating part of the whole farce.
Has it been so long?
http://judithcurry.com/2012/03/22/nrcs-artless-untruths-on-climate-change-and-food-security/
Rud’s become one of the most frequent contributors to CE in barely a year.
We ought have marked the anniversary of his first post with a cake or something.
manacker | March 22, 2013 at 6:10 pm
Thanks, Manacker. I note that folks like David Springer and Steven Mosher are all too willing to claim that they have some huge moral superiority over me. They’ve never made any mistakes, I guess.
But curiously, their claimed moral superiority doesn’t seem to stop them from making the most scurrilous of ad hominem attacks.
Mosher seriously says that folks should pay no attention to me, because of his high moral pronouncement that I’ve violated the Mosher Code Of Conduct … he says “Basically, I don’t find your [sic] in a position to moralize or get on your high horse.”
And that is a curious accusation, since I’ve done exactly what I’m advising people to do, to speak out publicly about scientific malfeasance. So I can hardly be accused of hypocrisy.
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. When all someone can dig up against me are bogus charges based on actions taken years ago, they just look desperate. I wasn’t afraid to go to war. I refused to go to that war. To me, anything was more honorable than being a part of the machine that was raining flaming death on little girls.
Call me crazy, but I did not want to take even the slightest part in that tragic mistake. And I am overjoyed that I did not have any hand in that war, that I fought against it in every way that I could.
BE CLEAR that I’m NOT saying those that went to Vietnam were wrong. They made what seemed the most moral choice to them, and every man had to make his own choice. I do not fault theirs in any form or manner.
Me, I was nineteen years old and very stupid. I took the King’s Shilling before I realized that the King was barking mad and the war was a lethal, tragic, monstrous, farmer-killing mistake. I realized that had to get out any way I could, because no way I was going to be a part of going halfway around the world to support killing a bunch of farmers and villagers in an unwinnable war.
That was my choice, and it was the best of the bad alternatives at that point. I’d already trapped myself through my own stupidity.
If someone wants to charge me with something I did during that time, the crime I’d offer is that at nineteen years old I didn’t have the … what … the nerve, the maturity, the wisdom, the strength of character, whatever it takes to do what Mohammed Ali did and go to jail. That, you can fairly accuse me of.
But of course, by the time I realized what the war really was and what I’d done, that was no longer an option, my choices were down to bad and worst. And I have not learned anything in the intervening years that makes me think I should have gone over to help do what my very best friend in high school called “kill gooks”.
And for those of you that think I should have just knuckled down, been a good soldier, and meekly obeyed orders and gone off to help kill gooks?
I fear you’ve not seen what many others have seen … that in an immoral war, there are very few moral choices, especially for the folks at the bottom of the heap.
Now, should I have called anyone a “coward” as I did above? No, absolutely not, that was entirely wrong. Among other things it’s far too emotionally loaded a word. I retract it entirely, and I apologize for saying it, without reservation.
So let me re-state my position, the position that Mosher and Springer are trying so hard to exclude from the discussion.
Steven said that scientists were speaking against Marcott in private.
I say that I would hope very much that someday those climate scientists would say the same thing, loudly and publicly, until the field of climate science finally starts to clean up the horrible mess it finds itself in.
Folks who advise just staying quiet often take refuge in the eventual exposure of the truth. People say “science is self-correcting”, and they are right. It will eventually self-correct, the truth will come out.
But in times when false science is harming and impoverishing and killing the poor as we speak, at a time when pensioners are shivering from fuel poverty, I’m sorry if I’m impatient. And indeed, I may be unqualified to judge what’s moral.
But standing silently by for forty years watching old folks shiver and poor people die because of bogus science doesn’t strike me as especially moral. We’ve been fed lies since Hansen turned off the air conditioners in the Senate Hearing Room and that was a quarter century ago … and I’m not willing to wait any longer, so I speak out. This is not some debate about the range of some frog, this is hurting people as we speak. I’m not going to stand silent while the poor are suffering.
So all you folks who agree with Mosher that I’m unqualified to judge these questions, you can reject my call to speak out, you can silently watch the poor die for the rest of your lives if you wish. That’s your choice.
Me, I speak out, and I plan to continue to do so.
Next, Steven Mosher described what Marcott et al. did as “chartsmanship”. That’s just deceptive spin control while the poor suffer. Chartsmanship is changing the graphic presentation of data. What they did was to screw with the data itself. That’s not chartsmanship, that’s scientific malfeasance.
This is another part of the problem, not calling things by their real names. This kind of spin leads the unwary to think that everything is fine, that there isn’t really rot at the core of climate science, that nobody is making lethally wrong decisions based on bogus claims … oh, no, none of that, it’s just a bit of innocent chartsmanship.
So I protested against that as well, and I will continue to do so despite the ad hominems heaped on me for having the gall to say that folks should speak out publicly against bad science.
In any case, thanks again, Manacker. You are an excellent example of someone who can disagree with me without turning it into mud-throwing.
w.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReHFfzjI4zk
Perhaps better said here. Proof McIntyre and Istvan aren’t the only ones with the same hockey stick problem.
As I understand it, the various hockey sticks have their blades starting 100+ years ago, yet even the IPCC only claims post-1970 warming is anthropogenic. Isn’t this a bit odd?
That’s a good observation.
I came into these arguments a few years ago around the time McIntyre was still trying to get data from Mann which I came across after I had been told the story that the temps were being driven up by man’s carbon dioxide input since the Industrial Revolution.
Of course I soon realised that they were beginning their measurements from the low at the end of the LIA, so it stood to reason that coming out of a low temps would increase back into the direction of the previous higher temp, that’s why it had been called a little ice age. In reply to my pointing out that not only was the AGW claim cherry picking a low temperature period as a start date to temperature rising, but had picked one before the Industrial Revolution had even begun, I was pointed in the direction of the Hockey Stick which my tutor said proved the LIA wasn’t the great dip into cold as I thought it was. The logic fails of AGW had begun to show.
My other point to him at the time was that the Industrial Revolution was actually quite limited and that it wasn’t until the forties last century that industry spread, but he ignored this as he ignored the email about getting rid of the MWP and LIA and when I found the Vostok data, and began to appreciate the great cycles within our Ice Age, he dismissed these too and came back to the claim that our temps had been ‘flat normal’ and our fault that we were changing this by our increased production of carbon dioxide as the Hockey Stick showed.
Over the next year or so I began to see fewer references from AGW supporters to the Industrial Revolution as a start point and more emphasis on the spread of industry in the early 20th century, until I came across anti arguments pointing out that after the rise of temps to the third and fourth decades the world began to cool again, considerably.
The scares at the time were that we would be going into another LIA at best and at worst the start of our final descent back fully into our Ice Age due at the end of the balmy Holocene interlude, (from a press and science community that hadn’t any reason to pretend the LIA didn’t exist and was then coming to grips with the glacial/interglacial cycles).
Although the arguments from AGW supporters tried to make out that these ‘back into the cold’ scares were not supported by ‘the consensus of’ scientists it was clear that it was a general fear among them and even taught in schools and, as the letter to Nixon shows, there were high level symposiums to discuss this.
So, in thinking about what you said, it seems to me that because of the spread of arguments about the cold dip after the highs of the thirties the emphasis from the AGW meme producing department was forced to change again, to the rise in temps during the 70’s. The Hockey Stick hadn’t kept up with those changes of narrative..
And of course we also now have the more recent fiddling with earlier 20th century temperature records to make the past hotter temps colder, the AGW meme producing department had to do something about the constant reminders that the highest temp of the thirties was hotter than present…
This would all be very amusing if the consequences of this science fraud for us general population weren’t so dire.
I’ve just done a search on “rise in temperature 20th century thirties forties cooling” and the first on the page came up: http://judithcurry.com/2011/01/21/mid-20th-century-global-warming/
“Mid 20th Century Global(?) Warming
Posted on January 21, 2011 by Peter Webster
“The mid-20th century temperature “bump” (peaking circa 1940) is an interesting feature of the temperature record. This “bump” was discussed in an email from Tom Wigley to Phil Jones referring to a WUWT post that discusses a paper by Thompson et al.
“The issue of the mid century temperature bump was raised on a previous thread by Girma in the context of an email he sent to Kevin Trenberth (some excerpts provided below): ”
The response from Trenberth is the “not global” one. Are they ever going to be embarrassed by the plethora of data showing the MWP and LIA were global?
Or are they going to carry on clinging by their nails hoping the time taken to provide contradicting evidence will be enough for them to put a new meme in its place?
They never seem to be bothered that evidence gathering also turns up countless examples of their deceits, they just move on to the next.
Marcott et al. have responded
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/fresh-thoughts-from-authors-of-a-paper-on-11300-years-of-global-temperature-changes/
As a stand alone statement, this is not unreasonable. However, it doesn’t address the hype from the press release and also Steve McIntyre’s specific concerns.
Marcott paper
Basically the folks at RC have probably made poor ol Marcott respond that the uptick did not matter anyway its not important, significant, robust etc don’t rely on it just forget about it please etc but unfortunately for them as
Ross MC on Realclimate reply, at CA says “But that is precisely what they do in Figure 3 of their paper, and it is the basis of their claim that “Global temperature, therefore, has risen from near the coldest to the warmest levels of the Holocene within the past century, reversing the long-term cooling trend that began ~5000 yr B.P.” Without the uptick in their proxy reconstruction this kind of statement could never have been made. The presence of the uptick in the proxy graph validates their comparison of the instrumental record against the proxy record. By admitting that the uptick is not robust and cannot be a basis for any conclusions they have undermined their own findings, root and branch”.
In my view, this paper must now be withdrawn
Pielke Jr’s post is a must read:
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/fixing-marcott-mess-in-climate-science.html
McIntyre also has a must read post
http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/31/the-marcott-filibuster/
More “must read” from Roger’s post (well, except that you can’t read it there because Roger doesn’t want people to):
From Roger:
Now that was in response to me correcting an incorrect assertion he made about me commenting on his “motives” – something I didn’t do.
My response:
In reference to this:
As well as comments that he continued to make (impugning the motives and integrity of other scientists) that [were] not in any way prompted by my comments.
It is your blog, Roger. Do as you see fit.
I’ll continue to post my comments and your lames ducks elsewhere in the climate blogosphere so that they can be saved for posterity. :-)
Yet another comment that Roger considers too offensive to post on his current thread. Let’s see if he finds it so offensive that he won’t even post it into his “rejected comments” thread:
===========
So we have this (from Roger):
After we have this (from Roger):
Sorry, Roger – but your inconsistent application of standards is counterproductive. It is a symptom of the larger problem – just as Revkin said,
Now I would underline his reference to the situational aspect – the fact that your behavior is typical of climate combatants on both sides of the debate doesn’t tell us about your integrity more generally. What you’re doing is an all too human trait. But clearly, poisoning the well and then complaining that the water is poisoned only undermines your goal of being an “honest broker.”
========================
Please note, that after Roger rejected that comment (w/o even posting it in his “rejected comments” thread), he has gone on to continue to take impugn the integrity of others even as he decries name-calling.
Roger does some good science, but sad to say that despite his pretenses otherwise, he is no less juvenile than your average climate combatant.
Joshua such a display of petulance.
Made ya’ look, Brian!
Interesting that in the comments of Roger’s “must read,” he makes an incorrect assertion directed at me, but deems my response correcting his error to be off-topic:
Hey – it’s his blog, you’d think that in a post where he comments on the motives and integrity of other scientists, he would stand behind his accusations.
More same ol’ same ol’ in the climate wars.
I have written earlier in this thread several comments where I say that the post 1900 part should have been left out of the paper. Digging into the details Steve McIntyre has shown that the source of the uptick is even a bit worse that the authors admit in their recent Q&A posted at RC as the main source for the uptick is that part of the data that’s not measured at all but put there for reasons of convenience. That reason is acceptable as long as that that part of data does not affect any conclusions. Here it is the main source of the uptick.
I would, however, not judge the statements of the authors as harshly as some have done. Their paper tells new information about earlier parts of holocene. It’s perfectly reasonable to put that information in context by comparing it with the instrumental record and even with the projections to the future. Where the authors have failed, is in not telling explicitly that they have no new results about the last couple of hundred years as their method tells really only about the more distant past. Thus they should have told explicitly that they refer to the more recent data only in order to connect their findings to what has been known before. That’s what they have done, but they have left another impression to all too many.
Concerning McIntyre, I found his earlier posts on this subject very interesting and his way of writing quite all right. This most recent post had the opposite effect on me.
Its clear that the other side is not fair towards him. Tamino wrote about the same errors several days later than McIntyre and gave a terribly bad excuse for not referring to him. Similar comments can be presented about Real Climate. Reading McIntyre’s latest post made it. however, more understandable that they behave like that.
Pekka, your ‘however’ IMO seems a defence for plagiarism, why?
Tamino’s response:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/for-the-record/
I have no idea whether it was “plagiarism” or not, but what is clear is that Stevie-Mac was sloppy once again. He allowed his tribalism to lead him to making an accusation without having solid evidence to back his claim. It isn’t the first time that he’s done this – it isn’t even the first time he’s done it w/r/t the Marcott paper.
All this finger-pointing is juvenile – but if you’re going to do it you should have solid evidence. Otherwise, you only expose a weakness in your own habits of analysis.
Joshua you, like Nick Stokes, amuse me. In Nick’s case somtimes brilliance, in your case most recursive.
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