by Rud Istvan
On March 8, 2013, mainstream media around the world carried headlines trumpeting a new study in Science, the gist typified by NBC News:
Warming fastest since dawn of civilization
Except that is not what the paper was about.
A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years
Shaun A. Marcott, Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark, Alan C. Mix
Abstract. Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2°C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.
The paper is published in Science, link to abstract [here].
The paper contains a comparison in Figure 1B to a version of the TAR hockey stick chart in which the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) disappeared, and ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ was used to ‘hide the [recent proxy] decline’ by pasting in thermometer temperatures. The paper found good agreement of their reconstruction with Mann et al.’s previous reconstructions: “indistiguishable within uncertainty”.
It is evident from the paper’s abstract that temperatures are not yet back to the estimated Holocene peak, let alone above it as Figure 1B depicts. This suggests a significant overall temperature calibration issue.
The MWP has progressively ‘disappeared’ over the course of the IPCC reports. FAR and SAR showed it to have been much warmer than the present—and nothing to do with CO2. By TAR the MWP was gone, leading to the hockey stick controversy and climategate.
While the MWP did not completely disappear in this new paper, it turned into a <0.1°C blip colder than 1961- 1990. This is quite curious. The MWP was not a blip for the entire northern hemisphere, as illustrated by this figure adapted from a 2010 paper by Ljungvist.
A reference list compiled by CO2Science shows that there are at least 96 proxy studies of Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Aus/NZ with quantitative estimates of MWP temperatures, plus 109 more with qualitative estimates, and an additional 116 providing evidence that it was a significant, centuries long event that came and went fairly suddenly.
How has the MWP almost disappeared again, just in time to perhaps go missing in IPCC AR5? Science’ supplemental information says the average resolution of the 73 paleoclimate series is 160 years, and the median is 120. The proxy selection was deliberately weighted toward ‘low frequency’ resolution, since the entire Holocene was being assessed. Figure S18c (below) shows there is no statistically valid resolution to the combined proxy set for anything less than 300-year periods. [“Gain” was defined as the ratio of output variance to input white noise in simulations ‘stressing’ combined proxy statistical reliability. In other words, for periods less than three hundred years, white noise in is white noise out (no matter whether the Monte Carlo sampling interval is 20 or 120 years) while for periods over 2000 years the output is about 90% ‘valid’ signal.] The paper itself said, “…our temperature stack does not fully resolve variability at periods shorter than 2000 years…”
Evaluate a 300-year MWP using methods lacking 300 year resolution and voila! The MWP turns into a blip diminished by the colder periods on each side.
As do any other ‘sudden’ temperature changes occurring over mere century intervals, of which there were plenty on the order of ±1°C in the actual proxies. The 20 proxies with the strongest Holocene peak signal plotted raw from the SI data file show this quite nicely.
The misinformation highway took the paper’s figure S3 (below) as a spaghetti chart hockey stick of the proxy temperatures. It is not. It shows 1000 Monte Carlo simulations of the 73 data sets, perturbed by inserting random temperature and age calibration errors to establish the blue statistical band in Figure 1B. S3 doesn’t say the last century’s temperature has risen above the Holocene peak. It only says uncertainty about the combined recent paleotemperature has risen. Which must be true if the median resolution is 120 years.
There were certainly ‘sudden’ temperature rises in the MWP charts above as ‘rapid’ as the 20th century (since there has been no rise yet at all in the 21st). Yet MSM headlines focused on the ‘fastest ever’ change. As the most telling example, Marcott’s NPR interview headline was Past Century’s Global Temperature Change is Fastest on Record :
But Marcott says the record shows just how unusual our current warming is. “It’s really the rates of change here that’s amazing and atypical,” he says. Essentially, it’s warming up superfast.
Marcott neglected to tell NPR his methodology did not recognize ‘fast’ century changes at all–until recent thermometer records were spliced onto the 73 paleosites.
And so the next CAGW hockey stick game begins. Possibly with a pass of the puck to Canadian Steve McIntyre.
JC comment: This post was emailed to me, unsolicited. I did some editing and checking (I have read the main article but not the supplementary material). I have not personally spent much time on this paper, but I think it is a paper that should be discussed, given the hypberbolic press coverage.
Andy Revkin has a post on the paper, with extensive quotes from Mann, Rohde, and Alley, worth reading.
Hank at suyts has a post on the paper, where he downloaded the data made available by the authors and analyzed it. This post is worth reading also.
There doesn’t seem to be anything really new here in terms of our understanding of the Holocene. Mike’s Nature trick seems to be now a standard practice in paleo reconstructions. I personally don’t see how this analysis says anything convincing about climate variability on the time scale of a century.
Saying it like it is, in a September 15, 2003 speech before the Commerce Club about environmentalism as a religion, the real challenge we face today, according to Michael Crichton, “is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda… We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems.”
Ya know, he could be so elegant about climate, and then botch it so badly in the screenplay.
=============
NBC News’ cognitive dissonance glibbest since the dawn of existentialism.
Seriously? Serious revisionist history at any rate. Linkage, as always:
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/tidescurrents/effects/climatechange_currents_lesson.html
ibid above
my emphasis
and in regard to river runoff
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/39/15242.abstract
Connect the two dots. Fresh water slows down MOC, MOC slowdown causes rapid warming, land use change in past 100 years causes increased river runoff into the ocean while CO2 increase has the opposite effect. Maybe what we really need is less anthropogenic impervious land cover. Hear that, you concrete jungle progressives? Your preferred unnatural habitat is causing global warming.
Hah, Judy; you saw ‘looking at it’, didn’t you.
My comment early on, prawly off Rud was ‘shaft smoothed, blade attached’. Aren’t there any new Trix in Climate Science?
==========
Kim, I posted this to Dr. Curry. She was in Wasington when the snowstorm did not hit but still cancelled her appearance before Congress, something more important than the rest of us all together in the new citizen science world.
Not a criticism. Just a small fact correction.
How could I criticize her for having the bravery to post this, not knowing whether it came from a nutcase? Let’s just say her edits were invaluable. She justifiable reserved judgement, since said had not had the time to study the details of the paper. No active scientist does.
That is how I discovered a major anomaly in energy storage materials, leading to fundamental patents which now (I hope) allow the pleasure of contributing more to this debate, using the same methods. And have allowed the time to publish two books. You might enjoy them.
Regards
Congress cancelled on her, that and the flights in and out
“reconstructions” “suggest” “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100″…
It’s all in a magazine called (gulp) Science. That august title reminds me of the old Twilight Zone episode, where the benevolent aliens had a book called “To Serve Mankind”. Turns out it was a cookbook.
Have the Pied Piper read ‘Childhood’s End’ aloud on the commons.
================
–> “To Serve Mankind”
–e.g., stuff with ham and stew like a chicken — sprinkle with rum, light on fire and serve hot.
“To Serve Man” I think you’ll find.
I also found it worthwhile to watch Revkin’s interview with the author. Seemed like a reasonable guy. Doesn’t look particularly tribal in nature. I guess, somehow, he must have slipped past the warmist cabal orthodoxy police?
Of course, then again, he might be some kind of a plant or Manchurian candidate. You can’t be too careful with these “warmists.” (Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.)
He may have looked reasonable to you, but he had a pretty big smirk, the sort that a post-doc gets thinking that this exposure is gonna look great in the next application packet. Still smugness like that will help him fit in fine at Harvard.
Speaking of which:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/12/corn-in-a-changing-climate/
Dagnabbit Willard, a 6% less corny globe is a serious prediction.
Hey Willard, did they analyze what happens to corn yield in higher latitudes where it wasn’t grown which become warm enough to grow it?
Going from zero corn yield to some corn yield is like an infinite percentage increase, right?
Give me something harder to shoot down. This was like shooting corn-fed koi in a keg.
Speaking of shooting:
> I introduce you to Caspar Ammann, the Texas Sharpshooter. Go get ‘em, cowboy.
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/6938566409
Oh, I missed that. You see, my “skeptical” skills aren’t up to that level. I don’t have those magical abilities to interpret a “smirk.” Or to be able to find the correct attribution (smugness) and motivation (advantage of exposure) and tribal loyalties (to those folks at the Harvard branch of the cabal).
You “skeptics” really quite sumptin.’
Seems Joshua is quite able to asses someone as being reasonable, but not as being unreasonable. This personal flaw is probably why he just swallows the IPCC kool aid.
BB –
It seems that you have some knowledge about how I do or don’t assess the veracity of the IPCC’s reports. Would you mind elaborating – because I think you don’t have evidence on which to support your conclusions.
If that were true, you would be a “skeptic,” and not a skeptic. I’d hate to think that of you. Please clarify.
Joshua,
Sophistry as usual I see. We all know you are utterly incapable of understanding and interpreting AR4 or anything else vaguely technical.
So what do you base it on? Tarot cards? Gut instinct? Allegiances?
Whatever – the world is not warming for decades hence at least. You lose.
Have a good day
Springer –
So your point is that the higher latitude areas that will be more compatible to raising corn with climate change is equal in size to the area that will be negatively affected? How quickly do you theorize those higher latitude areas will be able to adapt (clear and level land, build soil, move equipment, install irrigation systems, build need infrastructure like roads, etc.) and where is your evidence that the related areas are equal in size?
‘Cause, you know, not having that information might skew your aim.
No. My point was that the article Willard linked was only about changes in existing regions where corn is cultivated. Presumably as cultivation declines marginally because of increasing temperature in lower latitudes it will increase in higher latitudes where it is currently too cold for it. In other words the corn belt will expand.
Will the expansion negate the contraction in existing fields? Beats the hell out of me but at least I’m aware it’s a factor that has be taken into consideration before reaching any tentative conclusions about net yield in a warming world. If it does indeed warm which it hasn’t done in 15 years.
I might also point out that in the USA corn yield per acre went up every year since 1940 excluding La Nina years in which it goes down. It went down a bunch since 2010 and not surprisingly so did global average temperature.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/08/16/a-brief-history-of-u-s-corn-in-one-chart/
Any further corrections I can make in this particular subset of your reliably mistaken views?
Big Dave was merely showing off the power of arguing from ignorance, Joshua.
… It went down a bunch since 2010 and not surprisingly so did global average temperature.
So U.S. corn production went down because of global temperatures?
Interesting.
Probably more to do with rainfall. ENSO+PDO redistributes rainall globally – one cause of the recent US drought and one likely to continue for some decades.
The more interesting question is what us the physical mechanism for influencing rainfall? And temperature?
DS drives nails with a sledgehammer while willard taps with his shoe.
C’mon willard! Sophistry is a poor substitute for sophiology
Arrhythmic, and the humming is flat. Here I sit.
=======
Well, Joshua has a point. The northern boundary of prehistoric maize gardens went south by nearly 400 hundred miles following the end of the MWP and during the advance of cooler climate.
Isn’t this the “dumb farmer” argument, you know, the farmers continue to plant the failing crops and don’t turn to different crops more suitable to the climate they have? And, of course, it is also I call a static analysis, it assumes that the only two variables are temperature and crop growth. The father of static analysis was Malthus, yet despite the fact that we can currently feed around 6billion of our 7 billion humans and growing, there are still people out there who will use static analysis to promote their views and claim to be able to foretell the future.
Joshua
Since 1970 yields globally averaged temperature has increased by around 0.5C, with a major part of the increase taking place at higher latitudes and during winter months.
Over the same time period, CO2 has increased by ~20%.
And the world-wide yields of major crops has increased by 2.4 times, while population increased 1.7 times.
Global starvation rates have decreased and average life expectancy has increased.
Not much “negative effect” visible there, is there?
Why should there be a “negative effect” from a bit more CO2 and warming?
Max
willard (@nevaudit) | March 11, 2013 at 6:57 pm |
Insubstantive argument is par for Willard’s course.
Joshua | March 11, 2013 at 8:28 pm |
No, it went down because of back-to-back La Ninas which causes precipitous decrease in precipitation in the US corn belt. You can’t figure ANYTHING out for yourself? Those La Ninas also happened to crater global average temperature. Whether GAT declines and La Ninas have gone hand in hand throughout the Holocene is anybody’s guess they’ve travelled together reliably since we began to monitor both.
Your lame straw man isn’t at all interesting, btw. La Nina effect on GAT and USA grain belt droughts is encyclopedic information which you would know if you were even marginally informed on these subjects.
Generalissimo Skippy | March 11, 2013 at 8:50 pm |
Even Chief Kangaroo Ellison knew the correct answer.
The more interesting question is what us the physical mechanism for influencing rainfall? And temperature?
Rainfall over the US grainbelt is lower during La Nina because the lower SST in the Pacific causes the jet stream to move northward towards Canada causing a persistent blocking high pressure region to the south of it.
GAT is reduced simply because global SST is reduced and because the ocean warms the atmosphere GAT is reduced commensurately.
I suspect you meant to ask about the physical mechanism behind La Nina. It happens because of increased trade winds which raise evaporation rate which cools the ocean surface. As far as know no one quite knows what causes the change in behavior of the trades. I figure you’d just want to write it off to chaos like you do everything else and I suppose butterfly wing flapping is as good a hypothesis as any other at this point but I tend to doubt that’s the real cause.
blueice2hotsea | March 11, 2013 at 9:51 pm |
Yeah, no finesse. I was well known in the corporate world for not mincing words when stupid ideas were presented for discussion in meetings. Stupidity doesn’t deserve any respect. Ostensibly the people holding the stupid ideas still deserve respect but that’s a political game and I’m an engineer… homey don’t play that game.
You give him too much credit. Sophistry is deliberately invalid arguments. I don’t think the lad can help it. He can’t discriminate between valid and invalid. Obfuscation as a cover for lack of critical thinking skills appears to be deliberate though. Maybe he can’t help that either. Dunno. I’m not a shrink.
> Presumably as cultivation declines marginally because of increasing temperature in lower latitudes it will increase in higher latitudes where it is currently too cold for it.
Presumably reading the article would have settled such presumption.
But how fun it is to brag about one’s bragging skillz.
The corporate world sure enjoys Big Dave’s online presence.
David Springer says: “I suspect you meant to ask about the physical mechanism behind La Nina. It happens because of increased trade winds which raise evaporation rate which cools the ocean surface.”
There’s also an increase in upwelling in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific during a La Niña. Lots of cool subsurface waters being drawn to the surface.
Regards.
manacker –
Seems to me there are a couple of problems with your argument. The first is that you are projecting into the future based on a linear increase i temperatures in line with the past. That may or may not be valid – but it would depend on whether you think that ACO2 warms the climate. If you think that ACO2 warms the climate (as I’m told “skeptics” believe), then your linear projection would be problematic.
The second is that your argument seems to assume that improvements in crop yield will continue forever, at the same rate of increase that has occurred in the past. That may be true, or then again it may not.
The third is that it seems you are discounting what might, in effect, be “opportunity cost.” Sure – crop yield might increase in the future even with warmer temperatures that require a geographical shift in production. But what is important is whether or not that increase would have been larger absent the increase in temps.
Springer –
After this:
You say this:
And this:
So I am responsible because you argued a causal link between drops in U.S. crop yield and global temps – instead discussing drought and the associated cause of drought as the causal link? Is this another example of that famous insistence on “personal responsibility” of “conservatives” I’ve heard so much about?
Let me ask you – have there ever been short term (on the period of two-year) drops in global temps that have not been associated with drought in the U.S. grain belt? Because, you know, if there have been, then your post-hoc rationalization would look just a tad like a post-hoc rationalization for a bad argument.
.
Twas just an example of Huybers talking about adaptation, really.
A minute reading can be saved by hours of chest beating.
Josh,
It appears your knowledge base with regard to farming is rather limited.
Level land? Build soil? Install irrigation systems? I’m no farm boy but even I know enough to see this is nonsense.
I think all of you arguing about global warming and agriculture are wasting your time. First, as geronimo points out, farmers are not dumb. I’m willing to bet a significant number of them could school the majority of commentors here when it came to weather and climate.
Second, if you knew anything about world food production, you would know that about 50% of crops are lost to spoilage and waste. Add to this that world food production is increasing at the same time the amount of land under cultivation is decreasing. (Do you know what percentage of arable land is under cultivation? I believe it is less than 40%.)
You have to basically be retarded to use last year’s US corn production numbers in any argument for the impacts of global warming. We can ignore that the drop in production was a pittance when compared to historical production records. You only need to understand that it was also a pittance when compared to the 40% of production which was routed into ethanol production.
If you are truly concerned about agriculture, you would argue for your tax dollars going to soil conservation measures far ahead of any efforts to “stop” global warming.
> I think all of you arguing about global warming and agriculture are wasting your time.
More so that the sole connection was the word “Harvard”, where Peter Huybers teaches.
Speaking of whom:
http://climateaudit.org/2005/09/16/369/
Our emphasis.
Put your name on our response, pretty please with some sugar on it.
Oh, and timg56, please read that article before throwing an hissy fit on it [1], as auditors would say.
[1] http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/13730351446
tim56g,
Sorry about that. Thought the expression taken from the auditing sciences was respectful enough.
Please go read Huybers’ article. It’s free and it’s supposed to bring good news.
Hi Tim –
Josh,
Different beasts – urban farming and standard farming.
Leveling land – in most instances we are already talking about land which is fairly level. Farmers generally follow the topography, not try to change it. Draining land for agriculture is (or was) a common practice, but I believe the trend is away from this.
Building soil – in your case you are starting from zero. If you are referring to new areas opening up due to warmer temps, the soil is already there. The issue is one of maintaining soils rather than having to build them up.
Installing irrigation – I’d have to look it up, but a significant percentage of farming is “dry” farming. And in irrigated farming it isn’t a case of digging in irrigation piping. It’s above ground – think lawn sprinkler verses in ground irrigation system.
And I never said I thought the US was susceptible to a war of insurgency. I was responding to your comments about possible scenarios for how armed conflict might arise. Entirely speculative and not necessarily something I personally think is going to happen. But then you were the one with the pop corn crack.
As for studies in successful insurgencies, I am not aware of studies looking at possible insurgencies inside the US. They may exist, but I’d wonder that if so, would they be publically available. I don’t think we have many examples of civil war in a modern nation. There is Syria. Perhaps the Yugoslav Republic. Both would indicate that an armed populous can successfully prevail against a central government.
tim –
Both seem like assumptions without evidence The soil “was already there” in the case of our urban farm (we utilized land that in an arboretum)… but we needed to augment the soil to make it appropriate for the crops we were raising. Why do you assume that wouldn’t be the case for land that may not have been used for any agricultural purposes previously, let alone for growing a specific crop?
Look – I don’t disagree that conclusions about losses of productivity need to account for currently unused areas that might become appropriate with climate change. But if someone’s going to make that argument, they shouldn’t brew weak tea like Springer’s.
There’s another shocking gem in this subthread, Bob Tisdale in amongst Joshua and willard.
===============
yes, andy is a reasonable guy. And he is not trusted by either tribe. A good sign. other guy, you missed the big red flag. watch again
I’ve long defended Andy Revkin’s curiosity and intellectual integrity. I trust he’ll get it someday. Now, do I really have to go watch to see the red flag? My tummy ain’t just right today.
============
OK, urp, he’s gettin’ it. Notice his aside to himself about two decade old Anthropocenic speculation. Other guy, the flag flashed while he was wrasslin’ alligators. Nick sick so, too.
==============
What is this, twenty questions?
Save me some time and describe to me the red flag of unreasonableness that you see.
Seemed to me that he dealt non-tribally with Rohde’s criticism. Not to say that I found his response entirely convincing.
The alarmists are frightened out of their skins. They are flayed alive by their fears. They need consoling, and much pain relief.
=============
Joshua,
Perhaps the part where he says something like “when you tack on the temperature increase for the 20th century it really increases and then when you tack on the 21st century it is outside of the elevator”. So he goes from a 400 year based proxy reconstruction and tacks on the insrumental and then the ~3 C scenario to derive his hokey stick blade breaking three rules:
1. Combining proxy reconstructions with temperature records as per Mann.
2. Combining proxy reconstructions with temperature forecasts (scenarios whatever)
3. Truncating the part of the temperature record that demonstrates the forecasts are broken as per Mann.
The interview reveals a youthful naivety that Andy diplomaticly steps around.
You obviously do not have a red flag sensor.
Oh, that’s really funny. I thought he said ‘outside the alligator’. So much for that string of metaphors. By the way, I agree with you about Andy and about ‘the other’.
========
It’s also the part where he says that high frequency blips would go missing in the data, but this time we know that we’re in a long, sustained rise. He let’s the cat out of the bag when he connects that to “long-lived” CO2. So, it’s perfectly valid to paste on the recent thermometer record of a few decades to his muck analysis because this time it’s different.
There was also mention of “where this is going” when he was describing the end of his elevator ride with the president. Not only does his study tell us about the distant past, it also tells us about the present and the future. “Miracle mud,” I’d call it. I suppose he has some good policy ideas for us all, too. Maybe that was after I hit the “Stop, for God’s sake” button.
This is a man going after a top spot on the varsity team, and Michael should be really scared for his jersey.
I’ve got a slight grief reaction to the loss of ‘Outside the Alligator’.
Yep, J. DeF; I don’t think Andy was fooled one tiny bit by all the handwaving in his face.
==============
Notice Andy put the Elevator Shakun video on at the end of today’s DotEarth column. Andy’s a little bit upset.
==========================
Have some hockey cobs, eh?
As the American corn belt moves north, it will, and I know the existence of Canadian agriculture will shock some, but it will displace Canadian crops. Probably wheat in the bug yellow area.
existing arable land/boreal forest
Generally, the soil under boreal forests is mostly, well, who knows? Maybe we’ll get blog adaptation lucky!
See also http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1836.html
“The observed diminishment of ST and SV is equivalent to 4° and 7° (5° and 6°) latitudinal shift equatorward during the past 30 years in the Arctic (boreal) region”
I have done a statistical analysis of ice-out dates of Minnesota lakes and that has been creeping southward over the last 150 years as well.
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/09/lake-ice-out-dates-earlier-and-earlier.html
Latvian researchers noticed the same in the Baltic region.
http://www.springerlink.com/index/gh17r4720443q8w3.pdf
Ice-out dates are an interesting proxy for temperature as it is less prone to the systemic errors that beset thermometer measurements.
Acid,,, lime lime lime lime !!! but that’s just dirt and some passes.
Can anyone tell me why this paper refers to Mann’s 2008 hockey stick as:
Is Mann’s hockey stick really CRU’s composite temperature record? Did I miss them adopting it as their own? If not, why in the world would the authors describe it this way?
The A-Team on Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice weblog is now posting incredible satellite animations of this week’s accelerating 2013 arctic ice-melt.
Folks, when Mother Nature sets about to show us humans the real face of AGW … she has no need for Istvan-style/Watts-style spinning or quibbling, eh?
Conclusion Nature is announcing loud-and-clear: The scientific worldview of James Hansen and Michael Mann is correct.
LOL, 2013s accelerating ice melt? Uhmm, it hasn’t happened, yet. Has a maximum even been declared, yet?
Your link shows what appears to be normal ice flow for the arctic winter, including massive leads opening and closing. Ice extent for this date is considerably greater than the same date last year, also 2006. Nature is indeed saying something, but I believe it is about the foolishness of AGW belief instead.
Antarctic set a record yesterday for most ice ever.
2 million sq km above the lowest extent on this day.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/antarctic-sea-ice-day-69-2013-is-4th-record-for-the-day-this-year/
Fan, better hold your jubilation. I sense a Big Mac Attack coming very soon.
Fan, please post the graphic showing the decline in ice extent since Jan 1, 2013. I can’t seem to find it on line. All I can find are charts showing that ice extent is still growing this year.
Fan
Hansen’s 1988 warming forecast was off by more than 2:1.
This is most likely because the 2xCO2 ECS which his models used to make the forecast was also off by 2:1.
Recent observation-based estimates of 2xCO2 are around half of those used by Hansen (and IPCC in AR4).
So I wouldn’t say that “The scientific worldview of James Hansen is correct”
As for Michael Mann, his hockey-stick was discredited statistically, even before the “hide the decline” trick was exposed.
Over 80 independent studies from all over the world using different paleo-climate methodologies have shown that the MWP was global and slightly warmer than today, in direct contradiction of his findings.
So I also wouldn’t say that “The scientific worldview of Michael Mann is correct”
Sorry ’bout that.
Max
You made that up.
Again
Cites for the 80 please
Far more than 80 listed here:
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
I’m not vouching for all of them but I spot checked about 20 taking samples from each region of the world listed. All the ones I checked were legit.
I think you vastly misunderestimate how many foraminifera studies around the world have been done with sediment cores going back a few thousand years. Every non-descript university in the frickin’ world has done at least one. It’s a guaranteed-to-get-published paper for any previously undocumented region.
Dave.
the claim was that
The studies you link to are for individual sites. Not a single one of them is a global reconstruction. Which is what you need to demonstrate a global MWP.
So let’s have those 80 global reconstructions.
Also, there is a very good reason your link quotes a “description” for each study rather than the abstract. Can you guess what the reason is?
verytallguy | March 12, 2013 at 3:41 pm |
my emphasis
No, what I linked is exactly what was claimed. Far more than 80 independent studies. You demand 80 global reconstructions which was never claimed.
Hundreds of independent studies (which I linked) from all over the world show warming during the MWP and the vast majority of them say it was the greatest warming in the record. That is compelling evidence that the MWP was global to any objective person.
I encourage everyone to just go check it out for themselves and reach their own conclusion.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
Dave,
Again.
The claim was of 80 independent studies have “shown that the MWP was global”
Not a single one of the studies you have linked which I’ve looked at makes any claim whatsoever as to how global or otherwise the MWP was. They merely report individual site data.
*If* the site data were as compelling as you claim, then constructing to a global record clearly showing a MWP would be trivial. A true skeptic would ask why such a reconstruction does not exist.
I have no conceptual problem with a global MWP existing. I’m somewhat surprised you advocate it as it would suggest high climate sensitivity which is rather alarmist. In order to demonstrate it to some sceptical – like me – you need to show:
– unbiased selection of sites
– global coverage
– uncertainty estimates
The certainty of reporting a global phenomenon without scepticism on this blog is deeply ironic.
> I have no conceptual problem with a global MWP existing. I’m somewhat surprised you advocate it as it would suggest high climate sensitivity which is rather alarmist.
Why would a global MWP suggest a high CS, verytall?
Please be pedagogical: kim usually eavedrops.
“Why would a global MWP suggest a high CS, verytall?”
Low forcings. High temperature response. Therefore high sensitivity. Note “suggest” not “prove”. Remember the uncertainty monster is under the bed.
Thanks, very tall one.
Scratching my own itch, I found:
> If for some reason, temperatures over the Medieval Warm Period turn out to be warmer than previously thought, this means climate sensitivity is actually greater than 3°C. The climate response to CO2 forcing will be even greater than expected. So to argue for a warmer Medieval Warm Period is to argue for greater climate sensitivity and greater future warming due to human CO2 emissions.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Do-critics-of-the-hockey-stick-realise-what-theyre-arguing-for.html
But I’m afraid this might be clear enough for the eavesdroppers.
@verytallguy
There are sites from ALL OVER THE WORLD, predominantly foraminifera, but there are other methods as well. Practically all of them show higher temperatures than today during the Medieval Warm Period. Find some that don’t show this. Find some reason to believe the studies are biased. I give you solid evidence you give me speculation that something is wrong with it. Your answer reeks of dogma. You ought to start looking around to see if you can find where you lost your objectivity.
Climate sensitivity is usually defined as temperature response to a CO2 doubling. Was CO2 high in the MWP? I believe any number of ice cores will put that fantasy to rest. Nothing unusual about CO2 in the MWP. So we don’t know what caused it do we? There is absolutely no reason to say sensitivity must be greater than we thought just because the MWP was the warmest period in the last couple thousand years. That’s idea that it must be is simply more dogma talking. You boys are ridiculous.
> Climate sensitivity is usually defined as temperature response to a CO2 doubling. Was CO2 high in the MWP? I believe any number of ice cores will put that fantasy to rest. Nothing unusual about CO2 in the MWP.
More precisely:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-advanced.htm
So much the worse for Big Dave’s daily appeal to ignorance.
Dave
No Dave, you gave me nothing more than a hypothesis. I’d summarise that as “The individual studies collated by CO2Science prove the existence of a global MWP”
To test that hypothesis, you need to do a global reconstruction based on those studies.
Other people have done this, based on a selection of proxies, although the results are not very conclusive to my mind at least as the datasets are sparse and unreliable.
They don’t show a global MWP. See Mann (2009) for example.
In summary:
– Global reconstructions so far do NOT show a global MWP.
– You hypothesise that individual site data does show this.
– You have no evidence for your hypothesis.
Happily for you, this does support your idea than climate sensitivity is low*
*Willard correctly defines sensitivity. I apologise for assuming you knew that already
Very Tall Guy
All temperature is local or regional (as well as seasonal, diurnal, etc.)
80+ independent studies from all over the world, using different paleo-climate methodologies, ALL concluded that the MWP in all these locations all over the world was slightly warmer than today.
“All over the world” = “global”
Got it?
Max
PS In addition, there were two studies that compiled data from several locations:
Loehle (2007) – MWP slightly warmer than present
Moberg et al. (2005) – MWP same as present
Meh, you don’t know the cause of the millenial scale changes, you can’t yap like this about sensitivity. We’ve been through this before.
===================
Max,
repeating deceptions does not make them true.
You have not provided a cite for your 80+studies. Please do.
Reconstructions using global proxies do NOT show a global MWP. See Mann 2009.
*If* your 80+ studies are real and show what you claim, then reconstructing a global temperature history which showed a MWP would be trivial.
It’s not been done. If it is, I’ll gladly accept the result.
Repeating deceptions does not make them true.
Repeating deceptions does not make them true.
Got it yet?
Short vtg: We’ve got to disappear the disappearance of the disappearance of the MWP.
===========
Mann’s hockey stick is deceptive. Marcott’s hockey stick is deceptive. Is that enough repetition for you, vtg?
=====================
Kim,
we don’t need to know the exact forcings to say that the larger and more widespread any MWP was, the greater climate sensitivity is.
If feedback was strongly negative then global temperature would be very strongly constrained and a global MWP would be impossible.
A large and global MWP is an alarmist position to take
VTG, logic is not your stong side, is it?
VTG
The “cite” for the 80+ studies is quoted in the lead post (they actually quote around 100), but here are the ones, which I have read:
Craig Loehle (2007)
http://d1467362.i110.quadrahosting.com.au/pdf/2000%20yr%20non-treering%20temps.pdf
In this study, eighteen 2000-year-long series were obtained that were not based on tree ring data. The mean series shows the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) quite clearly, with the MWP being slightly warmer than 20th century values at these eighteen sites.
Data: http://www.ncasi.org/programs/areas/climate/LoehleE&E2007.csv
Greenland
D. Dahl-Jensen et al
Past Temperatures Directly from the Greenland Ice Sheet
Science 9 October 1998: Vol. 282 no. 5387 pp. 268-271
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/282/5387/268.abstract
MWP 0.8C warmer than latest average
The Last Glacial Maximum, the Climatic Optimum, the Medieval Warmth, the Little Ice Age, and a warm period at 1930 A.D. are resolved from the GRIP reconstruction with the amplitudes –23 kelvin, +2.5 kelvin, +1 kelvin, –1 kelvin, and +0.5 kelvin, respectively.
The HadCRUT Greenland temperature record shows an average annual temperature:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/greenland/swgreenlandave.dat
1926-1935 = -0.29C
1996-2005 = -0.61C (most recent data reported)
So 1930 was around 0.3C warmer than the latest average
MWP period high was around 0.5C + 0.3C = 0.8C higher than current highs.
Greenland Summit
Johnsen, S.J et al. 2001.
Oxygen isotope and palaeotemperature records from six Greenland ice-core stations
temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period (~AD 800-1100) were about 1°C warmer than those of the Current Warm Period.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_gripsummit.php
China
De’Er Zhang 1994
Henan Province
0.9-1.0°C warmer than present
http://www.springerlink.com/content/gh98230822m7g01l/
Eastern China
Ge, Q., Zheng, J., Fang, X., Man, Z., Zhang, X., Zhang, P. and Wang, W.-C. 2003
0.4°C higher than today’s peak warmth
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_easternchina.php
Pearl River Delta, S. China
Honghan, Z. and Baolin, H. 1995
1-2°C higher than that at present time
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_pearlriver.php
Japan
Adhikari, D.P. and Kumon, F. 2001
warmer than any other period during the last 1300 years
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V9/N13/C3.php
Yakushima Island, S. Japan
Kitagawa, H. and Matsumoto, E. 1995
about 1°C above that of the Current Warm Period
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_yakushima.php
Sargasso Sea
Keigwin, L. 1996
~1°C warmer than today
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/274/5292/1503
Tropical Ocean (Indian Ocean, South China Sea, Caribbean)
Alicia Newton, Robert Thunell, and Lowell Stott 2006
0.4°C warmer than today
http://earth.usc.edu/~stott/stott%20papers/Newton%20et%20al.,%202006.pdf
New Zealand
Cook, E. R., J. G. Palmer, and R. D. D’Arrigo 2002
(MWP confirmed but no temperature difference cited)
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2001GL014580.shtml
http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/CookPalmer.pdf
New Zealand
Wilson, A.T., Hendy, C.H. and Reynolds, C.P 1979
0.75°C warmer than the Current Warm Period
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_nzcave.php
Barrow Strait, Canada
Vare, L.L., Masse, G., Gregory, T.R., Smart, C.W. and Belt, S.T
(MWP confirmed but no temperature difference cited)
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l3_barrowstrait.php
Northern Gulf of Mexico (Pigmy Basin)
Richey, J.N., Poore, R.Z., Flower, B.P. and Quinn, T.M 2007
about 1.5°C warmer than present-day temperatures.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_pigmybasin.php
Coastal Peru
Rein B., Lückge, A., Reinhardt, L., Sirocko, F., Wolf, A. and Dullo, W.-C 2005
Medieval Warm Period for this region was about 1.2°C above that of the Current Warm Period
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_perushelf.php
Venezuela coast
Goni, M.A., Woodworth, M.P., Aceves, H.L., Thunell, R.C., Tappa, E., Black, D., Muller-Karger, F., Astor, Y. and Varela, R. 2004
approximately 0.35°C warmer than peak Current Warm Period temperatures, and fully 0.95°C warmer than the mean temperature of the last few years of the 20th century
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_cariacobasin.php
Lake Erie, Ohio, USA
Patterson, W.P 1998
both summer maximum and mean annual temperatures in the Great Lakes region were found to be higher than those of the 20th century; mean annual temperatures were 0.2°C higher
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_lakeerie.php
Chesapeake Bay, USA
Cronin, T.M., Dwyer, G.S., Kamiya, T., Schwede, S. and Willard, D.A. 2003
mean 20th-century temperatures were 0.15°C cooler than mean temperatures during the first stage of the Medieval Warm Period
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_chesapeake.php
Sweden (Central Scandinavian Mountains)
Linderholm, H.W. and Gunnarson, B.E. 2005
Between AD 900 and 1000, summer temperature anomalies were as much as 1.5°C warmer than the 1961-1990 base period
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_jamtland.php
Finnish Lapland
Weckstrom, J., Korhola, A., Erasto, P. and Holmstrom, L. 2006
0.15°C warmer than the peak warmth of the Current Warm Period
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_tsuolbmajavri.php
Ural Mountains, Russia
Mazepa, V.S. 2005
Medieval Warm Period lasted from approximately AD 700 to 1300 and that significant portions of it were as much as 0.56°C warmer than the Current Warm Period.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_polarurals.php
Altai Mountains, S. Siberia, Russia 2007
Kalugin, I., Daryin, A., Smolyaninova, L., Andreev, A., Diekmann, B. and Khlystov, O.
mean peak temperature of the latter part of the Medieval Warm Period was about 0.5°C higher than the mean peak temperature of the Current Warm Period.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_altaimountains.php
Swiss Alps
Schlüchter et al. 2004
http://alpen.sac-cas.ch/de/archiv/2004/200406/ad_2004_06_12.pdf
MWP and other earlier periods warmer than today, but no temperature estimate given
Austrian Alps
Patzelt 2009
http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/uploads/media/Patzelt_01.pdf
MWP ~900AD slightly warmer than today, earlier periods warmer
NW Spain
Martinez-Cortizas, A., Pontevedra-Pombal, X., Garcia-Rodeja, E., Novoa-Muñoz, J.C. and Shotyk, W. 1999
mean annual temperature during this time was as much as 3.4°C warmer than that of the 1968-98 period.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_nwspain.php
Antarctica (Amery Ice Shelf, East Antarctica)
Hemer, M.A. and Harris, P.T. 2003. Sediment core from beneath the Amery Ice Shelf, East Antarctica, suggests mid-Holocene ice-shelf retreat. Geology 31: 127-130.
The MWP at ca. 750 14C yr BP was likely warmer than at any time during the CWP.
http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/31/2/127.abstract
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l2_ameryshelf.php
Bahamas
Lund and Curry 2006
http://www.c3headlines.com/2009/12/paleoclimate-scientists-find-proof-of-medieval-warming-in-waters-off-the-bahamas-climategate-scienti.html
MWP (1200 years BP) roughly 0.2C warmer than today
Northern Hemisphere (MWP = Present), Moberg
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_mobergnh.php
Link to database listing several studies world-wide
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
Silvaplana, Switzerland
Larocque-Tobler, I. et al.
http://cmslive1.unibe.ch/lenya/giub/live/research/see/People/CK-Home/CK-Publications/Larocque-Tobler_et_al_2010.pdf
inferred mean July air temperatures were 1°C warmer than the climate reference period (1961-1990).
Lake 4, Southampton Island, Nunavut, Canada
Rolland, N., Larocque, I., Francus, P., Pienitz, R. and Laperriere, L. 2009. Evidence for a warmer period during the 12th and 13th centuries AD from chironomid assemblages in Southampton Island, Nunavut, Canada. Quaternary Research72: 27-37.
http://gizmo.geotop.uqam.ca/francusP/Rolland_et_al_QR_2009.pdf
Higher temperatures were recorded from cal yr AD 1160 to AD 1360, which may
correspond to the Medieval Warm Period. Between cal yr AD 1360 and AD 1700, lower temperatures were probably related to a Little Ice Age event; the most recent August temperature (which occurs at the end of the record at about AD 2008) is approximately 0.9°C less than the maximum August temperature of the Medieval Warm Period.
Eastern Sierra Nevada Range, California, USA
Millar, C.I., King, J.C., Westfall, R.D., Alden, H.A. and Delany, D.L. 2006. Late Holocene forest dynamics, volcanism, and climate change at Whitewing Mountain and San Joaquin Ridge, Mono County, Sierra Nevada, CA, USA. Quaternary Research 66: 273-287.
http://www.fs.fed.us/psw/publications/millar/psw_2006_millar027.pdf
we modeled paleoclimate during the time of sympatry [AD 1350] to be significantly warmer (+3.2°C annual minimum temperature) and slightly drier (−24 mm annual precipitation) than present
Spannagel Cave, Central Alps, Austria
Mangini, A., Verdes, P., Spotl, C., Scholz, D., Vollweiler, N. and Kromer, B. 2007. Persistent influence of the North Atlantic hydrography on central European winter temperature during the last 9000 years. Geophysical Research Letters34: 10.1029/2006GL028600.
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/20070809/20070809_08.html
the peak temperature of the Medieval Warm Period (AD 800-1300) was approximately 1.5°C higher than the peak temperature of the Current Warm Period.
Tagus River Estuary, off Lisbon, Portugal
Abrantes, F., Lebreiro, S., Rodrigues, T., Gil, I., Bartels-Jónsdóttir, H., Oliveira, P., Kissel, C. and Grimalt, J.O. 2005. Shallow-marine sediment cores record climate variability and earthquake activity off Lisbon (Portugal) for the last 2000 years. Quaternary Science Reviews 24: 2477-2494.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_tagusriver.php
The MWP was identified as occurring between AD 550 and 1300, during which time interval mean sea surface temperatures were between 1.5 and 2°C higher than the mean value of the past century, while peak MWP warmth was about 0.9°C greater than late 20th-century peak warmth
Whew!
Max
Unconvincing. We know little of the forcings for the millenial scale changes, and less of the feedbacks.
=======================
Max,
Thank you for the cites. We’ll have a look at their provenance a little later
None of these are global reconstructions.
You have, of course, failed to cite other studies which show the opposite of your claim.
Which is a deception.
This leaves us with a couple of possibilities:
1. No-one has done a global reconstruction.
2. A global reconstruction does not confirm your view that these are representative
Alas, a global reconstruction has been done (Mann, 2009), and contradicts your view.
As your studies cited are so conclusive, it’s astonishing no-one has bothered to report a global reconstruction, is it not?
Repeating deceptions does not make them true.
Got it yet?
VTG – apparently you have not “got it” yet either. None of the proxies – NONE – are global reconstructions. Period. They are regional indices that have been extrapolated out to encompass the globe. Nothing more. The MWP citations can more easily and accurately be compiled into a global reconstruction (and have been on 2 separate occasions – you sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling lalalalala will not make them go away) because they contain both more divergent data points, and of greater quality.
Thimk.
VTG > Alas, a global reconstruction has been done (Mann, 2009), and contradicts your view.
Which as everyone knows was a blatant fraud, based as it was on fiddling the data with diy stats techniques. A deliberate deception.
Why do you keep repeating this deception VTG? Do you imagine this will make it be true?
Let’s move on to provenance.
Your first cite is to a paper in E&E. I’ll say no more.
21 of the rest are in an archive put together in CO2science, run by the Idsos and financed by the Heartland Institute. We could go through those and see to what extent CO2science’s “description” of the papers matches the actual content, but I don’t think that would be pretty, would it?
This is nothing more than an attempt to deceive. You’ve quite deliberately put together an argument based on information you’ve chosen because it supports your case, and quite deliberately excluded other information which you know is significant and does not support your case.
I don’t care at all whether the MWP was global or not. Why you’re choosing to be deceptive about it I don’t know. But you are.
John Nielson-Gammon has a very relevant post on this on Scientific Meta-Literacy, where he notes “We scientists rely upon a hierarchy of reliability”. You’d do well to learn from him
So.
Again.
Repeating deceptions does not make them true.
Repeating deceptions does not make them true.
Got it yet?
Phil
“The MWP citations can more easily and accurately be compiled into a global reconstruction (and have been on 2 separate occasions – you sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling lalalalala will not make them go away”
Genuinely – I’m all ears, and more than happy to be persuaded of the global nature of the MWP. Please provide a link to these studies (not to the Heartland Institute mind…)
Tomcat – you’re doing exactly what Phil accuses me of. Do try to think.
But what more do you imagine there is to think about Very Tall Story Guy?
You are knowingly repeating Mann’s knowing deception. The End.
David Springer | March 14, 2013 at 9:01 am | Reply
@willard & verytallguy
willard (@nevaudit) | March 13, 2013 at 1:24 pm |
“http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-advanced.htm”
Blog science. Spare me.
VeryTallGuy | March 13, 2013 at 2:36 pm |
“Happily for you, this does support your idea than climate sensitivity is low* *Willard correctly defines sensitivity. I apologise for assuming you knew that already”
Blog science. Spare me.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6.html
The definition I gave is almost verbatim that of the IPCC.
People like you two are tedious and impossible to have a reasonable discussion with.
I can spoon feed this stuff to you two if you’d just stop making faces and spitting it out.
Due diligence has been paid to Big Dave’s chest beating below:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/11/lets-play-hockey-again/#comment-302563
Title of Johnsen & al 2001:
Oxygen isotope and palaeotemperature records from six Greenland ice-core stations: Camp Century, Dye-3, GRIP, GISP2, Renland and NorthGRIP
The abstract of Johnsen & al 2001, with our emphasis:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.622/full
Why not backtrack to the Boreal?
Lots of theories.
Let’s brace yourself – we’ve got mail.
A fan of *MORE* discourse: The A-Team on Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice weblog is now posting incredible satellite animations of this week’s accelerating 2013 arctic ice-melt.
Is there a typo? other sources (e.g. http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png) show 2013 Arctic ice extent still increasing.
A fan of *MORE* discourse | March 11, 2013 at 12:10 pm:
“Conclusion Nature is announcing loud-and-clear: The scientific worldview of James Hansen and Michael Mann is correct.”
Both are my unfavorite pseudo-scientists. Mann got away with publishing the hockey stick fantasy that is well described in Montford’s book. Hansen is spreading fairy stories about a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus and telling us to stop burning fossil fuels or else it will happen to us too. He should know better because prior to joining GISS he was an astronomer on the Pioneer Venus project. Unlike the earth, Venus has no plate tectonics but he is ignorant of this and all that that entails. Radioactive heat on earth is continuously vented by plate boundary volcanism. Absent plate tectonics, it builds up under the crust on Venus and leads to in-plate volcanism. This eventually so weakens the crust that it breaks up into large slabs that sink into the interior and a new crust is formed. Judging by impact crater counts such a repaving cycle may take from 300 to 600 million years to complete. If it is the same age as our planet there may have been as many as ten such cycles in its history. Its atmosphere is entirely a product of these giant eructations and has nothing whatsoever to do with any runaway greenhouse effect.
Arno,
fan’s affinity for those two gentlemen is probably based on his own pseudo-science reasoning. He likes to call people names – indirectly of course – and based on his last response to me, apparently believes he stands on the moral high ground.
In other words, it is pretty much an exercise in futility trying to engage him in a reasonable, adult conversation. But then that probably should have been obvious by his addiction to emoticons.
I’ve always believed the most important thing you can do when making or examining a combination of series is to look at the individual series. Before resorting to any statistical methods, just look and see what you can see.
To help people do this, I’ve plotted the 73 series used in this paper. I kept the x-axis constant so they could be visually lined up, but the y-axis varies by series.
I personally have trouble seeing much match between the data and the results, but I highly recommend people look for themselves.
One thing that immediately jumped out at me is there is very little data from the last 500 years. I did a count, and there are a total of 374 data points for the period starting at 1500 AD.
Clearly, temporal resolution is a big issue.
What is the latest point BP that the data cease?
A couple series end at -50 BP (corresponding to 2000 AD).
Brandon Shollenberger: A couple series end at -50 BP (corresponding to 2000 AD).
Please forgive me if I am being dense again, but don’t they put the “present” at 1950 AD, so – 50 BP is 1900 AD?
Ah, now I get it: that’s “minus 50” BP.
Brandon Shollenberger, many thanks. I think we should also thank the authors of the paper for putting the entire data file that they used for analysis on line. The sparsity of the most recent data escaped me on first readings of the paper (a paper that I like, overall), and I think it is a severe problem undercutting their hockey stick “blade”.
Glad to. The more I look at this paper, the more confusing I find its results. The data file includes a number of different “stacks,” and they are weird. The prime example is the Northern Hemisphere stack. It shows a massive increase in temperature between 1920 and 1940, but the underlying data doesn’t. There is only one NH series that increases in that period, and it increases by a smaller amount than the NH stack.
Results like that suggest a serious problem with their methodology.
“JC comment: This post was emailed to me, unsolicited”
This post is garbage, like almost everything that appears here now.
If this post is garbage, you should find it easy to point out problems in it. Why don’t you?
I trust you aren’t exempting your comment from your assessment of what appears here now?
This comment could also be interpreted to be garbage as well Mark. Any assertion without any analysis to back it up carries no weight at all.
Surely, Rud hit the nail on the head with his comment “How has the MWP almost disappeared again, just in time to perhaps go missing in IPCC AR5?” The warmists are getting desperate. The AR5 is in serious trouble on many, many fronts. Yes, the warmists need another peer reviewed paper they can refer to to try and support the unsupportable.
Yes, Rud hit the nail squarely on the head. It’s a vast conspiracy, growing larger by the day.
Mark
You may think it is a “vast conspiracy”.
I really don’t think so.
Simply a collusion of interests of various different groups, all hoping to benefit in some way from the CAGW hysteria.
Max
PS Maybe a “half-vast” conspiracy?
Max
A vast. Ye scurvy dogs.
manacker | March 11, 2013 at 2:45 pm |
“Simply a collusion of interests of various different groups, all hoping to benefit in some way from the CAGW hysteria.”
If by that you mean a perfect storm of perfidious political and pecuniary interests perversely proliferating within the practice of planetary science then I agree. :-)
Here Mark, maybe you can understand the thought in this manner….
http://suyts.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/the-dagger-in-the-heart-maybe-a-remedial-explanation-of-marcotts-hs-blade-mikey-whats-that-about-a-dagger/
Good work Suyts and well worth the visit to your website. Mark certainly would find it interesting reading and if he finds anything remiss with your paper he would no doubt offer constructive comments showing how and why he disagrees.
It’s a long, long train a windin’
Some days it’s worth the trip;
Two decades of a voyagin’,
Today, hooray, pip, pip!
============
@Mark
Yes, Rud hit the nail squarely on the head. It’s a vast conspiracy, growing larger by the day
Oh dear oh dear, the wacked-out old “conspiracy” strawman pressed into service yet again.
Government
(1) stands to vastly expand on the back of CAGW alarmism
(2) is the funder of that CAGW alarmism; all those climatologists on government paychecks (outspending everyone else put together, by a factor of many thousands).
See the vested interest connection? Note too that an organisation working in its own interest is not evidence of a “conspiracy”; it’s just business as usual – ie they’re doing exactly what you’d expect.
Now, if government scientists were saying there *isn’t* CAGW – well, *that* would be surprising, and possibly evidence of some secret group going against the government grain, a “conspiracy” maybe ( essentially, conspiring to be honest and objective, ie the polar opposite of what government climatologists today stand for (as per climategate etc etc)).
Meanwhile, schizophrenic, power-mad bureaucrats look to anorexic runway divas as models of heath and demonize everything from Big Macs to Cheetos as if on a mission to save humanity from an early death and push their own silly superstitions onto the children that are held captive in classrooms of fear. By any objective standard, humanity has never had it so good. Humans died of the same maladies three thousand years ago as today — even narrowed, blocked and calcified arteries:
…vascular calcification was present in 92% of the men and 72% of the women, and present in 2 or more vascular beds in 80% of the men and 62% of the women. By the time men reached 60 years of age and the women reached 70 years of age, all had calcification in 1 or more vascular beds… Arterial calcification was also seen in the aortas and carotid arteries of these mummies. Many studies have shown an association between aortic and coronary atherosclerosis and with aortic aneurysm, renal failure, and stroke, all of which share common risk factors… The estimated mean age at the time of death of the mummies we studied was 38.1 ± 12.0 years, a relatively old age 3 millennia ago. Several mummies had such diffuse generalized atherosclerosis that clinical symptoms would seem to have been likely… Our findings of frequent arterial calcification suggest that atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease was present and commonplace in ancient Egypt, raising intriguing questions regarding the nature and extent of human predisposition to the development of atherosclerosis.
(Adel H. Allam, AH, etc. Atherosclerosis in ancient Egyptian mummies. J Am Coll Cardiol Img. 2011;4(4):315-327)
”
And so the next CAGW hockey stick game begins. Possibly with a pass of the puck to Canadian Steve McIntyre.
”
McIntyre tries for a break-away, but runs into the boards.
Seitz gets the puck and passes to Ball.
Ball to Michaels.
Michaels to Lindzen.
Lindzen to Watts.
Watts takes possession, and tries for a goal – but is wide, and the puck sails into the seats.
Which are mostly empty.
> Lindzen to Watts.
Speaking of which:
http://deepclimate.org/2010/03/02/round-and-round-we-go-with-lindzen-motl-and-jones/
Why did Dick made his incident remark, again?
Talk to lewandowski about your thought patterns.
Speech patterns suffice:
> Data, because for social scientists, public statements and publically-expressed ideas constitute data for further research. Cognitive scientists sometimes apply something called “narrative analysis” to understand how people, groups, or societies are organized and how they think.
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyRecFury.html
An ad hominem to cover for a Bandwagon appeal.
A lukewarm gambit.
Lewandowsky doesn’t have thought patterns; he has achieved that rarefied mental condition that all senior AGW spruikers have and which is best summed up by one of Australia’s leading ALP political representitives, Graham Richardson as “Whatever it Takes”.
I like Dr Loo’s paper. It would have been better if he got the quotes right and if he didnt make mistakes about the origination of some of the meme’s. It was a good plan, poor execution. The taxonomy he uses will be a great tool.
Was the execution accidental or inevitable?
========
The “get your fact straight” is an important technique in the auditing sciences.
For instance, here’s what Lew wrote, with Jeff Id’s emphasis:
> Conspiracist ideation is arguably particularly prominent on climate blogs, such as when expressing the belief that temperature records show warming only because of systematic adjustments (e.g., Condon, 2009) […]
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/lewandowsky-strike-two/
I believe this does not represent Id’s position, which is:
> Conspiracist ideation is arguably particularly prominent on climate blogs, such as when expressing the belief that temperature records show warming mostly because of systematic adjustments (e.g., Condon, 2009).
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/lewandowsky-strike-two/#comment-92085
This alone made Jeff Id dismiss the whole analysis and write yet another colourful op-ed.
Hey, I’m listening for moshe’s viola.
Is the merit in the method neutralized by the necessity for unachievable objectivity in the executioner? Or, in other ways, is this failing Lewandowsky’s(and al’s. Never forget al.) or is the method unwieldy, if not impossible?
=============
Willard.
I’m not discussing Jeff Id’s issue. There Dr. Loo wasnt getting a quote wrong. There he was pressing an interpretation.
Let’s pose a hypothetical
“what happens if claims in the paper are directly refuted by comments made on his blog, comments that were recorded by screen shot and subsequently deleted by moderators. That would be an interesting thing to contemplate.”
Hypothetically, what would a man such as yourself, one with integrity say about such a thing?” in the abstract of course.
kim.
I think people would do well to read Dr. Loo’s paper and suspend their judgement about the people involved and the subject matter. I like it because it presents a nice taxonomy of styles of thinking/writing/ etc
and because it attempts to follow a conversation.
here is a game my friends used to play with me at college. At the end of a marathon bull session ( say 4 hours easily ) a conversation that started with Springsteen and ended with Godel, Moshpit would go last and recite every turn/tangent in the conversation.. all the steps that lead from the beginning to the end. who said what in what order. either forwards or backwards. weird.. and of course Lawrence stern and don quixote are favorites… but nobody tops Pynchon.
> I’m not discussing Jeff Id’s issue.
I’m not either. I’m discussing the “get your fact straight” technique, which some might argue is essential to the auditing sciences.
I could use other examples. A random one, by searching for “fact straight”:
> I don’t claim to have a full understanding of the ins and outs of Public Appointments, but I’m not sure you’ve quite got things straight here.
http://climateaudit.org/2013/01/15/acton-and-natural-person-powers/#comment-395103
Of course, there are some facts that are more important than others.
Thanks, moshe; I’m reminded of those who stuff up their ears so they won’t hear the crystalline logical conversations in their heads.
============
Mosher,
I hope you are being facious when you say you like Lewandowski’s paper, unless you are referring to it’s entertainment value – as in a joke so bad it is actually funny.
tmg56
The Loo paper is entertaining in a relative way. I once went camping in the Mojave and forget to pack the Loo paper. If you’ve been in the high desert on a freezing cold morning, hiked away from camp a ways to answer Nature’s call, then discover near the end of the process that you have to come up with something ad hoc to replace the Loo paper you’ll find the situation not the least bit entertaining.
willard,
“Of course, there are some facts that are more important than others.”
I’m not so sure about that. The point is rather simple. If your approach is to look at the narrative, then getting the text right and getting the attribution right is about as important as you get.
For example if you claim : X said Y on this date, and you use that data to drive to your conclusion, and X did not write Y on this date or any other date, then if you want to argue that this fact is not important, then its your sense of importance that is as wrong as the data. Further, if you argue that X was the first to suggest Y, and x was not in fact the first to suggest it, then again, that’s important and if you want to argue that its not, then its your sense of importance that is as wrong as the data.
And if, you yourself have edited the data you analyze and not revealed this, then that fact too is important and again, argue if you like that it is not important. That just indicts your sense of importance.
Speaking of scholastic:
> The question that I’m wondering about: do we know that mid-Holocene warmth was only in summer and only in the northern hemisphere, and, if so, how do we know it?
http://climateaudit.org/2007/01/01/holocene-optimum/
Kantian scholars are asking the same question as we speak.
Time for more geological perspectives.
Non nova, sed nove.
> I’m not so sure about that. The point is rather simple. If your approach is to look at the narrative, then getting the text right and getting the attribution right is about as important as you get.
You’re not sure that some facts are more than others.
Really?
***
There are worse things than bad paraphrases. Paraphrasing instead of quoting does not sound like best practice. But as auditors say, boo boo:
> Oh boo hoo; ever the victim. Well, that act wore thin the first time you appeared on CA, and it hasn’t gotten any better with time. Go home. Find a man. Do some suffering and work out those personal issues. Ban me for this, I care not. Chances are anyway I WON’T be back. Moshpit did a fine enough job ‘dressing you down’ as it is.
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/317325553
You recall that exchange, perhaps?
So yeah. OTOH, I’ve read enough exchanges with honest brokers to see when “I’ve been misquoted” is used as a trick.
“There are worse things than bad paraphrases. Paraphrasing instead of quoting does not sound like best practice. But as auditors say, boo boo:”
Not talking about a bad paraphrase. Why do you persist in thinking that I’m talking about interpretation or paraphrase. I’m talking about a bad quote.
As for previous episodes of bad quoting, I’m not interested in off topic mommy mommyism.
Given your responses I’m becoming less sure that some facts are more important than others. Either than or you concept of importance is upside down.
> I’m talking about a bad quote.
Quote it.
> I’m not interested in off topic mommy mommyism.
The topic, to remind Moshpit of it, was Lindzen’s email to Watts.
Yes, Willard that is the topic and as you have illustrated elsewhere commenting on the thought pattern is on topic.
No, Moshpit. My thought patterns were not on topic. Please remove your black marketing hat, once in a while.
Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be parsing emails, right now?
Agreed.
• Before this paper scientists were confident that the “Hockey Stick” was real.
• Before this paper scientists are more confident that the “Hockey Stick” is real.
And similarly
• Before this paper denialists were confident that the “Hockey Stick Cabal” was real.
• Before this paper denialists are more confident that the “Hockey Stick Cabal” is real.
In particular, contrarian pundits like Rud Istvan are likely to become more-and-more convinced that the climate-related denialist assertions of books like Istvan’s The Arts of Truth — whose sales are presently languishing at rank #588,883 on Amazon — are being unjustly ignored by a cabal of mainstream scientists!
——————
Prediction As scientific evidence becomes steadily stronger that Mann’s “Hockey Stick” is real, the “bubble” of denialist conspiracy-believers will become ever-more-concentrated and ever-more-vehement, within a smaller-and-smaller compass.
And in the end, <a href=:Nature will have the final say, eh?
Actually, our local star will have the final say, as it always has.
The Fat Lady of the local firmament, cheshire shushing her grinspots away.
========
Fanny
“Nature will have the final say”.
Indeed!
And right now she’s telling us it isn’t warming, despite unabated GHG emissions.
Right, Fanny?
Max
Wrong Manacker!
Yah gotta tune to Nature’s less-noisy channels: mass, melt, paleo, and radiation, eh Manacker?
Why focus on Nature’s noisiest climate-change channels … when the Nature’s many quiet climate-change channels are conveying a loud-and-clear message to us all … that AGW is real, serious, and accelerating?
That’s pure common sense, eh Manacker?
Your post is wrong-on-the-facts, Steady Eddie.
All citizens with a pair of binoculars can see with their own eyes that AGW is real, serious, and accelerating.
And there are tens of millions of these Nature-loving ordinary citizens.
That is why — in the long-run — the efforts of ideologues and astro-turfers to deny the reality of AGW are utterly futile, eh?
For the common-sense reason climate-change denialists and astro-turfers can no longer credibly deny what more-and-more ordinary citizens plainly see with their own eyes, eh?
To my -> “There will be massive political action on AGW regardless of what Nature has to say”,
Fan responds merely with –> “Your post is wrong-on-the-facts”,
but offers ZERO such counter-facts of support for his view, hastily diverting the discussion into his usual credulous and blinkered CAGW truebeliever catechism chants.
The truth remains that, as uncertainty about cagw rises, even among climate “scientists” employed by governments, governments are steadily enacting more and more law and taxes despite the support for it being on the wane.
The point is governments only care about the climate, to the extent they can use it to justify extra taxes and powers.
Hence : There will be massive political action on AGW regardless of what Nature has to say.
@Fan
And in the end, Nature will have the final say, eh?
I well understand your fear, but think it irrational.
The sheer size, power and self-interest of government will in the end ensure victory for politics – there will be massive political action on AGW regardless of what Nature has to say.
And that is how all on the Left, and many on the Right too, want it to go down.
How would you know about scientists, when you do not even understand the principals of science?
Reality Check: IPCC GCM mean model ocean heat content (temperature) trend is 7X higher than actual ocean heat content trend since 2003.
See: Tisdale Is Ocean Heat Content Data All It’s Stacked Up to Be?
Figure: Argo-era Ocean Heat Content v. NODC Levitus observations
+/- 30% I would believe, but off by +700%!!!
Climate alarms are based on an argument from ignorance!
http://www.americantraditions.org/Articles/New%20Evidence%20that%20Man-Made%20Carbon%20Dioxide%20(CO2)%20Does%20Not%20Cause%20Global%20Warming.htm
Nice graph from Greenland ice cores, puts what we’re arguing about in perspective..
..and a good summary of sudden climate changes: http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html
What’s forcing these?
The only thing that will settle this debate is another 20 years of a trend line matching the last 15 years of nearly no significant warming. Even then there will be some holdouts.
You are correct Dennis Adams! Provided that you mean the trend lines of:
• accelerating ice-mass loss, and
• ever-rising sea levels.
Of course, these striking observational trend-lines — which are in good accord with well-verified physical understanding and with the paleo data record — have long since convinced the scientific community!
So perhaps rational debate is nowadays … mostly settled, eh Dennis Adams?
Lol. Yes and the trend line for NY Battery Park which shows for the last 150 years the rise has been and continues to be at a rate of 11 inches per century. And the trend lines at a multitude of sites across the globe that are nearly flat and in fact are going down. I am waiting for the IPCC report so I can dwell on the horizontal line of observed temperature data diverging from the failed models. I know horizontal lines when I see one having learned about them in elementary school.
Fan,
Learn to read a graph.
Hell, learn to read the printed material on the graph. Are you so math challenged you can’t figure out total sea level rise by 2100 using the data you linked to? (Hint – it’s less than a foot.)
Thank you for that excellent suggestion, timg56!
Working out the cumulative effects of ice-melt acceleration is an outstandingly good idea too!
Thank you, timg56, for helping Climate Etc readers to recognize the willful scientific ignorance and ideology-driven cherry-picking that is pathognomonic of denialist cognition!
Fan,
I refer to your sea rise link and you respond about ice melt. Nice.
That’s so Climate Etc readers can appreciate the three cognitive elements of triple-strength climate-change denialism.
Thank you, timg56, for illustrating these elements so plainly!
Fan,
Care to be explicit in what it is I’m denying?
Since we both know you won’t, I will be explicit. I am saying that per the graph you linked to, sea level rise for the rest of this century does not appear to be anywhere close to being catastrophic. It also is nowhere close to the estimates ranging from 6 ft to 10 meters we’ve seen from some scientists. So where is the denial? Am I denying the possibility of 6 ft to 10 meters? Not explicitly. I am pointing out that the data does not support such a prediction. And until you can provide such data, it is reasonable to assume such rises in sea level are unlikely.
fan,
In addition to a propensity to post links which are not relevant or more typically, which you can’t correctly interpert, you are very good at throwing around unjustified and unsupported attacks on people. According to you I exhibit willful scientific ignorance and ideology-driven cherry-picking that is pathognomonic of denialist cognition. I have to be honest – I find this insulting. Not to mention completely untrue. First off, I don’t post links to graphs and data, so it is impossible to claim I “cherry pick” anything. (You meanwhile post this kind of stuff all the time.) Secondly, I take science literacy seriously enough to have spent the last 17 years volunteering my time to work with students performing real science. If your typical posting is evidence of your level of scientific proficiency, I can attest that the average 3rd and 4th grader I mentor can put you to shame. (I’ll be out at the Hopkins Demonstration Forest south of Oregon City this Monday with 5th graders, if you care to see science in action.)
In reading your comments here I am reminded of a couple of phrases I picked up from my dad that apply to your typical postings:
1) You couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.
2) You couldn’t find your butt with both hamds tied behind your back.
timg56, your conclusion rests upon two key assumptions:
Assumption 1 the sea-level rise-rate will not accelerate, and
Assumption 2 the future does not matter past the year 2100.
And yet, ordinary human common-sense tells us that Assumption 1 is unscientific and Assumption 2 is amoral, eh timg46?
Conclusion Key elements of denialist cognition are unscientific and amoral.
Thank you for this useful lesson, timg56!
morediscourse@tradermail.info
A fan of *MORE* discourse
> I refer to your sea rise link […]
Perhaps when tim said:
> Learn to read a graph.
Or perhaps when he said this:
> Hell, learn to read the printed material on the graph.
Or perhaps this:
> Are you so math challenged you can’t figure out total sea level rise by 2100 using the data you linked to?
Or perhaps this:
> (Hint – it’s less than a foot.)
How meaningful is “less than a foot”?
There’s an implicit argument right there.
***
Compare and contrast the implicit argument with “CO2 is just a trace gas anyway”:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/CO2-trace-gas.htm
fan,
How is an assumption that sea level rise will accelerate any different than one that assumes it’s rate will remain steady?
And if your point is that it will accelerate, why can’t you
a) clearly state that
and
b) provide evidence to support your case? Your link doesn’t do that.
As for the future mattering past 2100 – ignoring that this is another example of how you respond tangentally – the follow-on is “Matters to whom?” It certaintly will not matter to you or I. We’ll be dead. It’s unlikely to matter to our children for the same reason. If one is to worry about the future, there are a lot of things which are far more immediate to be concerned with.
Rather than trying to scare the children with your stories of diasterous increases in sea level, how about doing something for the couple of billion people alive today who do not have reliable access to inexpensive energy (and as a result, access to clean water, sanitary living conditions, reliable food supply, basic education opportunities and a host of other things we have).
willard,
as torpedomen have a reputation for having strong backs and weak minds, I hope you will understand when I say I’m confused by your comment.
Not being critical, just wanting to understand the point and if it is directed at me.
Perhaps we can accomplish a three-step trifecta, timg56!
S1 Begin by telling your 5th graders “We denialists don’t care about the world your grandchildren will live in … and you shouldn’t care either.” Don’t accept any back-chat, timg56! Insist upon libertarian-style short-term market efficiency as the criteria for caring about the future! If any rebellious child dares to argue with you, first mock them, then abuse them, then expel them (this will prepare the children to participate in forums like WUWT).
S2 Have your fifth graders read Hansen’s “Scientific Case for Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change to Protect Young People and Nature.” Hansen’s vocabulary is well-within their comprehension! Then explain to the children why Hansen’s moral case are wrong.
S3 When the children ask ask “Why do many scientists foresee that sea-level rise will accelerate?, summarize for them the physical science and paleo-climatology that are surveyed in Hansen’s “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications.” Then explain to the children why Hansen’s scientific arguments are wrong.
If you do these three things, timg56, then your 5th graders will arrive a solid understanding of (1) how climate-change science works *AND* (2) how climate-change denialism works!
It’s fortunate that 5th graders have plenty of common sense, eh timg56? It’s certain that the will learn a *LOT*!
timg56,
Perhaps I can clarify what I mean.
First, I don’t think you’re in any position to take offense for fan’s analysis of your interaction with him. In your first comment to him on this subthread, you attacked his intelligence three times. Out of four sentences.
Second, the only other sentence relies on the implicit assumption that less than one feet is not that much. If you have no idea what about a feet of sea level rise will be, you just can’t presume that: you have to argue about it by other means than attacking the intelligence of those who might argue otherwise.
Third, this implicit argument looks a lot like “yes, but CO2 is a trace gas”. Now, this does not mean that you’re wrong. It just means that something does not look good in your argument.
Fourth, while I’m not a fan of the d-word, Fan provided a list of conditions which satisfies it. Based on your reaction about Lew’s latest paper, I have the feeling you don’t like that word, nor that kind of analysis. You need to focus on the criterias themselves. Take a look at it.
1. Have you chosen a restricted measure? Some may argue that you did. 2. Have you chose a restricted time-frame? Sounds like it. 3. Have you restricted the discussion to these chosen elements. I think you did.
I’m not sure about the first item, though. I think it’s legitimate to pick one element presented by your interlocutor and criticism its legitimacy. OTOH, this criticism should not be projected on the overall discussion, or worse on your interlocutor’s mental capacities.
To recap. Keep the chin up. Keep your eye on the puck. Keep your stick on the ice.
Hope this helps,
w
Fan.
I think you need to take more care in your criteria for denialism
• cherry-pick a restricted measure: (KSD: ice extent)
• cherry pick a restricted time-frame: (KSD: the past two months)
• insist upon restricting public discourse to the cherry-picked elements: (KSD: restricts his literature search to ice-extent graphics)
#####################################################
Restricted measures: Any evaluation of a system will rely on selecting restricted measures. For example, when this very criticism is leveled at the IPCC ( they only look at a few measures for GCMs and only those measures that make them look good), the argument is made that one has to pick and choose measures. Of course in best practices we specify the measure BEFORE the experiment. Climate science does not practice best practices. The best example of this is the absolutely pitiful performance that climate models have on absolute temperature. They are all over the map and wildly improbable. But when you average them all and take an anomaly they look like they match history. getting the absolute temperature wrong, and I mean wrong, is a disaster if you predicting sea level rise and ice melting.
Another good example of restrictive measures is climategate. There deniers try to say nothing is wrong by saying no crimes were committed.
Restricted tIme frames: This is a necessity unless you want to go back to the big bang.
restriction public discourse; yes but RC moderation.
in short I dont think you’ve captured the essence of denialism in such as way that distinguishes it.
Speaking of ice:
> Fred Michel, an Arctic specialist from Carleton University, in an interview, discusses Arctic ice shelf break-up.
http://climateaudit.org/2007/01/10/interview-with-fred-michel-on-arctic-ice-shelves/
In the comment thread, the Auditor posted an op-ed by Michel in the National Post.
A short bio:
http://heartland.org/fred-michel
Yup.
willard,
Thanks for the follow-on. It helps a lot. I asked because, unlike fan, you are someone I think it is worthwhile having a conversation with. In other words, I have reason to respect your opinion, whether or not I agree with them. I can’t say the same for fan’s.
In regard to my attacking fan’s intelligence – I do not see that as an attack. One can either read a graph or not. Fan link’s to a graph to support a claim that the graph does not support is not the sign of someone who understands the subject. When challanged on that point, he a) switches the subject to ice melt and then b) tries to hide behind the “assumption” defense. Personally I see a big difference between pointing out someone’s weak argument and calling someone willfully ignorant and pathologic. If anyone is axcting willfully ignorant it is fan by refusing to acknowledge what his linked graph actually says.
On the implicit assumption point – I do not get your point. We’ve experienced ~ 8 inches of rise the last 100+ years. Using that as a baseline, onther 10 – 11 inches does not appear to be a number than presents any great concern. It should be well within our capability to deal with. It should be on fan to present arguments on what it is about 1 foot of rise is so worrisome. Of course fan seems to believe that it will be far more than that. He doesn’t provide us with any evidence on why it will be much greater. Just stands on his moral high ground and tells us it will be so. Again, it is not an attack on his intelligence to point out fan is pouring unsupportted hot air. I almost think the reason you think his intelligence is under attack is that what he’s doing is pretty idiotic. I’m not hanging that sign around his neck. If anyone is, it is fan, with you pointing it out.
On the “yes, but CO2 is a trace gas”point. You lost me. I’m not making any argument about CO2. I am saying do not use a graph to support claims the graph does not support. If you want to discuss sea level rise, discuss it on the basis of what the data shows. I happen to be of the opinion that 10 inches over the next 90 years is not particularly frightening. It likely will have greater impact on some than others, and we can discuss that. But you cannot have such a discussion with someone who refuses to agree on a reasonable basis for a discussion.
On the d-word – I couldn’t care less. Believe it or not, my parents a long time ago taught my brothers and I the lesson on name calling. Fan’s providing a list of conditions satisfing it is meaningless. He takes a list of conditions and pastes them onto someone without ever proving they are applicable. My reaction to Lewandowski’s paper is based on the ability to recognize poor quality work. I will admit to some bias. I’m not all that impressed with a Psycology degree. While I didn’t say so to him, my son found out how much weight one carries in the real world, which is why he’s back in school working on a CS masters. But even without that bias, it is almost impossible to evaluate Lewandowski’s paper (or it’s followup) as anything but a poorly designed and implemented exercise in self indulgence. 1. Have you chosen a restricted measure? Some may argue that you did. 2. Have you chose a restricted time-frame? Sounds like it. 3. Have you restricted the discussion to these chosen elements. I think you did.
On your recap. I’m more a baseball fan and the analogy at work is I’m on the mound and fan is behind home plate, dressed in a funny costume, jumping up and down to be distracting. The only qustion is – can I waste a pitch to bean the silly ass.
PS – did you bother with his ltest response? As if I’d serously follow any of his suggestions. If that is fan’s idea on how to get students interested in science, he should be kept away from them.
timg56,
Just read this comment. It’s a bit late now to reply, but can’t leave you without nothing that this:
> I’m on the mound and fan is behind home plate, dressed in a funny costume, jumping up and down to be distracting. The only qustion is – can I waste a pitch to bean the silly ass.
wins the Internet. You can make sure I’ll post it on my tumblog. Ze American sport par excellence and its unwritten rulebook made think of the nickname Baseball Jim. Hope you’ll like it.
***
I agree that you’ve wasted many pitches to bean Fan. From now on, I’ll say something like this instead of “attack”. At least when speaking to you.
My point about the trace gas and the implicit assumption can also be seen here:
> We’ve experienced ~ 8 inches of rise the last 100+ years. Using that as a baseline, onther 10 – 11 inches does not appear to be a number than presents any great concern. It should be well within our capability to deal with. It should be on fan to present arguments on what it is about 1 foot of rise is so worrisome.
Well, from Fan’s links, I stumbled upon this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN8M8Onnngk&feature=youtu.be
Please note around 2:30, where the Pentagon takes sea-level rise seriously. And that’s notwithstanding the weirding that can initiate this added water in the climate cycles, which is covered a bit earlier in the montage. These concerns should not be dismissed by engineering data hard ball games.
I do agree with you that Fan needs either to cut a bit on his sociological analyses, or tidy them up, that is to return to your analogy, to beef up a bit if he’s willing to sit on the plate. You should not expect to have a conversation with him anyway. He’s not here for that.
Bye for now,
w
Fan is right. Even if the lack of warming continues for another 10, 100, 1000 years, the Establishment and ‘progressives’ will as now still chant the CAGW mantra he does.
Judith Curry
Looks like this analysis will get the tongues wagging again, and some (including IPCC) may even see it as a resuscitation of the Mann “hockey stick” of TAR prominence, conveniently forgetting that it was discredited and about the “hidden decline”, but I think your last sentence summarizes it for me:
The 96 quantitative studies you cite from all over the world using different paleo-climate methodologies, which conclude that the MWP was a bit warmer than today, seem to me to carry a lot more weight than this one analysis.
But IPCC may see this differently.
Max
The “this” in “this analysis” is refering to the Marcott 2013 analysis, as opposed to the Istvan analysis of the Marcott paper. Correct?
While the article has so many problems that it’s hard to know where to start, it doesn’t actually used “Mike’s Nature trick” (as properly defined at Climate Audit,) Mike’s Nature trick (as UC dissected) was the splicing of temperature data with proxy data for smoothing, with the smooth chopped back to the end of the proxy data. It’s tricky, so to speak.
The Marcott study conspicuously doesn’t show temperature data, spliced or unspliced. One reason may be a rather severe divergence problem. Their SH extratropics reconstruction maxes out at 1.22 deg C in AD1900, declining to the reference period 0 in 1961-90 (not shown in the article.) This dramatic decrease in SHX temperatures in the 20th century will doubtless come as a surprise to many.
Similarly their NHX temperature increases all comes between 1920 and 1940. If Marcott is right, the ability of early 20th century Northern Hemisphere societies to cope with the 1.9 deg C increase between 1920 and 1940 bodes well in my opinion for the prospects of adapting to the lesser temperature increases projected in the next 60 days in most climate models. Of course, it is also possible that the 20th century portion of the Marcott reconstruction is completely worthless.
There you go again using actual data to confuse people’s preconceived notions. I suppose next that you will write that it is a poor practice to average the results of multiple computer simulations of unknown quality to make long term government policy.
that should be “next 60 years” in comment above. Hopefully, there will also be a 1.9 deg C increase in NH extratropics in the next 60 days as well. I’m tired of winter.
Okay, but you haven’t been here for the past 100 days or so like some of us.
Pingback: The Dagger In The Heart? Maybe….. A Remedial Explanation Of Marcott’s HS Blade ……. Mikey? What’s That About A Dagger? | suyts space
“Evaluate a 300-year MWP using methods lacking 300 year resolution and voila! The MWP turns into a blip diminished by the colder periods on each side.”
I wonder why the method reduces the apparent warming in the 300 year MWP, but has no impact on the more recent reported warming over approximately 50 years?
Is it because the drop in temperature after the MWP reduced the running average further than is possible with today’s temps??
And what would it look like if you truncated the data to the peak temperature of the MWP? In other words, ran the data as if you were doing so on the date of the MWP temperature peak. Would that show a hockey stick as well, because there were no later cooler temps to lower the average?
Were these rhetorical questions?
No.
Mine was.
And here I thought it was a pewling expression of ignorance.
Indeed, as the Auditor would say:
> Lots of theories.
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/1640585432
Oops. I shoulda checked WUWT before asking.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/11/a-simple-test-of-marcott-et-al-2013/
“This paper appears to be a text book example of creating a Hockey Stick by using a low resolution time series for the handle and a high resolution time series for the blade…”
There’s also Robert Rhode:
> In essence, their reconstruction appears to tell us about past changes in climate with a resolution of about 400 years. That is more than adequate for gathering insights about millennial scale changes during the last 10,000 years, but it will completely obscure any rapid fluctuations having durations less than a few hundred years.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/scientists-find-an-abrupt-warm-jog-after-a-very-long-cooling/
This has been acknowledged by one the authors.
On the other hand, he also said we have no reason to believe we’re witnessing just a blip.
Yes, this is why Andy’s was so amused at the end of the interview. It’s all in how long this human puffing can hold off the icy bricks.
================
Andy is/was? Well, that’s Andy.
=========
The infamous MBH Hockey Stick stole the show when it was used by the IPCC. Until good folks had a chance to look behind the curtain, translate the mumbo-jumbo and force the IPCC to disappear it.
This new study and the timing so close to Mambo-Report #5 looks like someone new is trying out for the next IPCC centerfold spot.
Watch out where they put the staples, might hide some declines or be a new Mikey Nature Trick.
Please send this kind of comment directly to Stephan Lewandowsky:
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyRecFury.html
I’d recommend sending him a list of therapists in his area. He certainly seems to have issues.
Perhaps he thinks there is a conspiracy to get him.
For anyone who is unconcerned that there has been little or no warming in the last few/several years, keep in mind that most of the heat emitted has gone to melting glaciers. Like ice cubes in a glass of water, the temperature of the water stays at ~32*F until the ice cubes are gone. We should be experiencing a temperature rise of ~0.17*F per year (if not for glacial cooling). We lose about one trillion tons a year of glaciers. When the glaciers are gone, then what?
@philohaddad
Heat of fusion in ice melt is something equivalent to the proverbial drop in the bucket with regard to global energy budget. Run the numbers. No wait, let me run them for you.
HoF in H20 = ~300,000 btu/ton (3*10^5) times 10^12 ton melt per year is 3*10^17 btu/year going into heat of fusion
entire planet gets 6 * 10^8 terrawatt hours per year absorbed solar energy
or 6 * 10^19 watt/hours
1 watt hour = 3 btu so solar energy absorbed by surface is 1.8 * 10^20 btu.
So heat of fusion in 1 trillion tons of net ice melt per year represents about 0.1% of the earth’s energy budget.
This isn’t significant in either the first or second approximations.
Morever, that’s converting ice at 32F to water at 32F which doesn’t change global average temperature one iota. What it does is sort of like what the stock market does when there’s a large volume of trading at the same price point – it establishes a point of resistance to price movement or in this case to temperature movement.
Plus there are 3 * 10^7 cubic kilometers of ice on the planet each massing 10^9 tons so there are 3 * 10^16 tons of ice to melt or 10000 trilllion tons. At one trillion tons per year it would take 10,000 years before it’s all gone.
I might say for a back of the napkin calculation done in a few minutes including typing it up it aligns nicely with more the most rigorous estimates such as
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/29/world/europe/climate-ice-sheets
Thank you, thank you. Come back again soon. I’ll be playing here all week.
Power play, he shoots, he SCORES!
Nice beatch slapping of the gnat.
@philohaddad | March 11, 2013 at 4:27 pm | Reply
For anyone who is unconcerned that there has been little or no warming in the last few/several years, keep in mind that most of the heat emitted has gone to melting glaciers
How do you know this?
How is it possible, given that the air with which they are in contact, which would need to warm to start melting them, has now not been warming for nigh on 20 years ?
I let the claim of one trillion tons of glacial ice loss each year slide for the sake of argument because even at that rate it’s still trivial in human time frames. The Holocene might last another few thousand years but odds are against that it’s already 1,500 years older than the average interglacial period.
I don’t believe for a New York minute that a trillion tons/year is being lost. This is based on really flaky gravitational anomalies recorded by a satellite. The signal is so buried in noise mathematical choices in how to dig it out determine its magnitude and even polarity. Complicating that even further is earth’s crust still readjusting from glacial/interglacial transition 11.5kya making it impossible to separate crust rise/fall from ice rise/fall through minute changes in surface gravity. Even further complication is shifting magma in the mantle which also causes gravitational anomalies.
Your point about air temperature must rise to melt glaciers isn’t correct for glaciers that flow into the ocean. They get squeezed like a tube of toothpaste into the ocean and the water melts the ice not the air. What factors might control the flow rate is a mystery. Lubrication by melt-water at the bottom is thought to help it along. The air above a glacier that’s a mile thick doesn’t seem a very likely candidate for influencing the melt rate at the bottom of it especially when the air temperature change is very small and hasn’t persisted for very long.
I did another back of envelope calculation some time back correlating 1998 El Nino with an approximate 10% step-change reduction in Arctic sea ice. As it turns out if you estimate the btu’s in the El Nino by change temperature vs. volume of water, then use the northerly transport time from tropical Pacific to Arctic via oceanic conveyor belt, and then when the pulse of warm water arrives give it a few years to translate into heat of fusion for an ice mass about 10% of the cap the numbers match the observations. The excess energy in the 1998 El Nino appears to have largely gone into heat of fusion in Arctic sea ice reducing sea ice cover substantially but not changing the temperature of the water because the heat of fusion is absorbed without a change in temperature.
The loss of Arctic ice predictably led to a cessation of global warming according to my automotive cooling system analogy. You see Arctic sea ice acts like the thermostat in an automotive cooling system. When the engine temperature rises (tropical ocean) it cause the thermostat to open wider (ice cover) allowing more water to reach the radiator (open water) which is then cooled by air flow (radiated to frigid outer space). Sea ice acts as an insulator for the Arctic ocean. It blocks both radiative and evarporative cooling of the water underneath. Take some sea ice away the water cools faster. So the 1998 El Nino, after about 18 months of transport time on the conveyor belt flowed up underneath the Arctic ice cap causing acclerated melting which over the next several years reduced its extent about 10% in the summer which in turn allowed more tropical heat to escape the water into outer space and brought a halt to global warming.
I could be wrong of course but in my experience as an engineer when hypothesis and observation line up so well with simple mechanical and thermodynamic explanations behind it then you’ve probably got your system correctly characterized.
I expect global non-warming to continue until Arctic sea ice extent has recovered, a process which empirically appears to take a few decades and can be readily seen in the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMDO) which has a cycle time of about 60 years.
Steve M, both figure 1a and 1b ( in the post) must have inserted thermometer data from Mann 2008 in some fashion. As Hanks at Suyts posted (see Dr. Curry’s link above), there is simple no support in the proxy data set for the post 1950 temperature increases shown. Moreover, there is none for 1900 on, because of the temporal resolution. The abstract says temperatures are not yet back to Holocene max found in the paper. Both figures show otherwise. So temp data was added, and points to the probable proxy calibration problem noted.
My main points were about the inevitable disappearance of the MWP given the methods, and that the claims for recent fastest rise cannot come from within the paper itself, but only from extrinsic beliefs based on extrinsic thermometer observations. The paper’s methods expressly prevent the making of any statements about century long changes at all–up or down, fast or slow.
So the press headlines are propaganda having nothing to do with the papers findings, whether they be good or bad science and statistical methods. The NPR direct quote proves the point in an unfortunately vivid and irrefutably damning way.
Highest regards
> Steve M, both figure 1a and 1b ( in the post) must have inserted thermometer data from Mann 2008 in some fashion.
Very interesting. Please continue.
Well, blow me beamward, the Ottoway Carnival is comin’ to town.
=============
Willard:
If you do not see that you need _______!
Why the ellipsis, miked1947?
We’re among adults.
***
Fascinating how much words one can see just by reading:
> But I’m less concerned now that I have read the paper over more carefully, because I think that Figure 1a and 1b give a pretty good sense of what features of higher resolution reconstructions (specifically, our ’08 global reconstruction which is shown) are potentially captured.
http://planet3.org/2013/03/07/a-new-longer-hockey-stick/
“In some fashion” sounds quite objective and factual.
Mann ’08 Aboard!
========
“Steve M, both figure 1a and 1b ( in the post) must have inserted thermometer data from Mann 2008 in some fashion.”
Yes, they did. They said:
“To compare our Standard5×5 reconstruction with modern climatology, we aligned the stack’s mean for the interval 510 to 1450 yr B.P. (where yr B.P. is years before 1950 CE) with the same interval’s mean of the global Climate Research Unit error-in-variables (CRU-EIV) composite temperature record (2), which is, in turn, referenced to the 1961–1990 CE instrumental mean (Fig. 1A).”
It’s not clearly said, but I think they are actually plotting the CRU-EIV composite. This is from Mann’s 2008 paper (the EIV option); CRU is the instrumental series, presumably HADCRUT3. Centred 100-year moving average is used, so the blade appears at about 1950.
I see two parts of the hockey stick blade. A shallow part that starts around 1900, and then a steeper part that the blade evolves into starting around 1950.
http://imageshack.us/a/img811/4829/bestco2model.gif
This is all from assuming the logarithmic sensitivity to CO2 with 3C per doubling, mapping to the fast transients of the BEST land-based observations.
That dang hockey stick blade just won’t go away. Interesting science.
Nick, my reading of that bit is that it’s just adding a constant, to make their their zero line match the standard anomaly.
Paul,
As I said, it isn’t clear and yours was my first interpretation. But they do say “To compare…”, and just aligning the means wouldn’t compare. I think they mean this plot does the comparison. I must admit that the only thing really favoring my interpretation is the result – I don’t see what else the spike could be.
Paul,
I think in view of Marcott’s email to Steve, your interpretation is probably right.
That pesky MWP’s gone missin’ …again?
Makes me think of the Hokey Pokey somehow …
Yer put yer new data in,
Yer take yer old data out,
Yer put yer new data in
And yer shake it all about,
And yer do Mann’s hokey pokey
And yer spin around,
…That’s what it’s all about!
Did ya look down the back of the couch?
To have lost the MWP twice smacks of carelessness.
‘In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.’
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/
I have recalibrated the wiggle room – and we can expect definitive answers any day now.
This matches my experience, anecdotally, anyway. In my undergraduate advanced lab class, one of the experiments we performed involved running a laser through a beam-splitter, running the two resulting beams through very different path lengths, and then bouncing them off of a rotating mirror. Measure the distance betrwen the dots on a wall, multiply by the ratio of path lengths, divide by the angular velocity of the mirror, and you get the speed of light. The experiment called for a result with .02% experimental error, but we slaved away in that lab 40 hours a week until we got an answer that agreed with what we knew the speed of light to be. When we turned in our report, the prof took one look at our results, and said, “The mirror is silvered on both sides. You’re off by a factor of two.”
Bethlinda, from Greenland to China, the creator left evidence of a MWP that never actually occurred (or not much). He was just testing the faith of his Brethren of the Hockey Stick.
You can do stuff like that when you are a creator.
+1
manacker wrote
quote
Maybe a “half-vast” conspiracy?
unquote
Applause!
JF
Perhaps a half-arsed conspiracy?
Today’s climate science
Is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper
I am sure temporal resolution of recent temperature history is unprecedented in the past 1500 years. It suggests what?
“Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history”
I don’t see any reason to dispute the above statement. However the wording ‘not yet exceeded’ is an attempt to forecast the future and is out of place. The paper does show the importance of temporal tesolution. One does see plenty of spikey records together with an invitation to the reader to estimate a climate trend. For years I have advocated the 11 year central moving average for presenting climate. Longer sampling intervals can of course supress entire eras.
Girma – your March 11 post “The above results show the similarity of the three climate response variables to the same solar input.”
Again they do not show the temperature peak at 1940. Do you really know what shaping was applied at the website in their “audio” graph?
If your three graphs showed the same shape for the same periods they would obviously be at least misleading because the ocean depth graph should lag at least 30 years behind atmospheric temperature due to the huge transport delay in transferring N.Hemisphere heat to the depths of the Pacific.
Alexander
The 1940 warming is due to the peak due to the PDO as shown in the following correlation between PDO and the Transient GMST:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:732/mean:60/from:1920/normalise:1920/plot/jisao-pdo/mean:60/from:1920/normalise/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.000001/from:1920
Here is the climate pattern of the 20th century:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/plot/gistemp/compress:12/offset:-0.08/detrend:0.04/plot/hadcrut4gl/compress:12/offset:-0.03/detrend:0.02/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:732/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/offset:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/offset:-0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.000001/offset:2/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.003/offset:-1.03/detrend:-0.22/from:1982/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/offset:0.015/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:732/offset:0.015/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.003/offset:-1.03/detrend:-0.22/from:1982
Girma – your 13 March post.
In general, correlation proves nothing.
Those of us who live on the shores of ths Pacific know there are two major cyciic events that affect our climate in order of importance: the SOI (Nino) and the sun spot cycle. The SOI is not fully understood and is not really a repeating cycle because it is irregulat, but at lest we know when we are in it. Most of us have never heard of the PDO, it is a theoretical possibility – no more, so why give it a major role in our climate when other well known events can describe it ? See my website underlinrd above.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2013/anomnight.3.11.2013.gif
The cool mode of the ‘theoretical’ PDO can be seen in the north east Pacific.
Pingback: A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years? – Stoat
Here is the correlation between the hockey stick for the GMST and the hockey stick for sunspot count.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:1056/compress:12/normalise/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:732/from:1895/to:1965/normalise
A correlation of 0.9!
iGirma – interesting except there is something wrong with your data. All temperature records I have seen from 1850 on, show a peak at 1940 followed by a sharp fall in temperature which does not start to rise again until 1970. Your graph shows no such dip so that requires explanation’
Alexander Biggs
The Secular GMST of the 20th century is the GMST for moving average period of 61 years as shown below:
Secular GMST =>http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vnh/mean:732
The difference between the Observed GMST and and the Secular GMST above is the Transient GMST, and it must be excluded from analysis of the climate.
Transient GMST =>http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vnh/isolate:732/compress:12
Residual GMST of the 20th century =>
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:252/compress:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.000001/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.000001/offset:-0.2
In my opinion a 61 year averaging period is far too much. It has actually removed the real peak at 1940. Is that what you want? The purpose of smooyjing is to isolate signal from noise, making it easier for humans to understand the graphics.
Also the word ‘secular’ is usually used in religious debate. Is this the creationist contribution to the climate debate?
Alexander
To explain the secular (non-periodic variation) sea level rise shown here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Visual-depictions-of-Sea-Level-Rise.html
there must be a corresponding secular variation in the global mean surface temperature as shown here:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:732
The CO2 concentration from Mauna Loa has also the same shape as shown here:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/compress:12
The above results show the similarity of the three climate response variables to the same solar input.
Girma | March 11, 2013 at 7:52 pm |
You appear not to understand what the normalise function does, otherwise you would not attempt to correlate two normalised curves and think the outcome in any way meaningful.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:101/mean:103/plot/gistemp/normalise/mean:101/mean:103
For anyone interested in seeing all the data, I didn’t just plot the highest series.
One set of five series shows a peak around 9k years ago, a dip from 7k-3k and a rise to the present day.
http://oi49.tinypic.com/lbogh.jpg
Another set of around thirty five series shows pretty much of nothing. It looks like random noise.
http://oi49.tinypic.com/t68r4x.png
And the third set of around twenty series shows the holocene optimum we know, with a peak around 2 C warmer than today.
http://oi47.tinypic.com/2uylqh3.png
Combining the 2 C Holocene warming with a bunch of flat ‘random noise’ series attenuates it to below a degree. Does anyone know how one area can very over 2 C for thousands of years and other parts of the world see nothing at all? Do all the proxies work? Or was the Holocene Optimum a local phenomenon?
The spike at the end does not appear in any of the proxy series.
http://oi48.tinypic.com/f1bji8.jpg
And if you look at those Marcott plots with Mann 08 overlaid, you can see a distinct change in the high freuency variance (the line starts to wiggle) right at the point where the overlaid data starts. Coincidence?
As a follow-up to my earlier comment, this temperature reconstruction ends at 1960. There are a total of nine series that extend to 1960. None of them show a dramatic rise like the final results do.
To demonstrate this more clearly, here are the same nine series from 0 AD on. Again, there is nothing resembling a sharp rise.
I don’t know just how the authors infilled their data to get a 20 year resolution, but I think it’s safe to say their dramatically high values for 1960 are questionable, at best.
The mystery’s of the data deepen. Keep digging. I think they will have to employ DeepClimate to save this one.
As far as I can see, the authors don’t explain how they get twenty year samples from their data. Getting samples at a finer resolution than the data series have requires some sort of infilling, but I can’t find any discussion of such in the paper/SI. It’s a key issue, and it seems to be completely overlooked.
Maybe I’m just missing something?
It turns out I misread 10 BP as -10 BP, and the reconstruction actually ends at 1940. That increases the number of series that extend to the end by a bit. Only one of them (Agassiz-Renland) shows an increase at the end.
As for infilling data, I’m going to assume they just used linear interpolation. It’s the simplest approach, and I think there are bigger issues. I still am bugged they don’t discuss it though. All of their cross-spectral analysis is affected by their choice of interpolation so I can’t see how they’d justify ignoring the issue.
Something odd about the data, also note the parts chopped off in early early years
Even the doubters here believe the temperature will rise at least 2 C and stay there (more likely 5 C, I would say), but just imagine what 2C looks like on that first graph. There’s your hockey stick. Not there yet, but getting there for sure, no denying.
“Even the doubters here believe the temperature will rise at least 2 C ”
Nooooooooooooooooooo. You can believe in any fairy tales you like but it is not nicey to putey words in other people’s mouths.
Best to keep yer pagan beliefs to yourself.
low-end sensitivity 1.6 C + low-end CO2 650 ppm = 2 C
mid-level sensitivity 3 C + eventual CO2e 1000 ppm = 5.5 C
Not even close. We have nothing in the way of believable science that suggests that making estimates of temperature 100 years hence is anything more than a climate narrative.
We have a lack of warming at least from large scale ocean and atmosphere patterns for decades more and an unpredictble shift in the patterns seems more likely to follow than not. I think this is where the smart money is.
GS, you are being left behind. manacker and kim now seem to be in the 2 C camp, and possibly Willis and a few others here too. A perceptible shift has occurred.
Jim D:
You are the one missing the plot! Reread the story line!
mike, I saw something about 2100 in the abstract. What warming do you think is projected in 2100? Compare that with the scale on the graph. Bingo. Hockey stick.
Jim D, your perceptions may have shifted, but I’m just as ignorant as ever.
And just what the Hell is a ‘2 C camp’? 2 C sensitivity(which one)? 2 C at 2100? 2 C total? Please, you confuse my ignorance.
=============
2 C by 2100. Isn’t that your position, or do you just support manacker when he says that? Even 2 C would be a big deal in the Holocene, wouldn’t it?
Jim D, you’re dreaming. We won’t have to wait for 2100. By ~2020 there will be no warming for 30 years.
My position is that the globe is cooling, but for how long even kim doesn’t know. Another position held is that CO2 probably warms the earth, but it doesn’t seem to be by much. I’m more inclined to the ‘2 C total’ club, and no, that’s not very much when the end(is nigh) of the Holocene might mean an 8 C drop.
===============
Even the doubters here believe the temperature will rise at least 2 C and stay there (more likely 5 C, I would say), but just imagine what 2C looks like on that first graph. There’s your hockey stick. Not there yet, but getting there for sure, no denying.
Rubbish, you don’t speak for any doubters. How can it be “getting there” when the trend from the Holocene Maximum continues downwards?
Do you know about the this period? Here:
Hint, it’s called the Holocene Thermal Maximum because it was global..
Even these faux climate scientists Marcott et al begin with the real facts before they mangle them..
“Our results indicate that global mean temperature for the decade 2000–2009 has not yet exceeded the warmest temperatures of the early Holocene (5000 to 10,000 years ago)”
Ever since then it’s been a downward slide back into our Ice Age.
Here, on this page is a graph of the last two thousand years, with a helpful line showing the decline:
What don’t you understand about Vostok? http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/vostok.png
There is no rational reason to predict a 2°C rise from present, let alone 5°C – and maybe not for another 100,000 years…
Now, since carbon dioxide always lags hundreds of years behind global temperature change in and out of our Ice Age, conclusive proof that it is never the driver of climate change, we need to concentrate on what does do the driving:
We’ve been in a slide downwards since the Holocene Max, the only way is down because it has nothing to do with us.
It is fundamentally all to do with our orbit around our billions of degrees hot Star, The Sun.
By the way, Arrhenius the chemist had no sense of scale either besides understanding zilch about the atmosphere, he would rather believe his minute percentage of carbonic acid (water and carbon dioxide, as in clouds, rain which he tried to pass of as dehumidified carbon dioxide) would drive us out of our Ice Age than try to understand what was being said when Croll first put forward the idea of orbital changes.
No real climate scientist gives the AGW carbon dioxide scam any credibility – instead, they continue to improve our understanding of the cycles in orbital changes and wobbles and how these affect global climate change through heat transport and weather systems and so on.
Jim D
Better check your arithmetic
~1,000 ppmv CO2 is the absolute asymptotic maximum we could even reach from burning all the optimistically inferred recoverable fossil fuel resources on our planet (WEC 2010).
3C is the old IPCC AR4 mean model-simulated prediction for 2xCO2 ECS; more recent observation-based studies show that this is too high by a factor of 2:1.
But back to your arithmetic:
Today’s CO2 level is 393 ppmv
So at 1,000 ppmv and a 2xCO2 ECS estimate of 3C we would have
3.0 * ln(1000/393) / ln(2) = 4.0C warming (when all fossil fuels gone at the exaggerated ECS estimate)
And at 650 ppmv and 1.6C ECS we would have
1.6 * ln(650/393) / ln(2) = 1.1C warming (by ~2100 when CO2 reaches 650 ppmv)
Just to set the records straight, Jim
Max
Oh no – I am way ahead. ‘One of the most important and mysterious events in recent climate history is the climate shift in the mid-1970s [Graham, 1994]. In the northern hemisphere 500-hPa atmospheric flow the shift manifested itself as a collapse of a persistent wave-3 anomaly pattern and the emergence of a strong wave-2 pattern. The shift was accompanied by
sea-surface temperature (SST) cooling in the central Pacific and warming off the coast of western North America [Miller et al., 1994]. The shift brought sweeping long-range changes in the climate of northern hemisphere. Incidentally, after ‘‘the dust settled,’’ a new long era of frequent El Nin˜os
superimposed on a sharp global temperature increase begun. While several possible triggers for the shift have been suggested and investigated [Graham, 1994; Miller et al., 1994; Graham et al., 1994], the actual physical mechanism obstacle to this understanding is the extreme complexity of the climate system, which makes it difficult to disentangle causal connections leading to the observed climate behavior. Here we present a novel approach, which reveals an important new mechanism in climate dynamics and explains several aspects of the observed climate variability in the late 20th century.’ Tsonis et al 2007 – ‘A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts
There were major climate shifts around 1910, the mid 1940’s, 1976/77 and 1998/2001.
The smart money is on deterministic chaos in a dynamically and very complex system. These climate etc are not abstracts but shifts in ocean and atmospheric patterns. Sensitivity is not at all constant either in space or time – too many other things happening to depend on a single number. It is absurd – and more absurd that you can’t see it and rely on confabulation instead.
Is this deliberate? Are you trying to trick people?
Have you seen Girma’s attempts to smooth the heck out of the temperature record (61-year running mean). It just goes up faster with time despite his best efforts. Something it in, I suspect.
I cite an important new mechanism and you give me Girma? Please.
It is to show that your mechanism isn’t what matters. When you remove the wiggles you are left with accelerating warming, so that would be the first thing to explain. Vaughan Pratt had a good explanation of that, I seem to remember.
I think Sergeant Hopalong would be a natural next step for the Captain.
P_ss off webby – I am sick of ignorant, redneck Minnesotans making inane and off topic comments for no other reason than to pursue a personal grouch or 2. You have proved again and again that you really do not have a scientific clue, have little to no style, imagination, humour or charm. Go on – say something stupid again.
Jim – you give me Girma for an answer to a peer reviewed study on a new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts – and say that it is to show that ‘my mechanism’ doesn’t matter? Hmmm.
Perhaps we should just call you Corporal Punishment – of the cult of space cadets.
Chief Procto says:
I had no idea that those were properties of the earth’s climate.
Like I said, the Chief thinks that the style points gained by pranking and generating foo are more important than pursuing real science. And he can’t take it when someone calls him on it.
Jim D > Even the doubters here believe the temperature will rise at least 2 C and stay there (more likely 5 C, I would say)
Someone earlier asked about where you get your excellent weed. Just tell us man!
Jim
Have you seen Girma’s attempts to smooth the heck out of the temperature record (61-year running mean).
It explains the climate pattern of the 20th century as shown:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/plot/gistemp/compress:12/offset:-0.08/detrend:0.04/plot/hadcrut4gl/compress:12/offset:-0.03/detrend:0.02/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:732/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/offset:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/offset:-0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.000001/offset:2/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.003/offset:-1.03/detrend:-0.22/from:1982/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/offset:0.015/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:732/offset:0.015/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.003/offset:-1.03/detrend:-0.22/from:1982
> Just how warm the world will be in 2100 depends more on how much carbon is emitted into the atmosphere, and what might be done about it, than on what the precise climate sensitivity ends up being. A world with a relatively low climate sensitivity — say in the range of 2 C — but with high emissions and with atmospheric concentrations three to four times those of pre-industrial levels is still probably a far different planet than the one we humans have become accustomed to. And it’s likely not one we would find nearly so hospitable.
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2013/03/making-sense-of-sensitivity-and-keeping-it-in-perspective/
Willard
Do you believe that the weather in 2100 would be markedly different if CO2 levels were at 450 ppm instead of 480 ppm in 2100?
Do you see any creditable path for CO2 levels not to continue to increase for decades at least?
Rob,
1. I have no idea what kind of thought experiment you’re engineering with 450 ppm and 480 ppm, but some say that:
> Goals of limiting human made warming to 2°C and CO2 to 450 ppm are prescriptions for disaster.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/why-450-ppm-is-not-safe.html
As far as I’m concerned, dumping CO2 in the atmosphere like there won’t be tomorrow might not be wise.
2. I have no idea what a creditable path is, nor what you mean by that, but some say that:
> Nobody knows what to do.
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/29648765499
As far as I’m concerned, playing number games and then whining about uncertainties might not be wise either.
***
Thank you for your loaded questions,
w
The spam filter inhales loudly.
Hal coff, hal coff coff.
======
Nullius in Verba (see my second book) and Brandon, thank you both. I was too lazy to plot all the raw data before writing the first draft of this post for Dr. Curry.I wanted to focus on the misleading MSM headlines about this study, more than the additional flaws within it.
You have deepened and enrichened the posted critique beyond my feeble starting attempt. As have others (Hank at Suyts).
I am concerned that we now have a completely flawed, obesequiant attempt to rehabilitate the Mann hockey stick for AR5. Which would be wrong.
Regards
> I wanted to focus on the misleading MSM headlines […]
Here’s the only one Rud quoted, with his own emphasis:
(1) Warming fastest since dawn of civilization
Here’s the two last sentences of the abstract:
> Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.
We know that the Holocene lasted 10 000 years. Calculation reveals that the projections for 2100 will apply in less than 90 years. Searching for the relevant press releases should make readers realize why we might have such headlines as (1).
I’m not sure what warrants the claim that the study ain’t about (1). Nor has it been shown what’s misleading in (1).
All the MWP stuff is a red herring. Too bad this covers most of what is being discussed in this op-ed.
Willard:
No we do not know yet the extent of the Holocene Optimum! We have a fair idea when it started but we do not yet have an end date. There are suppositions, but not enough accurate data as yet.
The study does not provide scientific evidence to back up the claim of fastest warming since dawn of civilization. Model outputs have nothing to do with this study unless they spliced those on as well as the Mann Et al Hockey Stick!
All lines after 1950 should be discarded and possibly even 1900.
This study proves the saying GIGO!
Willard
The fact is that there is no evidence that the current warming was faster or that it led to higher temperatures than previous warm period, such as the MWP.
In fact, there is ample evidence of a slightly warmer global MWP (the dozens of independent studies from all over the world using different paleo-climate methodologies).
But there is no evidence regarding the rate of warming, as Mosh wrote.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
But is certainly is not evidence of presence, either.
Max
When MiniMax sees a car getting faster and faster running toward his house, MiniMax would need to calculate the exact rate of its speed to claim that he has any evidence at all.
In fact, some would say that he would not be warranted to say that he never saw the car going faster. After all, the past occurrences are only in his memory.
But MiniMax certainly can sloganeer to his heart’s content while his neighbours tell him about his car rushing toward his house.
Well, that means that the earth’s climate is very sensitive to external perturbations doesn’t it? And we have a significant perturbation stimulus in the form of elevated GHG CO2 concentrations don’t we?
How tight does that trick-box that you found yourself in feel, Max? Not much room in there for you to move around, eh?
willard sees a ghost hockey stick and thinks his house is about to be hit. willard, your house is haunted by unfounded fears of catastrophe.
========
Yes, kim, we don’t not everything, so we know nothing.
Well, we do know that warmer is better than the inevitable coming cooling. The birds in the forest know, the beasties in the ocean know, Gaia knows.
=========
I always tell my lobsters that warmer is better.
You are boiled red by the bubbles of fear rising around you.
==========================
Here’s Richard Alley, anticipating WebHub’s argument:
> Furthermore, because the feedbacks in the climate system often respond similarly to warming with different causes (warmer air will tend to melt more snow and ice, and to pick up more greenhouse-gas water vapor from the vast ocean, whether the warmth came from rising CO2 or increasing solar output or alien ray guns or a giant hair dryer), data showing larger climate changes in the past in response to some estimated forcing actually increase the concerns about future warming. If, for example, scientists had somehow underestimated the climate change between Medieval times and the Little Ice Age, or other natural climate changes, without corresponding errors in the estimated size of the causes of the changes, that would suggest stronger amplifying feedbacks and larger future warming from rising greenhouse gases than originally estimated. Any increase in our estimate of the natural climate responses to past forcings points to a more variable future path with larger average changes.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/scientists-find-an-abrupt-warm-jog-after-a-very-long-cooling/
Creating blog posts around Richard Alley’s words might be tougher.
Not that it would be impossible.
But wonder why we’re seeing this piling on on Mike?
That depends on if forcing controls heat transport. If it did you would expect to have seen an increase lately yet the study by Josh Willis indicates there has been no recent change. Reconstructions inicate heat transfer at least into the Atlantic started at a point similar to the current rate during the MWP, declined to the LIA and started increasing again around 1750 and ended recently if the recent studies are accurate. Models indicate that the same forcing can cause either a snowball planet or an ice free planet depending upon the amount of heat transport. Now I don’t have any more confidence in models than you do but the one thing I think they are useful for is helping in forming new hypotheses. Richard Alley is jumping to conclusions. He could be jumping to the right conclusion but that is far from certain at least until we understand heat transport more comprehensively.
Well, he jumped willingly in the water, and he keeps turning up the heat. Have pity.
======
manacker –
I have been told that “skeptics” don’t doubt the basic physics of the GHE, and that they don’t doubt that the earth is warming to some extent due to ACO2.
Assuming that you are a “skeptic” and thus, believe as I just described – how do you know that ACO2 is warming the climate – given that there is no evidence of anomalous warming?
Indeed, we should have an engineer-level derivation of heat transfer.
This ought to cost only 20 millions anyway.
Note Trenberth’s ingenious null, and moshe’s amusement at it.
==============
Willard and Webby
Some basic rules you should know:
– Correlation is not evidence of causation, but lack of correlation is pretty good indication of lack of causation
– Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Now here’s the one that applies to your recent posts:
– Hollow claims, no matter how beautifully worded, are no evidence at all.
Max
“Nor has it been shown what’s misleading in (1)”
What is misleading about the headline is the word “fastest”
“fastest” implies a RATE of change. A rate of change requires a time scale.
the problem is this: In the current day estimates they have high resolution data. so we can see say 1C in 100 years. Thats a rate: 1C per century.
In the past, their resolution is worse. they cant even see data at 100 years so they cannot measure rates at 100 years and cannot make the comparison that the title implies. Their charts give the perception of a fast rate of increase because the resolution is different in the present than in the past
It’s not really defensible.
A better move than Rud’s.
There might be no need to measure rates with such a statistical significance as to exclude about any mathematical uncertainty:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=127133&org=NSF&from=news
The Earth might not move that fast and handwaving unknown abrupt forcings might be suboptimal here.
***
In any case, we can see by this press release that the headline is faithful to what the authors say.
Then the paper should have been rejected as being worthless! The entire paper is non defensible!
‘fastest’ appears to be a word added by the MSM. The word unprecedented in the abstract refers to the state after projected IPCC warming and is valid in that context. It might also be fastest, but that would be hard to prove, so they didn’t say it.
That’s why the Flying Trolls are out in fierce. The paper is critically important, the paper is fatally flawed. It’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard rain.
=========
kim, funny, I viewed Rud’s post as a typical damage control thing, as was also done over at WUWT, to keep the “skeptics” from being too upset by this new evidence.
Yes, “new evidence” of the MWP being airbrushed out again.
Jim D
Huh?
The “projected IPCC warming” is “unprecedented”?
I’ll go along with that statement.
(But it hasn’t happened yet.)
And in order to be more accurate in AR5, IPCC should add those words to its AR4 claim that ” the warmth of the last half century plus projected future IPCC warming is unusual in at least the previous 1,300 years”
Max
Shooting down this kind of study seems important:
> No plausible sensitivity-related argument is policy relevant.
http://planet3.org/2013/03/08/why-equilibrium-sensitivity-is-not-policy-relevant/
Mosher once again proves that even a blind squirrel finds an occasional acorn. So Steven, did you figure out the difference yet between AIRS and AMSU instruments onboard Aqua? I can explain it to you again if you’re still confused.
willard,
The headline is not faithful to the math of the paper. Whether it is faithful to some interpretation of what they hinted at in the paper is scholastic debate.
> The headline is not faithful to the math of the paper.
The authors disagree.
But then they used Mann 08.
So it’s a dog’s breakfast.
We have more time for auditing
Now that we can hope that humanity will adapt
And that auditors are tired of winter.
Willard,
The authors admit that the modern period reconstruction is not robust.
see paragraph 4 of the paper.
They also state that no variability under 300 years is preserved. see the SI.
Now, you can read the paper, or I can provide a direct quote from the authors saying that their results after 1890 are “probably not robust”
Their words kitty kat, not mine.
Unlike some, I’ll get the quote right.
If the results after 1890 are not robust, then claims about it being the fastest are well, not robust and it seems weird to lede with a claim that the authors themselves say is not robust.
Your claim, your quote, lazy black hat marketer.
Gentlemen
Good to see you playing nice.
The report could be a stepping stone to confirming whether or not the fastest temperature rise since the start of the Holocene is currently ongoing.
We know the authors believe this to likely be the fastest temperature rise based.
We’ve heard the authors’ argument outside the report explaining that the projected future warming in the next century will confirm this rate. This is not an invalid practice in conventional trendology, although I’ve formed the opinion such a complex infographic must be handled more carefully than a conventional time series. For that reason as a conservative trendologist, I’d prefer not to go there, and to avoid drawing such a conclusion absent significant further work, even though it is likely the correct conclusion based on the same current understanding of Physics that calls for significant and likely unavoidable further warming this century.
And the report is useful as a stepping stone, a forum, a framework to address some questions that a decade ago would have been considered impossible to answer.
As of this report, and recent developments in GCMs, scientists in future could generate enough Holocene-spanning daily weather pattern models and from them derive matching statistics to compare to the Holocene proxy infographic to produce a set of probabilities and likelihoods to allow us to judge the odds that the current rise is ‘fastest’ or ‘normal’ based on actual evidence. The proxy-infographic and patterns of agreement over a Holocene-length duration would validate absolutely and verify reliably GCMs. This was not even contemplated a decade ago.
Where do I err?
Curse my typing.
We know the authors believe this to likely be the fastest temperature rise based.
Should read:
We know the authors believe this to likely be the fastest temperature rise based. on a probable 2C-6C warming in the next century.
“So Steven, did you figure out the difference yet between AIRS and AMSU instruments onboard Aqua? I can explain it to you again if you’re still confused.”
who ever suggested they were the same? before you work with AIRS data it is important to read all the documents ( some will require you to contact the teams involved ) That should give you a clue as to the physics involved in moving from a signal from a sensor to a data product called a temperature
Also, You need to look at the reasons for the spurious cooling in version 5, which hopefully will be corrected in version 6. The error is believed to arise from having wrong values for C02 concentrations in the models used to create temperature.
start here: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=1196043
then here
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2005JD006272/abstract
Or
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~vijay/Papers/RT%20Models/strow-hannon.pdf
Willard
Yeah. But McIntyre & McKitrick, supported by the Wegman committee and confirmed by the NAS panel under oath, showed that the “breakfast” had already been run through the “dog”.
Phew!
Max
Audit dog’s return,
Tilj and split bark bristlecone.
Clews in the chunder.
=============
Steven Mosher | March 13, 2013 at 2:11 pm |
“So Steven, did you figure out the difference yet between AIRS and AMSU instruments onboard Aqua? I can explain it to you again if you’re still confused.”
>who ever suggested they were the same?
You did when you explained to Jim Cripwell in another thread that satellites tracking GAT look at pixel brightness to determine temperature. In actuality that’s the AIRS instrument aboard a single satellite that looks at pixel brightness. The satellites that track GAT use microwave sounders which don’t have CCDs because they’re not optical devices but RF. I was actually formally schooled in microwave hardware used in atmospheric sensing applications. You weren’t. And it shows.
here willard.
“20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.”
You claim he’s bright. When do you think he’ll get it?
===========
Rud Istvan seems to take exception to the phrase “Warming fastest since dawn of civilization” used by the NBC. The abstract in the paper, doesn’t say that, but does say the “recent warming is unprecedented in that time (1500 years)”
So what’s the objection here?
“fastest warming” isn’t the same as “unprecedented warming”?
or “1500 years” isn’t the same as the “dawn of civilisation”?
> So what’s the objection here?
Yes, but Mike.
tempterrain
The “objection”, quite simply, is that there are 80+ independent studies from all over the world, which show that the MWP was slightly warmer than today.
And this occurred less than “1500 years ago”.
A more realistic statement would be “the “recent warming is unprecedented in the past 600 years”.
OK?
Max
Per many previous comments above, the “80+ independent studies from all over the world, which show that the MWP was slightly warmer than today.” is at best misleading, at worst mendacious.
*If* they all did show this, it would be trivial to reconstruct a *global* temperature history which showed a global MWP. This does not exist. For good reason.
If it did exist, it would be evidence of high climate sensitivity, which you vehemently deny all evidence of.
Your attempts to mislead are arguing against your own case.
VTG
The subject here is the MWP.
The 80+ studies showed that it was global and slightly warmer than today, as actual physical evidence plus historical records from all over the civilized world at the time have concluded.
No big deal.
Switching the discussion to “evidence of high climate sensitivity” is simply a red herring intended to distract.
Max
So, its the scientific evidence you are objecting to, not the media coverage? Its good you at least agree that the NBC comment was fair enough given what was in the paper’s abstract.
Maybe Rud Istran just doesn’t like the NBC?
tt,
What is objectionable is that it is deceptive reporting. But deception is apparently an integral part of AGW radicalism.
The objection is that the authors have now walked away from the claim, and just after willard manfully defended it.
My mode in this thread was not defensive: I could not care less about iconography.
Having a good argument against *it* in the first place might have saved time. The Auditor did well.
A quote about the authors “walking away” would be nice.
Willard,
you defended. have some honor.
The quote is in their mail.
Their result ( recent warming) is not robust.
Translation; it looks good in the shower, but won’t stand up.
Let’s not go a bridge too far: the authors restated that the contemporary bit was not “robust”.
More pushing would be needed to have them walk away from their speedy claim, since non-robustness seemed to have been assumed before the Auditor sent his gentle missive.
Snorri Sturleson and the Icelandic authors knew, the excavators of Brattahlid knew, scholars of the Hundred Years War and the transition from Song to Ming knew…everybody knew till very recently. The MWP is one huge fact.
An end to all this noisist ideation! (See? I can talk like that too. You just kind of pause your brain and the grotesque buzz words come tumbling out the mouth.)
Weren’t you on your way to Minnesota?
Not in Latin mosomoso, yer not targetin’ the intellect-chools in
cloud towers, yer targetin’ the serfs. Tee shirts might work, with
a picture , say two IPCC shamen and balloon captions. Oh, and
labelled wall , ‘Corridors of Power –>’
The Aussie tribe is out in full force, Apparently, each tribal member knows the whereabouts of the others. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had an internal mailing list.
Another conspiracy WEB?
No Tim, just watching the clown show of fake ocher accents and larrikin antics. Pulling pranks is only a conspiracy when it comes time to not being in on the joke.
This is a down under version of The Great White North.
WEB,
I’ve seen that clowns are found on both sides. You’ll note that I don’t argue physics or propose theories. I’ll maybe follow the conversation for awhile and think that some of it is interesting – your ice out stuff being among that.
I also do not slam our host and try not to attack commentors. If clowns bother you, turn your attention to one of the other rings under the tent. Throwing rocks at them just gets you in a rock fight.
Minnesota is the joke and webby is the butt. Webby is a blowhard with nil scientific chops and a line in repetitive and quite xenophobic insults. It is all quite bizarre. He – along with a few others – imagines he has created a new method of climate statistics. These new theories are inevitably bogus – and I incur the wrath of webby by, inter alia, pointing out that a two compartment carbon function is simplistic beyond any reason. Unfortunately – he seems incapable of understanding even what a multi-compartment model is.
The joke? Mosomoso ‘won’ a one way trip to UNtopia – Minnesota. Does he imagine that anyone goes to Minnesota willingly? It’s full of redneck dickwads with no humour, wit, charm or culture. Climate doesn’t have these things either but they are essential properies of a complete human intellect without which little is possible.
Webby has a very narrow uderstanding – resulting in confabulist and obsessive creation out of nothing at all reasonable of quite preposterous curves. He is a typical interweb wack job of whom we have a few. For the most part he simply drops by with unwelcome comment on the characterisitics of Australians and threatening to put us all on his list of climate clowns. Boring.
Skippy said:
These “others” you refer to, do they include the father of statistical mechanics known by the name of Boltzmann and his teacher Stefan?
So it looks like applying statistics to the climate is nothing new.
I was really thinking of more contemporaneous wack jobs – Doug Cotton perhaps or numbnut. I have yet to see either Stefan or Boltzmann comment here.
What we have with S-B is a black body formula. First of all – have you come up to speed with the difference between a grey and black body yet? Just so we are on the same page – as much as that is possible.
S-B was at least based originally on data from John Tyndall. But the caculation is out by some 9 degrees K – without even considering that the earth is a grey body rather than black.
I don’t know why you think that constantly repeating basic phyics and not all that relevant claims of the significance of S-B means much. ‘No fundamentally reliable reduction of the size of the AOS dynamical system (i.e., a statistical mechanics analogous to the transition between molecular kinetics and fluid dynamics) is yet envisioned.’ (McWilliams 2007) The fact is that climate has dimensions that go far beyond what can be counted as physics at the present time.
I suggest that your curve confabulations are fundamentally unreliable and no amount of appeal to S-B is going to save the situation.
‘TOC essentially draws a line in the sand and a virtual stake in the ground. Everything I have written about and all the original analyses I have worked out on the blog has not fundamentally changed as I aggregated the information. As far as I can tell, no one else has picked up on the direction that I have taken, and nothing has come out of the research literature that comes close to unifying the set of topics as well as this does.’ webby
You are condemned out of your own mouth. A lone and misunderstood researcher struggling along brand new paths. These are most often the sentiments of an eccentric and misguided wack job. I think you fit the bill admirably.
It is a shame you don’t go away and let the rest of us to disccuss more complex and nuanced issues. On the other hand – does anyone believe you? Am I simply wasting my time correcting your missaprehensions and gross oversimplifications? Should I just ignore you? Certainly a tempting prospect. But you don’t ignore me. You simply drop in with rants and insults whenever my name appears. Worthless complaints about Australians usually. It fits with the wack job characterisation perfectly. Noise and bluster with absolutely no substance.
Chief Hydrologist is no different than Doug Cotton. Both are pulling pranks on the readership.
And it is so amateurish as well. Chief is just a copy&paste hack, as in the way he pulls the marketing blurb that I wrote for my book editor and tries to read something into it. Yeah, sure I will be meek and claim non-originality when I am trying to sell my research and written work. Not in my experience.
BTW, where is the Chief’s written work? Doesn’t exist because pranksmanship doesn’t demand accountability. It’s all a joke to the Chief, comprised of lazy drive-by nonsense..
Missed the spot again – very much time to call it quits.
Usually the ‘reseach’ achieves some sort of peer review and exposure in more or less respected journals. With webby there is no publishing except on a loser blog – and it is getting quite sad. The constant claims of a profound insight on his part is certainly tingling the spidey senses of people here.
My own published work is of a science communications nature – probaby quite fitting to my background and talents. I spend a lot of my time reading scence, modellin and putting it all on paper. I quite often groan and think that I could do much better than most of the cr@p that passes for science journalism. I have published in a few well known venues on ENSO and global warming and seamless modelling and in rather more specialised forums on environmental law and policy.
Webby for some reason objects to my quoting science and inevitably someone objects when I don’t. With these people the objective is not about communication and knowledge but in denying air to ideas they object to. All very Marcusian. They are desperately flailing and wailing and it is only going to get worse in the short term.
Skippy,
It is quite the accomplishment when you turn WEB into the reasonable, polite one in the debate. Your Minnesota bashing is no more acceptable than his Aussie bashing.
Hard to keep track of these threads.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/11/lets-play-hockey-again/#comment-302500
And it’s down the memory hole u need ter go: ‘Hi Keith and Tim,
…I get the feeling that I’m not the only one who would like to deal
a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm periods and myths
in the literature.”
H/t Jonathon Overport.
http://climateaudit.org/2010/04/08/dealing-a-mortal-blow-to-the-mwp/
Equally awkward is that Arctic Ice. It’s never gone to script, luring the Royal Society into melty waters after the Napoleonic Wars. When the British expedition of 1875-6 encountered iced-in Greenlanders, those Inuit romanced about the years when their grandparents could scoot about like…like there’d been some big melt earlier in the century!
After WW1 it got all melty again, till it got all threatening and Ice-Agey again by the 1970s…and then really melty…unlike the other end, which is record-icy…but we’ve found a melty bit down there too! We just need to deal a few mortal blows here and there…
“Hi, Keith and Tim, Mr. De Mille was wondering if you could tighten up that Arctic script. He loves your MWP rewrite, by the way. Now, could we make that little slice of West Antarctica a kind of microcosm for the rest of the continent? Ta. Jonathan.”
“The movie of the novel best seller!” A – re – do – of – the – MWP –
re -write! Say, I believe Sam Goldwyn is interested in making an
offer. He has a flair fer converting the novel into the technicolour
blockbuster…Not too worried about fidelity ter the book but heck,
it’ll have the customers on the edge of their seats.
In our movie, the hero and heroine escape the sweltering warmth of Europe for the chilly Pacific. (Of course, China and Japan are on the Pacific, and they got all warmed up too…but we can chill them down for the script.)
Anybody argues, we’ll just quote Sam: “When I want you opinion I’ll ask me”. Hey, should I put that into Latin as a motto for the IPCC?
Another way to play down this pesky MWP is to refer haughtily to skeptics’ fetishistic attachment to their “beloved” MWP. “Oh, you’re not still on about your cathedrals in the sun, are you? That’s so totally last century. We’ve moved on, haven’t you?”
Micahel Mann has apparently rented an apartment on Sunset Boulevard. “All right, Mr. Pachauri. I’m ready for a close up of my hockey stick.”
“After MBH 98, we’ll make another hockey stick, and another hockey stick….”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMTT0LW0M_Y
We’re offered a deal: we stop talking about “our” Medieval Warming, and in return they continue to dismiss it. It’s a win-win. First they win…and then they win.
Dang, I missed the late night showing. OK, redo Barbarella with Mann puttin’ on the Ritz.
==============
Confucius say: Man(n) who lose hockey stick bettah not bend ovah..
“No justification for regional reconstructions rather than what Mann et al did (I don’t think we can say we didn’t do Mann et al because we think it is crap!)”
CRAP!
The joke? Mosomoso ‘won’ a one way trip to UNtopia – Minnesota. Does he imagine that anyone goes to Minnesota willingly? It’s full of redneck dickwads with no humour, wit, charm or culture. Climate doen’t have these things either but they are essential properies of a complete human intellect without which little is possible.
Webby has a very narrow uderstanding – resulting in confabulist and obsessive creation out of nothing at all reasonable of quite preposterous curves. He is a typical interweb wack job of whom we have a few. For the most part he simply drops by with umwelcome comment on the characterisitics of Australians and threatening to put us all on his list of climate clowns. Boring.
Usually the ‘reseach’ achieves some sort of peer review and exposure in more or less respected journals. With webby there is no publishing except on a loser blog – and it is getting quite sad. The constant claims of a profound insight on his part is certainly tingling the spidey senses of people here.
My own published work is of a science communications nature – probaby quite fitting to my background and talents. I quite often groan and think that I could do much better than most of the cr@p that passes for science journalism. I have published in a few well known venues on ENSO and global warming and seamless modelling and in rather more specialised forums on environmental law and policy.
Webby for some reason objects to my quoting science and inevitably someone objects when I don’t. With these people the objective is not about communication and knowledge but in denying air to ideas they object to. All very Marcusian. They are desperately flailing and wailing and it is only going to get worse in the short term
web is never polite or reasonable. With all of the ongoing nonsense about Australia from Bart, web, springer – I suggest you sit on it and spin. I am being conciliatory by not including the rest of the US – although I can always lampoon Wyoming and California if you like. I wouldn’t be the first. Fish in a barrel.
Willard, you might be right if people read beyond headlines. But if they did concerning the NPR headline (as in the provided example) you must agree they would have been wrong.
In the post I only cited two of about 200 headlines to the same effect.
On the objective facts, I suggest that you will lose the headline arguement concerning this post/comment. If you disagree, please bring quantitative facts to the discussion. Else fade into the background like most of your compatriots already have. Brave but foolhardy to stand for a losing cause.
Mike, Joe, Al Gore, anybody else left out there to continue your losing debates?
If so, let’s at least make some interesting side wagers on outcomes.
Regards
> On the objective facts, I suggest […]
You do like to suggest, Rud.
Providing reasoned arguments would have been better.
You just could not resist mentioning Mike’s name, couldn’t you?
If you’re to summon the Auditor, please listen to what the he says.
Also, please beware that if you’re criticizing headlines.
In this case, “objective facts” is just a slogan.
But an important one in the auditing sciences.
This one is cute. An auditing note from willard, followed, in this threading, by a note from Steve McIntyre.
=============
INTEGRITY ™ — Problems that “matter”.
He’s funnier, too.
====
Speaking of bet:
> Just a quick point here. I state in the interview that we can’t be sure there aren’t any abrupt global warming blips during the Holocene similar to the current one due to chronological uncertainties and the relatively low time resolution of our global temperature reconstruction. It is worth considering though that we do have several high resolution proxy climate records from various regions around the world (think ice cores), and if abrupt global warming events happened in the past, then we might expect these local records to show them…..but my sense is they don’t. So, this isn’t hard and fast proof that there weren’t any abrupt global events like today during the rest of the Holocene….but if I had to lay down a bet, it might make me place my wager on that side of the argument .
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/scientists-find-an-abrupt-warm-jog-after-a-very-long-cooling/?comments#permid=24
Perhaps Rud should propose a bet to Shakun himself.
It is time.
beware of Slender Man
Omigod, moshe; why didn’t I go visit the Palace first? Here I am prattling away like a simpleton.
==========
Mosher says: “In the current day estimates they have high resolution data”.
Not in their dataset. They use the same low resolution data in the modern period, only less of it. It’s really hard to figure out why their reconstruction goes up so much, since, as others have observed, one does not observe a blade in the series themselves.
Some of their modern series are clearly dated wrong though the effect is hard to say until their method is replicated. For example, Marcot re-assigned the coretop of MD95-2011 a very well dated North Atlantic core (tephra dated) from the 570 BP of specialists to 0 BP, Another coretop is changed from before AD1000 to 0 BP. This is for multiple cores.
This sort of thing ought to “matter”. And if it doesn’t “matter”, then one will need to have them explain what exactly does “matter”. It looks like a real dog’s breakfast. I’ve been working on a long post at CA, but keep encountering new problems and am finding it hard to finish a post. Or even begin one.
Steven:
For many reasons it is a good example of GIGO! Nothing more! Their resolution does not allow them to make any claims about recent temperatures or even Mann et al Whatever. It was a major step backward for science respectability. Just another in the long list that have been happening since the start of this CAGW fiasco!
Making a new study as impenetrable as possible may be a natural next step now that data availability is somehow increasing..
“It’s really hard to figure out why their reconstruction goes up so much, “
Not really. They say, though not as clearly as they should. I gave the quote and reasoning here.
Nick Stokes,
It seems to me that putting this data into a 400 year bin would greatly reduce the ~0.8°C spike into a ~0.05°C bump.
However, if you were to include a 3°C increase forecast as well (as suggested in the Revkin interview) this bin comes out much closer to 0.8°C.
It all depends on the binning process.
Steve:
Have you been in contact with Marcott et al to ask for more details on their analysis? Given some of the points raised by you and others, it might be helpful to at least show that you gave them an opportunity to clarify their analytic choices and decisions. It sounds like there is a list of questions that you could pose.
Steve McIntyre sed:
” I’ve been working on a long post at CA, but keep encountering new problems and am finding it hard to finish a post. Or even begin one.”
In honour of Steve’s identification of this particular aspect of the Marcott et al paper, I suggest we now refer to it as Hydra13.
Warning: laymans question.
Paleo reconstructions show variability of temperature, but how is the absolute level of temperatures determined?
Absolute temperatures aren’t used for reconstructions like these so your question is something of a non-issue. It’s akin to the modern surface temperature record where desert temperatures are combined with arctic temperatures. The baseline for each series doesn’t matter, just the variance from it.
@BS
The implication in what you wrote is that absolute GAT isn’t known well even today. If it were then relative deviations from present absolute temperature can be used to calculate past absolute temperature. One cannot simultaneously say GAT today is 15C, GAT in MWP was 0.2C cooler without also being able to say MWP GAT was 14.8C.
Consciously or not you illustrate the fact that GAT right frickin’ now with the best instrumentation network ever we don’t know absolute GAT with a degree of accuracy that justifies bandying about numbers with tenth degee C accuracy dating back into the dark ages or more.
If we can’t determine absolute GAT today to within a couple tenths of a degree C with all our satellites and buoys and Stevensen Screens and whatnot how can anyone possibly claim, with a straight face, we can know if the MWP GAT was a couple tenths of a degree warmer or colder than today? It’s a travesty that we don’t have a reliable absolute GAT even today.
This is why I eschew GAT numbers going back before we had satellites with microwave sounders obtaining average column temperature variation for atmospheric layers a few kilometers deep over most of the face of the globe every day of every year with the precision necessary. And unfortunately that doesn’t measure enthalpy which is more important than temperature. We’re just starting to get decent enthalpy information and it’s telling a story that doesn’t agree with GCM physics assumptions and parameterization. Absolute humidity rises as expected but RH unexpectedly falls instead of remaining constant. Lapse rate feedback is much larger than expected. Cloud heights are changing unexpectedly. Actually not unexpectedly for my hypothesis which predicts exactly those things i.e. increased DWLIR drives evaporation higher without raising surface temperature much at all which results in lowered environmental lapse rate and higher altitude where clouds condense from adiabatic cooling. The higher level of the clouds which condense at the same temperature puts those warm clouds closer to outer space where there is less restriction to radiative cooling because there’s less mass in greenhouse gases in the way at the higher altitude. Adequate instrumentation to measure these hydrologic details is only now being deployed and the first results are confirming what I’ve been saying. So if you want to know where CO2 reaches its potential for 1.1C surface heating that is confirmed by applications of it like the laws of orbital mechanics were confirmed by putting a man on the moon you need to follow the water. Where there’s lots of liquid water on the surface there’s not much of CO2 warming instead there are higher clouds at the same temperature as the prior clouds with more total water in the ground to cloud column but lower relative humidity and very little change in surface temperature. Make it frozen water on the surface and then CO2 gets to do its thing because it doesn’t evaporate in response to DWLIR.
But hey, in my business we go to war with the data we got. Airplanes crash and bridges collapse if we used numbers we’d wish to have. In climate science it appears its all too common to go to war with data tortured into what you wish you had. That’s fine for academic wool gathering and internecine competitive paper publishing but it isn’t good enough for decision making where blood and treasure is at stake and certainly not good enough for planning a century in advance. The output of science goes into engineering and they inform those wishing to invest in some new or improved widget what can be done, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. Engineers decide which bits of science meet the standards needed to make reasonably confident predictions of practical application thereof. It seems modern climatologists want to skip straight from the hypothetical to the money supply without first getting the project approved by engineering.
Add to this the political impossibility of slowing CO2 emission enough to make any practical difference in the eventual outcome. The United States is back at 1990 level of emission and CO2 growth in the atmosphere didn’t miss a beat. All we ended up doing was driving our fossil fuel consumption overseas. We used to burn it to make various goods for ourselves now China burns it to make the same goods which we now buy from them. Manufacturing is global and will continue wherever it’s the cheapest and consumption will continue wherever there’s demand.
Springer has another lucid moment
I get your point if it is a proxy only reconstruction, but when the instrumental record is to be spliced on – you would surely need to know the absolute level of both proxy temperatures and the instrumental to get their relative level right?
I don’t see how it can be a non-issue.
Harris,
I’ve not read the paper so I can’t comment on how they did it. However, in principle, as long as there is a period of overlap between proxy and instrumental data that can provide a common baseline.
Anomaly data rather than absolute instrumental data can then be used.
Re “beware” – ironically, merely being aware of being a layman renders you expert compared to most who post here, both above and below the line.
The basic problem with tacking on the instrumental record to proxy records is it’s adding apples to oranges. The temporal resolution of the proxies in this case is hundreds of years. The temporal resolution of the instrumental record is hundreds of minutes. The instrumental record can show an anomalously warm day, year, or decade. The proxy record can’t show a warmer period as short as even a century because it only shows averages of 300-year periods or longer thus any shorter term anomalously warm periods are lost – smudged out by the colder periods surrounding them.
So that’s what’s wrong with tacking on the instrumental record in this particular case and it’s egregious. Marcott knows this full well. His doctoral thesis was based on exactly the same proxy record and includes the same graphs with the exception that his doctoral thesis didn’t append the instrumental record. One might wonder why the mass market addition contained the gratuitous bad-math addition of the hocky blade. Only Marcott or one of the other authors can explain. If I were to hazard a guess I’d say it was either one of the other authors or a reviewer who has a bit more of the caped climate crusader in him that is behind the addition.
I find Rud Istvan’s observations, if not completely kind or tactful, quite valuable. I found that when the authors made some similar observations with less clarity and emphasis, they were valuable too, sometimes to a lesser degree. Signs of a MWP less than 120 years would be imperceptible, and even one of about four centuries may resolve as little more than that turtle-like hump from the Dark Ages to the Late Renaissance we see in the simulated ensemble average. Or that turtle could aptly reflect something more like what really happened, though that’s far less likely.
The graph cannot be treated with traditional trendology, as it’s not a traditional time series. It’s more of an imaginatively constructed infographic.
I’m disappointed with the treatment of the endpoint problem in this infographic, personally. While the Revkin interview (http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/11/lets-play-hockey-again/#comment-301731 and thanks to nvw for providing the link to the video) allowed the principle author to enunciate his justification for the endpoint treatment based on the forecast of 2C-6C further warming this century, it sure ain’t the way a conservative trendologist would’ve done it, infographic-style or no. My own treatment would be to end the timeline 120 years earlier. Because just like you can’t use 5-year running means to reliably predict climate trends of 32 years duration, we have not seen a reliable proof developed showing that on this dataset a line 120 years long can forecast a 300+ year-long climate trend line (simulated ensemble or not). So even if the last 120 years is reliably known in the thermometer record, I’m not convinced it belongs in a study of the proxy record.
Nonetheless, the infographic approach, while it has several significant flaws as a truth-in-advertising problem (especially given the headlines touting it, and very especially given the headlines demonizing it) could be extremely applicable to future GCM validation.
Training models over 11,300 years and then ‘de-resolving’ their outputs through six dozen synthetic proxy filters (it’s much easier to predict what mud would look like given a climate, than integrating back to the climate from mud samples) to see if they reproduce the same infographic would be quite persuasive. Where the models substantially differed from the infographic by this test, valuable conclusions might be drawn about the nature of climate on the centennial to millennial scale.
And don’t we all like a nice, colorful infographic?
In lesser words, here’s Jonathan Baez:
> I agree that a graph like this is a good idea. But if the people spreading them around can’t point to a clear and precise explanation of what data and assumptions they come from, it’ll be easy to argue they’re just propaganda. It doesn’t take that much more work to do things right.
http://planet3.org/2013/03/08/why-equilibrium-sensitivity-is-not-policy-relevant/#comment-18835
A colorful infographic seems always to be a good first move in a ClimateBall game.
Seeing Rud offer a bet to Jonathan while beating his chest would be a theorical novelty here.
There seems to be a feeling that warmist conspirators have stolen away the skeptics’ beloved global MWP.
Is this really justified? Was there ever a consensus that it existed globally rather than regionally?
I’d refer anyone who thinks the former to the words of Hubert Lamb, written in 1982 long before AGW was quite so politically controversial an issue. This can be taken as a neutral opinion:
There are hints that this [MWP] was a cold time generally in and around the wide expanse of the North Pacific Ocean. If so, part of the explanation for the medieval warmth in Europe and North America, extending into the Arctic in the Atlantic sector and in at least a good deal of the continental sectors on either side, must be that there was a persistent tilt of the circumpolar vortex (and the climatic zones which it defines) away from the Atlantic and towards the Pacific sector, which was rather frequently affected by outbreaks of polar air
In other words, he was saying the North Atlantic was warmer because the North Pacific was cooler. On a global scale, the two would have cancelled out each other and so there wasn’t any global MWP but there was a regional MWP..
Evidence of the MWPhas been found throughout the world: Australia, NZ, Japan, China, Southern Chile, South africa.
The balance of evidence shows that it was in fact a global event.
The same balance of evidence suggests it was cooler than today
lolwot
Your response:
References? (Or is this just more hot air?)
Max
See the Ljungqvist 2010 graph in the post
lolwot
As evidence that the current period is warmer than the MWP you cite the Ljungqvist study cited in the lead post.
Duh!
This study concludes:
The graph you cite shows the same.
Max
According to HadCRUT the NH is now about 0.6C warmer than the “1961–1990” period.
According to the graph that makes us far warmer now than the MWP average.
Weasel word alert! “far warmer now than the MWP average.”
The MWP was generally agreed to have lasted 250-350 years. A long time for an average. Yet your time period is less than 20. Try using the same averaging for both periods.
You are guilty of the same crime of Marcott.
“The balance of evidence ” also throws up lots of hockey stick like graphs.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=31
philjourdan, note that manacker cited a 30 year period (the 1961–1990 mean temperature level).
So try again.
@Lolwot – note the comment was in reference to a comparison of the AVERAGE for the MWP (which we can put at roughly 300 years) and a time period AFTER 1990 (up to 2008 as that was the latest data quoted).
Ergo, 300 versus less than 20.
And my response was in response to TempTerrain, not Manacker. Learn to read.
Ha it was in response to me not tempterrain. You learn to read.
Also try to read what I was responding to. In which the MWP was compared to a 30 year period. An *old* 30 year period 1960-1990.
That was apparently OK, but I note the Earth has warmed since the 1960-1990 period taking us above the MWP.
Not when you use a 300 year average (that was used in the MWP). You made the same mistake that Marcott did. You cannot average 2 averages (or even compare them) that do not have the same base. Math 101.
And I guess I did miss YOUR comment as I do blank out at stupidity having to read it twice.
Try again. What is the AVERAGE for the last 300 years compared to the MWP? Or if you like, we can take the peak 18 years in the MWP and compare it to your assertion. But you cannot compare an 18 year average to a 300 year average and expect to get any intelligence out of it.
Why that’s the whole point. You have a period called the MWP that supposedly was 300 years warmer than present. I show that the present is higher than that average. Therefore that myth is busted.
If you want to talk about specific 30 year periods 1000 years ago. That isn’t the MWP. The MWP is a ~300 year period. Are we currently above that 300 year period? Yes I think the data shows we are.
lolwot,
“You have a period called the MWP that supposedly was 300 years warmer than present. I show that the present is higher than that average. Therefore that myth is busted.”
You are the Don Quixote of Climate Etc., ruthlessly slaying straw men with reckless abandon.
Who precisely was it that claimed the entirety of the MWP was higher than today’s temps?
lolwot
philjourdan has pointed out where your arithmetic (and logic) are again failing you.
The MWP average temperature is a 250-year average.
This is being compared to a 30-year average 1961-1990.
The conclusion of this comparison is that the MWP average was a bit warmer than the 30-year average 1961-1990.
You are wanting to compare it to some even shorter-term later average, which is 0.6C warmer than the 1961-1990 period..
But these are both just “blips” in the record.
Let’s compare the 250-year MWP average with the 162-year HadCRUT4 average to get a realistic comparison between the two periods.
The average anomaly over this period was -0.16C.
The average anomaly over the period 1961-1990 was +0.25C
So the longer period was 0.41C colder than the short-term “blip”
And the comparison with the MWP would show an even warmer (250-year) MWP compared to the (162-year) current warm period.
Get it?
Max
“The MWP average temperature is a 250-year average.
This is being compared to a 30-year average 1961-1990.”
What I want to do is compare the MWP average with the temperature of the last 10 years.
The last 10 years are warmer than the MWP average according to the data. It is perfectly factual for me to point this out, that the MWP is on average cooler than the last 10 years. This in fact means the MWP was cooler. Note it doesn’t mean the whole MWP was cooler (although it doesn’t rule that out), just that the MWP on average was cooler than today.
Yes Max, we get it.
You don’t want to compare today’s temperature to the MWP because that would involve admitting that today’s temperatures are warmer.
However your deceit is painfully transparent.
Repeating a deception does not make it true.
Do you get it yet?
tempterrain
Hubert Lamb wrote of the Medieval Warm Period (in fact, he arguably coined the term).a period during which temperature was generally a bit warmer than today.
Historical records from all over the civilized world at the time show us that it was a slightly warmer period.
And, of course, we have the physical evidence from old Viking farms buried in the Greenland permafrost or carbon dated remains of old trees found under receding alpine glaciers high above the present tree line.
Most of this evidence already existed during Hubert Lamb’s day, but more recently there have been almost 80 studies from all over the world using different modern paleo-climate methodologies, which show that the MWP was a bit warmer than today (these are cited in the lead post here).
So we have new information since Hubert Lamb’s time, which confirm that the MWP was global and slightly warmer than today.
Max
Max,
I’d say it’s time ter call in Tony Brown’s voluminous historical
record of climate variability, wouldn’t you?
Beth
Beth,
There’s no need. I think we know the answer. The early IPCC reports, based partly on the work of Hubert Lamb did show a more pronounced “MWP”. The question is was it global or regional?
As Max points out more information has become available since the early 80’s. If it shows the MWP to have been regional, as in this and other studies, then its obviously wrong and part of the conspiracy.
Hubert Lamb is generally regarded as being right by skeptics when he was talking about a pronounced MWP, but wrong when he wasn’t, when he was talking about the warmth being offset by cooler periods elsewhere. That’s because more is known now that it was then.
tempterrain
“No need for data, Beth. We know the answer”
Pretty much tells it all, tempterrain.
Ignore the 80+ independent studies from all over the world, using different paleo-climate methods, all concluding that the MWP was slightly warmer than today.
Ignore the historical records from all over the civilized world at the time that show the same.
Ignore the actual physical evidence that confirms a warmer MWP.
Sounds like the ostrich approach to me, tempterrain.
Max
Marcott uses a mean of globally distributed proxies – so really the old warmist meme of a regional MWP has no relevance at all. The result shows a smoothed MWP temperature not all that different to todays unsmoothed.
You guys are so weird.
Max,
I think I’ve pointed this out to you before, so ignorance on your part can’t be used as excuse. The idea of quotes is … well to quote. That means you quote what what actually said or written.
You can’t just insert words, like “data” as you feel like it. Especially when they completely change the meaning of the actual sentence.
It is my understanding that it is generally accepted that the MWP was generally confined to the North Atlantic and Western Europe region of the world. However, over the last twenty years or so, the definition of this region has been slightly expanded to include the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Alaska, Oregon, the Yucatan, South Africa, the Antarctic Peninsula, Siberia, China, New Zealand, etc.
The Chinese would beg to differ with you. They have shown that there was also a very warm time in China that correlates to the North Atlantic MWP – and I do not think they can expand the North Atlantic area that far.
There are many clues that the Chinese have figured out that a warmer world is better for the Chinese.
====================
philjourdan,
“That’s a joke, son. A flag waver. You’re built too low. The fast ones go over your head. Ya got a hole in your glove. I keep pitchin’ ’em and you keep missin’ ’em. Ya gotta keep your eye on the ball. Eye. Ball. I almost had a gag, son. Joke, that is.” [/foghornleghorn]
‘ENSO causes climate extremes across and beyond the Pacific basin; however, evidence of ENSO at high southern latitudes is generally restricted to the South Pacific and West Antarctica. Here, the authors report a statistically significant link between ENSO and sea salt deposition during summer from the Law Dome (LD) ice core in East Antarctica. ENSO-related atmospheric anomalies from the central-western equatorial Pacific (CWEP) propagate to the South Pacific and the circumpolar high latitudes. These anomalies modulate high-latitude zonal winds, with El Niño (La Niña) conditions causing reduced (enhanced) zonal wind speeds and subsequent reduced (enhanced) summer sea salt deposition at LD. Over the last 1010 yr, the LD summer sea salt (LDSSS) record has exhibited two below-average (El Niño–like) epochs, 1000–1260 ad and 1920–2009 ad, and a longer above-average (La Niña–like) epoch from 1260 to 1860 ad. Spectral analysis shows the below-average epochs are associated with enhanced ENSO-like variability around 2–5 yr, while the above-average epoch is associated more with variability around 6–7 yr. The LDSSS record is also significantly correlated with annual rainfall in eastern mainland Australia. While the correlation displays decadal-scale variability similar to changes in the interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO), the LDSSS record suggests rainfall in the modern instrumental era (1910–2009 ad) is below the long-term average. In addition, recent rainfall declines in some regions of eastern and southeastern Australia appear to be mirrored by a downward trend in the LDSSS record, suggesting current rainfall regimes are unusual though not unknown over the last millennium.’ http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00003.1?journalCode=clim
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Vance2012-AntarticaLawDomeicecoresaltcontent.jpg
And yet we know that Pacific sea surface temperatures were as high in the MWP as in the last hundred years.
+1
Peter Davies is off somewhere so I’m standin’ in fer him.
BC
Thanks Beth. I have been working outside and getting heaps of vit B12! Which many of the CE regulars could do with more of methinks ;)
All the Aussies are covering for each other, I see. Nice tribal tendencies you are displaying there.
Paging Dr Lewandowski. We have a patient for you. Dress warm, as he is in Minnesota.
PS – please do not form an opinion of Minnesotans from your patient. He’s an anomoly. They really are among the nicest folks you’ll ever have the pleasure of knowing. (Assuming you can recognize nice, Dr Lew.)
Ting, you don’t seem to get the joke of these Aussies with their fake ocker accents and weird narratives leading you all on an extended prank.
You would figure that with the Kate Middleton episode most people would catch on to their schtick. Some people are just kind of slow I guess.
Web
Your prejudicial behavior is showing again.
Ringo said
The schtick is about as juvenile as the dudes who insert themselves into some serious conversation and end it by saying “baba booey” . Google it, if you don’t know what I am talking about.
At least that one gets telegraphed when its over. This other stuff with Hydrologist, Girma, Doug Cotton, Myrrrrh, StefTheD’nier, Beth and the other Aussie pranksters just goes on and on and on.
WHT you missed the joke I’m afraid. There’s an ad going on air for an insurance company in Aust where someone vanishes and is replaced by someone else in the middle of a sequence.
In my recent peregrinations – I sought an answer to the question of why Australia is such a tremendously successful multi-ethnic society. Not multi-cultural – that seems more a sanitised version of reality for use in government press releases. But a truly human, grounded, earthy and usually vulgar adaptation of the Australian idiom in food, language and humour especially.
The consensus opinion is that we are a nation of wogs – and that we all have wog land rights. We all have dual allegiances to some nation somewhere and to a home in Australia. The saddest wog of all is the indigenous wog – who is a wog in their own country. But we all have a right to sun, sand, earth and sky. We have a right to fish and to a bit of consensual making of the 2 backed beast. We have a right to nude up at rock festivals and throw ourselves in the mud. We have a right to be happy in our own way.
This is a nation and a way of life that is worth defending and dying for if necessary. As we have again and again. One of the funniest things I have heard recently is that Australians had the worst desertion rates of any soldiers in World War 1. Australians were not shot for desertion and so disappeared into the nearest bar or bordello – only to reappear for duty slightly the worse for wear. This is a celebrated expression of the larrikin myth that is at the core of our national ideals – and which feed into the multi-ethnic dynamic. Send us your poor, tired, huddled masses and we will soon turn them into swaggering and insouciant larrikins. It is the Australian way.
Please be upstanding for the national anthem.
Well now, generalissimo from Oz, yer started off so impressively
with yer ‘peregrinations’ and ‘ we all have a right ter sun, sand,
earth and sky’ but then …ahemm… generalissimo skippy, hafta
say ter the denizens here, we who come from down under do not
‘all’ throw ourselves down in the mud at rock festivals : ) Tho’ we
do tend ter respond ter anthems in a somewhat irreverent fashion
I guess. We tend not ter do ‘respect’ all that well, unless we think
it’s been earned.
Beth the CG
Grr pesky lines!
And the pranks continue..
So what happened to that nice Jolly Swagman ?
It’s hard to tell Australians about climate change. We already have this idea of what it actually is, so it’s very hard for our Green Betters to “educate” and “empower” us on the subject. Just for example, the whole of eastern Oz got drenched in the 1890s (when it wasn’t getting singed). Then, after the Federation Drought, which even Kidman couldn’t handle, we were thirsty for five decades – barring the odd catastrophic flood, just ’cause it’s Oz. That’s a five, okay? Fifty plus years.
Then, in 1950, down came the rain, in startling excess, and kept coming. Then, in this previously thirsty land, we had what was called the Maitland Flood – though poor old Maitland was not to blame. This was in 1955. Now, picture England and Wales. Now picture some country to the west of Sydney. Got it in your minds? An inland sea formed west of Sydney which was the size of England and Wales. Shall I repeat? England and Wales. The size of. How’s that for a cherry-pick? Pretty cherry picky, eh?
But when you’ve copped the world’s greatest known inferno (Victoria 1851) and a storm surge that left porpoises 15 metres up a cliff (Cyclone Mahina 1899) you kind of get used to it, in a grim way. Even recently we’ve had fire and storm and flood that could stand with some of the crackers of past years.
Sorry, I’m rambling and pranking in that annoying Aussie way. You were going to tell us about climate change. Do go on. Fascinate us. Tell us about how the climate changes.
I well remember perhaps a little over a year ago, me friends,
when I first discovered Judith the Brave’s open society and her measured approach to uncertainty in climate science… a
comment by Kim resonated with me … something to do with
eschewing guilt and sacrifice of virgins, something about
laughter as the antidote to fear. That’s what the clowning’s
about, WHT. Free men and women, in Oz, in the YEW Ess,
the Yew Kay, Switzerland, refuse ter hunker down and fear
the fewcher. To truly ‘live’ is to question, adapt, laugh, love
accept our fallibility but also our appreciate our creativity.
Amen.
Beth the homespun philosopher ( tho’ she likes ter wear silk.)
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mark_twain.html
fear, and
That’s Sidney Kidman who couldn’t handle the drought – not Nicole. Nicole can handle anything.
You can’t lump all Australians together in this way. Some of us know the score!
http://www.csiro.au/Climate-Change-Book
“That’s Sidney Kidman who couldn’t handle the drought”
Well, his firm is still going strong.
‘As biographer Jill Bowen shows, Kidman was much more than a grazier. In addition to his many successful business ventures and his contributions to the war effort, he was driven by a grand plan for the remote, arid areas of Australia. This kept him locked in a battle with the land – and against drought.
As a barely literate youth of thirteen, Sidney Kidman ran away from home and worked as an add-job boy in a grog shanty in outback Australia. He went on to become the greatest pastoral landholder in modern history, acquiring a legendary reputation both at home and abroad as the Cattle King.
Wealth, power, fame and honours did not change Sidney Kidman. He remained the homespun, gregarious bushman for whom men worked with an almost savage loyalty. Greatly admired, he also had many enemies and in his later years was dogged by controversies and untruths. This book explores the fascinating Kidman facts and fictions, and gives a balanced, thoroughly entertaining account of this larger-than-life Australian and his exceptional achievements.’ http://www.exploroz.com/Shop/AngusRobertson+Kidman_The_Forgotten_King.aspx
Kidman has a mythical status in Australia – and so all sorts of speculations arise. But there are some battles with drought in arid Australia that can’t be won. Best to go with the flow sometimes.
Mosomoso is quite correct in his discussion. Australian rainfall has increased somewhat over the last century – http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/climate/change/timeseries.cgi?graph=rain&area=aus&season=0112&ave_yr=0
Alhough if you look closely you will find that there are decadal paterns related to ENSO+PDO.
1916 to 1945 – http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/climate_averages/decadal-rainfall/index.jsp?maptype=6&period=1645&product=totals
1946 to 1975 – http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/climate_averages/decadal-rainfall/index.jsp?maptype=6&period=4675&product=totals
1976 to 1995 – http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/climate_averages/decadal-rainfall/index.jsp?maptype=3&period=7695&product=totals
This has been known to Australian hydrologists since the mid 1980’s.
Rainfall catastrophists in Australia are wrong and it is the result of ignoring hydrological science. e.g. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JHM1215.1
We are in for very much increased average rainfall over the next few decades as the cool Pacific mode intensifies.
Max,
“We have new information since Hubert Lamb’s time, which confirm that the MWP was” not “global and slightly warmer than today”.
And this new study is one of them.
tempterrain
“And this new study is one of them”
And the various independent studies from all over the world using different paleo-climate methods are 80+ more of them.
Pretty hard to ignore 80+ studies in favor of 1, unless you have your head in the sand, tt
Max
The mainstream scientific position is that the global temperature record, when plotted in graphical form over the millenium , is indeed like a hockey stick in shape. Some handles are flatter than others.
So the MWP may exist, but it isn’t as significant as skeptics like to claim. Claims of Vikings cultivating vines in Greenland during the MWP are almost certainly exaggerated:-)
“And the various independent studies from all over the world using different paleo-climate methods are 80+ more of them.”
No. Those studies are not global. They are regional and many of them don’t even synchronize.
This has been hidden from you by a bit of co2science fiddling.
It’s encouraging to see you tying your pony to this wagon, tempterrain!
tempterrain
Again you are reverting to talking in riddles, like the Sphinx.
On one side we have:
– 80+ independent studies from all over the world, using different paleo-climate methodologies, which all show that the MWP was slightly warmer than today.
– A historical record from all over the civilized world at the time, which also shows a slightly warmer MWP
– Actual physical evidence, such as Viking farms buried in the Greenland permafrost or carbon-dated remains of old trees found under receding alpine glaciers, far above today’s tree line.
And on the other side we have
– One broken hockey shtick
– the Marcott et al. study featured here
Duh!
Pretty easy to see where the bulk of the evidence lies, right?
Max
PS The Vikings did not “cultivate grapes” in Nova Scotia. They found them growing wild there.
One broken record…
– 80+ independent studies from all over the world, using different paleo-climate methodologies, which all show that the MWP was slightly warmer than today. …
Of course, this does not mean the MWP was slightly warmer than the current period.
And were it, I do not think the consequence would be exactly what skeptics think it would be. There are no free rides out of the CO2 problem.
JCH
I’d agree that paleo-climate reconstructions should be taken with a grain of salt.
But when one sees 80+ independent studies from all over the world, using different paleo methodologies plus some studies based on actual physical evidence, which all conclude that the MWP was a bit warmer than today versus a broken hockey stick and this latest Marcott & Shakun study, it is easy for me to see where the weight of evidence lies.
It’s not that important, because the MWP was only one of several past periods of warmer temperatures than today.
Max
Max ,
This 80+ claim is pretty vague. You’re essentially using the same tactics as the Intelligent Design crowd who claim a similar number of independent “peer reviewed” scientific papers to support their position. But, you know as well as I do that they are well out of the mainstream.
http://www.discovery.org/a/2640
Note they also talk about a “scientific debate” about ID in the same way as you do about whether AGW is real.
Do they really think there is such a debate? Or are are they just claiming there is one to try to give themselves some credibility?
The relevant question here is :
are the mainstream (ie evolutionist) people who oppose the idea of Intelligent Design, anywhere near as obviously corrupt, biased, politicised, and entirely in the pocket of a massive funder, as the alarnmist climate mainstream is ?
I suggest not. It’s actually the climate mainstream and the ID people that go together.
Yes of course they are much worse. Climate ‘alarmists’, as you call them, only want to protect the environment. Evolutionists are evil atheistic types who deny the divine word of God :-)
It amuses me the manner in which the alarmists push a construct of the mind of man, and ignore nature.
=======================
Yes, simple minds are easily amused.
Why, Peter, you’ve Ockhamed right cleaverly to the source of my glee!
==================
Medieval Warm Period deniers. LOL
History won’t remember these people kindly. When they call others deniers they are simply projecting their own mindset onto others. Mother Nature can’t be denied forever and after 15 years of no global warming while anthropogenic CO2 continues to be produced at the same rapid pace has become like unto a wooden stake through the heart of the bloodsucking night stalkers.
“There doesn’t seem to be anything really new here in terms of our understanding of the Holocene. Mike’s Nature trick seems to be now a standard practice in paleo reconstructions. I personally don’t see how this analysis says anything convincing about climate variability on the time scale of a century.”
The only thing it suggests is we are entering a glacial period. Which I don’t think is true, but that what their long term graph suggests- if one properly ignores the obviously false splicing of modern record.
On use and misuse of data, there were recently posts on CE about Australia’s “Angry Summer” (TM Tim Flannery). Des Moore reports that physicist Tom Quirk recently checked the data, shown at http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2013/03/our-angry-summer-was-no-worse-than-miffed
Dr Quirk notes that the graphs show that it remains unequivocal that there has been no substantive change in annual global average temperatures between 2002 and 2012. And while there has also been no change worth noting in the 16 years from 1998, account needs to be taken of the fact that this pause includes the “high” El Nino affected year in 1998.
Yet according to the head of the government’s Climate Commission, Professor Tim Flannery, “if you look at the whole Earth system, you can see that strong warming trend. And indeed, if you look at the atmospheric record for a long enough period, you see exactly the same trend”. In response to the interviewer’s observation that “figures released last year… showed that there’d been a plateau for about the last 15 years or so”, Flannery replied “in a sense what you’re saying is correct …but there has been no plateau!” (below).
The five key “facts” identified by the Commission in its 12-page report of March 4, The Angry Summer, included “record-breaking heat … climate change that is already adversely affecting Australians … highly likely that extreme hot weather will become more frequent and severe in Australia and around the globe over the coming decades etc etc etc.” The Commission “discovered” no less than 123 records were broken in the December to February period. The lead author of the report, Professor Will Steffen, who has served as science adviser to the Department of Climate Change, observed “there is a 1-in-500 chance that we are talking about natural variation causing all these new records.”
By contrast, former Deputy Head of the Bureau of Meteorology, Bill Kininmonth, has noted that “the high temperatures were neither Australia-wide nor global, as might be expected from carbon dioxide forcing… (and) the past summer was only 0.2 degrees warmer than the previous warmest summer of 1982-83”. Separately, Kininmonth has observed that the trend in the Australia-wide maximum since 1980, including this recent “hottest summer”, has been 0.1 degrees per century, not significantly different from zero. He compares our hot summer with that experienced in Europe in 2003 — a manifestation of a sustained blocking weather pattern.
Here we have a classic example of the acceptance without serious checking of analyses by “official” scientists who are prepared to use data for their own purposes. It further reduces the credibility of the Gillard government’s policy on climate change. It is also a disgrace that the ABC did not have an alternative view when Flannery was given an extensive interview on 7.30. As Andrew Bolt suggested in his Sunday TV program (below), Flannery and the Commission should cease to have an official role.
+1
BC
That’s +1 for Des Moore rather than me. OT, but I’ve just been to the river and walked normally for the first time since July. Yea! Progress!
‘Tirra lirra by the river,’ good news Faustino…Birds calling,
river purling, riffling and silver swirls.Say, a lovely opening
to Melville’s Moby Dick describing human fascination with
water. Kinda like skeptics attraction ter the Medieval Warming
Period Tempterrain might say.
BC
http://www.americanliterature.com/author/herman-melville/book/moby-dick-or-the-whale/chapter-1-loomings
‘Call me Ishmael.’ A grand book indeed.
CAGW memes that refuse to die (in no particular order):
Mann’s hockey stick
Hansen’s ’88 predictions
There is no C in CAGW
The precautionary principle requires decarbonization because
of the potential for catastrophe.
All skeptics are funded by big oil
All skeptics are stupid, or evil, or insane, or all three
Climate models don’t need to be verified or validated to justify
massive carbon taxes
Climate models prove we need to decarbonize
Climate models are irrelevant to the need to decarbonize, because
paleo-reconstructions show the current warming is unprecedented.
Paleo-reconstructions are irrelvant to the need to decarbonize
because it’s all about the physics.
Even if we don’t know all of the physics, the climate models are the
best we have and they prove the need to decarbonize.
We know the global average temperature of the entire climate system
of the Earth, to within tenths of a degree for any day, year, decade,
century, millenium….
We know the average global temperature of the Earth to within tenths
of a degree for long past decades, centuries, millenia and eons.
Climate models can accurately predict what the global average temp
will be 10, 30, 50 and 100 years from now
We know enough about the complex, chaotic climate of the Earth to
model it with a reasonable degree of accuracy
Skeptics are stoopid
They’re like Freddy Kruger, no matter how you kill them, somebody always will bring them back to life because there’s a buck to be made.
Careful, Gary, warmistas might use that list for a scary pamphlet.
Gary M
We are dealing with the “hydra phenomenon” here.
http://mythology.wikia.com/wiki/Hydra
You have named 16 of the CAGW hydra’s heads.
But new ones keep sprouting, just like the demise of Mann’s original hockey stick “head” gave birth to several spaghetti copy hockey stick” heads”.
The end of observed global warming “head” gave birth to the Chinese aerosol and Ocean heat content “heads”.
Of course, the “immortal head” is the “it’s worse than we thought head”.
Max
PS Has Josh made a cartoon of this beast yet?
Gary M
Here’s your CAGW Hydra.
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8509/8552980332_4a6b761f76_b.jpg
Beastly.
(But purely fictional, of course.)
Max
Heh, attribution it’s a brute.
H/t Kim.
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8509/8552980332_4a6b761f76_b.jpg
Max,
The only question left is – Who is the skeptic Hercules?
Could it be Agatha Christie’s incisive detective Hercules Poirot? (Not to be confused with poireau = leek).
Beth
Phlannery needs to check out all those thermometers (even the ones next to AC exhausts).
Max
Max,
Channelling Phlannery
I intuit … he has no
problem with thermometres
next to AC exhausts or
at airports but prefers
fewer thermometers
at those alpine
freeezing cold ski resorts.
( I could be wrong of course.)
Beth the serf.
Having now read the paper and the SI and also having studied the actual data, here are my 2 cents, with a particular focus on the most recent part of the reconstruction.
1) results show that the reconstruction with a time step of 20 years shows a large upswing at 10 BP (1940, 0.6 +/- 0.56 K, the latter being 2-sigma).
2) results show that the reconstruction with a time step of 100 and 200 year do not show such an upswing
3) the number of proxies decreases strongly moving towards present times (acknowledged by Marcott in the paper; see also SI)
4) Marcott et al. [2013] say absolutely nothing about the upswing of their own reconstruction in their own paper
5) only a limited number of proxies provide recent data (about 10)
6) only two of those have a time resolution of 20 years (DOME C and Agassiz-Renland)
7) but exactly thos two (DOME C and Agassiz-Renland) are the ones with a strong increase in temperatures after 1900
This suggests that the reconstruction by Marcott for the last century or so should be interpreted with great care. For what I can see now it is not really
representative of anything.
Given that Marcott does not state anything about the upswing in their own reconstruction, the fuss is about in combining the low resolution Marcott
reconstruction with the high resolution Mann reconstruction for the year 1500 onwards. Whether or not that is justified is another debate – and Marcott argues that
you can based on the fact that his reconstruction and that of Mann for the overlapping period are statistically indistinguishable.
Whether or not you then can make confident statements about how unusual the recent warming is is another debate. It is clear that the Marcott reconstruction does not
provide much information about the ‘fast’ warming after 1900 (it simply does not have sufficient time resolution nor coverage in terms of number of proxies). It is
also clear that the Marcott reconstruction lacks temporal resolution to be able to make a confident statement about whether such fast warmings as the one after 1900
have occured previously during the Holocene.
In addition,there are many reconstructions that show the opposite behavior of the final reconstruction (see some previous comments by ‘Nillius in Verba’). How that
can lead to such narrow confidence intervals is a bit of a mystery to me, but that would require a real reproduction of the Marcott et al. [2013] study.
Nevertheless, the study suggests that the Holecene was for longer periods of time as warm as today or warmer, something which has often been suggested by individual
studies but it is nice to see it back when combining many data sources. It also confirms that – as I have seen suggested before – the Little Ice Age is the ‘odd one
out’, not the recent warming.
Whether or not this proves or disproves that we were on our way to a next ice age and that that has been avoided I think is way beyond what is justifiable based on
this study. Also because the warming is dated before 1950, and I don’t know how you can attribute that warming to greenhouse gas warming.
The rest of it is a lot of spin by the authors and the media.
Jos
+1
Jos, your views seem to be about the same as mine. The reason I’ve focused on the peculiar uptick at the modern end is just that it is an outlier. Outliers are often the best spot to start when trying to figure out what methodology was used.
If you can figure out how oddities in results are generated, odds are you can figure out everything.
Here’s Richard Alley:
> Our high assessed confidence that the recent warming is mostly human-driven, and that the costs will become large if the warming becomes large, do not primarily rest on how much warmer or colder today is than some particular time in the past, or even on how fast the recent changes are relative to those in the past.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/scientists-find-an-abrupt-warm-jog-after-a-very-long-cooling/
You are being played, folks.
Willard
Agree.
Alley (oops!) is trying to play us.
Max
K Scott Denison (KSD), thank you for illustrating for Climate Etc readers three cognitive elements of triple-strength climate-change denialism!
• cherry-pick a restricted measure: (KSD: ice extent)
• cherry pick a restricted time-frame: (KSD: the past two months)
• insist upon restricting public discourse to the cherry-picked elements: (KSD: restricts his literature search to ice-extent graphics)
Essentially all of the skeptical comments on this thread (as on denialist forums in gneral) employ some combination of these three cognitive elements to make the Hockey Stick just go away.
But yah know what?
The Hockey Stick ain’t going away.
For one simple reason: AGW is real, eh?
But it is going to be turned sideways and….
A fan of *MORE* discourse | March 11, 2013 at 12:10 pm | Reply
Rud Istvan posts “[business-as-usual spinning and quibbling regarding his precious MWP]“
The A-Team on Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice weblog is now posting incredible satellite animations of this week’s accelerating 2013 arctic ice-melt.
—–
You posted about the “accelerating 2013 arctic ice melt” and I’m changing the game? The link you sent doesn’t address 2013. I’d like some of what you’re smoking.
Fan says : The Hockey Stick ain’t going away.
Yes, political expansionism has far too much invested in it to admit it has failed.
Same old deck of cards by the same “climatologee” jokers who will add any deceptive trick to make a mockery of actual science, buys fraudulent/illegitimate time by way of gullible people who peddle the guff until someone sue’s the pants off them.
There’s a large class, some obvious tort feasors, and damages are demonstrable and huge. Give it time.
========================
I am extremely encouraged by this paper by Marcott. Ghandi famously remarked; First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they fight us, then we win. The warmists first ignored us skeptics, then they laughed at us. It seems to me that this paper by Marcott is one of the first where the warmists are starting to fight us skeptics.
Victory for the skeptics would appear to be in sight.
Alternatively, he was not fought, nor skeptics with this crook’t and ghostly stick.
===========
Join the bandwagon!
Willard
Yeah. And help pull it out of the ditch.
Max
Jim –
I’m afraid you’re a little late to the party. Final nails in the coffin and stakes through the heart have been driven many times. The public distrusts what climate scientists say – have for years now. They were expecting snow to disappear and now that it hasn’t, there is a public “crises” in trust of climate science (just ask Judith – she has a presentation on that “crisis”).
I wonder if the satisfaction of declaring (sight of) victory diminishes by virtue of repetition?
“I wonder if the satisfaction of declaring (sight of) victory diminishes by virtue of repetition?”
Nope. Actually increases. Each time better than the previous because we’re that much closer. Victory, like revenge, is a meal best served cold. Which in this case I mean literally. Brr.
Joshua | March 12, 2013 at 10:06 am | Reply
“I wonder if the satisfaction of declaring (sight of) victory diminishes by virtue of repetition?”
No. At least not as long as there are still alarmists to be annoyed by it. Victory is sweet in this case as the castrophe isn’t happening. If the warmist ilk had been right it would have been a Pyrhhic victory because there is no politically practical means of slowing fossil fuel consumption, eh?
Joshua
No. Because it is not only a victory over ignorance, but also over a horrible imaginary hobgoblin, which had been conjured up to frighten us into opening our pocketbooks to the political ruling class, greedy for more taxpayer money to shuffle around and distribute.
Max
”
The warmists first ignored us skeptics, then they laughed at us. It seems to me that this paper by Marcott is one of the first where the warmists are starting to fight us skeptics.
”
Who has time to fight “skeptics”?
It’s like playing chess with a pigeon.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pigeon%20chess
Still laughing – but will return to ignoring as soon as you stop being so unintentionally hilarious.
please ignore
heinrich | March 12, 2013 at 10:34 am | Reply
“Who has time to fight “skeptics”?”
Evidently you do.
”
Evidently you do.
”
This isn’t a “fight”. It’s pigeon chess.
You guys take your fascinating blog-commentary so darned seriously that you’ve somehow convinced yourselves that others do too.
heinrich
Confucius say: Man who play chess undah tree with pigeon likely to get checked by fowled King-piece.
Maybe if you stepped up your pigeon chess game you could get something done in Copenhage or wherever the next meeting of climate proctologists and sycophants is takng place. [snicker]
As Judith noted, this is simply Mike’s Nature trick rehashed and published in Science.
The whole process of putting incompatible datasets on the same graph is a gratuitous science fraud. It is designed to be misleading. It is a clear case of apples and oranges
It would have been better had they listed the authors in a different order. This paper would be best refered to as Shaken, Mix et al (2013).
Oops, small typo, this is of course the Shakun-Mix method.
This isn’t about truth for them. It’s certainly not about good science. It’s about pumping a little stale air into the flat tire now known as global warming. Just in time, the IPCC has a new scary image to put on its cover. The great deception continues.
Sorry…flat tire known as global warming.
Stirred, not Shaken, please.
When you mix apples and oranges, the outcome is bent – bananas.
Another complete puckup.
Rud Istvan, thanks for the post.
Regards
Bob, thanks. I have enjoyed both your books, and gave a shoutout to you in a footnote in the climate chapter of Arts of Truth. That book uses climate change as just one of hundreds of examples of how MSM and the ‘misinformation highway’ provide anything but truth.
Your blog is another oasis of truth in the misinformation desert.
Highest regards
And they say there is no God…
Ocean and lake sediment data from places such as California, Venezuela, and Antarctica have confirmed that these sudden climate changes affected not just Greenland, but the entire world. During the past 110,000 years, there have been at least 20 such abrupt climate changes. Only one period of stable climate has existed during the past 110,000 years–the 11,000 years of modern climate (the “Holocene” era). “Normal” climate for Earth is the climate of sudden extreme jumps–like a light switch flicking on and off.
See—i.e., your link above:
David Springer | March 11, 2013 at 4:55 pm |
The hilarious part of the link talking about the frequency of huge temperature changes in just a few years (at least a regional change where the core was taken in Greenland) is earth science for 9th-12th graders. Evidently that’s a bit too advanced for most progressives so climatoligists with better than high school science education can say anything they want knowing so much of their audience is not equipped to dispute them.
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/pd/tidescurrents/effects/climatechange_currents_lesson.html
@Wagathon
from the NOAA education link
“Normal” climate for Earth is the climate of sudden extreme jumps–like a light switch flicking on and off.”
That’s an awful analogy. It’s like thermostat with stops so the temperature is bounded within a range of about 10C from coldest to warmest and the setting can change from coldest to warmest in as little as a few years.
The worst part of it is that while conceding on the one hand that if not for 11000 years of warming — but for which we would not be here — that humanity is not is the slightest bit responsible for… on the other hand they say–e.g., we’re poking a stick at nature with our CO2 which could bring back Earth’s “normal” on allourasses. That’s simple-minded superstition that taxpayers are paying school teachers to preach in the classrooms and paying sin taxes to keep the ponzi scheme going.
… serve as a throwing stick that transformationally shapes public opinion in service of foresighted scientific and moral ends.
Conclusion That ain’t no climate-change HOCKEY STICK … it’s a high-velocity climate-change ATLATL for attacking climate-change denialism!
Michael Hart, please advise us if your Delphic prediction has been interpreted in any other than its most logical, scientific, foresighted, and moral sense!
Es schneit…!
There was a sudden dump of oddly late snowfall in Germany yesterday due to global warming and indicating a possible shut down of the the Meridional Overturning Circulation that could well lead to multi-year droughts that may affect critical agricultural and water resources world-wide that likely would greatly strain food and water supplies and also may lead to an abrupt change in the climate that could occur so quickly that human and natural systems would likely have great difficulty adapting and that could possibly lead to tens of millions of deaths and all of these exceedingly events may well be unavoidable unless more power over the economy and our all of our lives is immediately ceded to the UN and the secular, socialist liberal fascist establishment of Western academia.
When the EU burps up another Hitler and wants our help I hope Bush will come out of retirement long enough to let them know they can kiss our collective asses.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/3/13/climategate-30.html
!!!
“Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had some good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far.”
How can anybody disagree with this?
Agree Edim. 13/03/13 an historic day in climate science.
Oh … and it looks like the Medieval Warming Period has
reappeared. There’s an email :)
Napoleon lost 90% of his army to the cold after invading Russia; Hitler too. And now, the Earth is in a cooling trend, again. We may lose 90% of the government-education bureaucracy, oh no!
Yet another blizzard is bearing down on Russia. This is surely overwhelming proof of anthropogenic global warming, yet expect the skeptics to carp and evade, as they always do. Their cherry picking strategy will be to emphasise the cold, the snow and the ice – typical!
Climate expert Dmitri Wankov has declared that the recent blizzards are not at all like the traditional blizzards of his youth. They are much more rad and funky. He was about to say more when his teeth got to chattering.
As long as they are only rad and funky. Once they hit gnarly, then you need to worry.
Guess he’s jest a member of the chattering classes.
Re opinions, liked yr short story about the shop that
sells opinions on things climate sciency, political and
also ‘the arts”, mosomoso. In my opinion it’s kinda
rad and funky too.) BC
BC, another climate expert, Grigori Tossov, has stated that the smashing of the Northern Hemisphere’s cold record – last month in Oymyakon, by more than 3 degrees Celsius – is such compelling proof of warming that, under a proper Russian regime, skeptics would be confined for re-education.
But where do you go for a good strong leader these days? Oh, Conroy tries, I know…
Conroy, lol? Oz politics, taxes, more taxes and restrictive
media laws … Oh well, they’re tryin’.
Assuming there actually had been some measurable amount of global warming over the last decade, to the extent it was due to human CO2 would have to be the fault of all of the new coal-fired power plants that were built in China.
I would like to put this at the bottom if I can.
‘There doesn’t seem to be anything really new here in terms of our understanding of the Holocene. Mike’s Nature trick seems to be now a standard practice in paleo reconstructions. I personally don’t see how this analysis says anything convincing about climate variability on the time scale of a century.’
So we have recent temperatures that were fairly similar to todays. Nothing new in that.
‘With this final correction, the ERBS Nonscanner-observed decadal changes in tropical mean LW, SW, and net radiation between the 1980s and the 1990s now stand at 0.7, -2.1, and 1.4 W/m2, respectively, which are similar to the observed decadal changes in the High-Resolution Infrared Radiometer Sounder (HIRS) Pathfinder OLR and the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) version FD record…’ http://www.image.ucar.edu/idag/Papers/Wong_ERBEreanalysis.pdf
So if we had 0.6 W/m2 greenhouse gas forcing – net cloud radiative forcing was -2 W/m2 and anthropogenic warming was 30% of the total.
So if we are not warming for decades hence because of cool patterns of ocean and amosphere circulation – and resultant cloud changes – and most warming was quite natural then a millennial downturn in the Bond Event Zero may be sufficient to offsett warming for quite a while.
But there is no real expectation that climate will behave in any but unexpected ways with the potential for surprise at extreme ends of the spectrum of warming or cooling. Any other expectation is an argument form ignorance. Climate is far too complex for simple methods and climate narratives to succeed convincingly – and complex models bring their own baggage of deterministic chaos.
Whoops lol – so we have MWP temperatures that were similar to today’s…
‘Climate is far too complex fer simple methods and climate narratives ter succeed convincingly?’ Say, even I coulda’ told yer that )
mosomoso
Vat? Denies global varming?
Send him to Gulag in Dudinka – he vill vant varming.
Beth,,
It’s great to see someone can write dates correctly :)
The loony left will disagree. You can bet they will be doing all they can to find the identity of Mr. FOIA, and if they do they will have an army of lawyers attacking him in a variety of ways. They will break him, mentally and financially.. He’ll probably end up committing suicide if he ever gets caught. That’s the sort of hatred the Left dishes out.
Don’t know why so many denizens on WUWT were trying
to guess FOIA’s nationality, Peter. You’d think they’d want
to protect his identity.
Beth,
I agree. I expect they haven’t considered the consequences for the guy if he is caught.
Given he isn’t a UK citizen what do you expect the consequences would be? He or she is a whistleblower against the biggest con game in recent history and he isn’t even a citizen of the country that might possibly be able to prosecute him even if they dared. The people he vexed and confounded are academic creampuffs and environmental activists not the mafia so it’s not like they would hunt him down and make him go swimming with cement overshoes. They’d write papers about the situation that no one else would read. The consequences would likely be wealth and fame from a grateful world but probably not a Nobel prize.
http://bit.ly/92YKOp
There is some hope in the scientific community for a return of integrity. Good for him
Ignore the social pathology of engaging in baseless fear mongering about global warming and just consider for a moment the endless scandals, such as…
►CRUGate — Playing tricks with data to reach preconceived conclusions and refusing to hand over the raw data before simply losing it altogether and continuing to claim that the foi2009.pdf disclosures were illegally obtained when in reality it obviously was the principled act of a whistleblowing deepthroat who became disgusted with the corruption of the government-funded climate change charlatans…
All of the Gates can be summarized by NobelGate — A Nobel was awarded to the IPCC, Al Gore and Barack Obama for their aiding and abetting of a moribund Europe, an immoral UN and a corrupt Leftist-liberal establishment in the United States to undermine George Bush and overthrow free enterprise Americanism.
Thanks Girma. Hal Lewis is a great American hero as far as I’m concerned. It was good of you to remember him. RIP Professor Lewis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Lewis
Thx Girma for the letter by Emeritus Professor of Physics,
Harold Lewis on the corruption of climate science by the
American Physical Society, semingly because of money
and politics
DS, You are so naive about the world.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/climategate-3-0/#comment-111312
And you are so afraid of it.
You have no idea.
Let’s prepare ourselves:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/45381960089
Nationality wouldn’t usually give much clue to a person’s identity Beth. My bet is that he is an expat American living in northern Europe, possibly Sweden or Finland. He would probably have had access to the email database as an insider at either UEA’s CRU or certain individuals at Penn State U.
Yer back, Peter Davies:) Re nationality of FOIA … likely insiders
with access ter the data base narrows down the list of suspects
and then excluding some nationalities narrows the list further.
I understand this sort of thing, Peter, from watching detective
movies like Hercule Poirot and Miss Fisher.
Beth
Meanwhile, back at the Rocking A(udit) Ranch, sleuths sniff out Marcott’s doctoral thesis, and are starting to howl.
===================
Yep, that infilling into small grid cells will get you into trouble.
Excellent. The Climate Gravy Train meanwhile continues meandering merrily along. Something has to be done to totally derail it, since the Hole in the Wall Gang long ago took it over and left the Engineer and Conductor tied up in the weeds. The Posse’s following at a distance, but their galloping steeds are no match for the Iron Horse. Where’s the Lone Ranger when we need him?
Well we’ve had one or to two lonish rangers like McIntyre and Mr FOIA exposing endemic deception, but it seems cagw-inspired taxes etc will go ahead regardless, no matter how flawed the climate “science” supporting it. Government and the Left simply cannot let slip such a massive new gravy train.
Vassily
that is all.
@ very tall guy ….
… that is all.
You left off “utter drivel” at the end.
Vassily,
I think what VTG is struggling with, is that unless you are a blinkered state-worshipper like himself, and naively imagine that government-funded climate “science” attempts to be objective rather be biased towards promoting the state’s interests (with climate scare tactics calculated to justify a more totalitarian society), then you are very likely to see government climate “science” for the tainted product it actually is (hiding inconvenient data, and all the other climategate shananigans).
Especially galling to him, is that state climate science is exactly like tobacco company science that exonerated smoking was – a crock specially designed to advance the interests of its funder, regardless of the truth. Only government climate science is obviously thousands of times more corrupt and dangerous to the public.
Tomcat, thank you for a considered and thoughtful post. I suggest you mail it direct to Prof Lew.
> [U]nless you are a blinkered state-worshipper like himself, and naively imagine that government-funded climate “science” attempts to be objective rather be biased towards promoting the state’s interests (with climate scare tactics calculated to justify a more totalitarian society), then you are very likely to see government climate “science” for the tainted product it actually is (hiding inconvenient data, and all the other climategate shananigans).
Indeed, we should turn scientific endeavours to free-market engines like HSBC:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/11/us-hsbc-probe-idUSBRE8BA05M20121211
All science is molded by its funder. But government science is potentially much more corrupt and self-interested, because (a) government is vastly bigger and richer than everyone else put together, and (b) its funds are coerced out of taxpayers rather than enticed from willing investors.
Also, there need be no single “free market” science, like there is one single government science, and the public can evaluate between competing ones.
Lew, Lew, skip to my Lew…
Who is ‘your Lew’ ? Some dreamer who thinks anyone with “scientist” in their title is objective and must be believed. And that the funder’s decisions on which science and scientists get funding, has no bearing on the outcome, which is is never skewed to the funder’s interests ?
> Who is ‘your Lew’?
Start here:
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/lewandowskyRecFury.html
Nice demonstration of the “extreme man” straw man fallacy. First you make an unsupportable assertion colored by your own ideological bias:
“All science is molded by its funder.”
Then suddenly you are demanding that others prove a negative, to wit:
“And that the funder’s decisions on which science and scientists get funding, has no bearing on the outcome, which is is never skewed to the funder’s interests ?”
If it’s not “never,” then the answer is clearly “always”! Funny.
I saw this comment of realclimate.org:
The converse of this is the way science is done. It moves forward via substantiating evidence. If the evidence starts to move the analysis in a different direction, that is the way it will go, regardless of the funding source. If nothing else, someone other than the original investigator will pick up on it.
The statement “All science is molded by its funder.” is shown false every time a scientist finds something interesting that was not in his original problem scope,
Heh, Marcott may have found that by re-dating his negative hockey stick series that he could produce a hockey stick. This is something he has found since his original working of the data. Wonderful, wonderful molding.
Mouldering.
=====
Onward climate molders, marching onto war…
damn the threading
‘Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views. “You can question some of the details of John’s calculations, but it’s hard to argue that the essential ideas aren’t absolutely correct,” says Doug Altman, an Oxford University researcher who directs the Centre for Statistics in Medicine.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/
Realism as opposed to romantic notions of how science works.
“Realism as opposed to romantic notions of how science works.”
The romantic reality is that despite many individual works of science and scientists being in error, science has nevertheless succeeded in moving forward and becoming progressively less wrong.
The intractable reality of the physical world, which our science communicates, is precisely what offends the right-wing fanatics who embrace science denial.
If not for what psychologist Clive Hazell calls “the narcissism of small differences… to achieve a superficial sense of one’s own uniqueness, an ersatz sense of otherness which is only a mask for an underlying uniformity and sameness,” a Climatist would simply be a weatherman.
They of course made their play for starker differences but nature refused to cooperate. And, they could never make their case with real data. We now know that a Climatist is just a dishonest weatherman with an exaggerated sense of self-importance and a flair for histrionics.
> The romantic reality is that despite many individual works of science and scientists being in error, science has nevertheless succeeded in moving forward and becoming progressively less wrong.
In other words:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/3487519357
Willard
Agree.
But that is bad news for IPCC.
Max
Brace yourselves. Science moves forward.
http://memegenerator.net/instance/36246956
There seems to be a lot of deliberate misidentifying here of skeptics – ie those with an open mind – as deniers. Done by those precommitted to alarmism, who want to create the false impression that their only opponents are those whose beliefs are as firm, unfounded and emotional as their own.
Fan of more BS being a good example.
Petra, it’s backfiring. They will recruit many new skeptics, just like climategate, cooling and bad AGW ‘science’.
I just wish you were right Edim. But government climate ‘science’ is not going to be deflected from its main responsibility of advancing government’s interests – that’s what it’s paid to do after all. If the current incumbents stop doing this, they will be just replaced with others more compliant and in agreement with CAGW.
Mere physical facts have no chance against the might of political correctness.
And of course the skepticism that both alarmists (IPCC) and deniers (various) reject, is at the very heart of science. The climate skeptics are the only ones with any claims of science.
Yes, there is the entrenched Consensus (funded to the tune of hundreds of $billions), the entrenched Deniers ($tens of millions?), and the skeptics, the only ones who hold with science uppermost.
Petra,
Thanks for the good sense comment. It is possible to acknowledge some warming but be concerned with the unknown variables caused by cloud changes from the warming and various negative feed backs that may balence small temp increases. That CAGW vs AGW is the crux of the arguments. Seventeen years of stable temperatures from an increase from in 1998 may mean more efforts on models are needed to be able to identify impacts. Models that don’t reflect reality may be useful but need to be improved. Also needed are lots of science data from the deep oceans.
Scott
@Scott
Also needed are lots of science data from the deep oceans.
—
Yes. And how about the balance of radiation at toa ? I was flabbergasted to learn that this is not known to any useful accuracy. If it was, we could straightaway plot it against CO2 concentration and dis/prove (C)AGW in a trice.
Why p*** billions of dollars annually away on flaky models when these empirical basics haven’t been done yet ?