Thanks for the Wegman grid showing which Team members used which study, this is important evidence of the incestuous nature of the work – the HS was never independently replicated. I’ve copied it into the Primer now, alongside an annotated spaghetti graph.

But as for connecting actual real world thermometer readings of temperature; soething which we can’t even do very well today, as Anthony’s photo essay shows us; it’s for darn sure that we couldn’t measure temperatures very well much before around 1980.
That’s about when some ocean buoys got put out to sea, to actually record some lower troposphere air temperatures over the ocean; well specifically at +3 metres above sea level; while simultaneously measuring the near surface (-1 metre) oceanic water temperatures.

The results from about 20 years of that study were reported in Geophysical Reasearch Letters for Jan 2001; and they showed that over that 20 year period; for those sites that had been buoyed, the increase in lower troposphere temperature (air) was only about 60% of the increase in near suface water temperatures.
That is significant, since prior to the time they put those buoys out; ocean water temperatures from some arbitrary depth, were regarded as perfectly good proxies for the air temperature. I don’t know why anybody would even imagine that in a dream, since ocean currents, and wind speeds over the oceans, can be orders of magnitude apart. Air over Hawaii today, may be over Mexico in a few days.

So clearly that epoch around 1980 marks a disconnect between the world or real temperature measurments, and temperature proxies. The oceans comprise around 70-73% of the earth surface, so errors in ocean temperatuyre sampling mean total chaos in overall global temperature measurments.

Now you cannot simply apply the 60% correction factor to all that ancient oceanic water temperature data; because the key finding of that 2001 paper, was that the near surface oceanic water temperature, an the three metre high air temperatures are not even correlated; so it is impossible to reconstruct the ancient air temperatures over the ocean from the phony ancient water temperature data.

So as far as I am concerned, everything before 1980 in terms of climate data and trends (temperature wise, and what derives from that) now rests only on proxies; because we have NO continuous actual thermometer record before then for most of the world surface area.

That’s an interesting break point since the firsat polar orbit satellites went up circa 1979; so we had no real world ice data before that either; at least not that we can compare other than anecdotally with today’;s satellite measures.

Speaking of Bristle cone pines; C14 dating of individual rings from California’s White Mountains BCPs was used to recalibrate the radiocarbon dating record which had previously been believed to be an absolutely constant time scale, with unifrom and constant rate of C14 production by Cosmic rays.

We now know that rate is anything but constant; and the fix to the C14 time scale actually reversed the history of some pottery technology that went from Spain to the middle east (Mesopotamia) and had previously been thought to have gone the other way.

Some newly degreed botanist from California I believe, apparently had never learned about tree core boring techniques, so in search of an old bristle cone pone, he actually cut down the one that his seat of the pants credentials told him was old; and he took a segment out of that tree back to the lab to count the rings. Turns out it was old; very old; and once appraised of his stupidity and his act of ignorant vandalism; he went back to the White Mountains to look for more old BCPs.
He never found another one that came within 500 years of the age of the one he cut down.

You can find the story, and a picture of the dead tree stump in the archives of National Geographic Magazine; and no I remember stories, I don’t catalog them with dates of occurrence too.

George

If the models are so good they should be alerting the world to the inaccuracies of the proxy record not the other way round.

Yes, apparently the models can’t explain anything in the past without the requisite levels of CO2, a fact/assumption which the modelers seem to even boast about. Hence, even fairly recent past events simply did not occur, such as the MWP and higher bristlecone and Arctic timberlines when CO2 concentrations were much lower – according to Steven Arno, pre-AGW science viewed arctic and alpine timberlines as temperature proxies, not ring widths.

Imo, the models need to explain the higher timberlines, etal., not simply act like they never existed, or that they were only “local” while using the same “local” trees to claim “no recent past warming similar to present”.

But one issue. Does it matter if they know that 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium?

I would say yes.

The computer models are being used to predict the future climate, their credibility is based on their ability to model the past. Unless the Hockey Stick truly portrays the past temperature record it should never have made the light of day, let alone been the star turn. The models should have universally disagreed with it.

If the models are so good they should be alerting the world to the inaccuracies of the proxy record not the other way round. They should be able to hind cast some interesting climate features (previously unknown) that could be extracted from the geological record. eg They should have been able to predict that the Arctic Ocean saw greatly reduced ice cover 6000 – 7000 years ago.

As a pet peeve, the thing that really bothers me for some reason is the fact that bristlecone treelines have been as much as 300 feet higher in the past where Mann, etc., studied them, and bristlecone pine ring widths were primarily considered to be excellent proxies for local precipitation previous to AGW, according to Steven Arno’s Timberline, Mountain and Arctic Frontiers, which I happened to have bought back when it was published in 1984 just because it looked like a good book to have around if you frequent the Mountains.

I guess it’s just really irritating to read someone pre-AGW like Arno, who is so reasonable about trees and their growth and gives many real examples of what can and has influenced their growth, then compare it to Mann’s totally rediculous, unscientific interpretation of ring-widths. I have lived among wild trees now for over 30 years, and the idea that the ring-widths of wild trees can be merely assumed to be a proxy for even local temperatures seems manifestly absurd. Each got dam tree is different/unique and obviously has a different substrate for growth! Etc, etc.. You’d probably have to actually cut down the whole forest before you could be reasonably sure of [not] finding anything hidden away in the wild ring widths.

But it took Steve and Ross’s efforts to put the kabosh on Mann’s “work”. Thank Heavens – or whatever.

Gosh, yes. Great presence and presentation ability.

we live in hope.

We survived the Club of Rome. We’ll weather this.

The debate only reaches its climax when overpopulation rears its ugly head.

Overpopulation, hell. What really happens is that a society becomes affluent. At that point (NEVER until), kids cease being an essential economic asset and become a bigtime economic liability. THAT’s when the birthrate goes down. Always, and not until.

Human nature at its finest.

(When superaffluence becomes ubiquitous (give it a century or two–and we may possibly be around to see it), the drivers will doubtless have changed, of course.)

Yes, the AIG Newsletters have been following the climate debate for some time and they have been quite good at having guest authors or reprinting interesting articles; for example, a reprint from an article in the Financial Post of Canada (July 7, 2007):

“Geological Opinion about CO2″ in http://www.aig.org.au/assets/21/AIGnews_Aug07.pdf

They also weigh in from time to time on the debate from a geologist’s perspective (e.g. glacial geology, interstadials, etc.)

Geogrl re Zombie Science: Excellent essay that did not mention Climate Science, but I don’t think it was a coincidence that a 1975 clip regarding the greenhouse effect preceeded it. And Zombie Science is a good term for it.
Also an interesting article about radioactivity decay rates being correlated to earth-sun distance.

Up until recently it was not exactly on the horizon but with Bob Carter making it on to Fox News and by being allowed to put his point over to Glenn Beck we live in hope.

The old “he invented Elephant snowshoes” theory can now be firmly laid to rest.