Just when you think it couldn’t get any more bizarre in Mann-world, out comes a new paper in Nature hawking hurricane frequency by proxy analysis. I guess Dr. Mann missed seeing the work of National Hurricane Center’s lead scientist, Chris Landsea which we highlighted a couple of days ago on WUWT: NOAA: More tropical storms counted due to better observational tools, wider reporting. Greenhouse warming not involved.
Mann is using “overwash” silt and sand as his new proxy. Chris Landsea disagrees in the Houston Chronicle interview saying: “The paper comes to very erroneous conclusions because of using improper data and illogical techniques,”
From the BBC and the Houston Chronicle, some excerpts are below.
…
From the BBC, full story here
Study leader Michael Mann from Penn State University believes that while not providing a definitive answer, this work does add a useful piece to the puzzle.
 |
 The levels we’re seeing at the moment are within the bounds of uncertainty.  Julian Heming, UK Met Office
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“It’s been hotly debated, and various teams using different computer models have come up with different answers,” he told BBC News.
“I would argue that this study presents some useful palaeoclimatic data points.”
…
From the Houston Chronicle, full story here
One tack is based on the observation that the powerful storm surge of large hurricanes deposits distinct layers of sediment in coastal lakes and marshes. By taking cores of sediments at the bottom of these lakes, which span centuries, scientists believe they can tell when large hurricanes made landfall at a particular location.
The second method used a computer model to simulate storm counts based upon historical Atlantic sea surface temperatures, El Niños and other climate factors.
…
The two independent estimates of historical storm activity were consistent, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, the paper’s lead author. Both, for example, pinpointed a period of high activity between 900 and 1100.
“This tells us these reconstructions are very likely meaningful,” he [Mann] said.
UPDATE:
What is funny is that with that quote above, Mann is referring to the Medieval Warm Period, something he tried to smooth out in his tree ring study and previous hockey stick graph.
Now he uses the MWP to his advantage to bolster his current proxy.
Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit writes about “check kiting” related to this study:
The Supplementary Information sheds no light on the methodology or the proxies.
The Supplementary Information contained no data sets. The proxies used for the Mann et al submission are not even listed.
The edifice is built on the SST and Nino3 reconstructions, both of which are references to the enigmatic reference 17, which turns out to be an unpublished submission of Mann et al.
17. Mann, M. E. et al. Global signatures of the Little Ice Age and the medieval climate anomaly and plausible dynamical origins. Science (submitted).
At the time that Nature published this article, there was precisely NO information available on what proxies were used in the reconstruction of Atlantic SST or El Nino or how these reconstructions were done. Did any of the Nature reviewers ask to see the other Mann submission? I doubt it. I wonder if it uses Graybill bristlecone pines.
Hockey sticks and sand residue: It sounds like a bunch of “high sticking” to me.
Photo caption competition entry:
“Look into my crystal ball”
Computer modeling results are not data.
He’s such a duffer, isn’t he?
I become more embarrassed over time that Mann resides at my alma mater. There are so many possible causes for sand/silt action that it boggles the mind. Could the pattern he “sees” have been caused by hurricanes? YES. But so can 10-20 other probable and even more likely events.
The man is genuous. Usually a trick with “creative” science works only once.
A quote from Mann in another recent article.
“We can project meaningfully what the average temperature of the globe will be, but there’s quite a bit of uncertainty about how El Niño will change,” Mann adds. “It’s a little bit of a dirty secret that there is very little consensus on something that fundamental.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-records-geoducks-clams-tree-rings
The article is on the use of clams as a proxy. Not a very interesting article but why does someone who was discredited get quoted in every article on temperature reconstruction even when as in the article i linked to, he was not even involved in the study?
“and a giant leap for Mann-kind”, ….. my apologies to Neil A.
Has anyone else noticed that Michael Mann now looks very like Kane [snip] in the Command and Conquer computer game series ?
All this article tells us is that there is no penalty box in the game of climate hockey.
Anthony, good title, but I think a better one would be, “Mann High-Sticks Hurrricanes.”
To quote a Chron commenter, “What accounts for the high between years 900-1100? King Arthur’s SUV?”
“The levels we’re seeing at the moment are within the bounds of uncertainty”
I doubt uncertainty has bounds but presumably if it does, anything within them is uncertain. More likely this is a wholly meaningless statement.
I’m telling you, these guys are walking in the same steps as McCarthy. It’s only a matter of time…..
Another stupid example of the use of the Drake Equation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
http://www.classicalvalues.com/Mann_explains_treemometer.jpg
Can we see the hurrihockey stick somewhere?
I’m embarassed to be from PSU because of him; what a joke. Maybe the football team will do good this fall…
Absolutely unbelievable… How can these “scientists” say such things with a straight face? O_o
Richard Heg (08:46:25) :
“Not a very interesting article but why does someone who was discredited get quoted in every article on temperature reconstruction even when as in the article i linked to, he was not even involved in the study?”
I have the same question.
As I said yesterday, and I was right:
NOAA: More tropical storms counted due to better observational tools
Then…: If more counted, there will be more!. That’s nice!…but for who
We now know for who!
It seems they are preparing the “Mis en Scene” of some well known “prophet”.
I like the picture with the Matrix at the back… I guess he did not take the right pill and is still asleep.
He should “peer reviewed” by a team of independent……..psychiatrists
Take the observed record of major hurricanes in the Atlantic from 1944 to the present. Assume that each year is an independent, random trial of hurricanes, and a Poisson process.
An expected value of 2.76 describes the statistics of hurricane numbers (frequency data) remarkably well. Now give the process an additional degree of freedom let the expected value be (a+bt) and fit the data to the process using maximum likelihood. What you will find is no trend over these 65 years–i.e. b=0 to even 80% certainty.
I’d love to do the same with Mann’s proxy, but really, if the data do not show a trend in this “unprecidented period of change” then what does Mann’s analysis of change during periods without the suspect input do, other than confuse the issue?
Does this Mann have no shame? Apparently not!
Stephen Wilde (09:00:13) : [commented]
“Has anyone else noticed that Michael Mann now looks very like Kane [snip] in the Command and Conquer computer game series ?”
LMAO….now that you mentioned it!!! But are we ready for The Brotherhood of NOD!?!?
hmmmm (09:09:05) :[Commented]
“I’m embarassed to be from PSU because of him; what a joke. Maybe the football team will do good this fall…”
I was suprised to find out that he is associated with Penn State. I have always had great respect for the institution, guess every family has a crazy relative. I hope you are correct about Joe Pa & his boys, it just does not feel like a proper football season without the Nittany Lions in the mix.
The MWP, during which are now told there was a supposed hurricane maxima from 900-1100m AD, was dramatically reduced to a small bump by Mann in his hockey stick proxy studies. So the next step will be to state that the high hurricane numbers during the small MWP bump suggests catastrophic numbers for the large projected temperature increases by 2100.
Its all very logical, don’t you know 😉 .
Hysteria is rising faster than previously thought; Mann’s hockey stick proves it!
The UN’s Ban has alerady announced we have JUST FOUR MONTHS to avoid the deaths of millions!
I guess we have another four months of this hogwash and papers using PC (Politically Correct) analysis before we can all breath easy again.
How can Nature publish this rot? OK .. I know, rhetorical question.
Mann is playing John Desmond Bernal to James Hansen’s Lysenko.
(I guess that makes Al Gore out as Stalin.)
This sounds like a counter publicity stunt…. and guess who got all of the attention????? The alarmist of cource.
The interesting thing is that this time is was NOAA being countered by the hard core alarmist.
Folks, they are fighting amongst themselves…. shouldn’t be long now untill the bubble pops.
Observe the master: clicky
I remember looking forward to my Nature and Scientific American. I’ve cancelled both, they have become casualties of AGW.
It is incredible, after the hockey stick fiasco, that Nature would ever again publish anything by Mann. Will the editors of Nature and reviewers of this paper please come forward and explain yourselves?
I’m curious what else will be brought forth as proxies for climate? I mean, really. Clams?
Hooray ! That particular Hockey stick is the official unexpurgated version that I happen to have a B&W copy of from the Los Angeles Times. only the colors are removed from the LAT version. It’s those two little words; NORHTERN HEMISHPHERE that put the lie to the hocky stick being a global phenomenon; simply a local anomaly.
“”” The levels we’re seeing at the moment are within the bounds of uncertainty.
Julian Heming, UK Met Office “””
To which one might add; “and also within the bounds of normal variability.”
What weasel words these scoundrels come up with.
3.0 is within the expected range of measured values for Pi !
Is it just my lousy eyes or does Mann’s “noise level” suddenly drop about in half at the time of the Maunder Minimum. In any case I don’t believe any climate proxy data that is older than about 1980 when the first ARGO buoys were deployed, and subsequently showed that oceanic water and air temperatures are not correlated (John Christy et al Jan 2001, Geophysical Research Letters (I think)). So that accounts for that short red uptick from zero; and of course we all know that 20 years is just weather not climate.
Note also that the zero datum is the 1961 to 1990 average. So he picks the highly uncertain average of a sharply rising slope for his base line. Why wouldn’t he use the 1000-1900 average, which is much better behaved.
In any case; we all know that it was warm for a few decades in the late 20th century; now it’s getting a bit colder. Ho-hum !
The interesting thing to me is that until this study, the paleo-climate research showed that until now, we are actually experiencing fewer and weaker storms than just a few thousand years ago.
Mann’s pattern seems quite clear:
He seeks to turn established science, done by experts in the field, on its head in order to find a hockey stick.
His work seems to really need nothing at all except time with which to squeeze and ‘adjust’ the data into his graph of choice, the hockey stick.
Here is one abstract done by actual scientists in the field that shows hurricane activity weakened about 1250 years ago.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005AGUFMPP14B..03W
What Mann does is bad/unprofessional enough to end most science careers.
Equal/greater blame goes to the reviewers of this Nature paper.
Ditto to the cheerleading reporters who went to J-School to avoid those “oh-so bo-o-o-o-oring” topics of logic, deductive reasoning, scientific methods, fact-checking, skepticism, etc.
Publishing the names and professional affiliations of all technical reviewers would seem to be a good place to start a “reform” movement to reclaim true science.
What an opportunity for a Patrick Henry to step forward from the journal editorial boards. “Give me Skepticism or give me CNN”
I’m convinced that because of the great influence that MBH98 had on the global warming debate, including the prominent usage in the IPCC reports, that Dr. Mann was elevated to an upper rung of social status amongst his peers. Once such status is achieved, it is nearly impossible to lose it. It doesn’t matter that the Hockey Stick was shown not to be correct or that he refuses to publish his data or statistical methods. Any work he produces is treated with greater reverence than it would otherwise deserve and his supporters are unwavering.
For those of us who care most about the science and not so much about social status, such reverence seems completely unjustified but it’s not hard to find examples of this sort of social worshipping in all walks of life.
Once you have a high social status, you can get away with all sorts of behavior that you couldn’t otherwise. It will take something major to knock him off his high rung on the social ladder.
Well I guess he needed another reason to use all those other hockey stick charts he couldn’t sell at his CO2= temp going out of business sale 😉
We do not need any more papers like this to ruin our livers. We need something like :
” The hidden agenda of global warming/climate change, its origins and purposes”
or
“The most recent paper on the self destructive behaviour of global warming/climate change fanatics”
hunter (09:34:31), see also this reference:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7143/full/nature05834.html
Look at it this way — another garbage model from Mann (“Garbage Mann”?…HA!) shows that he’s now conceded, at least to some point, non-AGW reasons for the Medeival Warm Period’s (MWP’s) weather….only asserting that this time the reason is different.
Making that assertion means he ought to be able to back it up by explaining what happened & why last time. Has he answered that? Do his models predict/explain that?? He should, they should.
If he can’t explain ‘why’ for the MWP, then his assertion that ‘this time its different’ is unsupportable.
The NY times had the following quote:
“Although current numbers are relatively high, they say, both analytical methods suggest that a period of high storm frequency, possibly even higher than today’s, began in the year 900 and lasted until 1200 or so.”
Here is a link to the entire article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/science/earth/13atlantic.html?ref=science
My interpretation of that sentence from this article is that Michael Mann has finally found the Medievil warm period that he had previously misplaced.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again..
After seeing SO many “educated” people fall for using O18/016 proxy for “global temperature”…when it ISN’T. (It’s a proxy for thunderstorm activity, period..) I throw most all of these “proxy” studies where they belong…
IN THE TRASH BIN.
Dr. Joe
It’s interresting to note that Mann’s hockeystick correlates well with the number of publishing climate scientists.
However, I suspect the inverse of the hockeystick denotes the average individual intelligence of those.
Meaning the consensus as such, as an average of those scientists, also follows the inverse.
Proving again the definition of a comittee (and source of consensus):
A comittee is the only life-form known with more than one belly, but no brain.
Hmm. Somehow the term “Medieval Climate Anomaly” escaped my attention. Did someone invent that as a sanitized “Medieval Warm Period”? If so, shouldn’t the “Little Ice Age” become the “Recent Counter-Climate Anomaly?”
—
BTW, Chris Landsea has also spearheaded a review of hurricane records from ships logs, news accounts, etc. to clean up the data from the first half of the 20th century. I believe that effort was inspired by his graduate work at Colorado State under Bill Gray where they spend a fair amount of time poring through the historical records.
More from the Houston Chronicle’s comments from Landsea:
In his criticism, Landsea notes that the paper begins by saying that Atlantic tropical activity has “reached anomalous levels over the past decade.”
This ignores recent work by Landsea and a number of other hurricane scientists who found that storm counts in the early 1900s … likely missed three or four storms a year. The addition of these storms to the historical record, he said, causes the long-term trend over the last century to disappear.
“This isn’t a small quibble,” he said. “It’s the difference between a massive trend with doubling in the last 100 years, versus no trend.”
More detail would be nice. I’ll see what I can find.
Because he will not reveal methodology tells you all you need to know. The answer to the question of data acquisition and interpretation are also not revealed. Tree rings have problems with interpretation as it is difficult to tell if poor growth in a season is attributable to low temps, or drought, as just a couple of examples. Stratification of mineral deposit (as appears to be what he is misusing this time) are rife with interpretation difficulties. Is it a storm surge or a tidal wave resulting from tectonic activity? Please correct me if I am wrong about any of these issues. My data is open to critique.
I broke my hockey stick last winter during hockey season. He can use it for Carbon dating….
How does this guy manage to get so much coverage!!
“The paper comes to very erroneous conclusions because of using improper data and illogical techniques,”
Well, how else does someone go about proving AGW and anthropogenic climate change? Not to mix in politics, but people, please recall what political spectrum these snake oil salesmen and charlatans come from!!
Science is being dragged through the mud by these detestable charlatans
The reason why Nature Magazine published such rubbish? It’s probably is the same reason that GE has been promoting “Climate Change” and “Cap and Trade”. The media conglomerate that owns Nature is in bed with these same ideas and globalist politics.
As far as Mann is concerned, Sand & Silt consideered it as an uptake in Atlantic Basin Tropical Weather? Really…. Did he take in data on Nor’Easter’s, increased wave heights from storms many miles away, Thunder Storms not related to tropical activity, and Land and ocean breeze events. Obviously not, then he uses his own rogue data set, and changes the data for his outcome.
Does Mann understand the effects of EL Nino? I’m sure he does, he just misrepresents them for his political cause. This is what I get from him and the media pushing his so-called science.
Global Warming = More El Nino’s = More Tropical Activity <– this Equation Does Not Work
This reason (Real Climate Science):
El Nino = More Atlantic Wind Sheer = Below Normal Tropical Activity
It just proves the mainstream media and global warming political crowd can have there cake and eat it too. They make the false logic.
Now there are anomalies in every case, but If I had to make an educated guess, 80% of Nino Summer's (mainly Moderate-Strong Strength Nino's) would have below normal Activity in the ATL. 2004 and other Weak Nino's being an anomaly, the other 20%…
And how many millions of brainless drones are going to line up behind this paper, I ask?
Please where’s that Australia rejects Cap&Trade report? I need some sanity – quick!!
He’s Smoking something and it isn’t Havanas…
Hoooooo…man that felt real good.
Here’s a dose of sanity folks, in case you need it like I just did:
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate
At the end of BBC article, Mann says that 1000 years ago La Nina and a warm Atlantic kicked up a lot of hurricanes. He then goes on to say that today, with approximately the same frequency of landfall hurricanes as in the past, the setting is different. It is just a warm Atlantic that’s done it. So he speculates that as global warming warms the Atlantic, more hurricanes should be the result regardless of La Nina or El Nino conditions. And exactly how will the Atlantic warm? By longwave radiation? That would be some neat trick. Maybe he is thinking that if he blows enough hot air up our skirts, he can warm it himself?
Mann has no shame or scruples. None whatsoever…
Now, “In this new era”, ENSO has no effect on Tropical Weather in the Atlantic, It’s just SST’s as Mann states. So whats Mann gonna do if the AMO/TNA go into a below normal phase, I predict a new excuse? Good Point Pamela.
Only in a passive/enabling main stream press environment, would people like Mann, Hanson, and Moon not be exposed for the silly zealots they are.
Wonderful stuff from Mr. Mann, like the IPCC, start with the hypothesis and work backwards making the ‘evidence’ fit the hypothesis. Did Mr. Mann view the National hurricane center stats and Mr. Landsea’s synopsis? I wonder if he is squirming a little?
Not many bristle cone pines (pinus longaeva) in my neck of the woods, though I did pick one up this year on vacation in Weymouth – a Douglas fir cone (pseudsotsuga), it (the cone) is open and the weather is good and set fair in the North of England, just a thought I know – but should the Met’ Off’ start employing some old and tried and trusted methods??
David Ball (10:35:49) : … Is it a storm surge or a tidal wave resulting from tectonic activity?
Or volcanic activity or just sub-sea land slides such as the Storegga event off Norway c. 5100BC – http://www.fettes.com/shetland/Storegga.html – which devasted the east coast of Scotland. Sorry to fellow Scots for mentioning Norway so soon after yesterday’s result.
“What accounts for the high between years 900-1100? King Arthur’s SUV?” Alex
The historical Arthur (mentioned once, I think in Nennius) seems to have been a war leader around 300-400. By 1000 we might be considering William the Bastard, who did a fair bit of environmental modification of his own, setting up the New Forest for hunting. Perhaps the digestive gases of deer have a strong warming impact? I must remember to mention this to Michael Mann….
A USA Today blogger turned around the headline and pointed out that the study is saying that hurricanes were more frequent 1,000 years ago.
Gee, if only someone had noticed something else about what weather or climate was like 1,000 years ago.
Lance (10:36:26) :
I broke my hockey stick last winter during hockey season. He can use it for Carbon dating….
==================================
LOL Maybe he can retrieve some samples from Gore’s pipe with it.
And what would you like your computer model to say sir?
“The team also noted that the finding of no increasing trend in hurricane and tropical storm counts in the Atlantic is consistent with several recent global warming simulations from high-resolution global climate model and regional downscaling models”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/11/noaa-more-tropical-storms-due-to-better-observational-tools-wider-reporting-greenhouse-warming-not-involved/
“The second method used a computer model to simulate storm counts based upon historical Atlantic sea surface temperatures, El Niños and other climate factors”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/13/mann-hockey-sticks-hurricanes-hurricanes-in-the-atlantic-are-more-frequent-than-at-any-time-in-the-last-1000-years/
This mann has an strange mind fixation with sticks!
The key of the paper is using a statistical tool to coerce the sediment data into making the 1,000ad time becoming a hot bed of Hurricanes and therefore tie this with subsequent statistical models they developed.
If anything a cursory visual inspection of the sediment data offered in Figure 1. -especially paying attention to the age uncertainty of events- shows mostly activity prior to 800ad on every site. Then a paucity from 900ad to the 1,800ad, except at the Massachussetts site.
Therefore, it is likely that the magic was to overweight the Mass. site in the stats. Once this is done, there should be no problem comparing the so called “independent” datasets. Let’s not forget that the sites are all located in the same aerological domain…
Moreover Mann’s understanding of cyclogenesis is somewhat simplistic: if hot SST were the governing factor then there would be virtually hurricanes every day…
Yet on page 882, the third page of the paper, the authors are describing the true uncertainty affecting these geological sites, the possible confusion with monsoon storms and cite the Caribbean activity for good measure and yet conclude with the traditional “robust” this time minored by a “reasonably”…
The conclusion fizzles out with “suggest”, “some degree of additional validation”…
So from a geological viewpoint this paper is hardly hard rock evidence. I am sure the statisticians will have a field day.
It’s Mann’s type of ‘science’ that is dragging science down to the levels of newspapers and television. How can I counter religious belief with science when the religious can bring up what passes for science now? Very disappointed that more scientists don’t recognise what is being done within the whole debate about climate, and don’t stand up and voice their concerns. We seem to be going back toward alchemy!
[snip – ad hom]
Although I haven’t seen the paper, I will give him credit for at least looking for a source of historical data, such as overwash sediments. What you can interpret from that & the limits on that are a different thing all together. I do hope he had some geoscientists on his team.
Of course, since he is dabbling in Geology, I am sure the AGWers wont mind if non-climatologist scientists dabble in climate science. Fair is fair, right ?? :))
He’s still using that greasy computer-modeled hair stuff.
Nobody told him about the alternative: reality.
There’s more activity in the Pacific than in the Atlantic so far this year.
Because Climate Changes. Sung to the tune of Stuff Happens.
For the alarmist, evey day is Haloween. Boo !!
Once again the overwash will likely reach the MSM… Yet the Steig et al. corrigendum has not…
Christopher Monckton’s July CO2 report just came out today: click It contains a section on hurricane frequency.
Eureka!! With new data I just collected from the above report, i now know how he it all happened! And I wrote a quick computational model and ran the data through my super computer to prove it. (My data? Well, I’ll be releasing that later – – mmm, much later)
It shows that Mann is a – golfer! He hit into a sand trap and he didn’t have his Sand wedge with him, but he did have his Hockey stick – of course. He cares it with him everywhere he goes. And when he went to stroke the ball, a ton (Yes, a metric ton, according to my simulation) of sand flew up into his face and HE said, “Dang!” “I’ve figured out AGW – – again.”
Now if we could just get him out on the course more often…..
My 16 year old nephew is working with Chris Landsea as an intern, reevaluating and when necessary reclassifying old storms. Chris is an excellent mentor and is providing a great opportunity for Daniel.
Barry Foster (11:39:25) :
We seem to be going back toward alchemy!
Alchemy was a psychological endeavour not a chemical one. In any case this is REVERSED ALCHEMY which turns gold into sh**
Ric Werme wrote:
” BTW, Chris Landsea has also spearheaded a review of hurricane records from ships logs, news accounts, etc. to clean up the data from the first half of the 20th century. I believe that effort was inspired by his graduate work at Colorado State under Bill Gray where they spend a fair amount of time poring through the historical records.”
This is the job my nephew is doing with another young guy, deciphering things difficult to read and old and worn pages. Hopefully I will get some inside looks at NHC. and try to wangle an invite to go along when I visit my family.
More from the Houston Chronicle’s comments from Landsea:
In his criticism, Landsea notes that the paper begins by saying that Atlantic tropical activity has “reached anomalous levels over the past decade.”
This ignores recent work by Landsea and a number of other hurricane scientists who found that storm counts in the early 1900s … likely missed three or four storms a year. The addition of these storms to the historical record, he said, causes the long-term trend over the last century to disappear.
“This isn’t a small quibble,” he said. “It’s the difference between a massive trend with doubling in the last 100 years, versus no trend.”
—-
First is was bristlecone pines. Now it is silt & sand. Can tea leaves be far behind?
All your hockey sticks are belong to us:
El Niño (ENSO) and African Monsoon Have Strongly Influenced Intense Hurricane Frequency in the Past
“the work by Donnelly and Woodruff suggests that El Niño and the West African monsoon appear to be critical factors for determining long-term cycles of hurricane intensity in the Atlantic.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=32816
I can just picture a tree saying “Here I am! Rock you like a Hurricane!”
And of course Mann speaks Entish, while the rest of us are illiterate boobs.
Nature is a joke. In terms of rigor and believability it can no longer be considered top tier, it’s still a splashy pop-science leader however. The sick thing is I would still love to publish in Nature because it makes my future job prospects better. What a sick rat race, I am becoming increasingly embarrassed to be a scientist.
Michael Milken: Junk Bond King.
Michael Mann: Junk Science King.
Well, if the shoe fits…
Chris Landsea disagrees in the Houston Chronicle interview saying: “The paper comes to very erroneous conclusions because of using improper data and illogical techniques,”
In other words Landsea is pointing out that Mann, once again, is doing what Mann does….. produce garbage and attempt to call it science.
Tea leaves? No tarot cards are MUCH MUCH better. It’s the pretty pictures you know, whereas tea leaves are rather vague.
Kindest Regards
Antonio San (11:37:40) :
Overweighting the MA data would be a faux pas on the level of overweighting bristlecone pine data. Nor’easters, very definitely extratropical storms, may result in more damage to the northeastern coast than hurricanes. One in 1962 cut Long Beach Island NJ into three pieces. It destroyed my grandparents’ summer house which had survived several hurricanes. The Blizzard of 1978 washed away 30 feet of outer Cape Cod shoreline – in an area of high dunes. That single storm exceeded the average erosion for a year, maybe a decade.
Being extratropical, they are broader than hurricanes, and any overwash deposits are more likely from a nor’easter than a hurricane. There may be ways to distinguish them, e.g. the area affected, but unless that procedure is explicitly described and effective, then I’d consider the MA data very suspect.
“The edifice is built on the SST and Nino3 reconstructions, both of which are references to the enigmatic reference 17, which turns out to be an unpublished submission of Mann et al.”
The mann has a hide of a rhinocerous!
I would have thought after his first expose he should have disappeared with his tail between his legs.
Quite unrepentant, after reading tree rings in bristlecone pines, he now comes out with patterns in the sifting sands. What will be next? Tea leaves?
Would not the MWP have caused sea level to rise and possibly flood the lakes every time there was a high tide?
Slightly OT but just want to report that amidst all this global warming danger, the arctic north of 80 (see DMI chart in sidebar above) plunged below the long term average again and then below freezing over this week. Currently at Nunavut Canada it is -2C in freezing fog. The forecast for the next few days is for +1 to 2C highs and lows just below freezing:
http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/71082.html
The ice extent curve could begin to flatten a bit early (seems to be doing that already). Meanwhile, I have to admit that summer has finally arrived in Ottawa with temps 28 to 30C (82-86F).
What if there are no hurricanes this season?… which seems possible.
Awesome responses. Well done all!
Wow, Mann has a striking resemblance to Gavin Schmidt.
The Mann NINO3 reconstruction runs from 1650 to 1980. Data here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ei/ei_data/ninocold-recon.dat
Did he splice the newer data to it? That should be unique.
I used the Mann NINO3 data in a post on low frequency ENSO variability here:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/03/low-frequency-enso-oscillations.html
I blogged about this yesterday after I heard a story on NPR.
http://iamyouasheisme.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/paleo_hurricanes/
The argument was so confused, I wasn’t sure if it was the reporter’s fault or if the scientists were just totally sloppy.
“What is funny is that with that quote above, Mann is referring to the Medieval Warm Period, something he tried to smooth out in his tree ring study and previous hockey stick graph.”
EXCELLENT point Anthony. I laughed out loud when I read it.
” I guess Dr. Mann missed seeing the work of National Hurricane Center’s lead scientist, Chris Landsea”
…or maybe he got wind of it (pun intended) beforehand and came up with this crazy hurricane proxy idea to counter it. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy but I don’t have much trust in this guy’s work.
It is indeed funny that Mann now seems to be acknowledging that there was a Medieval Warm Period with the high storm activity between 900 and 1100. Not only that, since this study concerns tropical Atlantic hurricanes, apparently if there was a MWP, it wasn’t just a localized European event — something catastrophic AGW believers always try to say to explain away the MWP.
But, it’s peer reviewed, thus it must be true.
From Roger Pielke Jr. today, I respectfully submit the quintessential quote of the week-
“If Michael Mann did not exist, the skeptics would have to invent him.”
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/08/mann-et-al-unsmoothed-landsea07.html
Mann seems to have a knack for consistently publishing shlock science in the most respected journals and magazines. Its really appalling.
re Keith- you say “It is indeed funny that Mann now seems to be acknowledging that there was a Medieval Warm Period with the high storm activity between 900 and 1100.”
There is another interpretation of Mann’s ‘ground-breaking’ study. He has definitively shown that hurricane activity is not even weakly affected by temperature, according to Mann’s version of proxy-based global temperatures where the MWP vanished. The AGW community should be joyous with relief about this observation. Heh, heh.
One tack is based on the observation that the powerful storm surge of large hurricanes deposits distinct layers of sediment in coastal lakes and marshes. By taking cores of sediments at the bottom of these lakes, which span centuries, scientists believe they can tell when large hurricanes made landfall at a particular location.
What was the worldwide spacial distribution of these cores? Oh, sorry, no data provided.
“I would argue that this study presents some useful palaeoclimatic data points.”
If by palaeoclimatic data he means old hot air, Mann has given the world too much already.
…
Hey… that looks like a graph of the number of AGW skeptics.
Chuck (09:56:28) :
It will take something major to knock him off his high rung on the social ladder.
I can think of the ideal piece of winter sports equipment for the job.
“Hurricanes in the Atlantic are more frequent than at any time in the last 1,000 years”
Tell that to the Spanish explorers.
Mann has apparently put all data and code on line beating Dr Steig who still has not released the code by seven months.
http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Nature09/
There is a link titled responses to potential misconceptions at the bottom of the page which appears to address the referees concerns.
Hi Antony, just read the above story on the BBC and came straight here to see if you were on it, as usual you are on the ball. However I didn’t notice the BBC picking up on the NOAA piece about more tropical storms being counted due to observation rather than global warming. How strange.
Seeing mention of criticisms from Landsea, its ironic to see that the Mann et al article/letter, under Acknowledgements says: “We thank C. Landsea for comments on the manuscript.”
Ric Werme (10:29:05) :
Noting your comment re. the work of Chris Landsea. When I read this blog I was reminded of the following article in the London Times back in August 2008 that also talks of a surge of storms circa late 1600s coincident with the LIA.
——————————————————-
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4449527.ece
A preliminary study of 6,000 logbooks has produced results that raise questions about climate change theories. One paper, published by Dr Dennis Wheeler, a Sunderland University geographer, in the journal The Holocene, details a surge in the frequency of summer storms over Britain in the 1680s and 1690s.
Many scientists believe storms are a consequence of global warming, but these were the coldest decades of the so-called Little Ice Age that hit Europe from about 1600 to 1850.
Wheeler and his colleagues have since won European Union funding to extend this research to 1750. This shows that during the 1730s, Europe underwent a period of rapid warming similar to that recorded recently – and which must have had natural origins.
Hints of such changes are already known from British records, but Wheeler has found they affected much of the north Atlantic too, and he has traced some of the underlying weather systems that caused it. His research will be published in the journal Climatic Change.
The ships’ logs have also shed light on extreme weather events such as hurricanes. It is commonly believed that hurricanes form in the eastern Atlantic and track westwards, so scientists were shocked in 2005 when Hurricane Vince instead moved northeast to hit southern Spain and Portugal.
Many interpreted this as a consequence of climate change; but Wheeler, along with colleagues at the University of Madrid, used old ships’ logs to show that this had also happened in 1842, when a hurricane followed the same trajectory into Andalusia.
Ok, regarding the hockey stick, I recall reading that Mann came out with hockey stick II (rated PG-13) :-).
If this is true, did he also get rid of the MWP in it as he did in the first hockey stick?
Just saw this article on antarctic glacier melt if you are interested.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8200680.stm
Don’t forget his Hockey Stick Number Two last year that used False Proxy Number Two, Finnish lake sediment if I remember right from Climate Audit…
Steve M uses a very appropriate phrase “check kiting” ie juggling uncashed cheques to swell one’s bank balance / academic credit – Mann references an unpublished paper, he quotes neither method, data, or proxies (but when he’s published, that will smoothe the way for him to register sub-standard material without being questioned), he (and others) still ride high on HS No.1 because the media said (falsely) that the North Report validated it. Nobody but CA buffs know of the discredited Hockey Stick No.2, and – finally – Mann uses sleight-of-hand whereby the Medieval Warm Period he once discredited now recreates itself as the Medieval Private Anomaly which explains the reason his windy toy can function.
Well, kings could once get away with worse…
OT – From the BBC’s “we’re all f*cked department”…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8200680.stm
Oh bugger, DavidS got there first :o)
Actually the funniest bit is by looking at the hurricane data Mann actually shows the frequency as high or higher 1000 years ago and therefore brought the MWP back to life. [snip- ad hom]
The biggest contribution this guy could make to science is a personal proof of Newton’s theories by throwing himself of a large building…..
Nogw (13:02:58) :
What if there are no hurricanes this season?… which seems possible.
Nogw,
If so, then it’s just weather 🙂
why is this guy so prominent? i dont get it at all. seems like everything he does is not reputable. is he one of the many getting our tax dollars to waste on global warnimg projects??
Nonsense such as that really blows any credibility he might have had.
I seriously wonder if Mann has funding from property insurance companies.
As stated in a recent thread, the insurance companies use this and other bogus bs to present a false case for increased premiums.
How’s about some good paleotempestology?
Besonen, M.R., et al., 2008. A 1,000-year, annually-resolved record of hurricane activity from Boston, Massachusetts, Geophysical Research Letters, 35, L14705, doi:10.1029/2008GL033950.
Elsner, J.B., T.H. Jagger, and K.-B. Liu. 2008. Comparison of hurricane return levels using historical and geological records. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 47, 368-374.
Scileppi, E. and J.P. Donnelly. 2007. Sedimentary evidence of hurricane strikes in western Long Island, New York. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 8(6), 1-25.
Nyberg, J., B.A. Malmgren, A.Winter, M.R. Jury, K.H. Kilbourne, and T.M. Quinn. 2007. Low Atlantic hurricane activity in the 1970s and 1980s compared to the past 270 years. Nature, 447, 698-702.
Nott, J., J. Haig, H. Neil, and D. Gillieson. 2007. Greater frequency variability of landfalling tropical cyclones at centennial compared to seasonal and decadal scales. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 255, 367–372.
Donnelly, J.P., and J.D. Woodruff. 2007. Intense hurricane activity over the past 5,000 years controlled by El Niño and the West African monsoon. Nature, 447, 465-468.
Miller, D.L., C.I. Mora, H.D. Grissino-Mayer, C.J. Mock, M.E. Uhle, and Z. Sharp, 2006. Tree-ring isotope records of tropical cyclone activity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 14,294-14,297.
None of these studies support the claim of unprecedented hurricane activity. At the very least this study is at variance with the past work in this young field.
It’s almost comical. However, this comment by Mann about the Landsea et al. paper may explain this nonsense:
“Mann disputed Landsea’s research, saying that his technology argument ignores the chance that a single storm could have been counted twice before satellite records could show the exact track. He expressed doubt that the study would pass muster to be published.”
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20090517/ARTICLE/905171028/-1/NEWSSITEMAP#
Well, it did, and the paper which shouldn’t have been published is Mann’s.
Come on give Mann a break.
He jumped into his way back machine and got caught in a continuum loop over the Atlantic Ocean.
Honest mistake.
The Supplementary Information sheds no light on the methodology or the proxies.
The Supplementary Information contained no data sets.
Anthony, as Jeff Id points out above, the data sets and code are online.
Surely the fact that his computer model matches his silt samples can be used to disprove his computer model?
I mean all you need do is come up some other mechanism for silt movement (tidal water movement off the top of my head) and you can prove his model is false becasue it matches his observation?
I’m an amatur at this, just a thought
Lucy Skywalker (15:03:22) :
Don’t forget his Hockey Stick Number Two last year that used False Proxy Number Two, Finnish lake sediment if I remember right from Climate Audit…
Steve M uses a very appropriate phrase “check kiting” ie juggling uncashed cheques to swell one’s bank balance / academic credit – Mann references an unpublished paper, he quotes neither method, data, or proxies (but when he’s published, that will smoothe the way for him to register sub-standard material without being questioned), he (and others) still ride high on HS No.1 because the media said (falsely) that the North Report validated it. Nobody but CA buffs know of the discredited Hockey Stick No.2, and – finally – Mann uses sleight-of-hand whereby the Medieval Warm Period he once discredited now recreates itself as the Medieval Private Anomaly which explains the reason his windy toy can function.
Well, kings could once get away with worse…
I do remember perfectly Mann’s second HS. I think they repeat the same erroneous things from time to time for making people think the arguments which debunked their fallacious works were falsified and finally their “hypothesis” were correct.
The force of the routine does not construct science, but the careful observation of nature made by honest scientists. Unfortunately for our clean and true science, those guys are supported by the power of the Media and politics, the craftiest experts on distorting truth.
Did he really cut all those bristle-cone slices with just one circular-saw blade?
What a Mann!
The Besonen paper is reviewed at http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/02/09/1000-years-of-boston-hurricanes/#more-359
where it is stated:
Besonen et al. conclude “Hurricane frequency, as recorded at LML, has not been constant over the last millennium; the 12th –16th centuries had a significantly higher level of hurricane activity (up to 8 extreme events occurring per century) compared to the 11th and 17 th–19 th centuries when only 2–3 per century was the norm.” Similarly, they conclude “The LML sedimentary record provides a well-controlled and annually-resolved record of category 2–3 hurricane activity in the Boston area over the last millennium. The hurricane signal shows centennial-scale variations in frequency with a period of increased activity between the 12 th–16 th centuries, and decreased activity during the 11th and 17 th–19 th centuries.”
Seems to be the opposite of what Mann is claiming.
Clam history can be a delightful subject of study, in the right hands:
http://westinstenv.org/histwl/2008/01/29/clam-gardens/
KLA (15:33:37) :
Nogw (13:02:58) :
What if there are no hurricanes this season?… which seems possible.
Nogw,
If so, then it’s just weather.
Or they would adjust the classification of hurricanes so any drizzle would fit into a category of hurricane.
Pineapple Upside-Down Climate.
Flip over and bake in GCM for 1/2 hour.
AndrewG @16:45:24
As a scuba diver, I take great interest in sedimentation processes, normally under waer, as I see them in operation “in aqua”. I can assure you that there are many variables to sedimentation; I struggle to understand them.
If the data and methods are not available, then this is NOT science.
Steve M saiys: “The Supplementary Information sheds no light on the methodology or the proxies.
The Supplementary Information contained no data sets. The proxies used for the Mann et al submission are not even listed”
PLEASE, stop talking about Mann’s work as science. Until he releases the data and methodology, his work is nothing more than chicken bone throwing.
Apparently Mann’s work is nothing more than amatuer attempts to manipulate media stories, data and graphs. His work gets published and no one notices the necessary retractions, years later.
The public only remembers the front page of their paper’s lead story.
Mann HS must be right, remember, Al Gore indicated that he won the court decision in England regarding his so called Documentary…..
Hey come to think of it, my hockey stick that broke this past winter was made from bristle-cones. Maybe if Mann can do his math, I might have scored way more goals with it….nahh, i’m not that good.
“his new proxy”
Wow, how brilliant! Who could have thought of this but him!
Who can know what his proxy will be next?
A few links above to the BBC article on the melting ocurring on the Pine Island glacier in Antartica.
Here is 2003 versus 2009. (open in a new tab or a new window and click back and forth.)
2003.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/ICESHELVES/modis_iceshelf_archive/pinei/images/pinei_2003071_1615_modis_ch02.png
2009.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/ICESHELVES/modis_iceshelf_archive/pinei/images/pinei_2009074_1645_modis_ch02.png
Can you say B…
Roger Pielke writes:
“The Mann et al. historical predictions range from a minimum of 9 to a maximum of 14 storms in any given year (rounding to nearest integer), with an average of 11.6 storms and a standard deviation of 1.0 storms (!). The Landsea observational record has a minimum of 4 storms and a maximum of 28 with and average of 11.7 and a standard deviation of 3.75.”
Thus the two data sets have the same average (11.6 versus 11.7) and it is only the variability that has changed. Perhaps the standard deviation of 1 in the ‘historical prediction’ data is an artifact of some smoothing technique.
“Bill Illis (19:27:18) :
A few links above to the BBC article on the melting ocurring on the Pine Island glacier in Antartica.
Here is 2003 versus 2009. (open in a new tab or a new window and click back and forth.)
2003.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/ICESHELVES/modis_iceshelf_archive/pinei/images/pinei_2003071_1615_modis_ch02.png
2009.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/ICESHELVES/modis_iceshelf_archive/pinei/images/pinei_2009074_1645_modis_ch02.png
Can you say B…”
Way cool images…and does that look like, dare I say it, significantly MORE ice in 2009?? WOW!
Oh dear, this guy really is a scientific train wreck.
OT but evidence of yet more media scare mongering…
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/millions-of-salmon-fail-to-turn-up-in-canada-20090814-ekq4.html
“Officials and ecologists speculated the salmon could have been affected by warmer ocean temperatures, fewer food sources, or juvenile salmon may have contracted sea lice or other infections from some 30 fish farms in the Strait of Georgia as they migrated out to sea.”
This graph NH was dated 13/08/09 this morning. Its been put back to 07/08/09 just now. These things nearly always happen here when things don’t go the way there supposed to…
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
This may be becoming a major headache perhaps…
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi_ice_area.png
This is astonishingly convenient. First, tree rings expunge the record of the little ice age and medieval warm period (Nature article). Then Antarctica is discovered to be warming after all (Nature article). And now, sediments show that hurricane frequency has ramped up during the last century (Nature article). Too slick. This latest golden egg will eventually lead to embarrassment.
I mentioned above I would try to find more about Chris Landsea’s concerns with Michael Mann’s paper and methodology. I did this with the expedient of Emailing Dr. Landsea, and he just replied to me and included an open letter and permission to include it here:
—–
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:08:06 -0400
From: Chris.Landsea
Subject: Re: Can you expound a bit on your comments about Mann’s foray into
hurricane proxies?
Here’s an open letter to Michael that i just sent on a tropical storm email group. Feel free to post this. I’ll let you know if he replies.
Dear Michael and tropical storm folks,
I have some additional concerns about this new paper. As you know, I was one of the reviewers for your Nature paper and, as usual, I “signed” my review. Unfortunately, some very large concerns of mine about the paper were not addressed. The two gravest issues are the paper’s use of the Atlantic basin tropical storm frequency data without consideration of new studies and the merger of the paleo-tempestology record to the historical storm data. Perhaps these could be addressed here.
The first point is that the paper disregarded (and not even discussed) crucial new work by Vecchi and Knutson (Journal of Climate, 2008) and Landsea, Vecchi, Bengtsson and Knutson (Journal of Climate, 2009). The first paper showed that about 3-4 tropical storms per year were likely “missed” in the late 19th Century down to less than 1 per year by the 1960s. The second paper (provided to you all in the review process as an accepted paper) shows that two-thirds of the massive doubling trend is simply due to very short-lived (< 2 days duration) tropical storms. Taking out these "shorties" (very likely due just to our vastly improved observational capabilities) from the record and adding in the estimated number of "missed" medium to long-lived tropical storms causes the long-term trend to completely disappear.
Your paper starts with a premise that "Atlantic TC activity, as measured by annual storm counts, reached anomalous levels over the past decade", which is simply not correct based upon the new research. Instead of finding that the medieval peak in TC activity "rivals" current levels of TC numbers, wouldn't your conclusions have been substantially different? This isn't a small quibble: it's the difference between a massive trend with doubling in the last 100 years, versus no trend with only multidecadal variability remaining. This new peer-reviewed research should not have been ignored completely.
Secondly, I have no expertise on paleo-tempestology data and thus cannot provide commentary about that portion of the analysis in the paper. However, the merging of the paleo record with the historical all basin tropical storm counts is very problematic. Instead of trying to upscale the paleo-tempestology data (Category 2 and stronger) to all basin tropical cyclone activity (including all tropical storms and hurricanes), an apples-to-apples comparison directly of paleo landfall data to historical (1851 to today) hurricane-only landfall data should have been performed. Not surprisingly, the historical landfall record for those five sites shows no trend. How could this be considered a homogenous comparison: landfall of (primarily) major hurricanes at five locations versus all basin tropical storm and hurricane numbers whose trend is mainly due to very short-lived, weak tropical storms that we simply couldn't observe decades ago?
What is curious, too, is the press release (link below) issued at Penn State that concluded: "It seems that the paleodata support the contention that greenhouse warming may increase the frequency of Atlantic tropical storms," said Mann. "It may not be just that the storms are stronger, but that there are there may be more of them as well." Why would such a strong statement be included in a press release that isn't even discussed in the paper? Would the paper's co-authors agree with this very public pronouncement about the implications of the work?
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-08/ps-hoi081009.php
The bottom line is that the paper comes to very erroneous conclusions because of using improper data and illogical techniques. In my opinion, this work is, unfortunately, a step backwards in helping climate researchers understand how hurricanes have changed over the last several centuries.
Sincerely,
Chris Landsea
P.S.: The opinions expressed above are mine alone and do not represent any official view of the National Hurricane Center, the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or the Department of Commerce.
**********************************************************************
Chris Landsea
Science and Operations Officer
NOAA/NWS/National Hurricane Center
11691 S.W. 17th Street
Miami, Florida 33165-2149
**********************************************************************
"The sea was full of foam,
and the sea, air and clouds had seemingly merged into one."
– From the logbook of the "Johann Ludwing" – October 1894 hurricane
Ok, inquiring minds want to know: if Chris Landsea, as a reviewer, objected to the paper on such obviously fundamental grounds, grounds which CLEARLY state the paper’s conclusions not only inconsistent with the data, but outright incorrect, why was the paper published anyway? Is Nature to the point that peer review is really just window dressing and dissenting reviews are simply ignored? What shred of credibility is left when scientists claim “peer reviewed” work?
Mark
David Ball (08:56:39) “and a giant leap for Mann-kind”
Brilliant! David.
Robert Wood (19:00:10) :
AndrewG @16:45:24
As a scuba diver, I take great interest in sedimentation processes, normally under waer, as I see them in operation “in aqua”. I can assure you that there are many variables to sedimentation; I struggle to understand them.
I’m not a scuba diver; I was a long time ago. I share the same sideline to sediments. I have lacustrine, riverine and marine sediments. Something very interesting is the high percentage of iron stained grains in riverine sediments. Some days ago I was astonished by this phenomenon. However, I think I have found the answer. The riverine sediments are susceptible to intensive mixing due to human activities.
It is common the exploitation of sands from riverbeds. As they extract tons of sand for the construction industry, bulldozers mix the centennial and millennial sedimentary layers with modern layers; water currents take charge of dragging old sediments along the river course. Those companies could be integrating even sedimentary layers from the early part of the Holocene with modern sedimentary layers.
This human activity must be taken into account when we are analyzing riverine sediments. If we know that any industry is making excavations or mining upstream, it is better for us to discard those sediments from using them like indicators of climate.
One more thing on sediments: If we are analyzing marine sediments, it is very important to take the samples (boreholes) far away from deltas and river mouths. If we take the samples near river mouths, we could be experiencing the same problem than with riverine sediments.
We just heard from NOAA about technology and greater coverage of tropical storms
NOAA: More tropical storms counted due to better observational tools, wider reporting. Greenhouse warming not involved.
Mann is backpeddaling and attempting to rally support for his fading arguments.
The serious scientists are not going to let him slide.
The BBC tell a very different story on their actual radio broadcasts. No uncertainty there. They even added some stuff about a “a new report the bbc have seen”. It is beneath contempt.
“Mann is using “overwash” silt and sand as his new proxy. ”
Perhaps things would have a different perspective if one substituted “hog-” for “over-“
Ric Werme (21:24:11) :
Great work!
“During the past 35 years, the United States has experienced three Category 4 or stronger hurricanes: Charley in 2004, Andrew of 1992 and Hugo of 1989. However, on the average, a category 4 or stronger hurricane strikes the United States about once every 7 years. This suggests we have seen fewer exceptionally strong hurricanes than an expected 35-year average of about 5.”
Consider Al Gore’s statement hurricanes are getting stronger.
From the National Hurricane Centre
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/Deadliest_Costliest.shtml
Bill Illis
Great links to the ‘melting’ glacier. Have you got a day/moth for each of those photos to ensure we are comparing like for like.
Way more ice now but the dates need to coincide. If dates match a complaint to the BBC is in order
Tonyb
[snip]
Snip at will.
Reply: While some of us may appreciate the sentiment, let’s not go there. ~ charles the moderator
Who’s stick this, I think I know,
This louse spews lies and Co2,
He made one once before, it’s true,
Made from tree rings, falsely glued
To his hubris and some grass, this
Mann sure mangles randomness,
Won’t someone PLEASE hand him his ass?
:))
You know, looking at the picture of Michael Mann. I am struck by a remarkable resemblance to Gavin. Can it be that they are the same person? 😉
CtM:-)
I agree, I shouldn’t have been too keen, & I wouldn’t want the responsibility!
It seems a shame to chop all those tree down in search of proxy data. What to do with all this timber ? Perhaps he could carve out a hockey stick ?
Mann is in danger of becoming the running gag of GW controversy.
First he says there was no medeaval warming period, whereas overwhelming evidence says there was. Then he says Antarctica was warming over the last 50 years, whereas every other investigation, including those by researchers with an interest in the GW religion, told us it was not, actually became colder. And now the hurricanes are at an all time high, when researcher who actually know about these things say the opposite.
It’s obvious to me: his algorithms are flawed and they have a sign error somewhere.
The real question to me is, however: is it of any interest to the rest of the world to find out where and why he makes his mistakes? I think not, I find that totally uninteresting. So, next time, when Mann delivers his next exploits, I expect a report on this blog under the title:
“Mann farts again”
NS (22:55:57) :
The BBC tell a very different story on their actual radio broadcasts. No uncertainty there. They even added some stuff about a “a new report the bbc have seen”. It is beneath contempt.
They sure do. This paper was also given air time on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Material World’ yesterday. For what it’s worth, I’ve e-mailed the programme, giving a brief synopsis of Chris Landsea’s involvement and postings. I don’t expect much to occur as a result, but one can always hope…
Cheers
Mark
Mann is probably reading this article about himself and is working on a ‘new proxy’ for us.
The Pine Island glacier pics come from day 71 (2003) and day 74 (2009), so,
– same time of the year,
– at the very end of Antartic summer when there will be a minimum of sea ice and snow so it is the best satellite pic of the just/(mostly) glacial ice only. (It looks like there is still some sea ice off-shore in the 2009 picture).
Regarding:
Tim Clark (13:52:52) :
What was the worldwide spacial distribution of these cores? Oh, sorry, no data provided.
and:
Jeff Id (14:19:52) :
Mann has apparently put all data and code on line beating Dr Steig who still has not released the code by seven months.
http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/Nature09/
The actual sediment data is not available, only the techniques and locations.
This is the first reviewers criticism from the link Jeff provided:
Assertion #1: The merging together of the more recent instrumental tropical cyclone data with the proxy hurricane strike observations is not appropriate, since the sediment overwash deposits are generally recording direct major hurricane strikes. To attempt to infer basin-wide statistics from major hurricane strikes at four sites is not appropriate.
The instrumental data includes CAT 2 hurricanes, whereas the resolution of the HurrMannicane sediments is alledgely CAT 3, at only four sites. I concur with the asserted criticisms.
Oh – I just realized where the photo at the top came from. I’ve seen the original before, somehow it didn’t register with me your photo had been improved over that one at http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/
Bill Illis
Thanks for that. I normally trust your posts implicitly but if I wanted to complain to the BBC I needed to make sure of my (non melting) ground.
The BBC report was unbelievable in its bias and misinformation and follows hard on the heels of an ever more imaginative series of scare stories from them.
Tonyb
Oh, there are some storms in the queue right now. And it’s still relatively early in the season.
Always dicey, predicting which storms are going to become hurricanes, and then predicting which hurricanes will actually make landfall, and then figuring out where they’re going to land.
Always. I think in this one instance, “always” fits just fine.
Bil Illis
Another poster on another thread obtained this information.
“The Pine Island glacier:
-mean temperature -30 C
-snow accumulation 1m/year
-thinning(in a location at 55 km upstream of the grounding line):
1991-2001 1m/year
2003-2006 1.5m/year
2006-2007 2.5m/year
2007-2008 3.5m/year
Speed: 2075 m/year
Speed increase:6%/year
Mass loss:46 GT/year.
Source:Scott&Gudmundsson .”
The BBC are presumably referring to this report 55km upstream but showed photos of it melting as it entered the sea contrary to the official data. How a glacier can be melting at these sorts of temperatures seems strange as there is no warmer sea involved here which can melt from underneath.
tonyb
Ozzie John (04:34:21) :
It seems a shame to chop all those tree down in search of proxy data. What to do with all this timber ?
For winter time…ya know, one thing is to lie another to suffer cold.
How any scientist can speak positively of Mann and his work amazes me; it tells you all you need to know about that scientist.
I would suggest him a better proxie: Get an andean Llama, slaughter it by opening its chest, take its heart out, still beating , raise it to dedicate it to the sun above, then look at it, that will give you the best forescast of climate for the next year.
(note.-This is actually performed -SH winter solstice-, every year on june 24th., at the Intiraymi holyday, at Cusco, Peru, South America.)
Thank you Roger Carr !! It is apparent the world is waking up from this Gore induced fantasy. Their foundations are crumbling. Even some journalists are asking the hard questions. To me, that is the real story for journalists; how this scam was so effective and all encompassing.
I would like to see the authors of this research review Mann’s work:
Appl Opt Nyberg J, Malmgren B, Winter A, Jury MR, Kilbourne KH,Quinn TM (2007) Low Atlantic hurricane activity in the 1970s and 1980s compared to the past 270 years. Nature 447(7145): 698.
“Hurricane activity in the North Atlantic Ocean has increased significantly since 1995 (refs 1, 2). This trend has been attributed to both anthropogenically induced climate change3 and natural variability1, but the primary cause remains uncertain. Changes in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes in the past can provide insights into the factors that influence hurricane activity, but reliable observations of hurricane activity in the North Atlantic only cover the past few decades2. Here we construct a record of the frequency of major Atlantic hurricanes over the past 270 years using proxy records of vertical wind shear and sea surface temperature (the main controls on the formation of major hurricanes in this region1, 3, 4, 5) from corals and a marine sediment core. The record indicates that the average frequency of major hurricanes decreased gradually from the 1760s until the early 1990s, reaching anomalously low values during the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, the phase of enhanced hurricane activity since 1995 is not unusual compared to other periods of high hurricane activity in the record and thus appears to represent a recovery to normal hurricane activity, rather than a direct response to increasing sea surface temperature. Comparison of the record with a reconstruction of vertical wind shear indicates that variability in this parameter primarily controlled the frequency of major hurricanes in the Atlantic over the past 270 years, suggesting that changes in the magnitude of vertical wind shear will have a significant influence on future hurricane activity.”
“Has anyone else noticed that Michael Mann now looks very like Kane [snip] in the Command and Conquer computer game series ?”
Posing with his new vortex weapon.
David Ball (08:55:24) :
Thank you Roger Carr !! It is apparent the world is waking up from this Gore induced fantasy. Their foundations are crumbling
Crumbling?, are you sure?. There several changes ahead, like an “educational reform” which lowers markedly its level by creating new courses as “social personnel”(which includes in one:geography, a digest resume of history-enough to erase any national sentiment- and economy), then the subject called “communication” (including a very simplified language course, literature,etc), a very suscint course on mathematics, called “logical-mathematics” and “sciences”, including in it all sciences, from anatomy to physics and chemistry.
All this is intended for a population expected only to serve their Masters, for the new “Gammas” of this “Brave New World”.
Al this has been already implemented in several countries following the model proposed by the UN world governmental offices.
The WUWT saga will have to reach other areas menaced by this world movement which not only comprises climate issues but the future of all humanity.
If any of you visit the UNESCO web site you’ll feel aghast.
http://www.unesco.org/en/education
Absolutely Off Topic:
Paleontology is becoming extinct
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/55888/
Could we help it?
Mark T (21:43:15) : You should read Pat Michaels and Robert Balling’s Climate of Extremes-they have a whole chapter on publication bias, peer review, etc. which pretty well documents that the system is broken (for one thing, people can choose who reviews their work and who can’t, pretty much).
Chuck (09:56:28) : “I’m convinced that because of the great influence that MBH98 had on the global warming debate, including the prominent usage in the IPCC reports, that Dr. Mann was elevated to an upper rung of social status amongst his peers. Once such status is achieved, it is nearly impossible to lose it. It doesn’t matter that the Hockey Stick was shown not to be correct or that he refuses to publish his data or statistical methods. Any work he produces is treated with greater reverence than it would otherwise deserve and his supporters are unwavering.
For those of us who care most about the science and not so much about social status, such reverence seems completely unjustified but it’s not hard to find examples of this sort of social worshipping in all walks of life.
Once you have a high social status, you can get away with all sorts of behavior that you couldn’t otherwise. It will take something major to knock him off his high rung on the social ladder.”
Richard Lindzen has noted this phenomenon, and calls it “Opportunism of the weak”:
“Here, scientists whose work would
normally be regarded as weak and unimpressive, gain note by molding their results to the needs
of the alarmists in the environmental movement. This, normally, might be of little consequence
to more productive scientists. However, with the support of the environmental movement, such
weak opportunists can gain unwarranted authority. The examples are well known and include
the infamous ‘hockey stick,’ as well as the iconic statements of the IPCC.”
Read it all, it’s rather pertinent:
http://www.heartland.org/events/WashingtonDC09/PDFs/Lindzen.pdf
Lance (10:36:26) :
I broke my hockey stick last winter during hockey season. He can use it for Carbon dating….
How does this guy manage to get so much coverage!!
An excellent publicist and the interest of financiers of his latest “study.”
Nogw (09:51:24) :
The WUWT saga will have to reach other areas menaced by this world movement which not only comprises climate issues but the future of all humanity.
If any of you visit the UNESCO web site you’ll feel aghast.
http://www.unesco.org/en/education
On the contrary. Nothing appears terribly unreasonable except perhaps their climate program. More important is a commitment to balanced views of education that reflect a cross section of the human mindset – and not just the views of the UN.
PLEASE: No more photos of Michael Mann in the future. I usually am eating breakfast when I read your blog, and I find looking at Mann causes me to become nauseous.
Nature censored my post on “McIntyre versus Jones: climate data row escalates” so I am reproducing it here.
True science is spread and enhanced by criticism and argument. The data which is the basis of AGW hypothesis should be open to review and transparent. Saying that “Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”, doesnt exactly engender confidence.
Jones has published some papers with Mann of hockey stick fame. To remind readers the “hockey stick” did away with the Medieval Warm period and Little Ice Age and replaced it with a dead steady line with runaway warming in the last 30 years. It was the smoking gun of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
The Medieval warm period happened without the help of Anthropogenic CO2. If that happened quite naturally it could well be asked why todays warming is in anyway unusual or alarming or indeed if it would continue or enter another cold period.
The authors of the graph had used the varying widths of tree-rings as THEIR PRINCIPAL METHOD of estimating early-climate temperatures.
THE IPCC HAD, prior to this, WARNED AGAINST USING TREE-RINGS AS PROXIES for pre-instrumental surface temperatures as they were prone to be inaccurate.
They none-the-less used them and gave them 390 TIMES AS MUCH WEIGHT AS ANY OF THE OTHER DATA THEY USED
Not only did the authors of the “hockey stick” use temperature proxies that the IPCC had said should not be used; not only did they give these questionable proxies 390 times more weight than other data; but they ALSO LEFT OUT THE TREE-RING DATASET THAT INCLUDED THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD ITSELF!
Then the graph’s authors said in the scientific paper that accompanied their graph THAT THEY HAD INCLUDED THE TREE-RING DATASET FOR THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD THAT THEY HAD IN FACT OMITTED!
The graph’s authors inserted their own “estimates” in place of the data they had left out, BUT DID NOT PUBLISH THE FACT THAT THEY HAD DONE SO.
Worse, THEY HID THE MISSING DATA IN A FILE ON THEIR OWN COMPUTER that they revealingly labeled “CENSORED_DATA”.
When McIntyre and McKitrick obtained from the authors of the “hockey stick” the computer program they had used in compiling the graph, they found it PRODUCED A “HOCKEY STICK” EVEN WHEN THEY USED RANDOM DATA FROM A TELEPHONE BOOK!
Geophysical Research Letters finally published a paper by McIntyre & McKitrick exposing the defects in the graph (McIntyre & McKitrick, 2005).
“This paper provoked astonishment and dismay throughout the climatological community. That was the first moment at which many honest scientists who had previously accepted the climate scare at face value began to question the methods and the motives of the handful of politicized scientists.”
Three statisticians were engaged by the US House of Representatives (Wegman et al., 2005) to examine the evidence on both sides.
In a damning report, the statisticians confirmed all of the findings of McIntyre and McKitrick to the effect that the graph was defective.
The statisticians also found that a suspicious collection of subsequent papers that had suddenly appeared supporting the assertion that the medieval warm period had not existed.
They found that these had nearly all been written by associates or co-authors of the inventors of the defective graph, and using similarly questionable data and methods!
In the July 2005 hearing, Edward Wegman, a George Mason University statistician, testified on behalf of the mathematicians who reviewed the Mann papers. “The controversy of the [Mann] methods lies in that the proxies are incorrectly centered on the mean of the period 1902-1995, rather than on the whole time period.” He explained that these statistical procedures were capable of incorrectly creating a hockey stick shaped graph.
Gerald North, chair of the National Research Council committee, testified at the hearing that he agreed with Wegman’s statistical criticisms, but said that those considerations “did not alter the substance of Mann’s findings”! (How on Earth is that possible?)
North said that large scale surface temperature reconstructions “are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities.” Effectively bailing out Mann.
However in the detailed 155 page report of the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council Report, which was also chaired by Gerald North, said differently.
They accepted McIntyre & McKitrick’s argument that Mann’s method is biased towards producing hockey stick-shaped PCs
That uncertainties had been underestimated
That the bristlecone data, on which the famous hockey stick shape depends, should not have been used.
THEY ALSO EXPRESSED VERY LITTLE CONFIDENCE IN THE IPCC’S CLAIM ABOUT THE 1990S BEING THE WARMEST DECADE IN THE MILLENNIUM.
“The substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming.”
“Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that “the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium” because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales.”
However just before this they also slipped in that “..the committee finds it PLAUSIBLE that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium.”
This enabled Nature, who first published Mann’s work to say in a headline “Academy affirms hockey-stick graph”! and every other tabloid jumped in.
Shame on you Nature!
Overwash, coastlines, sedimentation and silt deposits have been greatly influenced by human migration and development, not just climate or tectonics. There is no chance it can be used as a proxy to determine historical weather events.
There is a major difference between an Addendum, which is published to correct an inadvertent error, and a Corrigenda, which indicates deliberate error. For instance, the correction of Mann’s hockey stick was a Corrigenda according to Nature, which stated:
In other words, Mann’s hockey stick was deliberately in error. And now we have the Steig Corrigenda.
Smokey:
You’re always taking things a bridge too far.
does not imply deliberate error, just error.
Corrigenda are for correcting errors, real errors that make a difference to conclusions, not necessarily deliberate errors. Addendums are for additions. That is the distinction.
RunFromMadness (13:11:28) : said
“Overwash, coastlines, sedimentation and silt deposits have been greatly influenced by human migration and development, not just climate or tectonics. There is no chance it can be used as a proxy to determine historical weather events.”
It has been though and many people are believing it.
Tonyb
jeez (13:25:16) :
… if the scientific accuracy or reproducibility of the original paper is compromised.
does not imply deliberate error, just error.
You are right. But:
Using tree ring proxies when warned not to do so;
Giving them 390 times the weightage of other data;
Leaving out the dataset that included the Medieval Warm Period;
Points to deliberate error
Saying that they had included the dataset that they had left out is lying, in my books.
Hiding the missing data in a file labelled “CENSORED_DATA” points to deliberate concealment.
It wasn’t inadvertent. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Richard:
Yes, but Smokey was implying that Nature agreed with his assessment of deliberate errors by use of the term corrigendum, and that Nature was endorsing accusations of Mann’s and Steig’s of deliberate misrepresentation and that is not the case. Whether Mann and/or Steig did or did not deliberately introduce errors is not the relevant to my point. That is a separate issue which I will leave others to address.
jeez,
I’ll defer to your expertise, but the way I had read the definitions in Nature, it stated that an Addendum is done when “authors inadvertently omitted significant information available to them at the time”.
The word ‘inadvertently’ is only found in the definition for an Addendum, not in the definition of Corrigenda. It appears to me that a Corrigenda is much more serious, and that those errors were not due to inadvertent mistakes.
Smokey, it’s a simple as using the English equivalents:
Addition
Correction
Smokey
Nature were the ones who published Mann’s work, including the sifting sands one above. They were part of the cover-up that happened subsequently when attacked by McIntyre and McKitrick.
They refused to reveal the details of the data and methods used by the authors when asked to do so.
They refused to publish McIntyre and McKitrick’s paper criticising the graph.
They went along with Caspar Amman and Eugene Wahl’s hasty post-facto cover-up which claimed to be “independent confirmation” of the hockey stick.
They published a news article headlined “Academy affirms hockey-stick graph”
They are hardly likely to say that Mann was in deliberate error
RunFromMadness (13:11:28) :
“Overwash, coastlines, sedimentation and silt deposits have been greatly influenced by human migration and development, not just climate or tectonics. There is no chance it can be used as a proxy to determine historical weather events.”
Can I add bioturbation to the list? (Non-human post depositional redistribution of soft sediments by all sorts of bugs of all sorts of shapes and doing all sorts of things.)
That shows that the Medieval Warm Period is well recognized in the Climate Scientific Community. Even Mann recognices it.
The MWP is NOT , and never was, a challenge for AGW theory. The MWP and the LIA are fenomena expected given the natural variability (solar radiation, ENSO and NAO cycles, etc). What is not natural is the warming of last decades. There are no solar radiation increase ,no radical shifts in ENSO (like the development of a permanent El Niño) and NAO is re-entering a cool fase in last few years.
How can you explain recent warming, specially in the polar areas, withouth greenhouse + aerosol dimming effects?
commonsense (16:51:28) :
How can you explain recent warming, specially in the polar areas, withouth greenhouse + aerosol dimming effects?
-From the last big el nino, in 1998, there has not been any warming but cooling. Before the 1998 el Nino, in 1991 – 1992 there was a low peak in GCR so low cloud cover decreased, sun heated sea water, and it began losing heat at 1998.(There is no heat you ever feel if it is not being lost from a source).
-There is no such warming in the polar areas!
Wow commonsense, have you got some reading to do ( and maybe some spell checking would help you as well ). The warming of the last decades, as you put it, are well within the bounds of natural variability. You will have a lot of work to do to prove to me that it is not. The MWP has been shown to have been warmer than it is today, thereby putting any recent warming well within the bounds of NATURAL VARIABILITY. The only reason you might think we are outside the bounds of NATURAL VARIABILITY, is if you buy into Michael Mann’s weak proxies, which has certainly made an attempt at removing the MWP and the LIA. It is definitely a challenge to those who believe we are outside the bounds of NATURAL VARIABILITY. Where is your common sense?
TREMENDOUS NEWS!!!!!!
RealClimate announces that ALL “real science” must reveal its original data and make public ALL of its process!!
(Wonder how they let that little statement get by given Hansen’s, Jones’, and Mann’s inability/refusal to do so most of the time …And the Brit’s absolute failure to track, archive, and even SAVE their original weather data.)
From that web site, quoting the following thread:
“Resolving technical issues in science
Filed under: Arctic and Antarctic Climate Science Communicating Climate
Reporting on climate skeptics— group @ 14 August 2009
One of the strengths of science is its capacity to resolve controversies by generally accepted procedures and standards. Many scientific questions (especially more technical ones) are not matters of opinion but have a correct answer.
Scientists document their procedures and findings in the peer-reviewed literature in such a way that they can be double-checked and challenged by others. The proper way to challenge results is, of course, also through the peer-reviewed literature, so that the challenge follows the same standards of documentation as did the original finding.”
La Nina might mean more hurricanes or less hurricanes. Same with El Nino. These are all completely consistent with results from GCM models.
“The MWP is NOT , and never was, a challenge for AGW theory.”
Name a model and set of climate forcings and “known” sources of variability/oscillations (What?!? Those exist now?!?) which shows a MWP globally and which was as warm as the present or warmer. Name one.
“given the natural variability (solar radiation, ENSO and NAO cycles, etc).”
Um, you mean those things that models have a great deal of difficulty with? And they can CAUSE warming? Gosh, who knew!
“What is not natural is the warming of last decades.”
Your argument is one from ignorance, but you state it with such confidence-pretty impressive. You basically say “it’s not the sun, or ENSO, or NAO (define “last few years”-you mean the years that there wasn’t any warming in the lower atmosphere, or before 1997?), or anything else I can think of. Must be AGW.”
“There are no solar radiation increase”
Debatable:
Nicola Scafetta and Richard Willson, “ACRIM-gap and Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) trend issue resolved using a surface magnetic flux TSI proxy model”, Geophysical Research Letter 36, L05701, doi:10.1029/2008GL036307 (2009)
(not that it matters that much)
“like the development of a permanent El Niño”
I’d bet you everything I own that if such a thing had occurred recently, rather warming being blamed on that, such a change would be blamed on AGW-I can’t make that bet because it’s a counterfactual, but still.
“How can you explain recent warming, specially in the polar areas, withouth greenhouse + aerosol dimming effects?”
With regard to “especially polar areas” there is a widespread misconception that this is some sort of greenhouse “fingerprint”-it’s NOT. Any source of warming is amplified at the poles, because of the ice albedo feedback. The arguments about water vapor etc. although often made even by people who should no better, are just wrong. But what about that warming, hm? Well, what about the warming of the arctic up to the thirties? Temperatures then were similar to today’s, and in fact a recent paper:
Chylek Petr, Chris K. Folland, Glen Lesins, Manvendra K. Dubeys, and Muyin Wang: 2009: “Arctic air temperature change amplification and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation”. Geophysical Research Letters (in press).
Concluded that, at least during the short instrumental record, the behavior of the Arctic temperatures in relation to global is really odd from the expectations of polar amplification and appears to be modulated by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
More over, when we look at Antarctica, (note that even with recent controversies, the warming that was “found” was mainly in a very early part of the record) changes in the last thirty years or so have been decidedly weak. If polar amplification WERE a necessary fingerprint of AGW, then that would be a problem (which one can attempt to address in a couple of ways)-fortunately for you it isn’t and there is probably a pretty good explanation for that.
Dimming? I have read several studies which claim that in fact the most recent period is one of global brightening so maybe the question you should be asking yourself is “How can you explain recent warming, specially in the polar areas, with greenhouse – aerosol dimming effects?”
And especially at the North Pole, given:
Drew Shindell & Greg Faluvegi, 2009: Climate response to regional radiative forcing during the twentieth century. Nature Geoscience 2, 294 – 300 (2009) Published online: 22 March 2009 | doi:10.1038/ngeo473.
which says:
“During 1976-2007, we estimate that aerosols contributed 1.09 +/- 0.81 C to the observed Arctic surface temperature increase of 1.48 +/- 0.28 C.”
(recent Atlantic warming may have more to do with dust variations, another (this time natural) warming effect of aerosols, which, per above, may also play into Arctic warming:
Foltz, G. R., and M. J. McPhaden, 2008. Trends in Saharan dust and tropical Atlantic climate during 1980-2006. Geophysical Research Letters, 35, L20706, doi:10.1029/2008GL035042.
No comment on the odd construction of yours that dimming “explains” warming!
Seriously though, you can do better than this in making arguments for AGW. I know you can, because “skeptics” Pat Michaels and Robert Balling actually do so almost enough to convince me in Climate of Extremes. Think about it-it has to do with the fact that the characters of recent warming ARE a little bit different than the early twentieth century warming in a way which DOES suggest some human influence (although given the biases in the surface record, how much is “real” greenhouse warming versus land-use etc. is not at all clear to me). There IS Global Warming (although probably less than usually calculated) there is even a (potentially substantial) anthropogenic component to it-BUT the points which matter are 1. The Nature of the Anthropogenic effects 2. The AMOUNT of warming which can be attributed to the various influences 3. And whether such warming is in anyway alarming.
You seem to be defending the claim that most of the latter half of the twentieth century warming was due to CO2 and other greenhouse gases (something IPCC gives 90% probability to). Well, that would indicate you believe that at least 51% of the 50% of the warming that happened since the late seventies (the rates for the warmings from 1911-1941 and 1978-2008 for the (biased) HadCrut surface record are identical) and if the warming of the twentieth century was .8 degrees (which is being exceedingly generous IMAO) that translates into you believe that all the anthropogenic greenhouse gases that have gone up into the atmophere since the late seventies have caused anywhere from .2 to .4 degrees Celsius of warming. Remembering that I wont let you fudge the aerosol numbers to whatever you need, please explain the small warming since the seventies with increasing CO2 and until recently increasing Methane, etc, etc. with a model-and tell me, after you get a good back cast, how much warming you see in the future. if it’s more than about 1.3 degrees, you’ve done something very wrong and will be reprimanded.
Hockey sticks are constructed from several elements. One mentioned thoroughly above is the defective statistical techniques that overweight particular proxies to generate flatness or lower values in the left hand part of the stick.
Another that was also mentioned above by Tim Clark (“The instrumental data includes CAT 2 hurricanes, whereas the resolution of the HurrMannicane sediments is alledgely CAT 3, at only four site”) is the splicing of proxy and instrumental records into a single graph with a misleading or inaccurate result. For temperatures it is the UHI infected instrumental temperature record spliced onto various proxies.
Another example is the CO2 hockey stick which splices modern instrumental CO2 measurements onto heavily smoothed ice code CO2 measurements. There’s a good reason that degassing 4k year old ice yields a sample of CO2 that is about 2k years old. Both the ice and the gas are dated fairly accurately. The difference is that the water and isotopes don’t travel through the ice over time, whereas the CO2 gas does as the ice is being fully solidified over centuries or millennia. The bottom line is that CO2 readings from ice cores are heavily smoothed and inappropriate to be spliced to unsmoothed instrument measurements.
Could the current CO2 spike be natural and ice cores have smoothed such spikes in the past? Probably not natural. The modern CO2 spike matches isotope ratios in fossil fuels. But that is a qualitative match, not quantitative, so the spike is probably mostly man-made but also likely partly natural. But can we be sure that CO2 hasn’t spiked naturally in the past, including the isotope ratios? Bottom line is there are natural mechanisms that could cause spikes (ocean off gassing, major vegetation decreases), but they tend to be slow and can’t explain much of the modern spike. I would say though that it is likely that the modern spike is not unprecedented for interglacial or perhaps even glacier periods (i.e. not a hockey stick)
commonsense (16:51:28) :
That shows that the Medieval Warm Period is well recognized in the Climate Scientific Community. Even Mann recognices it.
The MWP is NOT , and never was, a challenge for AGW theory. The MWP and the LIA are fenomena expected given the natural variability (solar radiation, ENSO and NAO cycles, etc).
===
Er, uhm, ah….politely put: No. Completely false. Utterly and completely false.
From the very beginning, the MWP and LIA threatened the entire premis of today’s ecotheist AGW theory: If the LIA or MWP produced greater long-term cyclic temperature changes over the period 1150 through 2000, and if that long-term cycle is further continuing a short 70 year cycle on top of the 900 year cycle, then today’s short “rise” in temperature between 1975 through 1998 IS well inside natural variation and your radiation-forced AGW warming theory is destroyed.
Quotes from the original climate ecotheists show they need to “remove the MWP” from the record, and they have: The original IPCC reports include both the LIA and the MWP. Later IPCC reports repeatedly insert Mann’sfabrication of the hockey stick instead – specifically because the IPCC’s first graph in their own report proves their own theory is wrong.
Likewise, Hansen’s own GISS has artificially raised the NOAA/NSDC original 1910-1970 RAW temperatures – hiding them with undocumented and unsubstantiated and unverified “corruptions” (er, corrections) specifically because the 20th century’s 70-year short term oscillation proves Hansen’s 1975-1998 rise is both within natural variation, and has been seen many times before.
Tim Clark
Eric (skeptic) (18:45:27) :
Hockey sticks are constructed from several elements. One mentioned thoroughly above is the defective statistical techniques that overweight particular proxies to generate flatness or lower values in the left hand part of the stick.
Another that was also mentioned above by Tim Clark (”The instrumental data includes CAT 2 hurricanes, whereas the resolution of the HurrMannicane sediments is alledgely CAT 3, at only four site”) is the splicing of proxy and instrumental records into a single graph with a misleading or inaccurate result.
—-
Please check me: As I read the excuses and rationalizations of Mann’s (missing) data, I understood that his hurricane landfall proxy data is coming
from ONE site in Massachusetts.
But Mann extends his proxy analysis not only for the “northeaster’s” that strike Mass. from the northeast (winter storms coming south), cold front storms coming from inland from the northwest, and (a VERY, VERY few) hurricane remnants after passing over the Ohio valley, NJ and NY and CT coastal plains, and directly from offshore still making storm floods.
Well, if so, then Mann’s proxy data – for his Mass site – will find dozens of large northeaster and winter storm debris and rain-induced floods from upstate and inland “regular” winter and summer floods, especially compared to so few true large hurricanes actually making landfall in New England.
Further, Mann then assumes that these miscellaneous and varied storm landfalls in from a single site in coastal New England can be used to tell us how many “hurricanes” strike the FL Gulf Coast, Texas coast, Louisiana and Alabama coasts, and the southeast’s Atlantic coasts.
Would it not be important to establish how Mann got a “robust” way to very that a rocky New Coast will deposit storm debris and mud in layers the same way that true hurricanes deposit mud and debris in flat Louisiana swamps and grass-covered sandy Florida beachs?
commonsense (16:51:28) :
That shows that the Medieval Warm Period is well recognized in the Climate Scientific Community. Even Mann recognices it.
Of course he does. That’s why he manipulated and fiddled the data and lied to remove it.
The MWP is NOT , and never was, a challenge for AGW theory.
Tell me another! If that is so why go through all that trouble to remove it?
How can you explain recent warming, specially in the polar areas, withouth greenhouse + aerosol dimming effects?
Must be one of the worlds many mysteries just like the MWP. Or maybe it is just like “The MWP and the LIA .. fenomena expected given the natural variability”.
Maybe Mann should spend his time trying to explain that rather than trying to fiddle the records to remove it.
The GISP2 ice core data clearly shows that Greenland (polar areas), at least, was warmer than today during the MWP. Wonder why that was so?
Actually no. Fossil fuels don’t cause much rise in atmospheric CO2. Most, over 95%, of the recent rise of the past few decades is wholly due to natural sources.
Unless you believe in the IPCC model in whose mythical world CO2 magically persists in the atmosphere for a thousand years contrary to the basic laws of physics and chemistry, and recently repeated by Salamon et al 2009.
What balderdash.
Observation, measurement, and analysis of the real world over the last fifty years shows that bulk CO2 persists in the atmosphere for only a few years and this is confirmed by isotopic analysis because of the slightly different rates at which the isotopes are adsorbed.
Contrary to IPCC assertions the isotope emission is largely meaningless because much of the CO2 released by natural sources is also very old, just like that in fossil fuels.
It is the adsorbtion rates not emission rates that are important in assessing the effect of burning fossil fuel. The latest paper on this is Essenhigh but there have been many previous ones.
Kindest Regards
Jeez – I’ve never seen so many good one-liners as these responses!
Ana now a named storm – this was the TD that petered out and was even dropped from the list on Thursday and Friday.
Now, Saturday morning at 0600 Eastern time, it’s back a storm. Odd.
Look at the CO2 levels on a weekly or daily level: You can the large !!! up and down swing as NH plants absorb CO2 in the spring and release it each fall-winter.
IF the AGW ecotheists’ theory of long-term CO2 deposits (or half-life) was true, then no such up and down swing could be detected.
Or do they pretend that it is only man-released CO2 that is kept untouched in the atmosphere for thousand years, but nature’s CO2 is changed out every 6 months?
David Ball (08:55:24): “To me, that is the real story for journalists; how this scam was so effective and all encompassing.”
Read this link from MartinGAtkins (06:50:31) for a clue, David: Global Warming, a Mass Mania
Roger Carr & Martin Atkins,
Thanks for linking to that excellent article.
Masters warned that TD might reorganize itself, and it did. Storms apparently dying and turning serious instead isn’t all that odd, really. Look what Ivan did several years ago: clobbered the Florida panhandle, chewed its weay North and then East, and then looped back to hit Central Florida at (IIRC) tropical storm strength.
Re BBC
Slightly off thread but the BBC Blog of Bloom that was showing dangerous sceptical tendencies has had no new postings for over two weeks with no explanation.
In addition to Material World you might want to “listen again” to Home Planet for more BBC AGW junk.
Regards
Paul
Excellent article, Roger Carr, thank you again.
RACookPE1978 (03:04:47) :
A little odd, but if it moved into an area with low shear redevelopment
happens frequently.
The year we got into the greek letters for storm names had several
storms redevelop after falling back down to tropical wave status. Pretty
much anything seemed destined to become a storm that year!
It’s still not very healthy:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATCDAT2+shtml/151455.shtml
MORNING SATELLITE IMAGERY SHOWS THAT THE CENTER OF ANA HAS BECOME
EXPOSED TO THE WEST OF THE CENTRAL CONVECTIVE AREA…SUGGESTING
SOME WESTERLY VERTICAL WIND SHEAR HAS DEVELOPED. SATELLITE
INTENSITY ESTIMATES FROM TAFB AND SAB REMAIN 35 KT…AND THAT
REMAINS THE INITIAL INTENSITY.
…
THE CURRENT SHEAR WAS NOT WELL FORECAST BY THE LARGE-SCALE
MODELS…AND IT IS UNCLEAR WHETHER THIS IS A TEMPORARY TREND OR A
SIGN OF LONG-TERM TROUBLE FOR ANA.
I’ve always been a bit nervous about how unprepared New Englanders appear to be for a major hurricane. In 1968 I visited Bass River on Cape Cod, and an old timer was shaking his head and muttering that the entire development had been build on a stretch of sand that was salt marsh before a certain hurricane (the Great Atlantic Hurricane?) As those old timers passed away fewer and fewer people seemed aware their houses were at risk.
Besides summer houses at beaches, the two areas at risk seem to be neighborhoods with many trees, (the 1938 hurricane took down half of New England’s trees,) and houses placed high up on hills for the beautiful views. (For various reasons, the winds atop New England’s hills are much higher, and remain higher longer even in a decaying hurricane. Old timers in New Hampshire told me that Carol in 1954 “flattened every tree up on that hill.”
While poking into the past I came across studies from marshes, which indicate hurricanes and super-nor’easters can bash the entire protective structure of dunes inland over the marshes, from time to time. However there is a problem trying to use such sediments as proxies.
One problem is that storms that come at low tide don’t bash down the dunes, especially north of Cape Cod where tides can vary ten feet, (and even more, as you move up towards the Bay Of Funday.) As I recall, Belle hit at low tide, yet the tide was so high the mud flats in Maine were deep under water, however the storm surge was still well below the level of an ordinary high tide.
The second problem is that super-storms tend to bash only one or two holes through the dunes, and therefore there may be sections of salt marsh that escape being buried in shifted sand.
The conclusion I drew was that such proxies are good, if you want to warn people about what occurred in the past, but are unreliable, when it comes to recording every single storm.
And now we have another named storm: TS Bill.
Roger Carr (03:28:28) : Excellent article. Thanks. I think it should be repeated and posted and excerpts posted often.
Thanks for the CO2 info Mr Cook (from freerepublic my second favorite website!) The seasonal variation in CO2 is proof of the natural carbon cycle. Then there is the steady year to year rise from some other source. That carbon has to come from somewhere, natural or not. The warming of the deep ocean is the most likely source, but is there a matching steady rise in deep ocean temperature? Short answer, yes there is some warming, but not enough to account for the steady increase in CO2. See charts in ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/lindzen.pdf for example.
For Jones’ criticism of typical isotope analyses, my question is what is the source of the CO2 and how is it as old as fossil fuels? Essenhigh does not offer an explanation of the age because his hypothesis is that the CO2 comes from the oceans. But that CO2 would not be old. There’s not much about CO2 on his web page http://www.mecheng.osu.edu/people/robert-essenhigh
I repeat my previous assertion that CO2 is likely not a hockey stick and past fluctuations have occurred, some of those independent of temperature (e.g. major vegetation changes on land or in the oceans), and those will never be discovered slicing up heavily smoothed ice cores and measuring CO2 in each slice.
commonsense (16:51:28) :
“That shows that the Medieval Warm Period is well recognized in the Climate Scientific Community. Even Mann recognices it.
The MWP is NOT , and never was, a challenge for AGW theory. The MWP and the LIA are fenomena expected given the natural variability (solar radiation, ENSO and NAO cycles, etc). What is not natural is the warming of last decades. There are no solar radiation increase ,no radical shifts in ENSO (like the development of a permanent El Niño) and NAO is re-entering a cool fase in last few years.
How can you explain recent warming, specially in the polar areas, withouth greenhouse + aerosol dimming effects?”
I feel like I’m piling on now, but what drivel! This is some classic AGW illogic. Consider the summary of your argument.. “Global warming may have driven MWP & LIA in the past, but only greenhouse gases could have driven recent warming”.
Your challenge… How can you explain the recent cooling, especially in tropical areas with greenhouse gas increases?
The Medieval Warm Period the warmers agreed
Was dangerous as it interfered with their creed
So the warmers resolved
To get rid of it because
‘Evil humans’ is the cause that they need
Trying my hand at Limericks. Pardon me this will be my last:
If your theory goes against all the facts,
Simply amend the facts that detracts
From the theory in question
And maintain the obsession
With your theory against the facts that it lacks
Arn Riewe (19:05:29) : To pile on further:
“How can you explain the recent cooling, especially in tropical areas with greenhouse gas increases?”
I’ll take a whack at this! (the following is meant as a joke and is bad science-reader discretion is advised…)
Gore (2005) has raised the possibility that large scale Climate Crisis Change could lead to rapid melting of Greenland like has been seen in some parts of Greenland in some of the last few years (in 2005, Greenland lost a full .004% of it’s Ice Mass or something like that!). This would lead at some indeterminate time to 20 feet of sea level rise definitely if it will happen I feel probably, if we don’t change our ways, which will help the economy anyway because Smith (1776) was clearly just plain wrong that people follow their own self interest and what not leading to using solar and wind power when it makes sense-after all, it all ready makes sense, I can feel it is so and it is necessarily I know that I feel it, not just because of that but the Planet!!! Anyway, all that melted ice will make the ocean less salty, and people will start to drink more of it because it will be easier to desalinate, and they will need it because the Climate Crisis doesn’t just mean more rain but also more drought, too. This has already lead to a leveling of sea level rise, but when people start to die that will accelerate again I know it. Anyway, the ocean has salty currents that keep Europe warming and we are disrupting them by changing the climate and drinking the water and the pumps are redirecting those currents. So now the Climate Crisis is making everything colder and this trend will reinforce itself because all change is bad and the system is highly unstable. I know it.
“Paleotempestology”. Oh yeah? I am learned in metaphysicotheologocosmoloonigology. Lady Cunegonde would be proud Dr. Mann.
Richard (21:41:53) :
The ABCNews article I read actually referred to the MWP. It also came up with the bizzare scientific discipline (striaghtfaced, mind you) of “paleotempestology”. A word not yet accepted in Scrabble, but all the rage in climate studies.
The human image has progressed over time from being in no control over our destiny, it was all up to the gods of nature, to being in half control of our destiny, Catholic church and free will, to now being in total control of our destiny, despite the ugly fact that human kind is due to pass away regardless of the most valiant of efforts and due to the permanence of impermanence.
This is the sort of garbage our kids in the UK are being subjected to…….
http://campaigns2.direct.gov.uk/actonco2/home/campaign-advertising.html
Data from modern thermometers vs. “tree rings, corals, ice cores and historical records.” Oh boy! He forgot tea leaves. coin flips, and crystal balls. I think I will compare these oranges with that mystery box behind the curtain, formulate the hypothesis and the solution at the same time, and force public and monetary policies from my “study.” Oh, and make sure the vertical graph scale is designed to show maximum lift where you want it. Oh, and make sure the really bad part is in RED. Oh, and make sure 90% of the graph is normal and peaceful, and the last 10% is bad, red and evil. This is comparing real data to historical guesses. It is not science. It is BS.
Caleb (08:46:27) :
I’ve always been a bit nervous about how unprepared New Englanders appear to be for a major hurricane. In 1968 I visited Bass River on Cape Cod, and an old timer was shaking his head and muttering that the entire development had been build on a stretch of sand that was salt marsh before a certain hurricane (the Great Atlantic Hurricane?) As those old timers passed away fewer and fewer people seemed aware their houses were at risk.
Besides summer houses at beaches, the two areas at risk seem to be neighborhoods with many trees, (the 1938 hurricane took down half of New England’s trees,) and houses placed high up on hills for the beautiful views.
Sometime ago I used reference to the 1938 hurricane as an intro into a blog entry titled “Science – Ethic and Responsibility”. Here is an excerpt…
Born in the year of 1937 on the twelfth day of May, she was but 31 years old when a category 5 hurricane destroyed her home. The exact date; 21 September, 1938. The location; Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her home suffered heavy damage during the storm and then was eventually washed over the edge of nearby cliffs. Fortunately for her, and us really, she was able to escape death. Approximately 750 others across the New England states were not so lucky.
In the pictures below, from the Connecticut Historical Society, we see our young lady salvaging personal items from her home, preparing to rebuild. We see her in moments of exhaustion and despair; then moving forward having found cause for hope, for strength; and then finally facing the challenge, with tenacity, with courage, with a smile.
Such was the nature of this young lady; Katherine Hepburn.
This story, however, is not about Katherine Hepburn. It is about storms, seas, and science. In 1938 the nation did not have the ability to track hurricanes or predict their landfalls. Hence the population in general, caught mostly by surprise, weathered major events the best they could and prayed to survive.
…… from there I went into discussion of ethics and responsibility of science mostly regarding climate change. The fact is, science should be advocating adaption to climate change (in either direction) rather than trying to claim that man can change the climate. Good science would acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge and also generate scientific results rather than politically ‘adjusted’ data and results.
*whistles* high sticking, two minutes!
Why does Mann think he still has credibility? His hockey stick was bad enough, now this? Oh please.
@Lee Kington: science isn’t claiming that man can change the climate. Look at everyone who’s claiming it. Governments, the media and scientists working for the governments.
Why?
Governments can tax us even more over this. They can get more control over our lives with this hoax.
The media sells more papers and gets more viewers (let’s face it, which headline will sell better: “Everything’s alright” or “The end of the world is near!”)
And the scientists working for the government get their funds from the government.
It’s all about money. The planet Earth is hardly fragile. That baby has experienced things far worse than humans. But it’s a trend. Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Without any further research mankind was at fault. Today we know that the thickness of that layer, especially in the south, is very heavily influenced by the sun. That hole on the south pole could have been there for centuries.
But hey, who cares about science? All people need to know comes from Hollywood movies and yellow press!
Bleh!