Read on for a new Josh cartoon.
What’s wrong with this image? Well if you are part of The Team (RealClimate and friends), it goes against everything you’ve been publishing. You want the Medieval Warm Period to disappear, and you want a hockey stick at the end showing “unprcedented” warming. The shape below just doesn’t cut it when that’s what you are researching selling.
On the left is temperature in °C, on the X axis, years, with labels from 0AD to the year 2000.
Images like the above don’t sell. With a clear MWP and no hockey stick, there’s no alarm, and no $$ coming in for “further studies”. In the Wake of the Gergis et al retraction, Steve McIntyre notes that one of the “screened out” datasets just happens to be the one with the best resolution and the greatest duration – the Law Dome Oxygen 18 data set (from Antarctica). He writes:
An annual version for two millennia was provided to Gergis (who screened it out.) delD and O18 are closely related and presumably the unarchived del D series will look somewhat similar.
For those that don’t know what this data represents, here’s a quick primer from Wikipedia.
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Oxygen isotope ratio cycles are cyclical variations in the ratio of the abundance of oxygen with an atomic mass of 18 to the abundance of oxygen with an atomic mass of 16 present in some substances, such as polar ice or calcite in ocean core samples. The ratio is linked to water temperature of ancient oceans, which in turn reflects ancient climates. Cycles in the ratio mirror climate changes in geologic history.
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Connection between temperature and climate
The 18O/16O ratio provides a record of ancient water temperature. Water 10 to 15 °C (18 to 27 °F) cooler than present represents glaciation. As colder temperatures spread toward the equator, water vapor rich in 18O preferentially rains out at lower latitudes. The remaining water vapor that condenses over higher latitudes is subsequently rich in 16O.[2] Precipitation and therefore glacial ice contain water with a low 18O content. Since large amounts of 16O water are being stored as glacial ice, the 18O content of oceanic water is high. Water up to 5 °C (9 °F) warmer than today represents an interglacial, when the 18O content of oceanic water is lower. A plot of ancient water temperature over time indicates that climate has varied cyclically, with large cycles and harmonics, or smaller cycles, superimposed on the large ones. This technique has been especially valuable for identifying glacial maxima and minima in the Pleistocene.
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McIntyre adds:
Oxygen isotope series are the backbone of deep-time paleoclimate. The canonical 800,000 year comparison of CO2 and temperature uses O18 values from Vostok, Antarctica to estimate temperature. In deep time, O18 values are a real success story: they clearly show changes from the LGM to the Holocene that cohere with glacial moraines.
On its face, Law Dome, which was screened out by Gergis and Karoly, is an extraordinarily important Holocene site as it is, to my knowledge, the highest-accumulation Holocene site yet known, with accumulation almost 10 times greater than the canonical Vostok site. (Accumulation is directly related to resolution: high accumulation enables high resolution.) The graphic below compares glacier thickness for some prominent sites for three periods: 1500-2000, 1000-1500 and 0-1000. its resolution in the past two millennia is nearly double the resolution of the Greenland GRIP and NGRIP sites that have been the topic of intensive study and publication.
Given the high reliance on O18 series in deep time, one would think that paleoclimatologists would be extremely interested in a publication of the Law Dome O18 data and be pressuring Tas van Ommen on this point.
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But despite the apparent opportunity offered by Law Dome, there has been virtually no technical publication of a high-resolution O18 or delD isotope series.
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A Climategate email shows that Phil Jones asked about the omission of the Law Dome series from the IPCC illustration in the AR4 First Draft. I asked the same question about the AR4 Second Draft. They realized that the Law Dome graphic had an elevated medieval period and thus, including it in the graphic would – to borrow a phrase from the preparation of AR3 – would “dilute the message” and perhaps provide “fodder to skeptics”.
Read the whole report at Climate Audit here
The Team keeps trying to bury this stuff, and Climate Audit keeps digging it up:
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Okay, this post definitely gets bookmarked!
As close to a smoking gun as I have seen yet. Present it as evidence in every court in the land!
1) the graph clearly shows that modern warming is in no way unusual. It has been warmer in much of the past 2000 years without any relation to increases in CO2.
2) the climategate emails show the Team knowingly conspired to downplay this information and paint a false picture for the IPCC.
3) the world owes Steve McIntyre a debt that can never be repaid. Rather he is slandered for his efforts by politically correct “scientists” in their pursuit of fame and fortune.
It really doesn’t take too much to figure out why the series hasn’t been published.
It would be scientific suicide to any scientist that did publish the result. They would be vilified and at risk of ruining their career.
There would be a hue and cry against them. No matter how careful and exacting their work, it would be labelled rubbish. Even if they could get it published, dozens of counter arguments would be widely published before the ink was dry.
So, when faced with the reality, the result are tucked away in the closet and the politically correct answer is submitted instead.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/11/climate-skeptic-instructor-fired-from-oregon-state-university/
The significance of the Law Dome series is staggering, as the Team’s determination to keep it in obscurity.
Ferd Berple is on the money with no 3 above!
If Global Warming is a fact, then surely “global” means just that. The hockey stick should be replicated in Antarctica studies if AGW is happening, the fact that it isn’t in this study confirms what a load of c**p AGW is.
I think in years to come, the hockey stick will rank equally with epicycles as far as science by bigotry goes.
The Mushroom Policy: Kept in the dark and fed on s**t!
If the GW movement was Monty Python themed, they’d all be screaming “but look at the bones!”
Lazy Teenager will no doubt say this is an purport…
It’s upside down.
“They realized that the Law Dome graphic had an elevated medieval period and thus, including it in the graphic would – to borrow a phrase from the preparation of AR3 – would “dilute the message” and perhaps provide “fodder to skeptics”.”
Aha, so that’s what “screening” means. Got it.
If the suppression of such data confirms one thing, it’s that these so-called scientists are nothing more than political advocates, with science being just a means to advance their policies. It was always about politics, never science.
Pointman
Watermelon Warmers are not interested in Facts.
They work with BS (Bureaucratic Science)
When all the Watermelon Warmers admit their Lie
We will raise a Monument into the Sky
A Monument of Solid Carbon
To commemorate their Bogus Bargain.
Certainly a “WOW!” moment for me when I read this over breakfast. Ferd Berple is correct – we owe Steve McIntyre a huge vote of thanks.
Dare I say….
‘This construction’s important because, for the first time, we can actually say that we’re virtually certain that the MWP did exist, and that present warming is caused not by man contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere, but by natural variability primarily.’
‘Climate Audit did it. No matter how you look at it, Steve did it. That’s it.’
Yikes – I wouldn’t want to play hockey with that!
Tas van Ommen, who’s done the work but apparently not published much, sees a clear hockey stick in snowfall; “What we found is that the last 30 to 40 years stands out as a complete outlier. It’s not something that’s within the band of natural variability at all….We’ve got the smoking gun that shows this recent period is outside the range of natural variability”.
http://www.sciencepoles.org/articles/article_detail/tas_van_ommen_the_information_ice_cores_from_law_dome_provide/
This conclusion seems to be a bone of contention in Australia:
http://landshape.org/enm/droughts-and-antarctica/
Mr. McIntyre’s post bends over backwards to be polite, as always. In looking at the Climategate emails, one can only cringe at the CRU response: (Jones to van Ommen on the McIntyre request for data) “I’ll just sit tight here and do nothing. Mike [Mann] will likely do the same…”.
http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/1/FOIA/mail/1076336623.txt
Finally, nice to know – in Googling the Law Dome ice cores, Josh’s ‘burning hockey stick’ cartoon appeared!
Sorry, for the non-astronomical minded I should have defined epicycles.
In medieval times the Catholic Church taught that the Earth was the centre of the universe and everything circled around it. When observations became more accurate in the 17th century and this was found not to be the case, religious “scientists” said that to explain the observations, the heavenly bodies moved in circles around the earth, but also in smaller circles at the same time. As observations got even more accurate and it was discovered that the perfect circular orbit did not exist they kept adding more and more epicycles to interpret these observations.
The parallel between early 17th century science and AGW is very close, except for having dissenters burned at the stake, although I think the warmists would like this to happen!!
I suspect that you would get a similar graph for land temps if you a) removed all the CRY and GUSH “corrections”, and b) made proper corrections for urban heat effects and really bad changes in the surrounding environment of many land based thermometers.
Speaking of something not cutting it. Yesterday the wooly mammoth went extinct because of a meteor . Today we discover it was climate change. Not a meteor. Campfire Global Warming. Or something like that.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120612144809.htm
This is the only logical data that demonstrates why the Vikings were able to survive so long in Greenland. Today they would not have been able to do so so the climate in those days must have been radically different.
the ideologues are too busy “forging a consensus” – ie finding new ways to keep inconvenient truths away from the public – to do anything resembling science. Real science is falsifiable, and this is one of the many research projects to falsify the anthopogenic climate change consensus. But while real scientists embrace Popper and his doctrine of falsification, pseudo-scientists run away from him.
That is one stunning graph. With resolution like that, and a shape like that, it’s a bit like hearing a CD of something you’ve only previously heard on a badly beaten-up cassette from about 1970 – and discovering it was a completely different piece of music all along.
I do hope there are multiple safe copies of the data around, given what tends to happen to inconvenient data which threatens The Cause. As it is, I shall print out the graph anyhow and keep a copy in my pocket at all times for ease and speed of deployment.
Doubtless this chart will either be ignored, or suitably ‘adjusted’, by the IPCC in its next fantasy report.
The Law Dome Oxygen 18 data set should be the final nail in the CAGW hoax, but unfortunately it won’t be. It will be explained away as not being scientifically significant, a local aberration or whatever.
Perhaps what is most frightening is the fact that if Steve had worked for government or an NGO, this would have been quashed and he would most likely have been dismissed for his heretical discovery, such is the censorship power of the CAGW cult.
I can see the problem, in the first chart they have forgotten to turn it upside down.
Sorry anorak historian alert.
There wasn’t a 0 AD. It started at 1, because the Romans didn’t have a zero. It is 754 after the founding of Rome ( depending on where you take the start of the year ).
I wonder if they had a Millenium Bug type problem when the calendars changed from BC to AD ?
Again, where’s the freaking media? This has to be spread far and wide. This has to go to Rio, smuggled in in briefcases if necessary.