This is something that needs wider circulation, hence its appearance here. I’ve been mulling over how to best present this, and decided there’s nothing I could do in the way of excerpts that still told the story effectively, so I decided to present it in full. I’m pretty sure Jeff won’t mind. Readers may recall Steig et al 2009 and its cover picture on Nature saying the whole of Antarctica is warming, and the skeptic response paper O’Donnel et al 2010 response demonstrating conclusively that the peninsula is warming, but the whole of the continent is not. The reason for this is the same flawed PCA flawed statistical methodology, similar to what was used by Mann to create the Hockey Stick. Jeff Condon, co-author of O’Donnell et al 2010 tells the story at his Air Vent blog. Andrew Montford also has a post on it where he opines about the Steig et al 2009 paper possibly being included in IPCC AR5. – Anthony
Posted by Jeff Condon
I know you guys missed me, Real Climate sure did. Eric Steig has written a letter to “The Guardian” (booming voice) in response to a Nic Lewis letter patiently explaining problems in an article written by yet-another-know-nothing with a keyboard. Unfortunately for us, the article itself has been updated in response so we can’t read the original. What is interesting about the exchange is Dr. Steig’s wild reply.
My bold.
Nicholas Lewis (Letters, 28 August) complained that your report (Arctic ice melt likely to break record, 24 August) gave the impression that typical temperatures in Antarctica have risen as much as on the Antarctic peninsula.
While he is correct about this, his letter also refers to an outdated study of his, which argued that previous estimates of overall Antarctic warming were too high. In fact, the work of Lewis and co-authors has been proven wrong.
The relevant paper here is Orsi et al, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 39, 2012, which shows that the rate of warming in west Antarctica is as great, or greater, than what we showed in our original work (Steig et al, Nature, vol. 457, 2009). Moreover, Lewis’s own paper shows there has been
significant warming in west Antarctica and that the average trend over Antarctica is of warming, not cooling as is often stated.
The reality is that the Antarctic is warming up and is contributing significantly to sea level rise; and that there is strong potential for a greater contribution to sea level rise from Antarctica in the future.
Professor Eric Steig
University of Washington, Seattle, USA
Our 2010 study is now outdated???
Seriously!! This absolutely is the doctor who never learned about matlab.
For those who have not read the history of the Antarctic wars, here is a pictorial summary.
Steig said this on the cover of Nature magazine:
We said, no you screwed up the math so using the same data it is more like this: (Ryan O’Donnel)
Because without the satellites the temperature stations alone say this:
So it absolutely cannot be the image on the right:
Steig 09 smeared the peninsula warming across the continent (see how it is missing from the peninsula on the left), but now he says O10 has been “proven” wrong. This tells me that he has apparently never understood that the result we produced is nothing more than thermometer data. That is all it is.
Temperatures as reported by thermometers. It is a skeptic plot I tell you!!
Perilously, Steig 09 was precociously printed on the previously prestigious primary page of Nature publication. Carelessly comprised of contaminated and crappy satellite data with thermometers taking a tertiary role in tolling temperature. Sorrily, Steig’s seminal segment was further stuffed by sloppy math. (alitteral too far?)
So Jeff , what did he base his conclusion that the PCA distributed thermometers of O10 are now “outdated” and “proven wrong” on?
A single borehole temperature reconstruction at a single point……
One spot
—-> o <—-
Genius!!
It was workmanship like that which got me labeled as a skeptic in the first place.
Notes to Real Climate and Orsi:
The PCA method S09 attempted to employ, is about redistribution of thermometer information according to covariance of AVHRR satellite data. By nature, every temperature station affects every point in the reconstruction. Kriging the temp stations, is a far more controlled and far more verifiable solution for the same thing and it would produce the same result as O10. The 3 pc’s of the Steig 09 method “smeared” the thermometer data everywhere, so no matter what is published, S09 methods will NEVER be verified. S09 can never, and will never, be correct….because it isn’t! The fact that it is to be cited in AR5 is yet another wart on the last few grains of credibility the IPCC holds.
Sorry for that.
Does the error of S09 that mean that O10 is right? No, of course not. But O10 is very close to actual thermometer results. This is because in a “skeptic” plot, we cleverly used actual thermometers. Bunch of morons I say. This is in direct contrast to S09 which preferred 3 pc’s of highly noisy Satellite AVHRR data WHEREVER available. That was not a smart plan ….. Um, if you want good results.
Even with enough pc’s as O10 used, there are points in this sort of reconstruction with noisy data, where modes of the PC are a dominant factor in creating the local trends of the plot. These methods mean that station information can be and IS copied across an entire continent. This was proven by the S09 cover of nature(Figure 1 above). The trick is to minimize the information bleeding. What this means to me is that I am quite comfortable that the O10 reconstruction will never be proven wrong, not because something as massive and complex as o10 doesn’t contain a boo-boo, but rather because it is an approximation of a field. The best anyone will ever do — is improve on it.
Apparently, this is something that Steig has never figured out. He might not ever work it out, but science is a cold sport and my guess is that those who are smarter than him ….. will.
===
Other notes of surprise:
What normal thinking person would take a temperature from a lousy borehole and hold that out as superior to an actual thermometer?
???????
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The sad fact is, Steig and all the other pseudo- scientist shills are the only voices that most people ever hear. Modern truth, as fed to the masses, has reached the pinnacle of Goebbel’s dream.
A peninsula stick! (if mirrored horizontally).
I hope that Steig checked with Mann, first, because the Orsi paper says that the LIA was a global event.
oops.
From the paper:
This result is consistent with the idea that the LIA was a global event, probably caused by a change in solar and volcanic forcing…
Priceless. They definitely need a new way to communicate science to the public lol! Better to shut up than to come with crap like this, they hurt their own “cause” more than skeptics do!
And figure 3 in the abstract would also indicate a MWP.
Amen. Why is it that such simple and obvious realities and deceptions are allowed to hang out there as “credible” in a science community? I have watched this for 17 years in plant science (biotechnology and bogus claims of organic farming superiority) and marveled/nauseated at the gall and success of the deceivers.
I’m now convinced that the “journal” model of scientific discourse is/has always been terribly flawed and inadequate (too easy to rig publication and responses) and that the science community should embrace an electronic forum system where vigorous debate and hypothesis testing/proposing can occur real-time and PUBLICLY.
Thanks for being a bit of that and here’s to more of honest, frank, dissection of truth and reality.
When their basic reasoning faculties, never mind their science, are just that bad, what else can you do but have a laugh at it. Amusing piece Jeff.
Pointman
Antarctic ice cover rising, solar magnetic activity falling, any connection?
Some 6 months ago I discovered that the Antarctic’s magnetic field decadal change and the sunspot magnetic activity (from which the TSI is derived), show good correlation
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TMC.htm
but in percentage terms change is far greater in the case of the earth’s magnetic field (as if there is kind of geomagnetic amplification involved)..
Dr. S. tells me that it must be a coincidence, but I am not entirely happy about that.
Still trying to understand what mechanism can be responsible and what consequences for the Antarctic and S. Hemisphere temperature might be.
huh?No mention about the misplaced Harry station? I though It was the main cause of warming.
http://climateaudit.org/2009/02/02/when-harry-met-gill/
What normal thinking person would take a temperature from a lousy borehole and hold that out as superior to an actual thermometer?
A PNS ‘scientist’? oh, wait, you specified ‘normal…
“…the same flawed PCA math used by Mann…” – Not really, neither the latest Mann work nor Steig 09 use PCA.
Steig 09 (ftp://soest.hawaii.edu/coastal/Climate%20Articles/Steig_2009%20antarctic%20warming.pdf) uses a regularized expectation maximization (RegEM) method. What it shares with PCA is that it is an iterative refinement method, a gradient descent fitting method, honing in on an answer by reducing error terms at each iteration. But it doesn’t share the math of PCA.
Iterative methods are a well known and characterized method of solving problems that do not have a direct analytic solution. Examples include simulated annealing for the Traveling Salesman problem, Richardson-Lucy deconvolution of astronomic images, and any number of industrial optimization problems. These methods have demonstrated success over and over again.
Regularized EM in particular (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation-maximization_algorithm) attempts to find the best fit of unobserved values given known values (such as in this case coastal temperatures and satellite IR records), given correlation of temperature anomalies and error bars on measurements. In EM you iterate between a set of estimates of your unknowns (which can be random at the start, although I prefer beginning either with uniform values such as “1.0”, or just interpolation of known measures), estimate forward what would be observed, and calculate errors between that and actual observations. You then use those errors to update the estimates of the unknowns. Repeat both steps until the errors converge to somewhere near zero (an asymptotic process, but well below known measurement errors is a good threshold).
—
It’s always a possibility that someone has incorrectly applied RegEM, or PCA, or other numeric techniques; perhaps their forward computation is incorrect, or their error formulation is wrong – but if you’re going to do that, you have to demonstrate the particular issues with their work. And if you’re going to do that, you need to be talking about the technique(s) they actually used…
REPLY: You are correct, its RegEm. My point is that they sought help from Mann on this paper, and statistical methodology has been shown to be lacking in both MBH98 and Steig 09.
UPDATE: Actually you are not quite correct, but I have made a clarifying update: Note this from Steig et al 2009:
Clearly, there was some PCA work done, but RegEm is the main method. The point is that the method produces an erroneous manufactured result, smearing peninsula data over the entire continent, which is not representative of reality. – Anthony
Indeed the Orsi et al. 2012 paper says the LIA was a Global Event… Thanks Eric for pointing us to their paper…
BTW in the post, the relation between Steig’s affirmation and the Orsi paper is not clear: in what sense is Orsi’s paper supposed to contradict O’Donnell?
Haha, a single borehole temperature reconstruction at a single point is now more accurate than instrumental data. Who would have thought that the scence in climate science couldn’t get any more non science? If this is not an example of who has the biggest agenda then what is?
Alex says
That’s how it all started at, for example, The Royal Society. Lectures and demonstrations were public events with real time debate. Journals only grew up because of the geographical impossibility of shifting people around, And the current model of journal publication assumes that it is paper based and that moving paper around is an expensive and time-consuming operation. Hence the need for the heavily devalued peer-review system and the enormously unwieldy mechanism of paper/counter paper/addendum etc which take months or years to settle questions that could be done in minutes face-to-face.
But the miracle of the internet frees us from nearly all of those geographical and technological limitations. You can have (near) real time public conversations with participants anywhere in the world. This forum is a fine example.
It is not the mechanism that is now the limitation…it is the willingness of the participants to use the new possibilities. And it is reasonable to assume that anybody who shies away from public debate has only a weak case and prefers assertion and table thumping to putting their work under tough scrutiny.
I think we can all identify some (in)famous academic climateers who are reluctant to do so.
“This is something that needs wides circulation” — should be “wider” I think.
[Fixed, thanks. ~dbs, mod.]
vukcevic says:
September 8, 2012 at 8:50 am
Antarctic’s magnetic field decadal change and the sunspot magnetic activity (from which the TSI is derived), show good correlation
The TSI of Lean 2007 does not represent the real variation of the sunspot magnetic activity, so your correlation is spurious.
Alex asked:
As a scientist myself, I learned one thing pretty early on in my career that was at odds to the conventional, public perception of science and it’s practioners: that science is a human endeavor, and, as such, is subject to the exact same biases and corruptions that are found in every other human endeavor. There is nothing special about science that makes it less open to corruptors and liars.
If I may suggest
Add large colored dots;
This shows results best
At thermometer spots.
A blue spot on Steig’s
Red field of high heat:
Such contrast intrigues
And shows the deceit.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Leif Svalgaard says: September 8, 2012 at 9:36 am
The TSI of Lean 2007 does not represent the real variation of the sunspot magnetic activity
Sorry about that, my bad, I have rearranged order, with L. Svalgaard’s TSI reconstruction now at the top, in order to give more accurate and up to date correlation.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TMC.htm
TomRude wrote:
“in what sense is Orsi’s paper supposed to contradict O’Donnell”.
You might well ask. Steig’s Guardian letter clearly implies that, in his mind, Orsi’s single-borehole surface temperature reconstruction proves that the O’Donnell, Lewis, McIntyre & Connon estimate of overall Antarctic warming is wrong. That a single point proxy temperature reconstruction can prove an multi-meteorological station based estimate for the whole continent wrong seems completely misconceived to me.
BTW, the Orsi reconstruction trend for the 20 years to 2007 is 0.80 deg.C/decade. Satellite AVHRR temperature measurements exist for that period and – although they also are Inaccurate – can be used as a check on Orsi’s trend . Steig’s own cloudmasked AVHRR data (ending one year earlier) shows post 1986 trends of 0.15 and 0.12 deg.C/decade for the two grid cells closest to Orsi’s borehole- a fraction of Orsi’s 0.80 deg.C/decade estimate.
Some points on Orsi. His Figure 3 shows warming of about 1.5 deg since the 80s. I believe this is what Steig is happy about.
The problem, though, is that Figure 3 shows no warming from 1957 to about about 1980. Steig said there was a warming of about 0.5 deg/decade from 1957 (correct me if the dates are wrong). That would make warming of about 2.6 deg warming to 2009 (2.15 deg to 2000). Not the 1.5 deg measured by Orsi to 2000. Orsi’s start date is moot, as he shows no warming 1900-1980.
Thus, Orsi validates O’donnel 2010 (O10), as O10 shows about 0.25 deg/decade of warming from 1957, in the location of the WAIS Divide. (yellow, 0.25 deg/decade, in the temperature scale for O10; red and 0.5 deg/decade for Steig09). O10 would give a warming of 0.25 deg/decade, vs Orsi’s 0.35, starting both from 1957.
This is also totaly ignores the fact that Orsi shows no warming for over 20 years (1957-1980), but which Steig09 says did occur.
Steig09 is actually proven wrong by the Orsi paper.Both in the amount of warming, and in the length of the warming, and in the slope of the warming. Orsi’s numbers are much closer to O10, except the slope.
Granted, Orsi’s warming is about 0.75 deg/decade, but there is only two decades of warming in his record.
Summary: From 1957, O10 shows 1.075 deg of warming to 2000. Steig09 shows 2.15 deg. Orsi’s measured warming from 1957 is 1.5 deg to 2000. O10 (-28% low) is closer to Orsi than Steig (+43% high).
caveat: most of the numbers I use are eyeballed, albeit using a ruler for Orsi and figure 3.
Instead of this —-> o <—-, perhaps it should be this )*(
“What normal thinking person would take a temperature from a lousy borehole and hold that out as superior to an actual thermometer?”
A post normal person?
Yancey Ward says:
September 8, 2012 at 9:42 am
“There is nothing special about science that makes it less open to corruptors and liars.”
I have suggested that scientists must be disciplined by a professional association that can discipline or bar its members from practicing in extreme cases of incompetence and abuse. It works for engineers who have to be on their toes when they build a bridge or a space shuttle or just about everything that isn’t built by nature. Non sequitur: there is no such thing as a rocket scientist – only an engineer does this kind of work.
There are greater temperature fluctuations at the higher latitudes. Thus, the equator is much more stable than the poles. So we would expect polar temperatures to vary [as they are doing now, especially in the Arctic].
But globally there is very little change. This is what the alarmist crowd is running around in circles and hand-wringing about. As any rational person can see, runaway global warming is trumped up nonsense. And Steig is riding the gravy train by falsifying reality. Shame on hiim.
Bore hole verses READER (Reference Antarctic Data for Environmental Research) …:
READER data (as of 2005) from 11 sites showed warming & 7 sites showed cooling,
verses Bore hole from 1 site showed warming & warmer yellow snow nearby.