Between this withdrawal and the Esper et al paper showing the MWP and RWP warmer than today, Mike Mann must be having a really, really, bad day. Even SuperMandia in tights can’t help. Thanks to Richard Tol (and Marc Morano) for this tip:
Readers may recall Steve McIntyre’s evisceration of Gergis et al. Steve’s question has now been answered. In retrospect, it looks like David Karoly’s puffed up legal whining was just that, puffed up.
Retraction Watch reports this update:
In June, we wrote about the withdrawal of a paper claiming that temperatures in the last 60 years were warmest in the last 1,000 years. At the time, we reported, following posts by others, that the authors had been made aware of errors in their work and were withdrawing it to correct their calculations.
For several months, the page housing the Journal of Climate study read:
The requested article is not currently available on this site.
It still does. But another page that should house the paper now reads, as commenter Skiphil notes:
Due to errors discovered in this paper during the publication process, it was withdrawn by the authors prior to being published in final form.
In June, one of the authors, David Karoly, told us and others he expected to resubmit the paper to the journal, and that’s what the University of Melbourne also reports on top of the original press release about the paper (also noted by Skiphil):
Scientific study resubmitted.
An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in the study, “Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium” by Joelle Gergis, Raphael Neukom, Ailie Gallant, Steven Phipps and David Karoly, accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate.
The manuscript has been re-submitted to the Journal of Climate and is being reviewed again.
========================================================
For all that posturing and mannian bluster displayed by Gergis and Karoly, in the end, it was simply bad science that required retraction. Given the screening errors Steve has pointed out, I wonder if retooling it can make it publishable again.
As we say in scotland: “Ye cannae polish a shite!”.
Good for Steve Mac! One piece of crap science down, thousands more to go!
So, they wrote a paper, that came to a conclusion based on faulty design and process.
Shouldn’t this paper be published, with the faulty design and process admitted to (therefore invalidating the conclusion, or at least indicating a method that doesn’t work)? It seems like retracting it is like hiding a negative result -> in this case, a clear sign that the choices they made developed an artificial hockey stick.
It seems to me that the dead end found by this paper is an important one for future researchers to avoid – besides the blog writeups, how does the scientific journal establishment preserve this kind of negative result?
But it will still be referenced in the next IPCC report. The other three mentioned here on WYWT strengthening the (already known) reality of the MWP, however, will not.
That’ll teach her to be rude and unpleasant to Big Steve McIntyre! Nobody messes with him on his own ground.
Jimmy Haigh says:
October 18, 2012 at 8:40 am
Or as Peanut says in one of Jeff Dunham’s items: “Polish a turd, it’s still a turd!”
Jimmy Haigh says:
October 18, 2012 at 8:40 am
As we say in scotland: “Ye cannae polish a shite!”.
We say in England that you can polish a turd, still, it is nothing but a shiny turd ( I may have just made that up )
I’m pleased that this paper has been withdrawn. Not for any schadenfreude although there is always a little of that in these cases.
It shows the value of ‘blog review’ and the authors might have come out of this smelling a little more of roses than the above mentioned ( shiny or otherwise) if they had accepted the help the blogosphere provided them rather than hunkering down and lashing out.
krischel says:
October 18, 2012 at 8:55 am
“Shouldn’t this paper be published, . . .
Maybe The Journal of Irreproducible Results would do. They claim an interest in “hypocrisy, arrogance, and ostentatious sesquipedalian circumlocution.”
http://www.jir.com/
A good result!
The spin from Gergis re Steve McIntyre and how ridiculous she now looks may – just may – be a flag to other “researchers” within “the team” – that their poor science is going to get that free and easy ride they got used to.
Well done Steve and all those who stood up for proper research – not the drivel, spin and advocacy we have seen by many on “the team”.
‘Due to errors discovered in this paper during the publication process’
No that is not what happened, but then they just don’t seem to be able not to lie in ‘climate science ‘
They were caught pants down when it PASSED peer review on was on-line in effect already published and initial the authors denied any fault and attacked the person that pointed them out , who they give no cerdit to once they be forced to accept they were wrong . That is quite a different story to one their trying to sell.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
Jimmy Haigh says:
October 18, 2012 at 8:40 am
As we say in scotland: “Ye cannae polish a shite!”.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ha ha ha ha
I know that’s not true – I saw Mr Obama debate 🙂
If any revisionists say that the withdrawal was due to a couple of minor issues, please point them to a list of “issues” that were found with the paper. They ranged from the simple observations that I made (e.g. No proxies from mainland Australia, but a number of proxies outside the study area, or only three proxies prior to 1450, but makes claims to cover the last millennium) to the more heavyweight criticisms from Steve McIntyre and Jean S.
http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/06/27/gergis-2012-mark-2-hurdles-to-overcome/
The system seems to be working. I wish it was not so much like passing a gall stone.
krischel:
At October 18, 2012 at 8:55 am you ask
No!
A negative result is a failure to find what it was hoped to observe. A rubbish result is merely bad science. The paper should be rejected by the journal. Otherwise readers who do not know of its faults may be misled (as happened with the Mann, Bradley & Hughes ‘hockey stick’ papers.
If the authors care to write a paper explaining the errors and how they can be avoided then that may be suitable for publication.
Richard
So, Ailie Gallant has now made a fool of herself at least twice in her short career as a ‘climate scientist’:
It is unfortunate that this was forced to be withdrawn.
Now the experts will have additional reasons and fears to justify witholding data and details from Steve & associates. /sarc
Well done and thank you Steve! Now in UK can we get a forecast from the Met Office that has global warming factors removed and therefore may be accurate?
The outright withdrawal of the paper might seem like a victory to some, but in my opinion, it’s a loss for everyone who cares about science and knowledge.
Yes, the analysis relied on flawed statistical methods which led to erroneous conclusions. Okay, it happens. The methodological flaws have been pointed out and were seemingly acknowledged. All good so far.
The rational course of action from here would be to apply the correct methods to the same data, and publish the improved results… whatever they might show.
However, the decision to withdraw the paper and hide the results suggests that when proper methods were applied to the data, the conclusions were either unremarkable, or ran counter to the intent of the authors.
Wouldn’t it be great if scientists stopped treating this as an “our team vs. their team” competition?
Billy Liar says:
October 18, 2012 at 9:38 am
“So, Ailie Gallant has now made a fool of herself at least twice in her short career as a ‘climate scientist’:… ”
More evidence that people who are orignial thought deficient resort to vile behavior (…or violent threats as seen here: http://twitchy.com/2012/10/17/post-presidential-debate-obama-supporters-renew-vows-to-murder-mitt-romney/?utm_source=autotweet&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter
“As we say in scotland: “Ye cannae polish a shite!”.”
Actually…. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprolite
http://ganoksin.com/blog/differentseasons/
Jimmy Haigh says: October 18, 2012 at 8:40 am
“As we say in scotland: “Ye cannae polish a shite!””.
So true, but you can role it in glitter
One wonders if the UK Guardian and Independent will both lead their environment sections with this breaking story, in the same way that they shouted from the rooftops when the paper was initially released?
Hmmm……..
nah?, what did I tell you. It is just going to get colder and colder.
It will take another 4 years before we have “bottomed out”.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
stop worrying about the carbon. Start getting worried about the cold.
Unless these people stop confusing what they would like to believe (“we’re all doomed unless you do as I say”) with reality, ‘climate scientist’ will become the obverse of ‘rocket scientist’ in the popular lexicography. And we really wouldn’t want that.
A small but vital point – as a matter of accuracy. For reasons i’m sure only known to SuperMandia he appears to be wearing waders not tights. 🙂
Ye cannae polish a turd, but ye can cover it in glitter.
Seriously though, well done. Well and truly done
Gergis et al., had an interesting way of getting rid of the MWP; their two continuous series showed a hump that looked like some sort of MWP, so they added a third ‘U’-shaped series that was discontinuous.
They will be forced to do something about the MWP in the new paper, so just look at how they get rid of it.
“For all that posturing and mannian bluster displayed by Gergis and Karoly, in the end, it was simply bad science that required retraction.”
I wouldn’t put it quite that way. Once the errors were corrected, the paper showed that very few – too few – SH proxies could satisfy a statistiical significance test that was a bit more rigorous than the metric usually used in climate science. It actually should have been published; the problem was that the conclusion was contrary to the desired one. And since I am commenting, I will take credit for correctly predicting that the paper would be retracted. This did permanent damage to Gergis, not because she made a mistake, but because her corrected paper showed that the climate proxies that constituted the life’s work of many of her SH colleagues do not show a statistically significant correlation to temperature.
Wish we could clone Steve and put one of him in charge of review of all climate papers. The IPPC reports would look radically different.
I might have some sympathy for a scientist so throughly “owned”. However this is the woman who wrote Steve so rudely:
“Gergis has an activist past which she has recently tried to hide. She was proud to mention in her biography that her data has been requested from 16 nations: So requests from Tunisia, Cuba, and Brazil are OK; but Canada — not so much. Apparently she didn’t appreciate his expertise with statistics and told him to get the data himself from the original authors, and added ” This is commonly referred to as ‘research’. We will not be entertaining any further correspondence on the matter. “ ” jo nova
So it was resubmitted to peer review? I’m curious if they kept the same title for the paper or revised it and the abstract before resubmitting for review. It seems it would be very difficult to show anomalous late 20th century warming without their full-force screening fallacy in place. I can also imagine some reviewers being a lot harder on them the second time with such a bold claim.
“In the question of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” ~ Galileo
“…her corrected paper showed that the climate proxies that constituted the life’s work of many of her SH colleagues do not show a statistically significant correlation to temperature.”
Which is a “significant” finding itself!
krischel asks about whether the paper should still be published as a negative result.
Absolutely, negative results should be published. Negative results are every bit as important as (and often, more important than) the positive results that get all the headlines.
Negative results, however, are situations like “I looked for X but failed to find it” (undermining the hypothesis about X) or “I looked for X using Technique Y but failed to find it” (undermining the hypothesis about Y at least). Those would be legitimate examples of dead ends that others can learn from and avoid.
This paper, however, was more like reporting “I used Technique Y to show X” when actually you didn’t use Technique Y at all. Could someone learn from their errors? Only what the reader should have learned in his/her basic statistics classes. “Garbage In, Garbage Out” is hardly a novel finding that requires yet another example in publication.
Now, you can make an argument that the corrected paper should have been published instead – maybe that would have shown negative results. That would be an entirely different paper, however.
And are the peer reviewers being questioned why they allowed it through in the first place?
The low calibre of the preachers, and of the researchers and their research, for climate alarmism is remarkable, and will, I suspect, be featured in analyses of this period of alarm for centuries to come. Future generations will mystified about how we came to this sorry pass with huge economic, educational, and political decisions being based on little more than speculations and poorly understood computer models. They’ll think we were pretty dumb.
krischel says:
October 18, 2012 at 8:55 am
So, they wrote a paper, that came to a conclusion based on faulty design and process.
Shouldn’t this paper be published, with the faulty design and process admitted to (therefore invalidating the conclusion, or at least indicating a method that doesn’t work)? It seems like retracting it is like hiding a negative result -> in this case, a clear sign that the choices they made developed an artificial hockey stick.
Not only the paper should be published, with an appendix exposing its errors fully, but the original peer reviews as well, which gave green light to publication of deeply flawed crap. What is more, I would also consider withdrawing the grant on which this hatchet job was done or else this type would never learn discipline.
Jimmy Haigh says:
October 18, 2012 at 8:40 am
And we in the US are always looking for a shovel-ready job.
Literally.
Finnish Jean S, first pointed out of that papers fatal flaws in Climate Audit boards discussion. There is lot of talented people who help Steve. I hope we can help Anthony at the same way.
Another one bites the dust!
And another one gone
and another one gone
and another one bites the dust!
MtK
PS: Love the extended comments and variations on Jimmy Haigh’s observation “Ye cannae polish a shite!”
You can’t polish one? Sorry, guys. “Can’t” is a big word, and quite a challenge to the adventurous. Let’s look at the data. Adam of Myth Busters does precisely what you “can’t” do, using water and elephant dung, IIRC. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI , and other excerpts.
mikerossander says:
October 18, 2012 at 11:12 am
krischel asks about whether the paper should still be published as a negative result.
Absolutely, negative results should be published. Negative results are every bit as important as (and often, more important than) the positive results that get all the headlines.
One of the most famous scientific experiments of all time was the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887. Since it had been known for many years that light, like other forms of electro-magnet radiation, is a wave, scientists believed that light must travel through an invisible medium, the ether. After all you could not have sound waves without a medium for the sound to travel through and you cannot imagine the waves in the sea existing without the sea.
Michelson and Morley assumed that the Earth must be in motion relative to the ether. Even if the ether happened to travel with the Earth around the sun relative motion would still exist since the Earth spins on its axis. Because of the relative motion of the ether the speed of light should vary depending on whether or not it was moving with or against the ether but Michelson and Morley found that the speed was the same irrespective of the direction. This negative result was not really understood until Einstein came up with his theory of relativity.
Most negative results are not nearly as significant as that of Michelson and Morley. However medical researchers realise that there is a real danger of bias in the literature on drug research because positive results are more likely to be published than negative ones.
At least medical scientists are aware of this problem. Is there any indication at all that climate scientists understand it?
In his July 8 2012 CA post ‘Gergis et al “Put on Hold” ‘ Steve McIntyre said,
Even to this day, Neither Karoly nor Gergis have the professional integrity to give credit to Jean S and CA for initially bringing the fact of the error to light.
John
I believe that the relevant remark is to be found in the last reel of ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ ….. ’till the next time anyways…
Olavi says:
October 18, 2012 at 11:42 am
I too think Jean S should get at least half the credit.
Markets announced skyrocketing world turd polish prices following huge demand by warmista and democrats in recent months. Manufacturer confirms fear that production will never meet demand due to co2 emissions taxes stunting expansion, “We simply cannot afford to expand the facility and pay the exponential increase in emissions taxes.” said Dr Guff. http://www.guffsturdpolish.com/
Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving, arrogant and snide group of people. And they call themselves “scientists”. They clearly didn’t know what research was, and it isn’t apparent that they’re laying open their methods and hypotheses to help future researchers avoid their mistakes. No, they are not scientists.
rather than Karoly being exposed by the MSM re the Gergis paper being withdrawn, he’s still being given space in the MSM as an authority on CAGW:
19 Oct: Sydney Morning Herald: Bianca Hall: Shock jock Jones told to get ‘factual accuracy’ training
The Australian Communications and Media Authority yesterday released a damning report on Jones’ show, finding he breached broadcast rules by falsely claiming Australians contributed just ”1 per cent of .001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the air”…
University of Melbourne climate change scientist David Karoly said Australians were in fact responsible for .45 per cent of total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. ”Obviously, we would much rather prefer that the comments of people like Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt were, in fact, correct, so it is pleasing to get this ruling from ACMA,” Dr Karoly said…
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/shock-jock-jones-told-to-get-factual-accuracy-training-20121018-27srs.html
19 Oct: Andrew Bolt Blog: Karoly throws stone in his greenhouse
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/karoly_throws_stows_stone_in_his_greenhouse/
“At present, more than 60% of the experiments fail to produce results or expected discoveries. This high percentage of “failed “ research generates high level knowledge. But generally, all these negative experiments have not been published anywhere as they have been considered useless for our research target.
“The main objective of The All Results Journals focuses on recovering and publishing negative results, valuable pieces of information in Science. These experiments are considered a vital key for the development of science and the catalyst for a real science-based empirical knowledge.”
http://www.arjournals.com/ojs/index.php?journal=index&page=index
There should be an All results Journal of Climate Science. Although some think that ‘Nature’, ‘Science’, PNAS etc already are…..
There are other journals of negative results including ecology, evolutionary biology and biomedicine;
http://jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr
http://www.jnrbm.com/
“I never allow myself to become discouraged under any circumstances. I recall that after we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed ‘to find out anything.’ I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way. We sometimes learn a lot from our failures if we have put into the effort the best thought and work we are capable of.”
Thomas Edison in an interview with B. C. Forbes for American Magazine.
The most important words for CAGW activist science are, “if we have put into the effort the best thought and work we are capable of”, for in pursuing the cause of CAGW, failures of method, design, data, honesty and reasoning in research papers are commonplace. In CAGW the lightbulb never worked.
Isn’t it funny how a biased cargo cult pseudo climate scientist is eventually caught out being a biased cargo cult pseudo climate scientist?
Oh well, that’s statistics for ya.
This is what happens when Australians try to play hockey.
kcrucible says:
October 18, 2012 at 9:59 am
RE: Polishing Coprolites
I respectfully suggest this may be the humble origins of Joe ‘Malarkey’ Biden
“Shouldn’t we trust that our scientists are kept in check by the professional peer-review process…?”
Joelle Gergis
Cosmos Magazine
27 July 2007
So, I wonder what the deal is. I bet they found the detrended data didn’t correlate with anything. Or even worse, the re-screening produced the opposite to the claim that warming is anomalous.
Either way, it’s pretty obvious they are going to let the dust settle, and then try again. I wonder who the reviewers were, and which associate editor(s) were responsible for this reprehensible corruption.
I’ll give a free bag of virtual lollies to the person who can find who the JoC associate editors are, information that was easily accessible in the recent past but now seems unavailable?
Very often the people where compare ‘climate science’ to ‘cargo cults’. May I point out how we can show this to be true? Above is a youtube video of the ‘climate scientists’. You can tell they are scientists because they are wearing Lab Coats. I wear a lab coat because I am an experimentalist, I also have interesting stains on most of my work clothes, lots of bleach being used in Cell Culture, but also a lot of dyes.
They are wearing lab coats, not because their sitting in front of a computer demands it, but because they want to look like real scientists, indeed they want to look like chemists/biochemists/medics.
Not only does the King have no cloths, but these little cargo cultists are wearing mine.
But you can polish a pebble. That’s what colleges are for.
(Blogs are for rough diamonds.)
I said at the time this paper would never again see the light of day.
They could not fix the math and get the results they wanted, and they are not honest enough to publish the results with the methods corrected whether or not it fit their intent, so it’s down the memory hole.
1. You may be able to polish a turd, but in this case it still remained stubbornly unflushable.
2. Note to Gergis: this is commonly called “statistics”.
Jimmy Haigh says:
October 18, 2012 at 8:40 am
As we say in scotland: Ye cannae polish a shite!.
Been done –
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/polishing-a-turd-minimyth.htm
– but it’s still not climate science!
A Rude Girl wrote a paper with statistics all a kimbo,
When this was pointed out to her, Rude Girl went full-on bimbo,
When other folks discovered that her math was full of beans,
Rude Girl withdrew her faulty fallacy as it was smashed to smithereens…
roy;
I gather the M-M experiment has now been repeated with more sensitive modern instrumentation, with positive results.
Oops.
Ro-ro-rotate Your Owl
John Shade says:
October 18, 2012 at 11:16 am
Future generations will … think we were pretty dumb.
========
Pretty much how we regard the past generations that invented everything we use. In fact we are no smarter than they were and we make the same mistakes given half a chance.
University of Melbourne climate change scientist David Karoly said Australians were in fact responsible for .45 per cent of total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
==============
That seems very unlikely. Maybe 0.45 percent of human produced CO2, but not of total CO2. Ozzie populations is way too small for it to be that high. That is saying that Ozzies are responsible for 10% of the Co2 produced by humans. Simply not possible,
This could be considered progress in scientific intergrity for climate science. Some people will remember an earlier recontruction in 2006 which was formally criticized in an open review process. Despite many of the same flaws as the Gergis paper, it was still published and the valid criticisms ignored. See the story at http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/2/1001/2006/cpd-2-1001-2006-discussion.html and read the comments edited by Willis Eschenbach.
No, you can’t polish shite. However, shite is moldable. If your audience doesn’t like the shape its in, massage it into another shape. Rinse and Repeat.
I’d love to know what the revised result was. And I do wonder why the paper was retracted rather than published with corrections. If it turned out that it did show the temperatures in the last 60 years weren’t the warmest or even that prior temperatures may have been at least as warm then that would have been a significant scientific result.
One thing’s for sure the end result didn’t show a hockeystick otherwise it would have been published.
With a bit of luck Karoly and Gergis will be awarded a Wikipedia page by the Connolley gang… Bet that notability will be off the chart!!! LOL
If I were SteveM I would refuse ever to work with Gergis again. She has shown herself to not only be wrong on the science and incompetent on the analysis, she’s also rude to those who lack her deficiencies but are willing to help anyway. I wish her well as she moves in a new direction away from serious climate science.
Steve from Rockwood says:
October 18, 2012 at 3:15 pm
This is what happens when Australians try to play hockey
———————————————————————————–
Actually, Australians play field hockey very well. Olympic gold medalists and World Champions in recent times. It is only the silly ice hockey game that we do not play. Not cold enough for ice in Oz.
Points I would love some competent statistician to discuss:
1) How many random replicate observations are needed to obtain a 95% CI on a daily temperature mean ?
according to my feeble knowledge, something north of 30 random replicate observations seems about right but we have ONE non-random minimum and ONE non-random maximum per day for most of the historical record.
2) How can ‘scientists’ compile monthly averages when daily temperature observations are drawn from different populations of temperatures ?
I seem to recall a requirement that observations must be drawn from the same population.
3) How can temperature drawn from liquid in glass thermometers be assigned precision of tenths or thousandths of a degree when the manufacturers of such devices claim plus or minus 1 to point 5 degree C ?
clearly this claimed precision is just so much bull.
Why do we even bother to give any credence whatever to historical temperature studies ??
How can we state an observed increase of .8 degrees per century as reality when we do not have a valid approximation of reality and the observed value is smaller than the instrument error alone?
Would these be some of the climate scientists that make up the consensus?
Hmm, well Richard Toll may say “now permanently”, but I am a real skeptic so I followed the link. The retraction watch article says nothing about “now permanently”. The retraction watch paper just gives a minor update referring to later publication.
So give us a more accurate link to prove what you say.
Truthseeker said
Quote
Not cold enough for ice in Oz.
Unquote
Not yet
“No, you can’t polish shite. ”
Politely beg to differ, they did it on Mythbusters, left open the question as whether the activity is worthwhile…….
“That seems very unlikely. Maybe 0.45 percent of human produced CO2, but not of total CO2. Ozzie populations is way too small for it to be that high. That is saying that Ozzies are responsible for 10% of the Co2 produced by humans. Simply not possible,”
Given the history of this particular episode, are you surprised that he is an innumerate dick?
dp:
At October 18, 2012 at 10:43 pm you say
No.
Gergis is typical of what passes for “serious climate science” and that is why her paper passed peer review. It is where the money is and, therefore, she will stay there and will not “move in another direction”: at her age she has to ‘make a living’.
Her paper was deconstructed by the blogosphere where real climate science is being conducted by the likes of Steve McIntyre who are revealing “serious climate science” to be advocacy dressed-up as science.
And your attempt to imply otherwise fails.
Richard
OT: This retraction reminds me: how is the Mann’s threatened lawsuit against Mark Steyn progressing?
TimtheToolMan wrote:
“I’d love to know what the revised result was. And I do wonder why the paper was retracted rather than published with corrections.”
The goals of this study were 1) show a SH hockey stick by meta-analysis of multiple climate proxies, 2) show consistency between NH and SH paleo with the 20th century most prominent, and 3) raise the bar on statistical significance validation by using detrended data. If I remember the numbers correctly, Gergis et al has something like 37 proxies that they claimed met the significance test after detrending. Jean S. at CA tried to replicate the results, but his math showed only 6-8 (depending on how you keep score) met the requirement. Jean S. was right.
Now look at Gergis’ position. She could not go forward with ~7 proxies and claim any hemispherical significance. She could not simply decide to use un-detrended data, since there was narrative in the draft stating that removing trends was important to prevent circular reasoning. The 37 climate proxies were developed by her colleagues. Publishing the paper meant that at least one peer-reviewed paper would exist stating that ~30 of the 37 most important SH climate proxies did not follow temperature well enough to be used after detrending. I would imagine that the authors of the newly downgraded ~30 papers were furious. She was boxed in.
This paper was a litmus test of the honesty of its authors.
They could have fixed the analysis and let the results speak for themselves. That would have been science.
Instead they’ve proven themselves the pandering hacks some of us expected them to be.
Matt Skaggs:
Thankyou for your excellent, clear and succinct summary at October 19, 2012 at 9:21 am.
I write to draw attention to it.
Richard
Matt writes “The goals of this study were 1) show a SH hockey stick by meta-analysis of multiple climate proxies, 2) show consistency between NH and SH paleo with the 20th century most prominent, and 3) raise the bar on statistical significance validation by using detrended data.”
So in essense the Gergis paper reconsidered, found the result that most (by far) of the proxies considered were not in fact proxies of temperature. That is an outstanding result and Gergis should have recast her entire paper around that. By rights she ought to be a skeptic now.
In the intererest of climate ethics I think it important we hear chief inspector Peter Gleick’s opinion on this matter before drawing any negative conclusions regarding intent. /