McIntyre finds the Marcott 'trick' – How long before Science has to retract Marcott et al?

Here is another case where someone who is a real statistician with a real understanding of these analytical methods finds defects or insufficiencies.
From the look of the graphs and the vagaries of both lines in the modern era I have to wonder whether the alkenone proxy is at even usable to estimate temperature.

GlynnMhor says:
March 16, 2013 at 3:56 pm
“From the look of the graphs and the vagaries of both lines in the modern era I have to wonder whether the alkenone proxy is at even usable to estimate temperature.”
Well obviously one proxy is not enough to estimate global temperature. Had they cut off their result before the proxy dropoffs the result would have been defensible.
They couldn’t resist to add a “non-robust” Hockey Stick; temptations of a warmist post doc, what a boring life they must have (had).

Hoo-boy. And just in time for the next AR, too.
🙂

Good work, these frauds, deceptions, data corruptions, and “mistakes” must be pointed out and documented in the literature so that one crook after another may not build on the original fraud or “mistake”. If the “mistakes” and hockey sticks went down in the last few decades as often as they went up then you could write them off to ignorance, incompetence, sloppy work, or mistakes. But when all the “mistakes”, frauds, errors, etc. always increase the temperature in the last few decades then you there is a high probability that all upward pointing hockey sticks are frauds.

Maybe, just maybe this will be the moment when the world realises what is happening, not just us sceptics, and the uncritical acceptance of ‘the science’ will never be the same again.
Here’s to you McIntyre!

I’m afraid I’m going to have to say it out loud:
They deliberately messed with the figures to fit a pre-conceived agenda.
It’s depressing to see science abused in such a way. Thankfully we have Steve M to bring some sanity to the chaos.

cui bono says:
March 16, 2013 at 4:12 pm
“3. ANGER & BARGAINING- Perhaps this team could be redeployed into auto repairs.”
Are you mad?

To the words of Mull of Kintyre:
Steve McIntyre
Old tricks are no contest to him
His desire
For justice will lead him
Oh Steve McIntyre
Sorry.

The final date of the Marcott reconstruction is AD1940 (BP10).
Could part of the problem be that they are confusing themselves and others with an archaic way of saying which year they are really talking about? If BP means before 1950, what would 2013 be? It would almost be as if an old article was written using the Rankine scale and a modern article refused to convert to C for newer readers. A high positive number on the Rankine scale, such as 200 R would be a large negative number on the scale in degrees C.

To the TUNE, even.
D’oh.

This just seems surreal. They could have just made up the data, it would have taken longer to debunk that way. I hate to be a proponent of conspiracy theories, but it just seems like Marcott is the sacrificial lamb to distract attention from something else. CG3?

Why is this surprising? To quote the old movie “you just don’t get it, do you? It’s what he does!”
Juicing the numbers to heat the planet is the norm for these guys, along with a lot of other stuff that we are all aware.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

By the way, where are the usual Warmists on WUWT defending this paper???

Anthony, it’s worse than this. Evidently Marcott’s thesis did not have the uptickhttp://climateaudit.org/2013/03/14/no-uptick-in-marcott-thesis/ , so something happened afterward whereby it got in. It is more than possible that it got inserted in the Science review process by hockey stick advocates, which then greased the skids for its publication.
The victim in all this, besides all of us who have been scammed once again, is Marcott who was just trying to get a PhD. And once again Science magazine has reasserted its status as supermarket tabloid of science.

Ohhh. That’s sure to get Steve another of those big cheques from Big Oil that wee-Mann is always yammering about. sarc/
It’ll surely get him a donation from me (which is actually money from big oil that I got fair and square).

Anthony, it is worse than this. Evidently the uptick is nowhere to be found in Marcott’s thesis. http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/14/no-uptick-in-marcott-thesis/
So it is more than possible that somewhere in the review process, the uptick was added on, which greased the skids for its publication in Science. There is definitely something we don’t know here, but we do know that Science has reaffirmed its status as supermarket tabloid of climate science.

Shakun bake? (as in cooking the books….)

OK so I read the post but I’m not seeing where the hockey stick comes from. As I understand it, Marcott re-dated the core sample proxy data. Since these proxy datasets were created over a 10 year time span, I can see taking the original raw data and re-calibrating the carbon dating for all the proxy sets to the latest standard (using CALIB 6). It would remove one source of variability. Was that the purpose of the re-dating?
But seems to me this would shift the data points to the left or right in time but not affect the temperature. So how does re-dating turn the red curve into the black curve?

Living in Oregon one likes to see Oregon people contribute to science and understanding of the earth. After reading the incompetence or fraud that this Marcott paper represents makes me very glad that my engineering degree is not from Oregon State. Last year Oregon State did not renew the contract of an assistant professor apparently because he didn’t agree with AGW, Now lets see how the university deals with incompetence and or fraud. Harshly if they want to maintain a semblance of integrity.

The real issue is not that Marcott and company fuzzed their data and shifted their dates.
The real issue is that none of Science’s putative reviewers spotted it and insisted they defend their rather interesting methods.
They may, in fact, have a defense for what they did. My guess, though, is that it’s worse than, say, using Graybill’s stripbark trees as a temperature proxy.

In the movie Hoosiers when the Hickory Huskers were getting trounced early in the championship game, one of the Husker players during a time out said: “This Is Embarrassing.” IMHO the phrase “This Is Embarrassing” should be the official motto of Team cAGW.

“It is taking all my will power not to make an obvious comment at this point.” Bloody lying, liars, lied.

I think all reputable scientific journals should require every step of data analysis, including data and code used for said analysis, be made available by the authors prior to publication. Perhaps on the journal’s website.

Michael Mann on Marcott et al. (2013)
Worth keeping in mind as the climate auditor(s) continue to shred the Marcott study that the illustrious Michael Mann had promptly signalled to Revkin that it should be regarded as an “important” paper (real scientists would be very very careful about appending the label “important paper” to a new piece of work, that’s like the much abused journalistic phrase “instant classic”).
Michael Mann trumpeted Marcott et al. (2013) as an “important paper”
[emphasis added]

Michael Mann:
This is an important paper. The key take-home conclusion is that the rate and magnitude of recent global warmth appears unprecedented for at least the past 4,000 years and the rate at least the past 11,000. We know that there were periods in the past that were warmer than today, for example the early Cretaceous period 100 million years ago. The real issue, from a climate change impacts point of view, is the rate of change –because that’s what challenges our adaptive capacity. And this paper suggests that the current rate has no precedent as far back as we can go with any confidence — 11,000 years arguably, based on this study.
My only real concern is that their data and approach (e.g. the use of pollen records in the higher northern latitudes) seems to emphasize the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, during the summer season. This is an issue because we know there is a substantial long-term natural cooling trend for high-latitude summers because of Earth orbital effects, but the trend is nearly zero in the global annual average. One gets the sense from looking at their reconstruction that there is a very strong imprint of this orbital cooling trend — stronger than what one would expect for the global annual average.
The interesting thing about that, is that it suggests that the true conclusions might even be stronger than their already quite strong conclusions, regarding the unprecedented nature of recent warming. That is, it may be that you have to go even further back in time to find warmth comparable — at the global scale — to what we are seeing today. If you look at their tropical stack for example (Figure 2J) [a particular set of data], the modern warmth is unprecedented for the entire time period (i.e, the past 11,000 years). That’s why I said that there results suggests recent warmth unprecedented for at leaat the past 4,000. It’s possible, given the potential seasonality/latitudinal bias, that there is in fact no precedent over the past 11,000 years (and likely longer, since the preceding glacial period was almost certainly globally cooler than the Holocene) for the warmth we are seeing today. In that case, we likely have to go back to the last interglacial, i.e. the Eemian period (125,000 years ago) for warmth potentially rivaling that of today.
But, again, the take-home conclusion: the rate of warming appears to be unprecedented as far back as the authors are able to go (to the boundary with the last ice age). And the rate of warming appears to have no analog in the past, as far back as the authors are able to go.
[REVKIN} My followup question for Mann:
Separate from the potential northern bias, are you confident that jogs similar to the one recorded in the last century (a well-instrumented century) could not be hidden in the “smear” of millenniums of proxy [indirect] temperature data? (This is where my ignorance of the strengths/weaknesses of these statistical tools forces me to rely on expert judgment.)
Michael Mann:
Regarding the resolution issue, this was my main concern initially when I looked at the paper. But I’m less concerned now that I have read the paper over more carefully, because I think that Figure 1a and 1b give a pretty good sense of what features of higher resolution reconstructions (specifically, our ’08 global reconstruction which is shown) are potentially captured. Based on that comparison, I’m relatively convinced that they have the resolution to capture a century-long warming trend in the past were there one comparable to the recent trend.

What I fear is expressed in a post I made at ClimateAudit:
“[Mindert Eiting] Thanks for bringing up data – as in “facts.” Work with proxies is so far from fact that the crucial issues in the Marcott controversy do not touch upon fact at all. Even the critics, first rate critics such as McIntyre and Telford, agree that the dates can be changed and legitimately. Clearly, then, the entire discussion is over what is “proper” in the relevant statistical methodology. Whenever proxies for temperature are the topic, scientists believe that they are quite justified in failing to tie their inferences to any factual ground at all. In my humble opinion, the lack of empirical science in the study of proxies is exactly why Warmists love them.”
It looks to me that the best that can come from McIntyre’s criticisms of Marcott is a dispute over the size of the uncertainty bars. Incredible! That gives Warmists free reign to use their new “NSF Hockey Stick” as they please.
Proxy science is no more science than is Freudian psychology.

Tad says: “I think all reputable scientific journals should require every step of data analysis, including data and code used for said analysis, be made available by the authors prior to publication. Perhaps on the journal’s website.”
Grate, no, great way to make people submit to less reputable journals. Because, like really, we have better things to waste our time on. Scientist’s strong point is not accounting and drudgery. That’s more a conservative occupation.

JEM says:
March 16, 2013 at 5:33 pm
The real issue is not that Marcott and company fuzzed their data and shifted their dates.
The real issue is that none of Science’s putative reviewers spotted it and insisted they defend their rather interesting methods.
======================
JEM, the blame falls on Marcott……..he cheated and got caught…
What has me floored is that Marcott is no green kid…..He knew his paper tied into Mann…..he knew the crap Mann has been through…..he knows we’re out here…..he knew he’d get caught

Absolutely no doubt about intent in this case…
A hockey stick is just a stick without a bend in it …. and then there is no story at all, is there?

Alex the skeptic says:
March 16, 2013 at 3:50 pm
“That was yesterday’s question. Now the answer is here. Marcott’s hockey stick has been murdered by the truth.”
Seems more like justifiable homicide to me.

Jimbo says: March 16, 2013 at 5:00 pm
“..Let us remind ourselves about some of the NH heat of the Holocene pre-20th century. It is unprecedented and worse than we thought….
Great post, Jimbo, thanks! I saved that lot.

trafamadore~ it is a waste of time to even read past your name. Some of us wish you just wouldn’t bother posting.

Assuming Steve M is correct (I have no reason to think he is not), the Marcott et. al. reconstruction is not simply a mistake. It is an intentional distortion and a lie, fabricated in order to further an agenda. The mistakes are simply too flagrant to be simple errors borne of incompetence. Marcott appears to have fabricated numbers to fit his plan, picking numbers from his data and relocating it on the timeline to get the curve he wanted. Very sad.
Is it possible someone other than Marcott altered the data? No scientist would do such a thing, whereas a true believer in CAGW would not hesitate when given the chance.

trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 5:59 pm
Look. Marcott’s paper is about long ago not the last century. That was added by his coauthors for perspective, it is not the major point of the paper, except to say say that the modern warming is not normal, which of course is what made it a science paper.
=========================================
He said the modern warming was:
“”Marcott stated that they had “clearly” stated that the 1890-on portion of their reconstruction was “not robust”.”
…If that’s the part that made it a science paper

D.B. Stealey says: … it is not the major point of the paper, except to say say that the modern warming is not normal, which of course is what made it a science paper.” That comment is a perfect example of someone who does not understand the Null Hypothesis. In fact, the Null Hypothesis — which has never been falsified — ”
Your comment leaves me speechless….ignorance always does that to me.

Latitude says: “He said the modern warming was that they had “clearly” stated that the 1890-on portion of their reconstruction was “not robust”.”
Actually, I think you have that quote wrong in that you don’t really understand what it means, but that doesn’t really matter here: if you have it right, what is your point? That the author is accurately portraying the data? You make no sense in your critique, it is nonsensical.

Otter says: “trafamadore~ it is a waste of time to even read past your name. Some of us wish you just wouldn’t bother posting.”
You have eyelids. Close your eyes. It seems you have been doing that for some time, so you should be good at it.

Interesting note from Andrew Revkin’s blog:
Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has been dissecting the Marcott et al. paper and corresponding with lead author Shaun Marcott, raising constructive and important questions.
As a result, I sent a note to Marcott and his co-authors asking for some elaboration on points Marcott made in the exchanges with McIntyre. Peter Clark of Oregon State replied (copying all) on Friday, saying they’re preparing a general list of points about their study:
“After further discussion, we’ve decided that the best tack to take now is to prepare a FAQ document that will explain, in some detail but at a level that should be understandable by most, how we derived our conclusions. Once we complete this, we will let you know where it can be accessed, and you (and others) can refer to this in any further discussion. We appreciate your taking the time and interest to try to clarify what has happened in our correspondence with McIntyre.”
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/scientists-find-an-abrupt-warm-jog-after-a-very-long-cooling/#more-48664
Consider what has happened here:
1. The paper purportedly by Marcott in Science was supposedly taken from Marcott’s thesis — which was overseen by Peter Clark at Oregon State University.
2. However, what is presented in the paper was not present in the thesis — specifically, a “hockey stick” which mysteriously seems to appear out of nowhere. It’s later shown by Steve McIntyre that the “hockey stick” was created by changing the dates of some of the various proxies.
3. Steve McIntyre queries Marcott about this via e-mail — and gets the confession from Marcott that the hockey stick is “not robust”; this information, as they say, goes ’round the world’.
4. Because of this, Andrew Revkin, famous and powerful science editor of perhaps the most prestigious publication in the world, and a committed climate activist sympathetic to publicizing the warmist’s claims, queries Marcott more or less saying. . . “Hey! What’s going on here???”
5. And notice — Revkin gets a reply — not from Marcott, but from Marcott’s supervisor — Peter Clark, more or less saying “We’re trying to come up with some plausible explanation for this disaster. . . just give us a little bit of time!”
So — where is Marcott? Why is Clark calling the shots on Marcott’s paper? Can Marcott still function? Do you suppose Clark has yelled at Marcott for answering McIntyre’s e-mail?
Since he was the lead author on the paper, Marcott should be the one answering the questions.

Ben Wilson says: “This is stunning — another “major scientific paper” taken apart and demolished in just hours at Climate Audit…..it would be foolish and incompetent for {major journals} if they did not to ask Steve McIntrye to review each and every climate paper that is submitted to them for publication.”
So far, McIntrye comments could be easily answered without doing extra work and arguing that that don’t impact the major point of the paper. I am guessing that the Science reviewers asked Marcott to add the data that McIntrye objects to, but who knows except the authors and the reviewers, both evil comic book scientists intent on world domination ****.
It seems to me, the the major weakness in any paper of this sort is the when and where of the proxies. If I was the author responding to such criticism, I would then just ask what other proxies I should use and include them. This will either leave the reviewers speechless or they will suggest something else that was used. For example, the Watts critique, that the data does not match the ice core data, that could be rescued by including the ice core data in the analysis, as one more location. Of course this isnt ocean data which I thought was the major data source for this paper, but even if it was included, it would have only been one more location data set and not changed the results much.
So, I am stunned….not.
**** hee hee hee haa haa haa (echo and reverb, with organ music in the background)

@trafamadore. You truly are a perplexing individual. Do you wander through with your fingers in your ears shouting ‘la la la’ whist seeing nothing but rainbows and unicorns?
There is no defence to be made here. you’d be better off saying nothing rather than continue with your bluster. Stop it, it’s juvenile.

For a bit of entertainment while the Marcott et al. (2013) paper continues to implode….. a few “true believer” comments from the notoriously unreliable “SkepticalScience” tabloid. I don’t usually waste time there but wanted to see if they’s said anything about the Marcott paper…. these are merely comments from users soon after the paper was published, so they don’t have any official status for SkS, but it’s still amusing to see the True Believers in action, and what will they do now!? (first comment is talking about “Mike” Mann hyping the paper on his Facebook page):
SkS comments on Mann on Marcott
[emphasis added]

chriskoz at 19:15 PM on 10 March, 2013
There is the new study by Marcott et al in Science extending the Hocky Stick to the whole Holecene (11.5ka) that is making quite a stir. MM has put many links to plenty of news on his facebook, for example this one. Certaithenly big news, especially for Mike who is predicting that professional denialist will turn their attention to the new ‘extended’ reconstruction. Perhaps Mike will be taken a little bit off the “denialist stage”, or at least he will now share that “stage” with Shaun Marcott. Personally, I think denialists and political intimidators have lost a lot of momentum behind their lies comparing with early 2000s, but who knows, we will see…
I don’t have access to the full text of Marcott et al 2013 but Mike is saying the results apear to be robust (i.e. at the same time vulnerable to the political attacks) and their conclusion correct.
Moderator Response: [JH] The seoond listed article in this News Roundup summarizes the study you refer to.
CBDunkerson at 22:28 PM on 10 March, 2013
chriskoz, yes Watts has aready gone into a full scale meltdown about how this Marcott global reconstruction doesn’t match data from a single remote location in Greenland and thus must be false. You’d think his readers would know how stupid that argument is by now, but nope… they remain clueless.
However, I agree with you on the ‘momentum’. Indeed, if you read the news coverage of the Marcott study in every mainstream source you can see a profound change. I haven’t seen one news outlet quoting Pielke, Monckton, Spencer, or any of the other usual deniers. Instead they are reaching out to people like Gavin Schmidt, Katherine Hayhoe, and Michael Mann. Several describe Mann as ‘an expert in the field’ and bring up the ‘hockey stick controversy’ as an example of unfounded personal attacks on scientists. It seems as if the deniers have lost the mainstream media. They told too many whoppers that proved to be false and finally people are taking notice. I couldn’t pinpoint a single ‘turning point’, but it does seem to me that the tide has definitively turned and anti-science on AGW is rapidly imploding.
John Hartz at 01:22 AM on 11 March, 2013
chriskoz & CB Dunkerson:
I intend to capture many of the high-quality MSM articles about the Marcott study in a special news bulletin. Right now, I have to crank out the Weekly Digest and finish a thrid news bulletin about the Alberta tar sands & the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
As they say, When it rains, it pours.” (Especially true in a warming climate.)

D.B. Stealey says:”It is trafamadore who is ignorant of the Null Hypothesis, which he studiously avoids…..Natural variability fully explains the current global climate.”
That was shown to me wrong so long ago that it’s stupid to bring up. What sort of lemming are you?
and the other quotes of mine on your post…even I dont understand them without context, and I wrote them.

It is apparent that no one agrees with trafamadore. Thus, we have a consensus!
And he is still ignorant of the Null Hypothesis, which destroys his assertions.

opps, not blobs. on line blogs.
Freudian, must be.

Ben Wilson says:
March 16, 2013 at 7:51 pm
“5. And notice — Revkin gets a reply — not from Marcott, but from Marcott’s supervisor — Peter Clark, more or less saying “We’re trying to come up with some plausible explanation for this disaster. . . just give us a little bit of time!”
So — where is Marcott? Why is Clark calling the shots on Marcott’s paper? Can Marcott still function? Do you suppose Clark has yelled at Marcott for answering McIntyre’s e-mail?
Since he was the lead author on the paper, Marcott should be the one answering the questions.”
This point is extremely important. Marcott’s job prospects just dropped out of sight. Things are bad enough when Daddy takes over. Things are way worse when you are twisting in the wind and Daddy takes over. Why? In the first case, Daddy is concerned about his son. In the second case, Daddy is concerned about Daddy.

trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 7:21 pm
“Latitude says: “He said the modern warming was that they had “clearly” stated that the 1890-on portion of their reconstruction was “not robust”.”
Actually, I think you have that quote wrong in that you don’t really understand what it means, but that doesn’t really matter here: if you have it right, what is your point? That the author is accurately portraying the data? You make no sense in your critique, it is nonsensical.”
Great Caesar’s Ghost! If the statistics are not robust then they should not have been published.

“Well, the hockey stick as survived quite well after McIntyre papers in the 2000′s, and more people have added sticks of their own. So root on for your hero.”
I am reminded of the following quote:
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
(Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace)

Nylo says:”Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Both of those sentences would have to change completely if Marcott’s reconstruction had not changed the originally published dates for the proxies. You are lying.”
Lying? Whew, strong claims. How could this paper affect the 2100 predictions, one way or another?

I was starting to make a list of all the things that trafamadore got wrong, but it would have made for a rather long post. I think she made one comment which sums it up nicely:
So, I am stunned….not.
Well after claiming that scientists shouldn’t have to keep details of their work, that the claims made in the headlines announcing the paper have nothing to do with the paper, confusing Clarke’s role as adviser with the role played by the author of the paper, trying to justify changing the data from one version of the paper to the next….sorry trafamadore, you need to reconsider your position on this matter too….
Is trafamadore all the warmists have on this one? Nick Stokes or R. Gates would often take a stab at defending the indefensible, but even they would giggle at trafamadore’s reasoning.

k scott denison says:”Traf said: Look. Marcott’s paper is about long ago not the last century.
——
Um, if the time shifting mucked up this century, and Marcott shifted the entire proxy, what does that say about the earlier years of the reconstruction?”
So his study is about the last 11350 years not the last 11300? Wow, that will make a difference.

trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 8:45 pm
“Theo Goodwin says: “I think it is highly likely that McIntyre will establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that the uncertainty bars on Marcott’s paper must be so wide that the paper is reduced to a triviality.”
Well, the hockey stick as survived quite well after McIntyre papers in the 2000′s, and more people have added sticks of their own. So root on for your hero.”
Right. Mann’s work has survived as propaganda but not as science. Marcott’s work will survive as propaganda but not as science.
When asked about the uptick, Marcott should not have said “It is not robust” but should have said “it is good enough for IPCC work.”

RossP says: I guess this is another nail in the coffin of Dr Mann’s reputation ( is there any room left in the coffin for more nails ?!?! ) as he was one of the first to trumpet / tweet the great significance of the Marcott paper.
No, not nails in a coffin. He is laying on a bed of nails, He made his own bed…

Trafamadore. I assume the Trafamadore Group spelled the name incorrectly and you meant to write “Tralfamadore” OK. I get it.

Where did Mosher go? He was so arrogantly calling all the skeptics are WUWT “savants” for being skeptical about things they have seen before.

Climate models on Viagra, limp data in, gargantuan erections out.

Trafamadore et al can protest as much as they like; bottom line is that Marcott and co “tweaked” (like the wonderful McIntyre,being polite) the data till it gave them the result they wanted. Or are we really expected to believe the changes they made/mistakes/corrections just somehow completely coinkydinkily made an its-worse-than-we-thought hockey stick? Seriously?

RE: Abstract from Nylo’s comment above:

And Marcott’s abstract reads at the end: “Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history.

The PAST DECADE ?? Marcott’s data used Time (BP) (Before Present, Year Zero = 1950) The latest data in Marcott’s paper is the year 1940. Marcott’s data stops at least fifty years short of “the past decade.” There is no data in Marcott’s paper to support any comment about “the past decade” in his abstract.
Is it possible that “Before Present” was a source of confusion to the reviewers AND the author?
Or is he simply using Mann’s Past Decade in comparison to his mid Holocene proxies? In which case, he is in fact, splicing the Mann temperature record onto his own. No different than pasting the thermometer record onto his proxy set.

Yo, tram(p)~ I double-checked. I can’t find any of your arguments over at CA, destroying Steve’s claims. Can you point them out to us?

Poptech says:
March 16, 2013 at 11:10 pm
Where did Mosher go? He was so arrogantly calling all the skeptics are WUWT “savants” for being skeptical about things they have seen before.

Yeah, where is Mosher? He was all abusive earlier calling people “savants”. You see Mosher, over the last 11 days you have seen why it’s good to be sceptical. Let’s hope have learned something here. What if sceptics accepted the results – bad science would have crept into the literature and subsequently to be cited by others? Would this have been good for science? Next time hold back on your abuse and stop putting words into people’s mouths.
Here is Mosher’s confident comment:

Steven Mosher says:
March 7, 2013 at 8:34 pm
Weird.
They just concluded that as much as 20-30% of the holocene may have been warmer than today and every savant here attacks a study they didnt read.
1. You think it was cooler?
2. You think it was warmer?
Which is it? If you think it was warmer.. On what basis? a piece of driftwood?
Simple: we have evidence to reconstruct past temperatures. That evidence is all we have.
We have methods for estimating. They are what they are. You take the data. You apply the methods and you get the answer that you do.
The nice thing about the study is that there are no tree rings.
The other nice thing is the methods are known.
So, if you think it was cooler during the holocene, on what basis?
Warmer? on what basis?
Show your work………………

Read your comment Mosher and compare it to what we have learned over the past 11 days. What I want to know also is:
“1. You think it was cooler?”
“2. You think it was warmer?”
“So, if you think it was cooler during the holocene, on what basis?”
Let this be a lesson to other Warmist faithfull.

Correction:
On my last comment the quote for Mosher should have been “savant” not “savants”

trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 6:12 pm
Tad says: “I think all reputable scientific journals should require every step of data analysis, including data and code used for said analysis, be made available by the authors prior to publication. Perhaps on the journal’s website.”
Grate, no, great way to make people submit to less reputable journals. Because, like really, we have better things to waste our time on. Scientist’s strong point is not accounting and drudgery. That’s more a conservative occupation
=====================================================================
If scientific work cannot be accounted for or audited, then it is not scientific work. Is it? And we know know that peer review is broken beyond fixing. The web is now where peer review is taking place, it’s in its infancy and being battered by all of the differing corps of the Climate Jihadis, but it is happening.

Looks like the Macott HS needs some Viagra.

trafamadore says:
“Well, the hockey stick as survived quite well after McIntyre papers in the 2000′s, and more people have added sticks of their own. So root on for your hero.”
So, you think that junk science surviving is a good thing? That’s all I need to know.

Joe Romm has some fun with Marcott and Shakun and extrapolates the spurious uptick.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/08/1691411/bombshell-recent-warming-is-amazing-and-atypical-and-poised-to-destroy-stable-climate-that-made-civilization-possible/?mobile=nc
I scanned the article and comments for “Monte Carlo”. No hits.
None of them understands what they are talking about.

Otter says:
March 17, 2013 at 1:46 am
trafamador~ if McIntyre’s points are so easily countered, why are you not over there making your argument and blowing him away?”
Because trafamador is a biologist. Math is not taught to these guys. He’d be ripped to shreds and he knows it. He’s never even heard of the null hypothesis. Why? It’s not needed when all you’re doing is listing and classifying species according to phenotype.

There’s a whole lot of going-on in Shakun (et pal).

You know, I work in the science world. It makes me wonder why we fight with each other so much about our data and the validity of the conclusions we make based on the data. All we really need to do is substitue our own fabricated data whenever we feel like it, like they did in the above peer reviewed paper. It would be so much more pleasent around here. Life would be easy.
Oh I know why, because if someone found out we’d all lose our jobs, the company would go bankrupt, senior executives would go to jail, shareholders would sue and the only winners will be the forensic accountants and corporate lawyers. Yea that’s all.

Look. Marcott’s paper is about long ago not the last century. That was added by his coauthors for perspective, it is not the major point of the paper, except to say say that the modern warming is not normal, which of course is what made it a science paper.
———————
Trafamadore,
Your argument is disingenuous at best.
It is disingenuous at best, because if this paper were really ‘about long ago not in the last century’, it would not be in mainstream news headlines such as Seth Borenstein’s AP article titled “Recent heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years”. The significance and interest in the paper lies in both it’s claim about the past and the recent uptick it reports, without either the importance of the paper evaporates. Since the recent uptick is shown to be a statistical artifact, the significance of the paper is invalid. I said disingenuous at best, because if you’re not attempting to deliberately mislead here, the only other alternative I can think of is that you lack the basic intellectual capacity to realize this.

jeremyp99 says:
March 17, 2013 at 2:47 am
trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 6:12 pm
…
Because, like really, we have better things to waste our time on. Scientist’s strong point is not accounting and drudgery. That’s more a conservative occupation
=====================================================================
If scientific work cannot be accounted for or audited, then it is not scientific work. Is it?
———
Absolutely Jeremy you are correct. I’m always amazed by arguments like these. Scientists are not artists. There is methodology to science and following it is important, and darn straight that includes making sure your documentation is in order and your results are reproduceable.

David L says:
March 17, 2013 at 5:27 am
Otter says:
March 17, 2013 at 1:46 am
trafamador~ if McIntyre’s points are so easily countered, why are you not over there making your argument and blowing him away?”
Because trafamador is a biologist. Math is not taught to these guys. He’d be ripped to shreds and he knows it. He’s never even heard of the null hypothesis. Why? It’s not needed when all you’re doing is listing and classifying species according to phenotype.
Easy, dude. I too, am a biologist, and I’ll be the first to admit “math is hard”, but Traf is an embarrassment to all biologists. I will also suggest to you that most areas of study by biologists are chaotic systems. Show me an easy way to do the research where you can get meaningful results on global scales.. The physicists with their irrelevant proxies have fun, but when the proxies are biological or ecological, they’re usually meaningless.at the level physicists employ them. This is why the Steve McIntyres are so important. – to blow holes in the childlike simplicity with which physicists approach biological proxies. My read of the climate wars through my 40 year lens as a practicing biologist is that “climate scientists” are intellectual buffoons. I understand that’s unfair to some truly serious students of climate, but, oh well. To be sure, Biology has its share of dimwits like Traf, but no more so than the physical sciences. The true Intellectual study of science died in 1975 at the end of the first modern green revolution, to be replaced by the science of politics and profit, when the baby-boomer cohort was released into the marketplace. Trafamadore, you need to just STFU. You’re an embarrassment to the discipline.

Well I personally, don’t have time to look at all of these papers/cores/constructions/detrenditions/anomalies/whatever, but when I used to do actual experiments a long time ago, we simply reported the numbers we read off the instruments; as in that being what we actually observed.
How is it even possible to switch the dates on data that apparently has already been recorded and reported.
Back when I was actually a lab technician, in a school physics lab, we had booby trapped apparati to catch students who thought it was ok to cheat.
For example, a setup to measure the coefficient of linear expansion (of a metal) had a jacketed rod through which water could be flowed, and the Temperature measured at several spots along the rod(each end and middle). The metal rod, protruded at each end, and a travelling microscope was used to locate marks on the protruding ends to measure change in length, when you went from ice water to some hotter water flow.
The protruding ends clearly showed that the rods were copper, which has a fairly high expansion coefficient. Woe betide the student, who reported the coefficient for copper, on some of those serial numbered apparati. At least a couple of them had Invar rods inside, with copper studs on the ends..
Whatever happened to reporting the results you get, instead of making up results you wished you had seen.
This whole bunch of crap, just sickens me.

IMO, this is a hotter story right now than CG3.

trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 6:12 pm
…
Because, like really, we have better things to waste our time on. Scientist’s strong point is not accounting and drudgery. That’s more a conservative occupation
WOW! Traf, stay far away from Pharma with an attitude like that. Do you have any idea how much we scientists have to account for everything in Pharma research? A signed paper trail that can stand up to the scrutiny of agency audits is an absolute requirement for every single piece of data. But hey, Pharma products impact the lives of people that use them so we should be very diligent.
One simple solution is to have climate scientists operate under cGMP rules. Instead of publishing pal reviewed papers they should have to submit their research in an NDA to the FDA. Then we’ll witness real crying when they ask for the raw data and code.

Michael Palmer says:
March 17, 2013 at 6:01 am
As it is, however, we simply have no basis to distinguish between natural and potential man-made changes in global temperatures.

Exactly, but anomalous behavior is the key metric. Were past climate changes in temperature more pronounced than what we’re seeing now, and knowing the Earth self-regulates its temperature, it matters not whether current changes are natural or man-made; the benefits that accrue because of man-made warming are less significant but welcome nonetheless.
For example, you’d think “biologists” like this “trafamadore” character would recognize how much the additional CO2 in the biosphere benefits the overall environment, but I believe he’s either been paid to think otherwise, brainwashed, or doesn’t appreciate the carbon cycle. That’s why he’s neither scientist nor honest.

For those of you attempting to have a coherent argument with “trafamadore”, you’re wasting your time, WUWT server space and precious electrons. He’s/She’s been a ParroTroll around the ‘Net for years. No amount of factual data or cogent argumentation will ever sway him/her.
Here’s a little snippet from back in 2009. You’ll note that he/she continues to use the very same Leftist/Warmista duck ‘n roll troll tactics to avoid addressing specific questions that would completely destroy his/her “argument”, such as it is. He/She is here simply to take the spotlight off of the topic at hand and throw the discussion off onto a different tangent.
http://comments.realclearpolitics.com/report.php?1,523759
As the old saying goes: Arguing with Leftists is like trying to perform DIY brain surgery with a bowling ball. It accomplishes nothing and will just give you an even bigger headache”. (IOW’s, don’t feed the trolls.) 😉
As to the subject at hand, I’m betting on Steve McIntyre in the Statistical Smackdown. Are hockey sticks on the Endangered Species List yet? 😀

tramafadore;
Scientist’s strong point is not accounting and drudgery.
followed by:
tramafadore;
And whoever said details of work should not be kept? That is silly.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are right. You’re being silly. Please try to aim for a higher standard. BTW, the Mann reconstruction you keep touting was demonstrated before a congressional inquiry to have been produced by an algorithm that drew the same graph regardless of the data. That anyone continues to cite that study is silly. Again, aim for a higher standard.

NikFromNYC says:
March 17, 2013 at 4:40 am
“Fishhead”
__________________
Thank you for that link.

DirkH says: March 17, 2013 at 6:22 am
NikFromNYC says: March 17, 2013 at 4:40 am
“A professionally produced documentary called “Fishhead” offers a possible clue, namely that business, politics and now science are being infiltrated by highly functioning psychopaths who don’t feel such fear.”
I was able to stand it for 5 minutes. Now obviously they’re interested in shooting at “corporate” leaders, ignoring the fact that the current POTUS has as a “community organizer” fought lawsuits to force banks to lend to people who can’t afford it etc. etc.
.
Well, DirkH, you made the right decision.
I watched the whole thing. (I’m retired). It starts out describing psychopaths, and how they unemotionally manipulate others. I was annoyed that they tossed snapshots of George W and Dick Cheney in among those of Hitler and Stalin, but that’s typical Hollywood. What I found remarkable is that every darn point they made perfectly fit President Obama.
They continued on to painstakingly (or rather ‘painfully’) develop a theory of what could be done to counter the evil of our psychopathic leaders. I listened carefully, and it turned out to be a secular restatement of 2000 year old Christian philosophy.
“Do unto others …” now has academic, peer-reviewed confirmation.

I am an editor on motor-magazines by profession.
We also have a system like “peer-review”, to avoid errors in the articles we are about to publish.
But, sadly, we have two kinds of “peers”, doing pre-publication reviews, too:
The first kind of reviewer takes their task very seriously and puts every claim and figure you make or give in your article in doubt, until proven correct.
The second kind of reviewer, on the other hand, is lazy and just checks the claims and figures you make and give for “implausibilities”.
But experience has proven time and again, that those reviewers, who only check articles for implausibilities only, in fact check them for NOTHING!
Therefore I know from personal experience that sometimes, it’s not so much the author, but the reviewer, who is to blame for the shoddy content of an article. Because reviewers are like firewalls: They are there to protect raging errors in articles from spreading.
But if they don’t work properly, you are screwed.

trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 9:32 pm
D.B. Stealey says “Mann’s Hokey Stick was so thoroughly debunked that Nature was forced to issue an extremely rare Correction”
Nearly a dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions have repeated Mann’s study. So It would appear that Mann was correct.
===========================================================
Shame then that REAL WORLD DATA shows it to be bollocks, eh, Traffy?

Mike McMillan wrote of the documentary:
“I watched the whole thing. (I’m retired). It starts out describing psychopaths, and how they unemotionally manipulate others. I was annoyed that they tossed snapshots of George W and Dick Cheney in among those of Hitler and Stalin, but that’s typical Hollywood. What I found remarkable is that every darn point they made perfectly fit President Obama.”
Exactly! Turning this sort of existing activist philosophy back onto its own lefty support system is the next and in fact only next step available now that conservatives are already on board. But the idea that recent Republicans are saints is just silly as well as a very bad PR move for skeptics to express, for under Bush Jr. both the crony banking housing bubble and the light bulb ban were allowed without any public protest, and the sciences of stem cells, evolution and Drug War era neuroscience are so proudly attacked by same. Understanding rather than mocking those you next need to convince is merely the proper art of influence. Divided is conquered.

urm.. do0es Marcott suffer from Shakon baby syndrome?

This from Science Editor-in-Chief Bruce Alberts at a March 5 Capitol Hill event on scientific integrity and transparency. http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2013/0311_alberts.shtml
Alberts then addressed concerns related to scientific integrity. Like others at the hearing, he cited 2011 correspondence in Nature by Florian Prinz and colleagues that questioned the reliability of published data on potential drug targets. “My conclusion,” Alberts said, “is that the standards are lower in some subfields of science than others, and we need to work on setting higher standards.” He also urged individual scientists to more critically assess their own work. “It’s easy to get a result that looks right when it’s really wrong. One can easily be fooled. Every scientist must be trained to be highly suspicious about his or her results.”
But wait, what if the result looks wrong and actually is wrong? How would you handle that situation Mr Alberts?

trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 7:54 pm
This will either leave the reviewers speechless or they will suggest something else that was used. For example, the Watts critique, that the data does not match the ice core data, that could be rescued by including the ice core data in the analysis, as one more location. Of course this isnt ocean data which I thought was the major data source for this paper, but even if it was included, it would have only been one more location data set and not changed the results much.
You need to raise your game.
Five ice cores are included in the analysis: Dome C, Dome F, Vostok, EDML and Aggassiz.
No wonder Otter ignores what you have to say.

NikFromNYC says: March 17, 2013 at 9:53 am
… for under Bush Jr. both the crony banking housing bubble and the light bulb ban were allowed without any public protest, …
Granted the light bulb, but Bush submitted Community Reinvestment Act reform legislation three times to Demo-controlled Congress and was rebuffed. Shoulda’ tried harder.

Are there still honest people who want to publish in Science magazine? Time for a full scale boycott, let crap sink.

Don’t we get to know who peer reviewed Marcott’s paper?

Merely observing the frantic frequency with which trafamadore has posted in this thread tells you everything you need to know about how severely this Marcotte episode has wounded them. I’ve been hunting, I know what it looks like when a wounded animal is bleeding out, and that wounded animal is the warmist theology and the parasites that have been feeding off that blood-rich carcass. Rage, rage, against the darkness of the light, trafamadore!
Or, as my Brooklyn bar-owning uncle used to say to the customers at closing time: “You don’t have to go home . . . but you can’t f’ing stay here.”

This paper needs to be reported here
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/ or least advise the person running the site

No comment yet from RC. Just this note w/in a comment on 8 Mar:
I’m surprised to see no mention of Marcott et al in March 8, 2013 Science “A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years”. Comments? [coming soon… -mike]

observa says:
March 17, 2013 at 3:55 pm
“The Fourth Estate are beginning to crack -”
Daily Mail had quite a few sceptical reports on CO2AGW in the past including mention of the solar minimum.
What’s more telling is the silence at Guardian, BBC, Der Spiegel. When they jump ship, they do it silently; not an about-face, just hopping on the next bandwagon.

If the paper is not withdrawn, I suggest not buying or subscribing to SCIENCE and terminating any membership associated with this organization. Its the only language they will understand unfortunately.

McIntyre is amazing. I want to have his babies. Sadly, I’m a guy and not gay :(.