A really bad case of 'stickophrenia'

Joe Romm is sooo entertaining these days. Yesterday, when I pointed out to him McIntyre’s takedown of Marcott et al, he came to the immediate conclusion that I was an “instrumental record denier”, apparently sent that assertion to Mike Mann, who then a few minutes later made it a “News Alert” on his Twitter feed, only to be forced to retract it later.

Today, denying the existence of the issues that essentially falsify the Marcott et al paper, while at the same time making sure his readers have absolutely no link to the contrary findings, or even to name “he who must not be named” lest readers might be tempted to Google it, Romm has a new post up, pushing yet again his hilarious projection of the future:

Romm_stick-Carbon-Final

Like a dog playing fetch, he only sees the stick, runs after it, and completely misses the fact that the small blue uptick upon which he bases his projection premise has been shown to be nothing more than an artifact of the shoddy science (removal of some unfavorable proxies) that somehow made it past peer review.

I have decided that this insistence on seeing sticks where there are none needs a label, and here’s what I have decided upon. “stickophrenia”. Here’s the definition:

Stickophrenia is one of the most chronic (long-lasting) and disabling of climate science disorders. People with stickophrenia see hockey sticks where none exist, and the sticks can be made up of just about any data on hand. It is a climate science disorder that causes easily identifiable symptoms such as:

  • Hockey Hallucinations (seeing sticks that don’t exist)
  • Data Delusions (bizarre thoughts of the data producing hockey sticks, where the data can’t possibly produce one)
  • Disordered thinking, to the point of arranging data to make sticks to satisfy urges
  • Social media bloviation
  • Denial of contrary science, opinions, and data that don’t show hockey sticks

It would be tempting to label Romm as “patient zero” but that honor really should go to Mike Mann.

Mann_stickophrenia

Romm in his article says we have no social media traction, but let’s see how far “stickophrenia” can go.

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March 19, 2013 6:29 am

How can we get this phrase and definition up on wikipedia?

cui bono
March 19, 2013 6:35 am

[snip – yeah let’s not project beyond the scope, shall we? – Anthony]

March 19, 2013 6:38 am

HenryP, It’s dead easy to create a page on wiki. The hard part is getting it past it’s moderators who tend to be of the AGW bent.

John Tillman
March 19, 2013 6:42 am

Hard to tell given the scale of the graph, but it appears that Uncle Joe predicts around a seven degree C temperature increase over the next century or so, maybe less. Given the straight shape of the line, we should therefore see about a 7/10 degree gain over the next decade. Not going to happen, but no amount of falsification can shake the faith of true believers in Mann-made “climate change”. No lie too big for acolytes & apostles of the anti-human faith.
As for the instrument record, there is indeed reason to doubt it, given the siting failures you have found & the blatant “adjustment” of at least land station records. When government pays for “research”, government gets the findings it wants.

March 19, 2013 6:48 am

Warmists always do have a hold of the wrong end of the (hokey) stick.

March 19, 2013 6:48 am

At least the slope of the line means we have only weeks to verify the prediction! We should be boiling by next week or so!

Glacierman
March 19, 2013 6:50 am

Since this disorder originated in the mind of the Mann, maybe it should be termed: SticksoMannian Syndrome.

March 19, 2013 6:50 am

Romm better be careful. Turn the graph on its side, and you have a picture of a gun. And we know that will get you kicked out of school.

NikFromNYC
March 19, 2013 6:55 am

Romm writes: “They are arguing that the warming of the past century the authors found in their proxy records is in error. What makes this so head-exploding is that the uptick just happens to match the uptick in the heavily documented and independently verified instrumental record. So the disinformers are spending most of their time attacking the one part of the paper we know is unequivocally is true. That is the quintessence of anti-science.”
This is a game changer in that they finally unravelled in a way that renders them publically ridiculous in a way lay readers can clearly understand, and it dragged the whole hockey stick industry into it. The entire left wing has tied its wagons to this beast.

Mark Bofill
March 19, 2013 6:57 am

Anthony says: Romm in his article says we have no social media traction, but let’s see how far “stickophrenia” can go.
—–
We can fix that. Want for me to write you some twitterbots? :>

johnmarshall
March 19, 2013 6:59 am

Firstly I would consider the blue uptick suspect because, even at the large time scale here, is not natural. To then continue that vertically could be considered the act of a child told to ”continue that nice blue line” by a stupid teacher.
Any study considering past climate must account for diverging accuracies the further back you go. A shorter time period would have shown (?) the RWP, MWP, LIA, far more clearly. If I was cynical I would have thought that the choice of time period was to confuse and distort the data, assuming the data was correct in the first place.

aaron
March 19, 2013 7:18 am

Don’t call it science. It’s shody analysis of shody data.

March 19, 2013 7:18 am

what about Climate Cult Syndrome, where individuals with an unblemished past go ga-ga after becoming enamoured of Michael Mann and friends? Lovelock, Attenborough and recently Phil Plait are sad examples, whilst Revkin sounds almost cured of the illness.

Myron Mesecke
March 19, 2013 7:18 am

I saw a home made rail buggy yesterday. It had a hockey stick taped to it.

Jeff Alberts
March 19, 2013 7:19 am

I posted this in another thread, but it seems more appropriate here:
The uptick in the Hockey Stick is the nervous tic of the climate science shtick.

Bernal
March 19, 2013 7:20 am

Curses, foiled again. It is a conspiracy. Now they are out to make hockey sticks obsolete! I am sorry but that’s no hockey stick, it just isn’t. Something Pythagorean… I don’t know.

Lloyd Graves
March 19, 2013 7:22 am

Much as in the Allegory of the Cave I think these must be stickmann drawings from a cave of their own poorly illuminated design.

March 19, 2013 7:22 am

Would one who has “stickophrenia” be considered
a “stickophreniac” ?
Inquiring minds want to know.

Bloke down the pub
March 19, 2013 7:24 am

Romm is more akin to Typhoid Mary.

TRM
March 19, 2013 7:25 am

Well the NHL and the players union settled so nobody needs “The Hockey Team” any more. There is real hockey to be watched.
” Jimmy Haigh. says: March 19, 2013 at 6:48 am
Warmists always do have a hold of the wrong end of the (hockey) stick.”
Good one Jimmy. Made me laugh.

EternalOptimist
March 19, 2013 7:28 am

ask not what your stick can do for you; ask what you can do for your stick

Theo Goodwin
March 19, 2013 7:31 am

NikFromNYC says:
March 19, 2013 at 6:55 am
Nice work, Nik. In this quotation, Romm remains confused between the instrumental record and the bogus paleo record. This raises another question. Is Mann still defending his hockey stick? I get the impression that Mann and Romm are looking to some chart that has the shape of a hockey stick and they are calling it the instrumental record.

observa
March 19, 2013 7:34 am

[snip again, let’s not project beyond the scope – Anthony]

provoter
March 19, 2013 7:34 am

“Stick-zophrenia” “Stikzophrenia” “Stixophrenia” (Stiksophrenic, Stixophrenic, etc.)
Better rhymes with that other word I think you’re trying to tie this to. Just a thought…

O Olson
March 19, 2013 7:37 am

How about Manniacal Neurosis?

O Olson
March 19, 2013 7:40 am

With of course tendencies toward “Paranoid Sticksophrenia”

Theo Goodwin
March 19, 2013 7:46 am

In the worst case, Paranoid Stickophrenia, the sufferer hears voices that tell him to arrange data in the form of a hockey stick. The sufferer experiences intense fear that others are conspiring to take away his hockey sticks. In a rare form, Krugman Syndrome, the sufferer believes that he is an angel of God who must condemn to Hell all who do not hear the voices calling for hockey sticks. The most effective treatment for Stickophrenia is to prohibit the sufferer from sharing public venues where he is rewarded for arranging random data into hockey sticks.

Henry Clark
March 19, 2013 7:50 am

To protect against deletion, at least as long as webcitation lasts, I added the plot at http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Carbon-T-F.jpg to the webcitation archive for future proof of what they claimed:
http://www.webcitation.org/6FEmUMaTJ
That graph is claiming at least around a degree Fahrenheit rise per decade-and-a-half over this century.
And that is excellent … because its absurdity is perfect to be among examples to save, and, a couple decades from now, publicly compare to reality.
Present in a context of showing the beauty, depth, and complexity of real climate history compared to what they tried to reduce it to in flattening the past, placing plots of real data next to it, the likes of
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/kirkby1.jpg?w=542&h=329
and
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/gisp220temperaturesince1070020bp20with20co220from20epica20domec1.gif?w=578&h=396
Just don’t let this get swept under the rug as will be tried.

ferd berple
March 19, 2013 7:50 am

By far the biggest group of climate change deniers in the world are climate scientists and the IPCC.
Climate Mannia denies the LIA and the MWP. They deny that climate change is natural. They deny there is anything wrong with their math. They deny to publish their data to support their math. They deny to debate the issue. They deny to allow anyone to publish contrary findings. They deny their reliance on funding driven results. They deny that they are the deniers. Mann made climate change deniers.

klem
March 19, 2013 7:52 am

I love it when I see graphs like the one above. There is a small uptick at the end, so they use the uptick to extrapolate into the future. It reminds me of my son’s last basketball game, he scored 2 baskets in the final seconds getting a little scoring uptick at the end. So I can now extrapolate that if he continues on this trend he will pick up an additional 218,574 points by the end of the season (next week).

March 19, 2013 7:53 am

Stickophrenia and religious delusions – Marcott is the Son of Mann

provoter
March 19, 2013 7:55 am

O Olson gets it. (Although I think I like the ‘z’ over the ‘s’ – “stickzophrenia.’)

ferd berple
March 19, 2013 7:56 am

StickoManniac: someone suffering from Mannian Stickophrenia

Gareth Phillips
March 19, 2013 8:00 am

I don’t think that we should use use appendages like’ Phrenia’ lightly, Schizophrenia is a devastating disease which robs parents of children and adults of life. If you want to give someone stick, how about using the word ‘phile’ as in lover of, hence stickophile or if someone wanted to avoid such things, stickophobic. Thanks.

March 19, 2013 8:01 am

“[Denier blog] traffic has flat-lined or declined since Climategate, and despite their best efforts, they can’t get any real traction on social media.”
Where the assertion of a “consensus among climate scientists” is logical fallacy by appealing to popularity (false though it be) and authority, does the assertion of lost social media “traction” represent the appeal to consequences of a belief?
“Real” climate reporting, as detailed on a web site like Climate Progress, is done via social media or so Romm seems to assert. To Romm, real seemingly pertains to papers that support AGW, while anti-science is the sole purview of climate deniers and journals which publish papers questioning the anthropogenic cause of global warming.
But Romm’s assertion is nothing more than the logical fallacy of appealing to consequences of a belief (and a belief system requires faith – not fact which belongs to science, but I digress). This fallacy can take several forms, but Romm is employing the notion that, “Climate deniers spread anti-science because they lack Twitter/Facebook/etc… followers; therefore, AGW is real because warmist web sites have more Twitter/Facebook/etc… followers.”
What makes Romm’s “reasoning” fallacious is that the consequences of a belief (AGW is real because of the number of followers) has no bearing on whether the belief is true or false (climate deniers spread anti-science). Try exposing such failed reasoning to someone like Romm, and that belief system mentioned previously engages, along with cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization. Put more simply, Romm “scaled back [his] coverage of the denier blogs” because he insists there are zebras and ponies in those ink spots, when (quite truthfully) they’re only ink spots.

steveta_uk
March 19, 2013 8:05 am

I thought it should have an entry in “stikipedia”!!!
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that such a site already exists!
http://stikipedia.wikispaces.com/

Espen
March 19, 2013 8:13 am

I think Romm may be so statistically illiterate that he actually thinks it’s OK to glue a high resolution instrumental record to an extremely low-resolution average of noisy, low-resolution proxies which basically flattens everything so much that we’re still basically in the LIA if the reconstruction *had* worked. But when Michael Mann tweets “Denying the 20th century uptick in the #ExtendedHockeyStick equivalent to denying the instrumental evidence for #globalwarming. Just sayin..”, he’s proving that he’s either deliberately pouring deceiving information out to the public or so ignorant in statistics that he should be fired. My hunch is the latter – but in any case, will the Real Climate Scientists please finally stand up against Mann?

Richard M
March 19, 2013 8:13 am

I like it. Stickophrenia … a common malady of those practicing clientology.

tgmccoy
March 19, 2013 8:25 am

FTA:”Like a dog playing fetch, he only sees the stick, runs after it, ”
Try saying “Anthony Watts” around Romm would be like yelling
“Squirrel!” around my Springer- a frantic, futile, search ,while said
Squirrel chuckles from a limb in the apple tree…

Annie
March 19, 2013 8:26 am

Stickomannia?

Annie
March 19, 2013 8:29 am

Mannic Denier?

thisisnotgoodtogo
March 19, 2013 8:41 am

sticksophrenia

Gary Pate
March 19, 2013 8:46 am

Put it in UrbanDictionary.com

Noelene
March 19, 2013 8:49 am

“Disordered thinking, to the point of arranging data to make sticks to satisfy urges”
That’s very funny.
Flatstickaphobia?

peebo
March 19, 2013 8:51 am

Just curious: Who first coined the phrase “hide the decline”? Was it first mentioned in that Phil Jone’s email referencing “Mike’s Nature trick”? Thanks,
p.s. I propose we have an international Hide The Decline day, on the date the phrase first entered the public consciousness. On this day, everybody gets to “hide a decline” of theirs in a printed-out email letter, which is then tossed en masse into a huge pit before being filled with concrete.

Theo Goodwin
March 19, 2013 8:54 am

Gareth Phillips says:
March 19, 2013 at 8:00 am
Come to think of it, “Stickophilia” and “Stickophiliac” have a catchy ring to them.

OssQss
March 19, 2013 9:02 am

I just could not stop my mouse after viewing all the insults and talk of hockey 🙂

accordionsrule
March 19, 2013 9:13 am

Gee, if I had known all I needed to be a scientist was a straightedge I wouldn’t have avoided taking physics in college. I thought I was going to have to deal with logs and error bars and all that hard stuff.

March 19, 2013 9:17 am

Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
Sticking it to the “stickophrenia”-acks
Word added to my spell check. 🙂

Dodgy Geezer
March 19, 2013 9:28 am

DON’T knock this attempt to create a hockey-stick! Encourage it!
As Napoleon said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”. In this case we should be playing the part of the advisors who said: “Why don’t you march on Moscow, mon Empereur?”

John Tillman
March 19, 2013 9:36 am

After just three hours, some 250 Goggle hits. Now if we project that rate of increase out in a Rommian straight line, that means 730,000 in a year.

March 19, 2013 9:41 am

Posted this on my facebook page, with link so people get what I’m talking about. I know I’ll get some flack… But I don’t care. This is funny.
The Climate Cat Fight, boring for quite a while, has really been heating up lately!… Oh, I made a pun there!!! 🙂
“Stickoprenia”!

Leo Geiger
March 19, 2013 9:53 am

Yes, it is a bad idea to extrapolate from a proxy record whose final points are “not robust”.
But if you remove the proxy reconstruction for the last 120 years (that part Marcott said was not robust) and replace it with the instrument record (which Watts says does show warming in the past century), don’t you still have something that looks like a hockey stick?

O2bnaz
March 19, 2013 9:56 am

I guess we can now call Warmers “dataphobic stickophants”

ralfellis
March 19, 2013 9:57 am

Romm writes: “They are arguing that the warming of the past century the authors found in their proxy records is in error. What makes this so head-exploding is that the uptick just happens to match the uptick in the heavily documented and independently verified instrumental record. So the disinformers are spending most of their time attacking the one part of the paper we know is unequivocally is true. That is the quintessence of anti-science.”
This is obviously how the fraudulent uptick got past the peer review. They appear to have merely assumed that since it looks like previous hockeysticks, it must be true. So they passed the paper through without even checking it.
This is not peer-review, it is poor-review.
.

rogerknights
March 19, 2013 10:23 am

Lance says: October 20, 2011 at 3:40 am
As I step away from my computer I accelerate to 3 m/h in 1 second. Extrapolating from these “actual measurements” I will break the sound barrier in a little over 4 minutes.
I better button my pajamas.

John West
March 19, 2013 10:28 am

How about inverting data to produce a proper hockey stick as an additional symptom?
Tiljander!

Ian W
March 19, 2013 10:35 am

Gareth Phillips says:
March 19, 2013 at 8:00 am
I don’t think that we should use use appendages like’ Phrenia’ lightly, Schizophrenia is a devastating disease which robs parents of children and adults of life. If you want to give someone stick, how about using the word ‘phile’ as in lover of, hence stickophile or if someone wanted to avoid such things, stickophobic. Thanks.

I agree – a far more accurate terminology Stickophile is someone who is Stickophilic a far more accurate terminology. A Stickophile is a term for someone that sees hockey stick shapes in any data.
The ‘Team’ are desperate to have something that they can put into AR5 that shows looming catastrophe from warming. It will not be easy as based on every instrumental metric for the last 15 years there is no warming and they will need to invent data. That is in effect what they appear to have done with Marcott. While we can make amusing comments this is extremely serious as we know that the Team members in IPCC will have no problem whatsoever in uncritically accepting the Marcott ‘hockey stick’. Indeed I have no doubt that they have already got the Summary for Policy Makers in draft and are looking for papers to support various parts of it. Hence the frustration about their preparatory papers being ‘reviewed’ and shown to be without foundation.

carbonicus
March 19, 2013 10:50 am

Anthony, he says we have no media traction b/c every time one of us posts a calm, factual, reasoned comment that conflicts with The Litany, he simply deletes it. Some of us he’s even gone to the point of banning our email addresses from making any posts at all!

Alan S. Blue
March 19, 2013 10:59 am

If a detailed study were performed analyzing the actual “instrumental error” of even a single surface station with the corresponding gridcell average temperature, the error bars on the pre-1978 “instrumental period” would be identifiable as a different type of proxy-measurement.

Skiphil
March 19, 2013 11:45 am

Romm is the circus clown but there are some interesting developments in the “Marcott curve” which puts more of the circus in jeopardy. In addition to a new post on CA detailing changes in the core top record, there is this very significant comment on a prior thread which deserves some serious exploration:
Jean S on “Marcott’s main plot (Figure 1A)”

Hah! There is some additional fun in Marcott’s main plot (Figure 1A). Mann’s hockey stick there is the global EIV-CRU from Mann et al. (2008), which means that there is no actual reconstruction post 1850, since it’s the Reg-EM produced EIV reconstruction! So they have now essentially “grafted the thermometer record onto” Mann’s reconstruction. To his credit, Mann has always been careful to plot the post 1850 part in EIV reconstructions in a different color. He is actually explicitly warning in his data description spreadsheet that the values for 1850-2006 are instrumental data.
So in Marcott et al Fig 1A we have a comparision in the interval 1850-1950 between their reconstruction (uptick) and Crutem3 (LAND only) (annual?) intrumental record (no uptick). But that’s not all, folks! See the associated uncertainties … Mann et al (2008) uncertainties (which seem to match in the plot to those given in the spreadsheet, i.e., 2 sigma, whereas Marcott et al uncertainties are 1 sigma) are naturally calculated only up to 1849 (as there is no actual reconstruction afterwards), but in the Figure 1A they continue all the way to the end. Where did those 1850-2006 uncertainties come from?

Tom Stone
March 19, 2013 12:05 pm

Here is the Romm analysis of daylight: In the last two months, we have gained 3 hours of daylight, to 12 hours a day. If current trends continue, in 8 months, we will have daylight around the clock, and in 10 months, we will have 27 of daylight every day.

SAMURAI
March 19, 2013 12:08 pm

ThinkRegress.com and their ilk are simply getting comical at this stage.
Their, “it’s much worse than we thought” meme is becoming about as realavent as lime green 100% polyester leisure suits…..
I think the following skit pretty much sums it up:
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qf6Sv3A9zs

Manfred
March 19, 2013 12:18 pm

Great Expectations meets Desperation Data and they produce Predicktorshtick.
Annie says: March 19, 2013 at 8:26 am Stickomannia? – Love it! Thanks.

O Olson
March 19, 2013 12:32 pm

Stickophile? Wouldn’t that be making light of those such as Pedophiles then? I like to laugh a little, life is to short not to laugh a little.

Michael
March 19, 2013 12:33 pm

Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the study end at 60 years BP? So, with Romm’s addition, at 0.7C temperature increment per decade from 60BP, we would already be some 4.2C above 1953 temperatures.

O Olson
March 19, 2013 12:36 pm

By the way, I too have lost a family member to schizophrenia, and I do NOT take the disease lightly.

Lark
March 19, 2013 12:54 pm

These days a Fascist is someone who’s winning an argument with a “Progressive” and a Socialist is someone who’s winning an argument with a “Conservative”.
But if you want to go back to an older definition, remember… fasces are sticks.

March 19, 2013 1:02 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
anybody got any idea how we get this off from the internet?

DirkH
March 19, 2013 1:32 pm

Michael says:
March 19, 2013 at 12:33 pm
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the study end at 60 years BP? So, with Romm’s addition, at 0.7C temperature increment per decade from 60BP, we would already be some 4.2C above 1953 temperatures.”
Good observation! So Romm’s projection is already falsified! Just like the climate scientists’!
Could some one please write a serious statistical examination of the predictive skill of Joe Romm’s prognosis?

DirkH
March 19, 2013 1:41 pm

Leo Geiger says:
March 19, 2013 at 9:53 am
“But if you remove the proxy reconstruction for the last 120 years (that part Marcott said was not robust) and replace it with the instrument record (which Watts says does show warming in the past century), don’t you still have something that looks like a hockey stick?”
Yes, but that means splicing two data sets together that have a limit frequency that is a factor of 600 different. (assuming monthly resolution of thermometer record)
Shakun himself acknowledged in video interview with Revkin that the 11,300 year long past of the M&S curve does not resolve decade-long peaks. EVEN Shakun is honest enough to acknowledge that, that should tell you something.

DirkH
March 19, 2013 1:45 pm

HenryP says:
March 19, 2013 at 1:02 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
anybody got any idea how we get this off from the internet?”
Relax. The more extreme Jimbo Whales’ NPOV becomes, the more traffic they drive our way.

TomL
March 19, 2013 1:49 pm

hot off the press… a new puff piece on Mann in Yale Alumni Magazine
http://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/3648

March 19, 2013 2:01 pm

Stickophrenia is one of the most chronic (long-lasting) and disabling of climate science disorders. People with stickophrenia see hockey sticks where none exist, and the sticks can be made up of just about any data on hand. It is a climate science disorder that causes easily identifiable symptoms such as:
Hockey Hallucinations (seeing sticks that don’t exist)
Data Delusions (bizarre thoughts of the data producing hockey sticks, where the data can’t possibly produce one)
Disordered thinking, to the point of arranging data to make sticks to satisfy urges
Social media bloviation
Denial of contrary science, opinions, and data that don’t show hockey sticks

===========================================================================
I never thought I’d say this but maybe the solution to stickophrenia is to go with Obama’s electric kiddie-car. I mean, if we did away with gas powered vehicles then as Mann and Marcott are drawing their little graphs then maybe their hands wouldn’t jerk up every time they hear a car backfire?

Mickey Reno
March 19, 2013 2:03 pm

WUWT making history… now defining actual medical terms. Stickophrenia is the disease that causes one to see and/or prefer “hockey stick” shapes, but only if the handle is laying flat on the ground, and the blade is on the right side, AND it defies gravity to point upwards.
Some other suggested medical terms we need.
– Peer-Reviewed Flu (a very deadly condition which only strikes if your journal editor or his reviewers tell you you’re sick, but which they hate to diagnose, and will avoid at all costs)
– McIntyre Flu (a minor flu that could hit you only if you’ve avoided the Peer-reviewed flu. This disease wasn’t considered nearly as serious as the Peer-Reviewed Flu, until Joelle Gergis contracted a serious, deadly strain even more virulent than it’s cousin)
– Watermelon Dermatophytoses (a fungus which causes your thick green skin to soften and break, allowing the red and pink inner meat to liquify and flow out onto the ground. Thought to be trigged by large utility bill increases caused by wind and solar power subsidies and electrical generation shortfalls.
– Gorzeera Scabbing (after making doomsday predictions which fail miserably, and fabricating undesired markets based solely on government coercion, this scabbing condition allows scar tissue to form, which stops fatal financial hemmorage, and keeps your economic viability and status from oozing away. The survivors group for this condition is called Seventh-Day Climatology).
– Mann-ic Depressive disorder (huge debilitating mood swings, the upswings caused by others blindly accepting silly claims you’ve made, the depressive phase when they don’t.)
– Twitter-pill ( the act of posting ranting tweets for their analgesic effects, usually prescribed to relieve symptoms of Mann-ic Depressive disorder, Watermelon Dermatophytoses, or Steve McIntyre flu)

McComber Boy
March 19, 2013 2:06 pm

Stickophenia is perfect. Especially in the context of the great Phrenology rage of the nineteenth century. It too was sciency. Just by feeling and cataloging the bumps on your head all manner of things about your value and your future could be told. It was almost as sciency as the Eugenics that followed hard on its heels. If only you can feel the bumps that are the science of aggregated flat line proxy temperatures then behold, through stickophrenia those bumps can be digitized, graphed and held up to the world as proof of the coming warmth. Oh wait…it hasn’t gotten warmer? What? Let me fondle those bumps just once more and see if we can get a stick to rise from phrenological ooze and lead us into the light. Hallelujah!

Scott
March 19, 2013 2:16 pm

The hockey stick has achieved religious significance among the warmists and is summoned whenever the warmist data needs extra power, maybe it should be called the Holy Hockey Stick of Manntalk (apologies to Monty Python and the holy hand grenade of Antioch).

William Zmek
March 19, 2013 2:21 pm

Stickeidolia.

Chuck L
March 19, 2013 2:22 pm

I am tempted to go to Romm’s post to see his latest excursion into climate folly, but do not want to give him a “hit” in the blog.

March 19, 2013 2:31 pm

Mickey Reno says:
March 19, 2013 at 2:03 pm
WUWT making history… now defining actual medical terms. Stickophrenia is the disease that causes one to see and/or prefer “hockey stick” shapes, but only if the handle is laying flat on the ground, and the blade is on the right side, AND it defies gravity to point upwards.
Some other suggested medical terms we need.

===================================================================
Hansonalitosis Phobia : The fear of exhalation.

Lars P.
March 19, 2013 2:57 pm

Stickophrenian: I see hockey sticks 🙂
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/6/24/zombie-science-josh-109.html
Stickophrenia in your theater today: The hockey sticks and the climate wars:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/3/21/mann-overboard-josh-157.html
Stickophrenology overheated: hockey sticks overwarmed:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/6/11/burn-after-reading-josh-171.html

Mark5
March 19, 2013 3:08 pm

Isn’t the main point here that if the actual proxy data is used without manipulation it shows a big decline in the 20th century where actual instrumental measurements show a rise? Doesn’t that demonstrate conclusively that the proxies aren’t ‘robust’ and that the reconstruction of past temperature isn’t scientifically valid???

Mike
March 19, 2013 3:08 pm

The price of EU carbon credits has sunk to an all time low.
The EU is now considering swapping carbon trading for a new market in trading hockey sticks and upticks.
Does anyone know the going rate is for an uptick? Or a corrupted scientific hockey stick?
Will Moody’s and Fitch be rating these sticks and upticks?

Owen in GA
March 19, 2013 3:08 pm

Ok, I see an easy debunk of this…Marcotte et al have their hockey stick starting in 1950. I think we all would have noticed the 7-8C uptick in the last 60 years, wouldn’t we?

observa
March 19, 2013 3:11 pm

The simplest and robust test for stickophrenia is an inabilty to draw straight lines through raw data points..

Lars P.
March 19, 2013 3:22 pm

the oldest stickophrenia case known from the archives: pinockey stickophrenia:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/3/8/josh-84.html
Thanks Josh for the good laugh!!

March 19, 2013 3:24 pm

Hockey is a popular sport in Canada. What irony that it’s a Canadian that is so effective at shredding them.

March 19, 2013 3:30 pm

Owen in GA says:
March 19, 2013 at 3:08 pm
Ok, I see an easy debunk of this…Marcotte et al have their hockey stick starting in 1950. I think we all would have noticed the 7-8C uptick in the last 60 years, wouldn’t we?

=================================================================
Well, I don’t know about the rest of the globe but here in Ohio I know I used my snow shovel more this year than last year. But I’m not a “Climate Scientist” so maybe I’m mistaken.

March 19, 2013 3:38 pm

Hansantanitis Phobia: The fear that bad little boys will get coal in their stockings.

Richard G
March 19, 2013 4:44 pm

Stickophrenia Variant: Mannchousen By Proxy, in which a climate scientist induces apparent symptoms of climate disease by manipulating proxy data in order to be perceived as heroically rescuing the world. A form of child abuse.

Skiphil
March 19, 2013 5:10 pm

Something to keep some eyes open for …. I happened to notice that Marcott co-author Jeremy Shakun, although based at Harvard on a fellowship this year, taught the 1-month January ’13 term at Middlebury College (some liberal arts colleges have a 3 or 4 week intensive “winter term” in January, usually for one intensive course or internship). Middlebury College is where the uber-activist Bill McKibben is based, using that snowy cum verdant corner of academe to wage war on evil fossil fuel guzzling deniers (sic).
This does not necessarily mean that McKibben had anything to do with Shakun as a visiting lecturer at Middlebury — even in small colleges, with many of which I am very familiar, departmental boundaries can be strict, different profs don’t necessarily get along or work together, etc. McKibben has some non-science appointment for enviro journalism, whereas Shakun’s course was for the Geology Dept. I have no idea if Shakun and McKibben even know each other, but at a small campus like Middlebury, with relatively few faculty teaching in enviro and earth related areas, it would be surprising if Shakun was brought there recently for a month for any reason except that he nicely fit into the “narrative” of McKibben et al.
Not saying Shakun has any activist affinities with 350.org, and of course scientists have every citizen’s right to participate and agitate etc. for any of their views, but it can be well worth knowing when a supposedly “objective” study comes down the pike which (perhaps) was not generated out of some purist science-for-its-own sake spirit and method. I only got onto this track because in Shakun’s video interview with Revkin I thought “this guy sounds like a political activist not a scientist” — with all his hand-waving, both literal and metaphorical.
Shakun at Middlebury College
Shakun Jan. 2013 course at Middlebury College

The Future of Earth’s Climate as Revealed by Its Past: Middlebury College, Winter 2013
Climate change in the 21st century poses a number of significant questions. For instance, how much will temperature and sea level rise? What is a ‘safe’ level of CO2? How robust are climate models? What is the likelihood of an abrupt climate shift? In this course we will explore the central issues surrounding global warming, particularly as viewed through the lens of Earth’s climate history. We will link climate theory, global warming projections, and the geologic record of past climate to understand the scientific basis for and level of certainty about our climate future.

GreatAnarch
March 19, 2013 5:17 pm

OK, but ‘stickophrenia’ is neither good Greek nor good English. Can I suggest ‘rabdophrenia’ from the Greek ‘rabdos’ (a stick) if we are going to put a new word into circulation?

david moon
March 19, 2013 6:17 pm

The Climate Progress graph has the Y axis in degrees F. All the graphs I’ve seen excerpted from the Marcott paper are in degrees C. Is it just to make the numbers bigger and scarier? (Aside from the fact that the extrapolation is bogus)

Jeff Alberts
March 19, 2013 7:12 pm

Gunga Din says:
March 19, 2013 at 3:30 pm
Well, I don’t know about the rest of the globe but here in Ohio I know I used my snow shovel more this year than last year. But I’m not a “Climate Scientist” so maybe I’m mistaken.

And here in Western Washington I haven’t had to use my snow shovel, or even ice melt, at all. Very different from the last 4 years.
This is why you can’t put a global number on anything.

JoeJ
March 19, 2013 8:13 pm

I am *so* tired of all the talk of Hockey Sticks. Leave Hockey alone!
How ’bout we call Mr. Mann’s well-documented overexcitement just a case of “Temperature Erection”?

Skiphil
March 19, 2013 10:21 pm

Where’s Elmer?? Can Minnesotans for Global Warming do the “Hokey-Pokey”?
Great LOL post by Pat Frank about using children’s song “The Hokey-Pokey” for the climate core-top hokey pokey. This might be inspiration for a new climate video.
The Core-Top Hokey Pokey

I just realized that, “They bent their core-tops in” fits the rhythm of, “The Hokey-Pokey.”
And it turns out to be so appropriate! 🙂
They bent their core-tops in
They bent their core-tops out
They bent their core-tops in
And they shook them all about
They did the climate science
And they’ve turned it all around
That’s what it’s all about!

======================================
Now imagine that instead of Pat’s link to a kindergarten version, try this one, comedian Jim Breuer channelling AC/DC in AC/DC as inspiration

Skiphil
March 20, 2013 1:03 am

A key point neglected by Romm and friends is that the tale told by Marcott et al. has too little resolution pre-20th century (can’t really eliminate as much natural variability as Alarmists would like), and then in the 20th century it does not actually track the instrumental records decently at all (thus highlighting Marcott’s ad hoc and careless decisions or errors). Alarmists are already saying “it doesn’t matter” but that is a bizarre stance to take for a study that does this:
Climate Audit on Marcott’s Zonal Reconstructions

According to Marcott, NHX temperatures increased by 1.9 deg C between 1920 and 1940, a surprising result even for the most zealous activists. But for the rest of us, given the apparent resiliency of our species to this fantastic increase over a mere 20 years, it surely must provide a small measure of hope for resiliency in the future.

Lars P.
March 20, 2013 2:44 am

JoeJ says:
March 19, 2013 at 8:13 pm
How ’bout we call Mr. Mann’s well-documented overexcitement just a case of “Temperature Erection”?
Well, that makes sense in an interesting new way. See also the link:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/2/18/hiding-the-decline.html

Dub
March 20, 2013 6:00 am

They made a movie about this phenomena, “The Sticks Sense” from which the famous line, “I see hockey sticks” comes from. Surprised no one caught this before!

Graham
March 20, 2013 8:12 am

“…end of stable climate.” Pray tell, what era was climate stable?

John Kaye
March 20, 2013 11:11 am

If things are as bad as that ridiculous graph would indicate, what does Romm seriously think can be done about it?
Of course, I don’t for a moment suppose that Romm believes his own spiel.

March 20, 2013 11:23 am

“Patterns might only exist in the mind of the scientist’s desire for order.”

This was in a March 19, 2013 presentation by geologist John Roesink of Bill Barrett Corp, “Before the Data Warehouse – the Importance of Dynamic Data to Sub-Surface E&P Teams.” at the Spotfire Energy Forum, Houston TX. This quote might be his or it might be from John C. Davis, “Statistics and Data Analysis in Geology” (2002). It is a caution to the scientist to skeptical of their own discovered relationships. Just because you want to find a relationship, doesn’t mean there is one to be found.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman.

provoter
March 20, 2013 5:03 pm

Ok, I know this thread is dead, but the term “stickoholic” just hit me. I mean, it does come across as sort of an addiction, no?

thisisnotgoodtogo
March 23, 2013 6:58 pm

How about someone writing an essay comparing what Romm just did with Durkin’s representation of “Lamb’s graph” in “Swindle”?
You know, to look up all the big name complainers about the issue of presenting a graph that makes 1950 look like “now”
Take Romm’s graph with it’s extension from 1950 as if “now”.
What fun!.