Just last month, these were the claims:
We’re screwed: 11,000 years’ worth of climate data prove it. It’s among the most compelling bits of proof out there that human beings are behind global warming, and as such has become a target on Mann’s back for climate denialists looking to draw a bead on scientists. — The Atlantic, March 9th
Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years The modern rise that has recreated the temperatures of 5,000 years ago is occurring at an exceedingly rapid clip on a geological time scale, appearing in graphs in the new paper as a sharp vertical spike. — Justin Gillis, New York Times, March 7th
Study: Recent heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years “Rapid” head spike unlike anything in 11,000 years. Research released Thursday in the journal Science uses fossils of tiny marine organisms to reconstruct global temperatures …. It shows how the globe for several thousands of years was cooling until an unprecedented reversal in the 20th century. — Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press, March 7th
True face of climate’s hockey stick graph revealed The rate of warming in the last 150 years is unlike anything that happened in at least 11,000 years, says Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who was not involved in Marcott’s study. — Michael Marshall, New Scientist magazine, March 7th
Now, Ross McKitrick, building on the work of Steve McIntyre and others in the blogosphere, shows how easily these media outlets were duped into believing this study was the end-all for proof of man-made climate change.
We’re not screwed?
11,000-year study’s 20th-century claim is groundless
On March 8, a paper appeared in the prestigious journal Science under the title A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years. Temperature reconstructions are nothing new, but papers claiming to be able to go back so far in time are rare, especially ones that promise global and regional coverage.
The new study, by Shaun Marcott, Jeremy Shakun, Peter Clark and Alan Mix, was based on an analysis of 73 long-term proxies, and offered a few interesting results: one familiar (and unremarkable), one odd but probably unimportant, and one new and stunning. The latter was an apparent discovery that 20th-century warming was a wild departure from anything seen in over 11,000 years. News of this finding flew around the world and the authors suddenly became the latest in a long line of celebrity climate scientists.
The trouble is, as they quietly admitted over the weekend, their new and stunning claim is groundless. The real story is only just emerging, and it isn’t pretty.
============================================================
Read his excellent essay in full at The Financial Post here:
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/04/01/were-not-screwed/
news flash for anyone who can try to run down estimates of insolation over the period of the Marcott et al. (2013) study!
Posted at CA, and I looked at the linked reference, it definitely only shows years 1500 – 2000 in Figure 4, so there may be some mystery about where the claim for 11,500 years of decreasing insolation comes from, is it accurate claim but simply wrong reference given, etc. Or what is going on and what does it mean for the science of the Marcott study?
seriously mistaken reference and claim about insolation over 11,500 years
[emphasis added]
While the scientists try to prove who’s the most clever, making trends, formulas and theories the world is getting colder. The real story yes… just emerging……And then suddenly we are in a long cold minimum period!! Maybe they will call it AGC ?? LOL
“Rapid” head spike unlike anything in 11,000 years.
An egregious example of cherry picking by starting just after the end of the Younger Dryas, when temperatures warmed perhaps 10 times faster than the late 20th century over a similar period.
But they rely on most people not knowing this.
Seems to me that these guys will never quit, no matter how much the “consensus” turns against them or how discredited their religion becomes.
So, the truth is finding its way into the newpapers? GOOD.
Headlines everywhere OUGHT to be screaming it out – but I bet they don’t.
How do we stop this Grab-a-Headline-with-Lies trick? I suppose we can’t, but people are waking up to the lies anyway. I tell you, it’s going to get violent unless these fraudsters are pulled into line. The alarmists are making it ever more clear that they are coniving manipulators, not honest scientists making a mistake. Mistakes, people can forgive. Continuing and deliberate misconduct, they will not – especially when lives and money are on the line. Their crimes are against each and every one of us.
Has it been decided whether Marcott will be withdrawing the Science article or his thesis?
Rob Dawg says:
April 1, 2013 at 11:41 pm
Supposedly, Marcott’s thesis is OK, lacking the hockey stick figure. But I’m wondering what sort of employment this newly minted PhD will be able to get after this episode. Oh! That’s right. There’s a position at NASA opening up soon.
Excellent account. I like the way he discusses the missing Medieval Warming as perhaps a consequence of low res and smoothing in the proxy recon. However, I also see internal contradiction in using Mann08 proxy-instrument composite alignment for their argument because the 1950 Marcott uptick climbs out of the Mann uncertainty and visa versa. So they can’t have it both ways by claiming alignment and high res by Mann08 and then contradict it where it matters, ie when the uptick starts. There is a prima facie contradiction in the comparison of change rates — even if by an external comparison with Mann08 (as now seems to be the claim) a contradiction that should have been picked up in peer review.
Ross McKitrick,
Elegant summary of the whole affair. Clear and concise. Thanks a lot for putting it out there.
I also enjoyed your Christmas CD.
Steve
Seems with the spike now gone and warming at a standstill, we have a definite trend of cooling going on for the past 5000 years or so from the Marcott paper. Does that make the science community concerned about cooling, and less about the warming. You would think the paper would be embracing the warming they think we are causing, not condemning it.
Anybody overlaid the CO2 record for the last 11000 years over the Marcott paper and noticed the lack of correlation?
remember where a lot of these “scientists’ get their grants from the really smart people called … politicians.
Anthony
Would it now be worth having an auditing process for top journals. In all other branches of life which claim authority to advise policy makers you get this (in most branches of finance and education).
Things seem to have got so bad that peer review – possibly because of the demands on reviewers – has lost its value.
Its the shysters at supposedly respectable publications who should know better, like New Scientist, which should be screwed. Why don’t you call them on this one Anthony and see if they retract in light of the statement and give any retraction the same billing as their original article. That will prove their professional integrity.
Hoser
I don’t know what happened to the guy. I think, assuming he’s young, he was influenced by others with the promise of fame and fortune to play loose with the data. It does raise questions about his integrity though and the usefulness of peer review.
Normally, you try to assess the situation and give the guy the benefit of the doubt (we may have all failed the same test); he is probably young – and foolish – and may have been swayed by others so I hope his life isn’t ruined by this. But still, I don’t think these mount to mitigating circumstances. His paper could’ve been used to push policies that will hurt the poorest in our society and for that reason folly shouldn’t let him off the hook. If he comes clean then may be he deserves a second chance but I think he does need to come clean.
Andor on April 1, 2013 at 11:26 pm
While the scientists try to prove who’s the most clever, making trends, formulas and theories the world is getting colder. The real story yes… just emerging……And then suddenly we are in a long cold minimum period!! Maybe they will call it AGC ?? LOL”
Don’t laugh… That’s exactly what they will do. They claimed global cooling in the early 70s so why not now? A recent paper by them that WUWT addresses just last week is claiming coal soot is mitigating the warming, shifting of gears have started already, they ‘ll just flip the hockey stick over so the blade points down.
The ice age is coming and they will claim we are responsible , they’ve known it all along, and it’s worse than they predicted back in the early 1970s.
I grew up in a wealthy town where people, and especially the wives, were quite smart but knew nothing about engines, and the local auto mechanic took advantage. He would replace things that didn’t need replacing, (if he really replaced them at all.) For example he might replace a car’s ball joints after 2000 miles.
Then my mother took an auto mechanics course, (creating quite a stir as she was a prim and proper and tweedy lady among grimy guys.) Soon the local auto mechanic hated her, because she was advising all the other Moms that it was unnecessary to replace ball joints every 2000 miles. He was never actually arrested, but when he lost a lot of business he had to shape up his act.
Climate Scientists remind me of that auto mechanic. They spoke a lot of gobbledygook thinking no one had the brains to double check. Now they are losing business.
When I look through the Climategate emails, I honestly feel the Climate Scientists were even fooling each other. When one questions the other, the other replies with a bunch of gobbledygook, and the first is afraid of looking ignorant, and doesn’t dare ask, “What the heck are you going on about?”
The media has no clue about what they are going on about either, but they should have asked and probed. People like Ross McKitrick simply asked the questions which reporters should have asked, with enough knowledge to see when the complexity was truly science, and when it was mere gobbledygook and a sham.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
Our Gav I says, you never ever listen to me do you. I warned you years ago about our Mikey but did you listen?
Those new kids on the block who arrived a few weeks ago. What did I say well I’m going to tell you again. I said to you lovely boy ” Our Gav don’t go near that new gang Muchrot, Scheissen et al they are just trouble”
Do you ever listen to sense?
David L. says:
April 2, 2013 at 2:51 am
Andor on April 1, 2013 at 11:26 pm
While the scientists try to prove who’s the most clever, making trends, formulas and theories the world is getting colder. The real story yes… just emerging……And then suddenly we are in a long cold minimum period!! Maybe they will call it AGC ?? LOL”
————-
Don’t laugh… That’s exactly what they will do. They claimed global cooling in the early 70s so why not now? A recent paper by them that WUWT addresses just last week is claiming coal soot is mitigating the warming, shifting of gears have started already, they ‘ll just flip the hockey stick over so the blade points down.
The ice age is coming and they will claim we are responsible , they’ve known it all along, and it’s worse than they predicted back in the early 1970s.
I think that you are correct as they did this when the global cooling scare of the 70s seamlessly switched to the global warming scare. However, they are now a lot more visible, the internet does not allow things to be lost or deleted as easily as was the case in the 70s and 80s, and thanks to political funding there has been an explosion of papers all towing the political line. Hansen et al have been trying to back out – the latest meme being warming causes cooling, now the Chinese are to blame and soot has suddenly changed from being a huge positive forcing to a negative.. etc., but from the negative comments to the faithful MSM articles, it does not appear to be working and I don’t think that the population is as ready to believe as before. It will also be a difficult sell to some of the AGW apostates in Universities who are suddenly asked to volte face and start teaching the opposite to their hard fought ideas. The cognitive dissonance should cause a lot of thought.
Caleb
I think R Lindzen sort of agrees with you, and not just among climate scientists, graduates of all disciplines – it’s the the emperor’s new clothes.
Caleb says:
April 2, 2013 at 2:56 am
————————————————
An alternate term is “bafflegab” – http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9686940/armstrong/Nursing%201982.pdf
Enjoy 🙂
We put Marcott to bed, now we have to deal with this:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/04/01/climate-paradox-longer-antarctic-melt-season-less-global-warming/
Caleb:
At April 2, 2013 at 2:56 am you suggest that Climategate climate scientists thought
With respect, I disagree.
I think the so-called climate scientists have adhered to – and still adhere to – the version of that dictum provided by P T Barnum; i.e.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and that’s enough to make a living.
Richard
A.D. Everard says:
April 1, 2013 at 11:38 pm
“How do we stop this Grab-a-Headline-with-Lies trick? I suppose we can’t, but people are waking up to the lies anyway.”
It’s basically a multi-headed Pravda run by the Bilderbergers and the CFR. Murdoch for instance is a CFR member. The editor of the German Die Zeit, for instance, is a Bilderberger. So no, we won’t stop that. Liberal foundations like The Ford Foundation give cash to outlets like WaPo to stop them from going bust, calling it an award for outstanding journalism.
All channels of the traditional media are occupied by them. Well I didn’t find a link to the Daily Mail for the moment, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
They will carefully control message AND counter-message to arrive at the synthesis they target. One could call it a pretense of haggling or a dialectic.
Blogs are not exempt; but must censor to play their role in the dialectic. Komment Macht Frei and SkepticalScience come to mind.
Good to get more of this counter-alarmist stuff in print and a good job R.M. You of course mention the reason for the incorrect graft of the uptick, but I think you have to treat your audience as a high school class – the Marcott et al supporters keep saying, yeah, whatever, but the instrumental record tells us there is a real uptick anyway. This is the straw being clung to. I would suggest mentioning that the only way to add on the instrumental record as roughly apples to apples is to average the 150 years of data- the uptick, of course, disappears. One major thing that has been largely lost in all the flurry (I see a few commenters picking up on it), is that, if the proxies have any legitimacy, the thesis graph is the darkest and scariest thing to appear in climate science! I’d say we are screwed if it is correct in the gross.The hockey team saw this horror of sliding into the next ice age and they pressured this poor fellow Marcott to cook an uptick. They even swallowed all the warm periods that they have been trying to erase in their desperation to try to alter this very unsettling graph of doom.
I should add, I would like to see a post, by someone in the proxy field to deal with this. If there is support for this in the many proxies this would be the biggest finding so far in climate science, maybe in science itself if we are considering the future of the human and other species. One look at that graph tells me that we are helpless to roll back mother nature as easily as all the cream-puff geoengineering types think.
Caleb says:
April 2, 2013 at 2:56 am
I grew up in a wealthy town where people, and especially the wives, were quite smart but knew nothing about engines, and the local auto mechanic took advantage. He would replace things that didn’t need replacing, (if he really replaced them at all.) For example he might replace a car’s ball joints after 2000 miles. “….
Same in my town. I know a lot about automobiles and I see a lot of scamming. They love to replace brake rotors around here. Why? Because it’s the simplest job to do while the car is on the lift for inspection, it cost less than $20 a wheel and they can charge $250, and they can scare the owner into all sorts of “safety” concerns if you don’t replace them. 99% if the time it’s total rubbish.
In the book “Freakanomics” they have similar events which are ascribed to the concept of “information assymetry”. It’s essentially the power someone holds over others when there isn’t a balance in knowledge about the subject, like the true state of the brakes, or the value of an object for sale, or what the climate data really says about the climate system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
Marcott et. al. use a 300 year smoothing technique and then expect the end point hundred years to be representative! They are either idiots or biased and the reviewers have no common sense to recognize the disconnect! And why did it take skeptics to find that Marcott’s PhD thesis findings were vastly different? The hypocrisy and hubris abound! Severe penalties are well deserved to all involved in producing, reviewing and publishing this paper, maybe even the withdrawal of Marcott’s PhD.
Bill
Re Skyphil above is this important?
“seriously mistaken reference and claim about insolation over 11,500 years” link. If it is should it not be followed up urgently (if so I assume SM is looking into it)
BUT…..the readership of the un-retracted / un-corrected warmist reports outnumbers that of “The Financial Post” and even THE BEST blogs (;-) by what, a few tens or scores of millions?
You will never win a cultural dispute by rational argument.
Culture can only be changed by cultural acts. For an excellent example of a cultural act (working outside of rational argument) you have that superb cartoon by Josh, the scythe.
The MSM is always reporting that doomsday is here, doomsday is here, and they always cry wolf, so nobody believes them any more any way. The public has reached the saturation point, and no amount of doomsday claims will get traction. Their scheme is unraveling, and now temps are headed down, so we can really laugh at their flailings and failings.
David L. says:
April 2, 2013 at 2:51 am
//////////////////////////////////////////////
I don’t see that happening simply because the public will not buy into such a switch, at least not for a generation or two. They have shot their bolt with manmade global warming, if that turns out to be bo**ocks, the public will not believe ‘the Team’ should they claim catastrophicmanmade global cooling.
No, I think that the public will instead be baying for blood. Should cAGW fall down, the MSM will review the effect and costs of policies that were undertaken with a view to mitigation. It will become clear that we have locked ourselves into energy prices at least some 30% higher than they need be, we have lost much industry and lost a lot of jobs. If on top of this we have to endure energy insecurity until new conventional power generators can be built, the public will not be in the mood to cut the greens some slack let alone to go with them on their next suicide mission.
11,500… 1500.. I haven’t read through this whole sorry mess, but could it be that a career has hit the wall on a misread or a typo…?
Their problem is they posted the studty too early. April 1st was yesterday.
OK, their STUDY
Ross has put together as really easy to digest summary of the whole Marcott et al debacle in this article. I really hope it gets wider visibility than just the FT – a great paper but most the general public will never see it & this is an article everyone could & would understand. The general public needs to see how the CAGW crowd operates & this shines a light on it like few other articles do.
If there were truly unbiased journalism out there, this whole episode ought to be the final nail in the coffin of the whole CAGW scare, but unfortunately, I suspect that will not be the case.
richard verney says:
April 2, 2013 at 5:43 am
“No, I think that the public will instead be baying for blood.”
Even if elements of the public are, the MSM will not give them any publicity. Blogs that report about such an unrest will be smeared by psychologists/sociologists as being run by the insane, as has already happened.
If the public manages to see through the propaganda fog in larger numbers, the repressive measures might get more extreme. Alternatively, if the leaders of the regime are chicken, like e.g. social democrats are, they will retreat and the meme will collapse.
Jeff L…its NOT the FT, if it was it would mean something. Its the “Financial Post”. Whats that!
Yes indeed, this is a great read and a cogent summary of the takedown of Marcott et al. Perhaps for legal reasons, Ross chose to call the deliberate re-dating of the core tops “arbitrary”, when clearly nothing could be further from the truth. That is to say, why bother re-dating without a specific purpose in mind. Furthermore, if there was a valid reason for re-dating specific samples, an explanation should have been annotated in the original paper.
One can almost picture Marcott and the team begging those responsible for originally dating the samples in question for a viable cover story. Methinks this is why it took so long for Marcott et al to post their lame FAQ/ semi-retraction. I wonder if Steve or anyone else has reached out to said individuals for a statement?
To Skiphil says:
April 1, 2013 at 11:19 pm
seriously mistaken reference and claim about insolation over 11,500 years
[emphasis added]
Nicolas Nierenberg Posted Apr 2, 2013 at 12:23 AM
Nick, so this is pretty funny to me. They reference Huang 2004 as their source for decreasing insolation over an 11,500 year period to the present. I found the paper from S Huang 2004 GRL. It only covers 1500 to the present and claims increasing temperatures and insolation during that period. See figure 4.
This has all the correct page numbers etc. I have no idea how this could be a reference for an 11,500 year period.
————————————————————————————————–
1500 or 11,500 – it’s only a difference by one order of magnitude.
That’s close enough to support “The Cause” with full authority for those who want to believe….
Reblogged this on BenfromMO and commented:
Worth a reblog.
I just read the comments below the Revkin piece “Scientists Find an Abrupt Warm Jog After a Very Long Cooling”. It was a very sobering and disturbing experience; those of us who stay away from alarmist blogs forget how entrenched those beliefs are.
People like Susan Anderson (who she?) have no interest in going to CA (or coming here) and actually reading the detailed analyses of Marcott et al’ s fudging of the data. Instead, they keep citing and posting links to all the heavily censored alarmist blogs; sadly their appeals to authority and their belittling of people like Steve Mc do not fall on deaf ears.
The title of Revkin’s piece should be amended to “Scientists CREATE an Abrupt Warm Jog After a Very Long Cooling”. But there is more alarmist noise on the thread, than sensible presentation of the mistakes in the paper.
Nothing will happen with this until some big shots start demanding that Science withdraw the paper
Do they really think that they won”t get caught? They can’t be that stupid. I guess they know they will get caught, but not until after all the headlines trumpet our impending doom. It is probably worth it, not only for the ‘noble’ cause, but for the bottom line. Despite a flawless record of being wrong, doom and gloomers are often rewarded financially. Take Paul Erhlich…please.
Shaun Marcott is a name that has now appeared in news outlets around the world. The majority of people seeing that name will never know that his ‘science’ is really a deception. They will think he is a very smart young man adding more proof to a settled science!
Its not about being correct. Its about being loud and scary. It’s not a conspiracy. Its just how it works. That’s where the big bucks are.
In some of the blogs there seems to be a misconception that Marcott et al. somehow “spliced” modern thermometer data onto their reconstruction and that the resulting sharp uptick, while misrepresenting the temporal resolution of their reconstruction, is a valid comparison.
Trouble is, that’s not what they did. Their reconstruction is a compilation of many Monte Carlo “realizations” of the actual proxy series. The Monte Carlo realizations created the uptick out of thin air, with no help from the modern instrumental record. The “blade” of the hockey stick is purely an artifact of the reconstruction statistics. People who try to claim that it’s just comparing the thermometer record to the paleo reconstruction are missing the point.
The sad truth is the cold NH land temperatures this winter have done much more to sidetrack the cagw bus than anything else. While debunking this nonsense is essential, the impact is far less than it should be.
I would think that the fault lies with the universities that allow those teaching climate science to ignore valid scientific points made by qualified skeptics. You cannot blame the younger climate scientists for being alarmists when they paid good money to be indoctrinated into the CAGW cause. They seem to have been taught a religion posing as a science as well as the true science involved.
Without some sort of potential punitive measures there is no reason any school’s administration will care what is being taught. Perhaps Congress should threaten to prevent taxpayer backed student loans from being used at any university that can be shown to have suppressed or blatantly ignored evidence suggesting they are teaching pure conjecture as fact. I’m not saying something that is conjecture should not be taught, only that it should be made clear to the student that it is not fact and that the student should be both alert and open to any contradictory evidence, as that is what any true scientist should do.
Matcott was quoted on CA as saying that it was standard practice to redate core tops. I think that was from his FAQ. That statement should be put under the microscope.
The invariably senseless ‘policylass’ (fashions herself a member of the “policymaker class”) I think.
Has an obscure, unread blog dedicated to material furthering mankind’s future enslavement to a scientist-governing oligarchy …
.
If none of them does, and if Science lets it stand, maybe with a “clarification,” it will go harder on science-as-an-institution in the long run.
mogamboguru says:
April 2, 2013 at 7:18 am
It’s actually only 500 years being compared with the 11,500 years. The dates are 1500 to 2000 in the Figure 4 of the Huang (2004) study referenced (and the curve is up not down in any case). Presumably some got their reference notes mixed up, since the paper referenced does not remotely support the claim, but what is the correct reference?
How did this get past peer review and when will the retraction occur?
I suspect that Marcott got some mentoring for this paper by an established climate scientist. Something along the lines of:
“Son, this thesis of yours, it’s not what we look for in the published literature. If you expect to get published, you’ve got to sex it up. You’ve got to show that it’s worse than we thought. Find a way to spike it up at the end. Mike’s got all sorts if cleaver ways to do this kind of thing. Talk to him. Learn the trade. He’s the best in the business. If you’re going to have a career in climate science you need to learn one thing: serve only what the dogs are eating.”
You correct, Tom (toml says: April 2, 2013 at 8:14 am),
But now that they (and their supporters) have admitted that the uptick is bogus (or ‘not robust’) they are defending including it because it “confirms the instrument record”. Basically, they are trying to have it both ways now that they have been caught out including a statistical artefact.
Furthermore, the uptick is probably more related not to a few Monte Carlo runs, but – as Steve McIntyre has detailed – some seriously dodgy changing of the end points of a couple of their proxies. There has been no response to this in the FAQ the authors have posted and this is most damming point in regard to their actions in writing the paper, even though the post-publication emphasis on the uptick (which they had not placed emphasis on in the paper) is also highly suspect.
Steve is very careful not to attribute motive to the authors of this paper, but it is getting harder and harder to think this is simple scientific error, especially in the way they are obfuscating in their defence.
I searched the BBC news site for recent entries for “Marcott”:
“Sorry, there are no results for ‘marcott’ in the category ‘News’.”
So I tried CNN. Their latest report is the original headline of the now-retracted hockey stick:
“Global warming is epic, long-term study says Updated March 8, 2013
Global warming has propelled Earth’s climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest — in just one century.
How about Al Jazeera?
“Your search – marcott – did not match any documents. No pages were found containing “marcott”.”
The NBC, like CNN, still have as their latest word on Marcott the full lurid original misinformation:
“Warming fastest since dawn of civilization, study shows – Science
Updated 9:07 a.m. ET, Mon., April. 1, 2013
Overall, Marcott and colleagues note Thursday in the journal Science, the planet today is warmer than it has been for about 75 percent of the Holocene.
How about Fox news – at least they should be expected to report the discovery of data manipulation and the Marcott et al retraction?
“Did you mean: “marco” ?
Your Search for marcott did not return any results.”
Well its nice to see Fox being sensitive to the possiblity that I might be Mexican. But nothing at all – even from them – about the Marcott retraction.
This is what is so sinister and dangerous about the media. Marcott et al have won and they are laughing. The initial knee-jerk predjudice-driven sensational report of the study – “climate now warmer than 75% of the Holocene, climate-change skepticism demolished” was read by millions and this will never be undone. No amount of retraction will change that fact. AGW activism worldwide has received an irreversible boost. The exposed invalidity of the study and even the marcott retraction will remain unknown to most of the public. This is the modern mass media at its politically twisted worst.
Now, Ross McKitrick, building on the work of Steve McIntyre and others in the blogosphere, shows how easily these media outlets were duped into believing this study was the end-all for proof of man-made climate change.
They weren’t duped, they were complicit in the fraud and deceit. Any of them that were duped are dumb as a bag of hammers. Deborah Feyerick of CNN falls into that category. I’m surprised she has enough brains to remember to breathe. http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/02/11/cnn-anchor-blames-asteroid-on-global-warming/
McIntyre & McKitrick strike again, I love it. Three cheers for the good guys getting a win.Even if the MS media are certain to wash this under the rug.
toml says:
April 2, 2013 at 8:14 am
In some of the blogs there seems to be a misconception that Marcott et al. somehow “spliced” modern thermometer data onto their reconstruction and that the resulting sharp uptick, while misrepresenting the temporal resolution of their reconstruction, is a valid comparison.
Trouble is, that’s not what they did. Their reconstruction is a compilation of many Monte Carlo “realizations” of the actual proxy series. The Monte Carlo realizations created the uptick out of thin air, with no help from the modern instrumental record. The “blade” of the hockey stick is purely an artifact of the reconstruction statistics. People who try to claim that it’s just comparing the thermometer record to the paleo reconstruction are missing the point.
==============================================
I think you’re being too charitable. I think, but can’t prove, that they intentionally manipulated proxies to show the uptick. Given they had very few proxies to play with and that they had no misgivings about moving them up and down the timeline, it wouldn’t have been very hard to do.
Do you think they’ll put the FAQ with the supporting online material that they supplied to Science?
How difficult would it be for experts to perform an end-to-end parallel implementation of the Marcott et al reconstruction, doing so according to Marcott et al’s nominally stated methods, but instead using data which has not been arbitrarily modified and which is directly traceable back to the original data sources?
Phlogiston…ABSOLUTELY spot on.
What I was indicating earlier (and surely others before me had in mind).
I do think very many commenters here assume that simply proving a thing wrong will change perceptions. It wont. it would be good to see sceptics wake up to this reality: culture and policy is not determined bY realities but perceptions.
Wow, this is what should be called the marcottisation of a diagram.
The procedure is simple and should be added in the handbook of the small climastrologist: one takes a diagram that looks like it looks and through marcottisation one may change it to look like you want it to.
The marcottisation process works through redating the various proxies inside for the period of your interest. One can take any spaghetti graph and redating some component parts inside it, cutting off some inconvenient values obtain the graph of your desire from their average.
Beta Blocker says:
April 2, 2013 at 12:29 pm
How difficult would it be for experts to perform an end-to-end parallel implementation of the Marcott et al reconstruction, doing so according to Marcott et al’s nominally stated methods, but instead using data which has not been arbitrarily modified and which is directly traceable back to the original data sources?
Was already done by several in the search of how the hockey stick was achieved – you can see here some examples:
http://suyts.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/hockey-stick-found-in-marcott-data/
This is what the data without being changed shows.
Thanks, Steve McIntyre, for your scrupulous attention to details. Thanks Ross McKitrick, for your clear voice. Thanks, both, for bringing the truth to light.
There is probably no hope until we literally freeze over and people notice there ain’t no warming. The Steig et al paper was debunked by SM and others showing that they artificially spread the heat from one point of the Peninsula to the whole of Antarctica if I recall correctly. The paper has not been withdrawn or retracted. I would not be surprised that the owners of the journals like Nature and Science really don’t care anymore about the science as long as the journal sells. Basically like a newspaper does with sensational stories. The fact is their income is going to keep drying up if they keep this up because no one serious will be able to believe any of the work that is published on their journals.In other words the “Name” or “prestige” of these journals is being eroded by this tomfoolery
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I prefer “scicobabble”.
1) They don’t need to get away with the lies, they just need to get away with it for a little while. Headline page A1, correction page A23. It’s not science, it’s propaganda.
2) I *already* view scientists like used car salesmen. Suspect until proven. It kind of boggles me that scientists in general (of all people) defend the club first and correct the problem never. Scientists need to start policing their profession on a volunteer basis, it’s pretty clear no one else is going to do it. I know that scientists claim that’s what they do, but step back and look. It’s really, really not what you do.
What a well written review by Dr. McKitrick. I think it is time to start rolling past the circled wagons. I believe the media is starting to come around. With this nonsense, corrections from every publication who published that graph should be demanded.
I call on all WUWT readers to demand retractions/corrections from any publication that put that graph in their content.
I feel sorry for Marcott. Poor bloke unknowingly fell on his sword for the team and will never work again if we regain control of grants to study real science.
What’s the story here? ‘Before’ seems to be in the real world, in national media – often under Science/Technology sections. ‘After’ refers to an online Opinion piece in a Canadian financial outlet. Result? No change. Hardly surprising when you compare the reach of real-world science to that of provincial opinion, but it’s interesting how much the need to believe can lead to the creation of a bubble-world ‘reality’.
My God people. The scariest part of all this is that Climate Change is being taught as FACT at my children’s elementary school here in Arizona – AND, the school is REQUIRED to teach it! Try undoing that disaster each and every night around the dinner table to confused 10 and 11 year olds. Those of us who are truly informed about the issue can sit around and discuss the absurd lack of data credibility all we want on forums…meanwhile they are quietly drilling it into our children’s heads, and shooting out never-ending headlines of lies that never get retracted. Sick, sick stuff. And very frustrating.
Eliza:
It’s more about vanity than selling magazines. That and an amazing degree of insularity. There really is an illuminati vs. the great unwashed masses aspect to this business that is quite important is keeping the AGW train rolling down the tracks.
So you use a record that smooths and suppresses all short-term variation, and then announce, “Looky! the short-term variation (upward) is unprecedented in our record!” Uh, yeah.