Guest post by Nancy Green
Tamino claims he has added 3 spikes to the Marcott et al proxy data and the Marcott et al process detects them.
Source: http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/many_vs_unpert.jpg
This, he then proposes, is proof that there are no 20th century spikes in the Holocene. This claim appears to run counter to a prediction I made recently in a WUWT post; that as you increase the proxy resolution you are more likely to find spikes.
See:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/03/proxy-spikes-the-missed-message-in-marcott-et-al/
Having had my reply disappeared at Tamino’s site, I thought readers at WUWT might be interested. I don’t believe Tamino’s conclusion follows from his results. Rather, I believe he has demonstrated the truth of my original prediction. What needs to be understood is that adding a spike to the proxy data is not the same as adding a spike to the proxies. This is where people get confused.
The proxies are ocean cores or similar sitting in some repository. They are real, physical objects. To truly add a spike to the proxies you would need to travel back in time and change the temperature of the earth. This would then affect the proxies in some fashion, depending on the resolution of the proxies, how they respond regionally, including lags, gain or damping. The proxy response might also be affected by other unknown factors at the time that are not visible in the proxies. In other words, the spikes that you add to the proxies would have all the resolution problems that the proxies themselves have.
However, adding spikes to the proxy data is an entirely different animal. The proxy data is an abstract representation of the proxy. It is numbers drawn on a sheet of paper or electronic equivalent. Now you are adding (drawing) high resolution spikes onto low resolution proxy data, with no accounting for regional affects, lag, gain, damping or confounding factors. It should be no surprise at all that these high resolution spikes jump out. If they didn’t, it would point to a serious flaw in Marcott et al.
An analogy might help better understand the problem. Imagine for a moment that we are not dealing with temperature, but rather trying to detect planets around stars. We have before us a photograph of a star taken by a telescope on Earth. We look at this under the microscope. However, we find no planets because the telescope lacks the angular resolution to distinguish them from the star itself.
Now let’s go out to the star in question and add planets around the star and take more photos with our telescope. These planets are real objects. We know they exists. However, it will make no difference; we still can’t see the planets with our telescope. In this example we have added a spike to the actual proxy and it has made no difference.
Now let’s add a spike to the proxy data. Instead of placing planets around the star, take the photo from the telescope and draw a picture of a planet on it. This is an example of adding a spike to the proxy data. The photo is an abstract representation of the star and its planets, equivalent to the proxy data. Now examine the photo under a microscope and voila, the planet (spike) will now be visible.
What we are seeing in action is actually a form or misdirection used in stage magic. It fools us on the stage just as it does in science. It is our minds that create the confusion (illusion) between what the proxies actually are and what the proxy data actually is. The proxies are ocean cores – they are real objects. The proxy data is an abstract representation of the real object. However in our minds we are so used to dealing with real objects as abstract representations that we are fooled into thinking they are one and the same.
If anything, what Tamino has actually done is to prove the point of my original article. He has added high resolution spikes to the low resolution data and as predicted they are detectable. To conclude however that this somehow proves there are no 20th century type spikes in the Holocene makes no sense. As we have seen in this example, no matter how many planets you physically add around a star it makes no difference if you lack the resolution to detect them. This is no proof that they don’t exist. It is only after you examine them at sufficiently high resolution that they become visible.
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Odd. It looks fine though my Foster Grant polarized lenses …
/sarc off
Tamino again demonstrates that he doesn’t understand what thinking people object to with regards to the CAGW hypothesis, and has faulty logic when it comes to analyzing scientific concepts. Sad, really.
Again: the kind of proxies being used record only long-term averages, NOT year by year temperatures. They are incapable of recording spikes, either upward or downward. Only someone either rather dense or deliberately obtuse could fail to understand this concept.
Same as failure to comprehend how UHI affects temperature records…
Tamino compares apples to oranges and comes up with a lemon.
If I understand, then temperature spikes during the formation of the core would be hidden due to the natural resolution inherent in that type of core. The spikes, though real, would not cause spikes in the data. So adding an artificial spike in the date afterwards tells us nothing about finding real spikes.
What Nancy says rings true. I’m not sure, but another example of what Nancy is saying might be to add a short-duration spike (inherently broadband) to broadband noise before lowpass filtering as opposed to adding a short duration spike to the broadband noise after it is lowpass filtered. In the former case, the high frequency components of the short-duration spike will be removed resulting in a smoothing over time of the spike; whereas the short-duration spike added after lowpass filtering contains all its original high frequency components.
In trying to defend press release statements about the Marcott paper, Tamino is effectively calling Marcott a liar. Tamino’s claim that 100-year-long temperature spikes would be preserved and detected in the Marcott reconstruction completely contradicts what Marcott said in his FAQ:
“We showed that no temperature variability is preserved in our reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, 50% is preserved at 1000-year time scales, and nearly all is preserved at 2000-year periods and longer.”
Cute headline, and Tamino is indeed “out!”, but mostly because he butchered the calculation. Any data person knows that the spikes must spread when doing x-axis perturbations but Tamino’s did not — it’s an in-your-face flub and an embarassment to Tamino’s acolytes. But see Clive Best’s site for an authoritative demolition: http://clivebest.com/blog/?p=4833
Here is a chart of the Marcott-2013 cores – Elevation vs ProxyType & Core Name.
Color is by Category (NH, SH, Tropics), Shape by Proxy Type.
http://i47.tinypic.com/w7bfbc.png
Horizontal lines at sea level, -700 meters, and -2000 m. (key Argo depths)
There are 18 proxies from below -2000m,
29 proxies from -700m to -2000m
11 proxies from 0 to -700 m
10 proxies from 0 to +1000m
4 Proxies from above +2800 m. (Antarctic ice cap)
Knowing what we know of the thermal profile of the -2000m to -700m to sea level ranges of the ocean depths from the Argo Floats, How reasonable is it to expect that that the 47 proxies (out of 72) that come from below -700 m water depth are going to be able to see an atmospheric temperature spike of any kind? The Ocean’s heat capacity itself is one huge low pass filter.
Nancy Green says: “Having had my reply disappeared at Tamino’s site, I thought readers at WUWT might be interested.”
I had a look at Tamino’s site. It says that there are “166 Responses to Smearing Climate Data.” Yet there are only approximately 20 comments published.
Looks like there’s been a lot of comments disappearing without trace!
This is what I mean about the alarmists. They keep doing this sort of thing and, seriously, no one in their right minds can continue to claim they are doing so by mistake or by delusion. That would be like claiming the magician on the stage accidentally fools his audience with a trick he thought was real (therefore it’s science). Too much attention and hard work goes into this for it to be a genuine attempt at anything but conscious, deliberate misdirection.
Many of us are already calling “FRAUD”. When will everyone else see these alarmist “scientists” for what they clearly are?
AndrewS: your browser malfunctioned, I see all 166 comments. Mind you, I made 3 comments on that thread, all of which disappeared, and many others have said that all or most of their comments disappear. With Tamino’s butchery of the simple perturbation calculation, I’m no longer interested to go there — I require competence.
Another way of looking at the star analogy is to ask ‘what size planet would we need for it to show up in our telescope?’ given the resolution we have. Answer: a very big one, perhaps 100 times larger than Earth. Thus it still gives no answer as to whether there could be an Earth-sized planet.
Returning to Marcott, to get a proxy spike of +0.9 even before perturbation, the global temperature would eiether have had to have been +0.9 for a very long time (say 150 to 200 years), or MUCH higher for s shorter time (say +2 degrees for 80 years, or +3 degrees for 40 yrs). Such condititions are not representative of what we see in 20th C. If 20th C were included in Marcott, it would show a proxy value of around zero on their scale.
Thus, Tamino’s work still tells us nothing about whether 20th C scale changes ocurred during the past 11,500 years. Its main achievement is to give the ‘right’ answer for warmists – which of course is his aim.
Tamino’s friends are people who know him well but like him anyway. You can’t undo that with logic and precise science. None of them are interested and you are left preaching to the choir who are also unmoved. The only way to win is to not play the game – WOPR
I think you need to be a little careful with your Astronomy analogy. What you’re referring to (I believe) is astrometry in which you attempt to measure the motion of a star (by observing it’s position change on a photographic plate or CCD) around the center-of-mass of its planetary system. The problem is that the typical angular movement of a star about the center-of-mass of its planetary system is orders of magnitude smaller than the typical resolution of a telescope today. The correct analogy (in my opinion) would be trying to detect a temperature perturbation with a period of a few years. I completely agree that it is not possible to detect such signals in the Marcott et al. data. Given that the instrumental data suggests that we’ve been undergoing warming for the last 120-130 years, we’re interested in signals with a period comparable to the resolution of the data in Marcott et al. and so we would expect such a signal to have some noticeable effect even if we can’t actually determine its precise structure.
It’s like to be on a ship that’s sinking or running aground. A group of scientists and egineers are on the ship trying to figure out why it is sinking. They have trends and formulas. They argue day and night about facts left out,history charts, computer programs with wrong data, why it’s sinking and on and on it goes…
Then you have the ones on board that always denied the fact that it can sink and they are caught with their pants down.
You also have a smaller group that is prepared, acknowledge the fact, acts fast and survives.
(-:
Friends:
Grant Foster is unwilling to put his own name to what he does and, therefore, posts on his blog under the alias of Tamino. People don’t act under false names without reason, and it has always been clear that Foster is not proud of what he does on his blog.
Acting under the alias of Tamino, Foster has been pretending he has expertise in time series analysis and signal processing. And he has acquired a few acolytes who believe he has such expertise.
Foster’s attempted ‘defence’ of the Marcott paper demonstrates complete ignorance of fundamental principles of resolution and smoothing as they apply to time series data. This can only indicate that
(a) Foster is incompetent at time series analysis
or
(b) Foster is sure his acolytes are so devoted to him that they will accept blatant falsehood from him
or
(c) both (a) and (b).
Personally, I think it is (c).
Richard
Surely it’s easy for Tamino and otehrs to prove that the spike would appear on proxy data.
Just stop pretending history stopped in 1950, and show up-to-date proxies that really do show the 1950-2013 temperature traces with corresponding spike.
Since Marcott et al themselves tell us that this isn’t possible as the proxy resolution is too poor, why would anyone believe Tamino can detect a similar spike from 1000’s of year ago?
“What we are seeing in action is actually a form or misdirection used in stage magic”
Misdirection indeed. Grant Foster is competent enough to understand what he is doing is incorrect, yet he wilfully uses it to mislead people…
AndrewS says: ” had a look at Tamino’s site. It says that there are “166 Responses to Smearing Climate Data.” Yet there are only approximately 20 comments published.”
… and when anyone challenges his pseudo-scientific BS he just deletes the comment. If the author persists he bans them from posting.
This creates his own little microcosm of blog space where he is always right (even when he’s knowingly wrong) and he gets applause from a small fawning crowd of clapping seals that want to be reassured that we are indeed heading for ecological collapse of the biosphere.
Before his audience of intellectual toddlers he gets ooo’s and aaaw’s and much applause with his slight of hand tricks. When one of the audience shouts out “I can see the string” , he gets sent out of the room.
He is the majestic king In his little fantasy world, where none have the right to question him.
Someone suggested here recently this probably reveals a narcissistic character disorder. It certainly has nothing to do with science.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/open-mind-or-cowardly-bigot/
For the sake of argument, let’s accept that Tamino found 3 other spikes in the temperature record. What that proves is that what he is calling the present spike is not unusual. It’s happened at least 3 times before in the past 10K years, and with even higher amplitudes. Just means that the present spike, if there is one, is not unprecedented.
Thanks, NZ Willy. I tried again later and all the comments downloaded ok.
I can see why they ignored your comments – you clearly know what you are on about. Keep up the good work.
Kind of like goblins, isn’t it. The fact that no-ones seen them and they don’t leave a trace doesn’t mean they aren’t real.
Not even Tamino believes this carp. It’s just throwing sand in the face.
Actually we know there is at least one (cold) spike in the data, an abrupt relatively short cooling episode known as the “8.2 KA event”. It is well documented in a large number of high-quality proxies, but invisible in the Marcott et al. curve.
When “Tamino” made this bonehead mistake, I presume that he had no inkling that it was a mistake at all. The eco-leftists don’t even think in terms of whether they are right or not. They just look for ways to make an argument that seems to support their desired conclusion, and by this criterion (the only criterion that exists in Tamino’s head) the argument is right, or it seems to be.
But now that he has had his error pointed out to him, just watch, he will not admit the mistake and issue a retraction but will try to deny it, proving that, even though he did not originally know that he was making a mistake, he is indeed willing to affirm what he knows to be mistaken arguments, and how could it be otherwise? A person who was looking for the truth rather than to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion would have easily caught the error to begin with.
Not to deny the insightfulness of Nancy’s elegant expose, but it’s a very simple mistake, and for anyone writing on the significance of the time resolution of a proxy data set, there is nothing more basic than the difference between a spike in the proxy data and a spike in what the proxy is being used as a proxy for. To miss it you have to not be looking for truth in the first place, but for a particular result, so the priority of preferred conclusions over truth is already present when the mistake is first made, even though Tamino probably wasn’t aware he was making a mistake.
The whole idea of trying to make sense, rather than trying to arrive at a particular conclusion, is alien to Foster, which makes it particularly perverse that he calls himself “Tamino.” That was the name of the pure hearted seeker of truth in Mozart’s Die Zauberflote. In abstract nature, Foster is the polar opposite of Tamino.
Do you think he does this simply to obfuscate or does he really believe what he has done is legitimate?
Has he not applied his brain as to what underlying geological/climatic activity would have to take place to generate a spike of the level shown in a core sample.
I am sure he is not that stupid, so I can only conclude that he is deliberately making false claims. The stupidity then lies with the people who accept what he publishes.