People send me stuff. Robert Sheaffer sent part of a blog post titled:
The “hockey stick” slaps back by Donald Prothero
After reading it, this is what I mailed back:
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Oh please, Marcott et al has been fully debunked for recent temperatures. Even Marcott himself admits the uptick is not robust on RealClimate.
Marcott et al have posted their long-promised FAQ at realclimate here. Without providing any links to or citation of Climate Audit, they now concede:
20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.
You can read all about it here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/category/marcott-et-al-proxy-paper/
and at: http://climateaudit.com
Anthony
========================================================
He mailed back that he realized all this, but was essentially saying that at the source, they seem oblivious to the problems with Marcott et al.
For example: “…best evidence is Marcott et al’s 20th century warming!!!!!!!!”
I ask readers to go help them out with their slapstick:
http://www.skepticblog.org/2013/04/17/the-hockey-stick-slaps-back/
They’re all laureates, don’tcha know?
“…best evidence is Marcott et al’s 20th century warming!!!!!!!!“ means there’s not much warming at all, and certainly nothingly statistically significant in the past 16 years!
If that’s the best they’ve got, they’re in a world of hurt.
Anthony, there were 8 comments on that post.
I left everything untouched.
I feel cleaner that way.
cn
There is a limit to self-flagellation….with an non-robust hockey stick….that humanity can stand. Hopefully we have finally passed that limit.
I just submitted this over there-
“The Marcott paper supplemental material, pages 23-26, has this-
“The gain function is near 1 above ~2000 year periods, suggesting that multi-millennial variability in the Holocene stack may be almost fully recorded. Below ~300 year periods, in contrast, the gain is near zero, implying proxy record uncertainties completely remove centennial variability in the stack. Between these two periods, the gain function exhibits a steady ramp and crosses 0.5 at a period of ~1000 years.”
Figures S17 and S18 are unambiguous regarding the frequency response of the reconstruction. By the way, when they say the gain is ‘near zero’, they mean it is one percent or less of the actual signal amplitude.
So, apparently Tamino argues that Marcott’s spectral analysis of Marcott’s reconstruction is wrong, in order to defend Marcott’s initial claim that modern temperature trends are unprecedented, even though Marcott later backed off that claim.
Meanwhile, Mann told Revkin at Dot Earth that the Marcott paper proves that modern temperatures are the highest in 4000 years, and that the rate of temp change in 20th century is the highest in 11,400 years. Neither claim is supported by the paper’s self-analysis.
Climate science shines once again.”
In the interest of slapstick …
I was raised on a remote farm, home schooled, and knew not of other human beings.
The farm had many types of animals, including a dog.
Since the dog was the most loyal, devoted, and friendly creature on our farm, I married the dog,
because the”best evidence” available indicated the dog would be my closest friend and companion.
The AGW paradigm is visibly collapsing.
Hopefully our politicians will wake up and realize that the cost of carbon strangulation programs is not only too much for the taxpayers to bear, but of no value besides.
Save that posting by Donald Prothero — he will be as famous as Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf; known as Bagdad Bob – who could say there were no U. S. solders in his city even as they could be seen in the street behind him.
It is saddening to read the Porthero post. He writes books, including textbooks that college students are required to read. Yet the posting shows he has not read, nor if he has read, not understood the failings of the climate team.
Dang, that guy in his piece is going on about how Marcott verifies and resurrects Mann’s 1998 Hockey Stick.
Even Mann is too smart to try to bring back his 1998 version.
This Donald Prothero guy strikes me as being as skeptical as the possum who was certain he had found a pork chop when he smelled the packaging and tore into the garbage bag. Sadly I think Donald will need something more to convince him of his grave mistake than a quick whack upside the head.
That’s really funny, slapstick indeed. Donald Prothero calls himself a skeptic but has not thought to question anything about the paper or look at the data on which it is based, or search the web for any criticism of it.
Incidentally there are now two criticisms of the Marcott paper now up on the Science website
http://comments.sciencemag.org/content/10.1126/science.1228026#comments
One from me and one from Arno Arrak.
I guess Prothero didn’t notice these either.
“They’re all laureates, don’tcha know?”
—-
And Hardeates.
The climate team lead by Marcott,
Misused the data they’d got.
With graphic rejigging,
Mann’s numbers he was frigging,
Tracing hockey sticks all over the plot.
🙂
Oops retry –
The climate team led by Marcott,
Misused the data they’d got.
With graphic rejigging,
Mann’s numbers he was frigging,
Tracing hockey sticks all over the plot.
🙂
I’m still trying to get my head around how proxy data with 100 year resolution can show a century long uptick.
Chuck Nolan says:
Anthony, there were 8 comments on that post.
I left everything untouched.
I feel cleaner that way.
Indeed, all Anthony has done is give him an unwarrented traffic spike for a day.
That is such as crock of unmitigated BS , it’s not even worth telling them how wrong they are. They know and they lie.
There’s a whole internet full of that kind of stupidity.
Please don’t bother telling us next time you find one. 😉
Paul;
No, he doesn’t call himself a sceptic. He purports to be deconstructing scepticism with approved science.
tckev;
Don’t quit your day job. ;p
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
April 18, 2013 at 9:42 am
Dang, that guy in his piece is going on about how Marcott verifies and resurrects Mann’s 1998 Hockey Stick.
Even Mann is too smart to try to bring back his 1998 version.
He’s not smart enough to keep distance from Prothero’s article, though, he happily tweeted about it:
https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/324511641578389505
Willful blindness is my sense of Donald the Wise .
Anthony, I hope you realize you are responsible for more traffic to that vacuous and narcissistic site than it will ever see again. Yes some sarcasm and exaggeration, but could you also do before and after shots of traffic on these seedy sites of reality exclusion?
I expect the traffic graph would closely resemble a single upraised digit.
chris y – I applied the Marcott measured frequency gain response of their processing (Fig. S17a) directly to a 200-year 0.9 C spike – it results in a somewhat smoother, approximately 600-year duration, 0.3 C spike (http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1951&p=2#93527 for discussion and graph). Their white noise gain measurement includes proxy sampling, temperature and date peturbation, and Monte Carlo averaging – the full process.
I considered additional blurring from phase shifts, but the authors state that “…the time series are coherent and in phase at all frequencies (Fig. S17b,c), indicating that our Monte Carlo error-perturbation procedure does not artificially shift the amplitude or phase of input series”, and their phase plots (Fig. S17b/S17c) show coherency with insignificant (0.2 C 600-700 year bump.
chris y – I applied the Marcott measured frequency gain response of their processing (Fig. S17a) directly to a 200-year 0.9 C spike – it results in a somewhat smoother, approximately 600-year duration, 0.3 C spike (http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1951&p=2#93527 for discussion and graph). Their white noise gain measurement includes proxy sampling, temperature and date peturbation, and Monte Carlo averaging – the full process.
I considered additional blurring from phase shifts, but the authors state that “…the time series are coherent and in phase at all frequencies (Fig. S17b,c), indicating that our Monte Carlo error-perturbation procedure does not artificially shift the amplitude or phase of input series”, and their phase plots (Fig. S17b/S17c) show coherency with insignificant (less than 10 degrees) phase effects at longer than 500 year periods. I will note that this frequency analysis result is quite close to the Tamino results from processing such a spike directly.
A 200-year up/down spike contains many frequencies, down to the 0-frequency contribution to the average, but the measured Marcott response only eliminates the high frequencies. I believe such a spike would indeed be quite visible in the Marcott data as a greater than 0.2 C 600-700 year bump.
@glynnmohr I think you are making the mistake in concluding that since AGW is collapsing, carbon taxes are without purpose. Politicians were never worried about helping their constituents but in gaining power.
Marcott succeeded in high sticking public opinion into his own net!
See High Sticking
Glynn:
“The AGW paradigm is visibly collapsing.
Hopefully our politicians will wake up and realize that the cost of carbon strangulation programs is not only too much for the taxpayers to bear, but of no value besides.”
What they need to realize is that continuing down the AGW road is going to LOSE them VOTES. That’s the only thing they respond to. AS I’ve written before here, politicians WANT AGW because they can tax us without actually taxing US. The only thing which will de-rail them is when the CONSESNUS of a majority of voters leads them to an inexhorable conclusion that if they continue they will lose in the next election
The Team does have that Keystone Kops aura about them. Bumbling about furiously, and failing miserably at everything they do.
Don’t know about anyone else, but it took me about 10 years (and 6 stitches), before I ever produced a decent slap shot.
Youth is indeed, wasted on the young.
“We are weeeening! We are weeeeeeeeeening!” Good one, Hultquist.
U.K.(US)! At last. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You made my YEAR. And, you can write. (please forgive me, everyone, but his or her (don’t Canadian women play ice hockey?) encouragement meant so much)
My comment over there has been pending moderation for quite awhile while other comments come in behind. Is that how they control the conversation?
“My comment over there has been pending moderation for quite awhile …” [jubutzi]
You wrote something intelligent, no doubt. Could take several days… .
Chuck – Snap!
In fact, I felt dirtier for having visited it.
It’s a rubber hockey schtik … it slaps about all over the place and needs a ‘trick player’ to manage its use.
Went over there as you suggested….but could not read any more without gagging. When confronted with the delusional it pays not to engage in blogging. It isn’t worth the energy and will only encourage them. They will only censor anything you say anyway, so let them continue to preach to the choir. At least here there is a full range of views and minds focused on facts rather than on twisting interpretations to meet preconceived ideation.
Went over there but the ice was so slick that I was afraid I’d slip and end up with a broken hockey stick in an orifice I need on a daily basis.
I don’t want to go to a place involving “double hockey sticks.”
KR-
“I applied the Marcott measured frequency gain response of their processing (Fig. S17a) directly to a 200-year 0.9 C spike – it results in a somewhat smoother, approximately 600-year duration, 0.3 C spike”
I tried this as well. With a 200 year, 0.9 C spike with 9 mC/yr slopes, the reconstruction gives a 0.17 C peak blob delayed by 450 years, with a maximum slope of 0.7 mC/yr. Both results grossly underestimate the simulated spike.
But then, a 400 year, 0.45 C spike with 4.5 mC/yr slopes gives the same 0.16 C peak blob, but with a maximum slope of 0.5 mC/yr.
With a 0.9C spike centered on the mean and 9 mC/yr slope, I get a 0.05 C peak blob, with a maximum slope of 0.2 mC/yr.
Neat. Any blob in the reconstruction could have resulted from an infinite number of choices for the actual temperature.
A volcanic catastrophe causing a 20 C drop over 10 years hardly registers as a -0.2 C depression buried in the noise.
Heck, even a year of Hansen’s boiling oceans would be buried in the noise.
chris y – I would be quite interested in your methodology. Did you run the full 1000 Monte Carlo analysis with the spike applied to the proxies (as per Tamino), or did you apply frequency gains to that spike? I took the measured frequency gain (from the Marcott supplemental, filter function as linked), and applied it to the 200/0.9 spike spectra, giving the results I linked to – 0.3 C over 600 years. How did you do your analysis?
Some minimum criteria from the white noise results: the Marcott et al gain function _will not_ affect the addition to the average, meaning that 0.9C x 100 years will be added to the average reconstruction by such a spike, regardless of how blurred it is – does your reconstruction show that? If not, there is a problem there. Secondly, the lack of phase shifting as seen in Fig. S17c indicates that the mean of the spike should not move, just ever so slightly phase blur – I am _very_ puzzled by your 450 year shift.
chris y – “Any blob in the reconstruction could have resulted from an infinite number of choices for the actual temperature.”
With that I would have to _strongly_ disagree. The frequency response of the processing will affect each input in a characteristic and defined fashion. And given the non-zero gains for anything longer than a 300 year sinusoid, it should in fact be possible to invert the gain function to see the inputs up to that frequency – a fairly simple deconvolution. Each of which will match the given inputs, with the only ambiguity being the higher clipped frequencies.
I left “skepticblog” a comment yesterday morning. Checking back I see that they did not let it through moderation. I linked some data that exposed the cherry-picking of post author Donald Prothero. Guess that’s verboten for these supposed truthseekers. My comment:
Why is this site called “skepticblog”? This is as credulous a recounting of politically funded research as can be found. Do you all really think that CO2 approaching 400ppm (.04% of atmosphere) is scary? From Lawrence Livermore Laboratory:
“Carbon dioxide is necessary to sustain life in concentrations of about 0.04 percent of the earth’s atmosphere.”
https://energy.llnl.gov/ccs-docs.php?id=2
Over our current ice age (alternating glacial periods with interglacials) life on the planet has been strongly CO2 limited. How about showing your readers the levels of CO2 on the planet over the last 200 million years, when larger forms of animal life evolved? Average PPM over 1000:
http://www.americanthinker.com/%231%20CO2EarthHistory.gif
Notice also (same graph) that there is no correlation between CO2 and global temperature over earth’s history. Where is your skeptical common sense?
It is disappointing to see a site with such blinders on. Assuming a comment would never be shown, I felt the least one could do is give it a one star rating.
“…best evidence is Marcott et al’s 20th century warming!!!!!!!!“
Is that a statistically significant number of exclamation marks?
I’ve tried to leave the following comment on the site two days in a row now – I’m going to stop trying and post here:
First of all – define the term “denier.” Aside from the kooks who also believe Obama is Muslim and had something to do with 9/11, global warming skeptics do not deny that the earth has warmed in the past century. They quibble with the amount of warming, are skeptical that CO2 is the sole or main driver, and if they “deny” anything it’s global warming alarmism that treats this as a crisis which much be dealt with immediately and with strenuous methods (and also disagree with the methods!).
Second – the chief legitimate concern over the hockey stick is NOT grafting thermometer readings unto paleoclimate proxy data. See this for background: http://climateaudit.org/2005/04/08/mckitrick-what-the-hockey-stick-debate-is-about/
Third – you upbraid global warming skeptics for supposedly mistaking weather for climate (tellingly, however, you post no links to those alleged transgressions). However two paragraphs before this allegation, you commit the same error – using “weather” events like Sandy as data to support your conclusions.
Fourth – as has been mentioned in the comments already, the Marcott paper has nothing useful to say about climate in the 20th century, by their own admission (after the headline-grabbing press releases of course).
Fifth – heavily funded “climate denialism”. I think just about every skeptic has a bit of a chuckle every time they read a charge like that, wondering if their check got lost in the mail. Global warming proponents are so much more heavily invested in the crisis of global warming, and have orders of magnitude more funding available to them. The US government alone spent $8.8 billion on climate change in 2010 (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11317.pdf). Name an “energy industry” who has come even close to that.
Finally – the climate change industry has painted this as a zero-sum game. Fossil fuels emit carbon, carbon changes climate, therefore, carbon emissions must go down. However people like Allan Savory are working on techniques to combat desertification, which could change the composition of grassland areas which in turn would absorb more carbon. In fact, this may be happening already: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-greening-of-the-planet.aspx
Clearly climate is a complex system which is not even close to being fully understood, why treat the only possible solution in such a binary fashion? Any why continue to launch attacks against “denialists” who fail to tow the dogmatic line of climate scientist/activists?
Being a Canadian, I take great offence at this garbage being labelled the ‘hockey stick’. Can we call it something else, like a one-sided polo mallet or a faulty cricket bat or whatever?
It’s an insult to the great Canadian game.
@outdoorrink
It’s always an up-going check mark ✓(or tick for the Brits) so why not NIKE©limate ?