Mann's Hockey Stick Goes Zombie

Nuclear war simulation forgets the Medieval Climate Optimum

Story submitted by P. Wayne Townsend

Yesterday’s Daily Mail carried an article about a simulation of the climate consequences of nuclear war.  The paper Multidecadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict is not paywalled gives the usual horror stories (nuclear winter, crop failures, etc.).

What caught my eye was this idea intellectual relic found in both the Daily Mail article and here quoted from the abstract of itself. 

Our calculations show that global ozone losses of 20%–50% over populated areas, levels unprecedented in human history, would accompany the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years

.

1000 years would be 1014, during the Medieval Climate optimum.  Digging deeper we find that, indeed, Michael Mann’s discredited hockey stick is the zombie reference for this claim.

The severe increases in UV radiation following a regional nuclear war would occur in conjunction with the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years [Mann et al., 1999].

Of course, this is a model of climate after a nuclear wars so, perhaps these may be disciples or wannabes of the distinguished Mr. Mann.   With a reference to Mann this long after refutation, will we ever be able to get rid of this zombie science, or are we doomed to living in the land of the walking dead papers?


 

The paper is available here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000205/abstract

Abstract

We present the first study of the global impacts of a regional nuclear war with an Earth system model including atmospheric chemistry, ocean dynamics, and interactive sea ice and land components. A limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each side detonates 50 15 kt weapons could produce about 5 Tg of black carbon (BC). This would self-loft to the stratosphere, where it would spread globally, producing a sudden drop in surface temperatures and intense heating of the stratosphere. Using the Community Earth System Model with the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model, we calculate an e-folding time of 8.7 years for stratospheric BC compared to 4–6.5 years for previous studies. Our calculations show that global ozone losses of 20%–50% over populated areas, levels unprecedented in human history, would accompany the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years. We calculate summer enhancements in UV indices of 30%–80% over midlatitudes, suggesting widespread damage to human health, agriculture, and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Killing frosts would reduce growing seasons by 10–40 days per year for 5 years. Surface temperatures would be reduced for more than 25 years due to thermal inertia and albedo effects in the ocean and expanded sea ice. The combined cooling and enhanced UV would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine. Knowledge of the impacts of 100 small nuclear weapons should motivate the elimination of more than 17,000 nuclear weapons that exist today.

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Admin
July 22, 2014 3:08 am

A nuclear winter would have to be pretty impressive to beat the “year without a summer” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

J Murphy
July 22, 2014 3:21 am

Perhaps you might have to acknowledge that Mann is ‘refuted’ only in your particular corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet, and not in real life or the real world? In reality, whether you like it or not, he is a highly cited researcher -http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/about/cv.php
Maybe everyone should accept reality and move on to the next obsession from the distant past…

Konrad
July 22, 2014 3:25 am

“Mann’s Hockey Stick Goes Zombie”?
Well just how do you tell the difference between a zombie and someone who short centrers data prior to principal component analysis?
They are both staggering around seeking “brains…brains…”
So are the authors of this sadly Sageneque study. Volcanoes put the lie to the nuclear winter tripe.

Reply to  Konrad
July 23, 2014 10:36 am

@Konrad

Well just how do you tell the difference between a zombie and someone who short centrers data prior to principal component analysis?
They are both staggering around seeking “brains…brains…”

But one is looking for one to use, the other to eat.

Konrad
July 22, 2014 3:29 am

J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
———————————-
“Maybe everyone should accept reality…”
Are you prepared to accept that adding radiative gases to the atmosphere will not reduce the atmosphere’s radiative cooling ability?
Just how long can you deny reality?

HomeBrewer
July 22, 2014 3:32 am

What seems more probable in the near future is an eruption of the icelandic vulcan Katla.
That will lower the global temperatures about 2C and then we’ll long for some warming again.

NikFromNYC
July 22, 2014 3:34 am

“With a reference to Mann this long after refutation, will we ever be able to get rid of this zombie science, or are we doomed to living in the land of the walking dead papers?”
But don’t you see, Mann’s schtick has been resurrected as a “super hockey stick” in 2013 so all that ancient history was just technicalities in early work as climate “science” moved on to today‘s newfangled right-in-your-face fraud instead of yesterday’s statistical black box magic:
http://s6.postimg.org/jb6qe15rl/Marcott_2013_Eye_Candy.jpg
Science has nothing to do with the odd practice of climatology. It’s not so much fraud as much as a social science agenda masquerading as physical science. It’s not even in the same ball park as hard emperical science. Enter psychologist Lewandowsky featured on a climate model paper this week. It’s no different in scope or kind from the last hundred years of an upside down toilet as being the pinnacle of fine art. It’s not about climate. It’s about destroying the authority of objective facts and intuition in favor of the purely arbitrary power of state sponsored facts.

garymount
July 22, 2014 3:43 am

One of Mann’s walking dead zombie minions seems to have got hold of an internet connection and posted a brain dead comment here. Speaking of Walking Dead, season 5 starts in October:-)

garymount
July 22, 2014 3:48 am

You can simulate a nuclear explosion with enough dynamite. All dynamite must be eliminated.

David A
July 22, 2014 3:56 am

J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
Perhaps you might have to acknowledge that Mann is ‘refuted’ only in your particular corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet..
======================================================
Sorry J; Mann was heavily dissed by his peers, or did you not read what they said about him in “Climate-gate” ?
They have spent the last decade plus slowly erasing his work, at the same time trying not to give up the ghost, at the same time admitting the know “fuck-all” about 100 year periods, even if they did their best combined work. Did you read the Wegman report? Even NAS admitted the Wegman report was essentially correct.

Hans Henrik Hansen
July 22, 2014 4:00 am

“1000 years would be 1014, during the Medieval Climate optimum” – correct, but the (quoted) statement was: “…in the last 1000 years”, i.e. a time interval including the LIA.

Sleepalot
July 22, 2014 4:01 am

I estimate it would take 10-40% of the energy of each bomb (assuming 15kt = 63TJ) to put 0.05Tg of black carbon into the stratosphere (10 – 50km up). That seems a lot. All the mushroom clouds I’ve seen portrayed were white.
(But I’m a relative dumbass: someone smart should have a go.)

Travis Casey
July 22, 2014 4:05 am

I’m going to need a lot of popcorn for this thread. Hehe.
Here is my comparison to illustrate what kind of statistical trickery was used to create the hockey stick graph. Imagine if we could take the average gain of every running back in NFL history. We take the yearly avg. starting in the modern pro football era. I will speculate that the number will be between 2 and three yards for the last hundred years or so. Then we take the avg. gain of each rookie running back’s first carry in the last 10 years. Let’s say that number comes out to be 8.7 yards. Small sample with some break away gains that skew the avg. Next we splice together the two data sets to produce a hockey stick graph. OMG, it’s worse than we thought. Running backs are taking over the NFL. HS and college coaches will start training their QBs to run as well. (Feedbacks). By 2100 there will be no more passing because the avg. run will be 80 yds. after we pass the tipping point. There were some tackles for a loss in the recent 10 year data set, but those were ignored so that only positive gains were considered. In this way we “hide the decline.”

July 22, 2014 4:06 am

The old saying about a bad penny comes to mind.

M Seward
July 22, 2014 4:16 am

J Murphy says regarding Michael Mann ” In reality, whether you like it or not, he is a highly cited researcher “. and J Murphy is quite correct. God is also a highly cited source as are the various prophets not to mention dictators and despots throughout history,. The Buddha gets many mentions as does Sun Tzu. And so what? We are supposed to slavishly follow all their peachings and teachings like robots? I refer J Murphy to the comments by Professor Richard Muller of the BEST project etc ( hardly a ‘denier’ and the mildest of skeptics I think but eminently qualified to comment) regarding Michael Mann and what he thinks of the Hockey Schtick and Hiding the Decline.

Sweet Old Bob
July 22, 2014 4:20 am

And how do they “model” this nuclear war? Ground bursts? Air bursts? Looks to me to just be a whole bunch of suppositions packed into a group think grant search.
Or just sucking up to other alarmists.

Doug
July 22, 2014 4:20 am

J Murphy is right and it’s not fair that he, and people like him, should suffer climate catastrophe because the rest of us won’t face up to the truth.
We should divert global warming research funding to the construction of a giant spaceship, perhaps captained by Dr Mann, that can take those who realise we are doomed to a new planet, This new planet can then be populated by those who understand the importance of living in an environmentally sustainable way.
The rest of us will be stuck on Earth to suffer the hell of our own making.

Reply to  Doug
July 23, 2014 10:42 am

@ Doug – Can you pick out Mann in this video?
http://youtu.be/NON4hksO77I

garymount
July 22, 2014 4:30 am

philjourdan says:
July 22, 2014 at 4:06 am
The old saying about a bad penny comes to mind.
– – –
Ah yes, Pennywise the evil clown. Scary movie filmed in one of my old neighborhoods I used to haunt (one scene anyways). I don’t remember the old saying though.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099864/

Reply to  garymount
July 23, 2014 10:31 am

– ““A bad penny always turns up” is a very old proverb that dates back to at least the mid-18th century and is probably much older. ” – From http://www.word-detective.com/2010/03/bad-penny/
Mann’s hokey stick is like a bad penny.

July 22, 2014 4:36 am

J Murphy, it doesn’t matter if people still cite Mann’s hockeystick, phlogiston or that the world is flat.
It ain’t so.
It sure ain’t proven to be so.
And It’s not justified to say it is so because you won’t make it so by doing so.
Citing it discredits the fools who do so. It doesn’t add support to the folly. Reality exists whether you wish it were so or no. Unless you are Dumbledore in disguise.
If you aren’t a wizard I hope you haven’t made the blunder of citing it yourself.

Joseph Murphy
July 22, 2014 4:40 am

J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
————————————
Mann’s claims are demonstrably false but, you are correct that his work is probably well accepted in most climate circles. Although, encouraging people to follow a false path in order to fit in is a questionable line of reasoning at best.
-The Real J Murphy 😀

July 22, 2014 4:46 am

Above ground nuclear weapons tests in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were many times higher (number and power) than this simulation and nothing like the consequences proposed in this study occurred.

Billy Liar
July 22, 2014 4:48 am

Mann often comments on blogs using the alias ‘J Murphy’.

Editor
July 22, 2014 4:48 am

we calculate an e-folding time of 8.7 years for stratospheric BC compared to 4–6.5 years for previous studies.

What’s that? This paper is worth the respect to dig that up, I assume it’s the time period or just the time for all that black carbon to settle out of the stratosphere.
Volcanic aerosols settle out over a year or two, those are tiny droplets of sulphuric acid. I suspect soot and other structures will settle out pretty well too, IIRC, that’s one of the reason Sagan’s nuclear winter hypothesis is little heard from these days. I suppose some heating at the topmost soot might be able to cause some convection and keep soot suspended a while longer, but that’s an awfully strong temperature inversion to break.

The combined cooling and enhanced UV would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine.

Oh Noe – not the dreaded global nuclear famine! Let’s hope it’s not as bad as the frumious Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Nuclear Famine or the odd Weirdly Global Nuclear Famine.

MarkW
July 22, 2014 5:09 am

I thought the Kuwait oil fires put to rest the “theory” that fires alone could loft soot to the stratosphere.

MarkW
July 22, 2014 5:11 am

J Murphy says:

Wow, all the talking points. Nice job.

July 22, 2014 5:15 am

J Murphy
“In reality, whether you like it or not, he is a highly cited researcher ”
– Can you explain how this is in anyway synonymous with being correct?

July 22, 2014 5:30 am

“…J Murphy says: July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
Perhaps you might have to acknowledge that Mann is ‘refuted’ only in your particular corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet, and not in real life or the real world? In reality, whether you like it or not, he is a highly cited researcher -http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/about/cv.php
Maybe everyone should accept reality and move on to the next obsession from the distant past.”

Cites are a popular opinion poll saying that someone else’s research supports the opinion holder’s research.
Science requires full disclosure and independent replication. Mann’s research has neither, only clowns dancing and saying they love his research even if it has been profoundly rebutted and dismantled by numerous researchers.
The fact that the owner of the hockeystick refuses to acknowledge his errors, mistakes and failed predictions is embarrassing to science. Researchers citing such flawed science should be similarly embarrassed; most should realize that at some future point they will face withdrawing their research if they’ve based it on such flawed foundations.
History is already demonstrating hockeystick irony with the entry of new adjectives and verbs into our languages; reference the Urban Dictionary’s addition of the adverb ‘mannian’ tracking mannian’s entrance into common usage.
Another interesting note for those defending themselves from Mann’s legal abuses; just how unknown and honest is someone whose devoted adoring fans have caused new words to enter our languages?

rgbatduke
July 22, 2014 5:36 am

Sometimes I wonder how people come up with this sort of idiocy. They are asserting this is the inevitable result of exploding only 100 “small” nuclear weapons? Obviously, they’ve never watched this:

This is a lovely, graphical illustration of the 2053 nuclear tests that occurred from 1945 to 1998, almost all of them above ground at first. Pay close attention to e.g. 1959 and 1961/1962. The above ground “Tsar Bomba” at Novoya Zemlya in 1961, at roughly 55 Megatons, was by itself well over 100 500 kiloton bombs, and a 500 kiloton bomb (necessarily fusion) is by itself 25 to 50 times a “small” (fission) nuclear device such as the ones used during WW II or extensively tested by the US throughout the 50’s and 60’s.
If atmospheric explosions of nuclear weapons in aggregate quantities of (say) 100 megatons — not exactly small explosions — were going to cause either nuclear winter or ozone depletion, they would have done so from testing alone back in the early 60’s before the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 (which was probably partly motivated by the Tsar Bomba, which devastated the Soviet Union’s own breadbasket with its fallout even though it was designed and tested as a relatively “clean” bomb with no outer Uranium casing.
Then, of course, there is the 1815 Tambora eruption:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora
Tambora was an estimated 800 megaton explosion — that is, 16 times the Tsar Bomba. It did, in fact, cause a “volcanic winter” event — the Earth cooled between 0.4 and 0.7 C over the following decade, led off by “The year without a summer” (1816).
Krakatoa, in comparison, was only around 200 megatons — a paltry four Tsar Bombas (TB) if one makes superbombs into a scale. It, too, caused a 1.2 C “volcanic winter” of somewhat shorter duration (as might be expected) than Tambora in the five years following 1983. Both Krakatoa and Tambora mucked up the stratospheric chemistry big time — huge amounts of water, sulphate aerosols, and dust/soot, warming the stratosphere and cooling the troposphere.
With this historical data about the effects of massive gigaton scale explosions — three or four orders of magnitude larger than any of the bombs likely to be used in any nuclear exchange in the post MAD-world, and two or three orders of magnitude more megatonnage than is at likely to be delivered in the post MAD world — and with the direct experimental evidence that 100+ atmospheric bombs in the 10 kiloton to 5 megaton range in a year do not suffice to trigger either nuclear winter or ozone depletion — why would they claim either one?
One can argue that a full-scale MAD-level nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR in prime cold war territory might have burned a gigaton or more and triggered an event worse than Tambora. It is difficult to argue for any event now that would even equal Krakatoa. Don’t get me wrong — nuclear war is bad for puppies and small children — but nuclear winter isn’t the major risk. It is the fact that they are dropping all of those bombs straight down onto cities and incinerating (or causing to die from sequellae such as fallout or famine) anywhere from 100 million to a billion people in the process.
Next you’ll hear people calling for building a Tsar Bomba level bomb to “cure” CAGW, and that way madness lies. Heck, why not go all the way and set it off in Yellowstone and try to revive a supervolcano in the process? Insane.
rgb

July 22, 2014 5:37 am

J Murphy,
Mann’s Hokey Stick has been thoroughly debunked. It is nonsense. Deal with it, sycophant.

Mark Bofill
July 22, 2014 5:38 am

Hey, this isn’t snark, honest question. How come both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were able to test substantially larger nuclear devices without triggering a nuclear winter?

Mark Bofill
July 22, 2014 5:39 am

LOL. I should have read the comments more carefully. Thanks Dr. Brown!

July 22, 2014 5:43 am

Mann does not allow for replication of his shoddy work. For fifteen years Mann has withheld his methods, data, methodologies, and metadata from other scientists. That is not science; that is merely assertion that what he says is legit. But it isn’t.
Mann hid data that would have destroyed his hockey stick in an ftp file labeled censored. If he had used that data, his work would have been debunked. Some scientist, eh?

Steve McIntyre
July 22, 2014 5:44 am

In your headline, you say “Nuclear war simulation forgets the Medieval Climate Optimum.” According to my reading of the newspaper article, the relative differential of the modern warm period and medieval warm period is irrelevant to their claims. They argued that nuclear winter would have global temperatures 1.5 deg C colder than the present and thus colder than the Little Ice Age (and obviously the medieval warm period). Based on 1.5 deg C, Hubert Lamb would not have disagreed. None of this had anything to do with “forgetting” the Medieval Climate Optimum. Nor is it a given that the medieval warm period was warmer than the modern warm period. Obviously I disagree with Mannian statistics, but flaws, even gross flaws, in calculations by Mann and similar studies do not establish the opposite result. The rhetoric in this article should be dialed way back.

Robert of Ottawa
July 22, 2014 5:47 am

J Murphy July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
In reality, whether you like it or not, he is a highly cited researcher
Highly cited by similar rent seekers, but proven wrong.

July 22, 2014 5:51 am

J Murphy
Once upon a time I was uncertain as to whether AWG was correct or not. I felt certain that solar activity was the main driver of climate. All I did was ask questions about previous changes in the climate.
One would have thought that I was out to destroy the world. None of the simple basic questions have yet to be answered. Whether some people are quoted or not is irreverent if they are wrong. Increasingly as the temperatures and co2 are taking different paths, arguments by AGW look ludicrous. Often in science I heard the phrase, ” this is what was once thought, but not anymore”. AGW will end up in the dustbin of history.

July 22, 2014 5:54 am

J Murphy – compare your vision of past climate based on the hockey stick fabrication to the reality, then perhaps join the discussion in a meaningful way.
Here’s a link one of many actual paleoclimate reconstructions based on the best science that shows our little blip of warming coming out of the little ice age is neither odd, nor correlated to human injected C02 into the atmosphere.
http://www.iceagenow.com/Now_colder_than_during_most_of_the_past_7000_years.htm

Robert
July 22, 2014 5:57 am

The Zombie reference is not nearly interesting as the WACCM Survival Guide:
https://bb.cgd.ucar.edu/please-read-known-problems-and-suggestions-running-waccm

Bulova
July 22, 2014 5:57 am

This paper seems to have serious flaws. The Russians alone detonated 224 nuclear weapons at Novaya Zemlya in the high arctic. The single Tsar Bomba test was 58 megatons and created a cloud 35 miles high. That one test far exceeded the numbers cited in the study. It didn’t have any affect on climate or event short term weather.

rgbatduke
July 22, 2014 6:07 am

Obviously I disagree with Mannian statistics, but flaws, even gross flaws, in calculations by Mann and similar studies do not establish the opposite result. The rhetoric in this article should be dialed way back.

And I agree. Indeed, rhetoric in general should be dialled back unless it is backed by numbers. For example here:
http://www.brookings.edu/FP/PROJECTS/NUCWCOST/TESTS.GIF
or here:
http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab15.asp
Note that in two separate years the threshold of 100 atmospheric bombs/year was exceeded, and these were not small bombs — in the 1961/1962 tests the largest bombs ever exploded were set off. I have no idea what Mann asserted or why, but we (humanity) has already performed the “experiment” that basically refutes much of what is asserted above in his name.
However, everything is a matter of scale. There is, no doubt, a scale for nuclear war that would affect weather. It’s just that by the time we reach that point, weather is the least of our concerns. It would almost certainly not affect climate — even Tambora had effects that only lasted a decade, Krakatoa only five years.
rgb

Chris B
July 22, 2014 6:14 am

I googled, “mrs murphys cow chicago fire”, and got 327,000 references. Mmmm, must be true.

July 22, 2014 6:24 am

J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
In reality, whether you like it or not, he is a highly cited researcher

Uh, so was Sir Arthur Smith Woodward.
What’s your point?

M. Jeff
July 22, 2014 6:27 am

Concerning reality: Murphy’s Law. Murphy was an optimist.

Tim OBrien
July 22, 2014 6:29 am

In WWII, numerous cities in Germany and Japan were fire-bombed out of existence with massive effects equaling or exceeding nuclear bomb strikes. Funny, but there is no historical evidence that those massive fire storms affected the weather…

Dire Wolf
July 22, 2014 6:31 am

Doug says: “We should divert global warming research funding to the construction of a giant spaceship, perhaps captained by Dr Mann”
Are we talking the “B ark”? Is that you, Douglas Adams?

July 22, 2014 6:38 am

@ Dire Wolf
Let’s not be too hasty.
Not all of that plan is bad.
In fact, over the door to the entrance to the giant spaceship, we could hang a sign:
“To Serve Mann”.
(Cue Twilight Zone music)

brentharg@aol.com
July 22, 2014 6:49 am

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the EE network. From: Watts Up With That?Sent: Tuesday, 22 July 2014 12:01To: brentharg@aol.comReply To: Watts Up With That?Subject: [New post] Mann’s Hockey Stick Goes Zombie
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/* @media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) { .post { min-width: 700px !important; } } */ WordPress.com
Guest Blogger posted: “Nuclear war simulation forgets the Medieval Climate Optimum
Story submitted by P. Wayne Townsend
Yesterday’s Daily Mail carried an article about a simulation of the climate consequences of nuclear war.  The paper Multidecadal global cooling and unpr”

ICU
July 22, 2014 6:53 am

This is just another in a long recent series of papers starring Alan Robock;
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/robock_nwpapers.html
This goes back to the TTAPS paper.
The Nuclear Winter stuff mostly disappeared ~1998.
Dr. Robock started back on the regional aspect ~2007.
In between? Almost absolute dead silence.
The subject matter is very broad and very deep, but basically it’s all about either buoyant plumes of carbon black (heated by the sun) and/or pyrocumulonimbus cluods from the ground based firestorms (that would follow a regional nuclear conflict) reaching into the stratosphere.

Gary Pearse
July 22, 2014 6:57 am

Bill Illis says:
July 22, 2014 at 4:46 am
“Above ground nuclear weapons tests in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were many times higher (number and power) than this simulation and nothing like the consequences proposed in this study occurred.”
And we even had a nuclear war in 1941.

ferdberple
July 22, 2014 7:01 am

In reality, whether you like it or not, he is a highly cited researcher
============
I’m reminded of Bertrand Russell’s lecture on belief. That if you accept just one thing to be true that is in fact false, then you can prove that anything is true.
This is the danger to climate science and science in general. Once a false paper is believed to be true, all sorts of erroneous conclusions follow. Thus the current epidemic of diabetes, following the cherry picking of 7 country’s health data from the 20 countries studied (A Keys 1980).
Calibration of tree rings is the same statistical nonsense. Similar to cherry picking 7 countries from 20, drawing bulls-eyes after the fact around tree rings that happen to match global temperature records ignores the large number of tree rings that don’t match. These mismatched tree rings are telling you that the ones that match are likely accidental matches, the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy in action.
As a result, millions of people are now suffering from diabetes, that should otherwise be healthy. While research into the adverse health effects of artificial (hydrogenated) fats was largely overlooked. Yet the data was all there, in the Korean War cadavers of US Servicemen. Why were they showing advanced heart disease, while WWII cadavers of US Servicemen did not? What had changed? It certainly wasn’t saturated fats.
Now we have a similar situation with global warming. Tree rings were cherry picked to “improve” the signal to noise ratio, without first considering that this would amplify the noise outside the calibration period. As a result we have a generation of wasted science, blindly following down a false trail.

July 22, 2014 7:08 am

“The severe increases in UV radiation following a regional nuclear war would occur in conjunction with the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years [Mann et al., 1999].”
I’m no fan of Mann, but this statement seems logically consistant on its face. If Mann places the temperature at that time at X, when it should have been X+Y, and you’re comparing to Z (temp at time at nuclear winter)…
Z < X
Z < X+Y
Both statements are true, right?

ferdberple
July 22, 2014 7:17 am

on an encouraging note, I’m told by the assistant dean of medicine at our local research university that they have now confirmed the US Korean War data, so maybe in Canada at least we may eventually reverse the faulty “food pyramid” preached by health officials. science truly advances one funeral at a time.
the problem for the hockey stick is of course “the pause”. climate science is now falling all over itself to explain this in terms of natural variability. but the hockey stick shows that there was no variability prior to industrialization. this was the argument that global warming must be due to humans, because natural variability was so low. the hockey stick proved it.

Eugene WR Gallun
July 22, 2014 7:17 am

Over the years I have written a few poems about some of the major
creeps involved in the CAGW scam. This was the first one I wrote.
THE HOCKEY STICK
There was a crooked Mann
Who played a crooked trick
And had a crooked plan
To make a crooked stick
By using crooked math
That favored crooked lines
Lysenko’s crooked path
Led thru the crooked pines
And all his crooked friends
Applaud what crooked seems
But all that crooked ends
Derives from crooked means
Eugene WR Gallun

Reply to  Eugene WR Gallun
July 23, 2014 12:26 pm

@Eugene WR Gallun
You have a flair for the creative! Excellent! Beware the lawsuits!

ferdberple
July 22, 2014 7:29 am

Z < X
Z < X+Y
Both statements are true, right?
==========
not for Y <= Z-X

Rob aka Flatlander
July 22, 2014 7:31 am

We NEED a graph # of Mann citations vs Time, of course it would also need to be broken down into PRO /NEUTRAL / anti hockey stick. Id like to see if he trends down with the warmest climate crowd, and up with the “denier of AGW-CC-CD crowd”

AnonyMoose
July 22, 2014 7:47 am

I really hated that Kuwait nuclear winter.

July 22, 2014 7:53 am

I saw the article and what occurred to me was “A limited, regional nuclear war .. in which each side detonates 50 x 15kt weapons could produce about 5 megatons of black carbon”
um.
My understanding is, roughly 6kg plutonium is used to make a blast of an equivalent of 15kt TNT, so they talk 50 per side = 100, so 600kg plutonium.
where the heck does 5 million tons (Tg) of “black carbon” come from??
ah.. maybe the original pub date might give us a clue ‘Article first
published online: 1 APR 2014’

July 22, 2014 7:55 am

I believe in Michael Mann made global warming…..and I’m a zombie.

July 22, 2014 8:10 am

“not for Y <= Z-X"
I figured, in context, Y being a positive integer could be assumed and not have to get pedantic about it.

July 22, 2014 8:36 am

Err.. value, being an integer is irrelevant 🙂

David Ball
July 22, 2014 8:43 am

Neil DeGrasse Tyson can tell us. He is widely cited. Television never lies.

MikeN
July 22, 2014 8:48 am

Even during the Medieval Warm Period, there are proxies that show very cold years during that time. Lake Kottajarvi that led to upside-down Mann is one such example. My first attempt at explaining it someone, I said look at this decade, picking one at random. They looked at it and said, yes it is very cold then, what’s your point?

Goodmongo
July 22, 2014 8:56 am

Forget climate for a minute the study fails on the nuclear side. 100 15kt weapons means a total of 1.5 MT in nuclear yield. During the 1950’s and 1960’s over 500 MT of yield was exploded with no nuclear winter.
Also, the study is based on all 100 warheads being ground burst. Air burst has maximum damage so it is a waste to use a ground burst unless you are going for underground complexes or hardened structures. The amount of dirt and debris from an air burst is very low and could never reach their required levels.
So without even getting to the question of if 5 Tg of carbon and it’s impact on climate the study fails because 100 warheads of this yield would never produce that amount of dust. A single ground burst of a 9 MT warhead over Bikini Atoll never created that much carbon so how can 1.5 MT do it?

mjc
July 22, 2014 9:17 am

” Goodmongo says:
July 22, 2014 at 8:56 am
A single ground burst of a 9 MT warhead over Bikini Atoll never created that much carbon so how can 1.5 MT do it?”
Ummm….maybe they are counting on it coming from burning cities?
Anyone know how much soot was put up from the fire-bombing of Dresden during WWII?

July 22, 2014 9:20 am

I particularly liked the “that Mann is ‘refuted’ only in your particular corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet” line. The alarmist web sites only dream of getting the traffic this site does.

wobble
July 22, 2014 9:30 am

<J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
Perhaps you might have to acknowledge that Mann is ‘refuted’ only in your particular corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet, and not in real life or the real world?
What do you personally think of Mann’s Hockey Stick? Are you personally OK with the fact that he omitted 30 years of proxy data while simultaneously replacing it with thermometer data – without mentioning it on the graph, in the paper, or even in response to FOIA requests? Are you OK with that?

Billy Liar
July 22, 2014 10:05 am

I love this link:
https://bb.cgd.ucar.edu/run-scam-cesm
CESM = Community Earth System Model

more soylent green!
July 22, 2014 10:14 am

Joseph Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 4:40 am
J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
————————————
Mann’s claims are demonstrably false but, you are correct that his work is probably well accepted in most climate circles. Although, encouraging people to follow a false path in order to fit in is a questionable line of reasoning at best.
-The Real J Murphy 😀

Well accepted by climate researchers or well respected by mainstream journalists, politicians, UN bureaucrats, climate pimps and climate racketeers?

Michael 2
July 22, 2014 10:21 am

J Murphy (suggested by Billy Liar to really be M.M.) says: “Mann is ‘refuted’ only in your particular corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet”
15 minutes after the article is posted YOU arrive in this “rarely-visited” edge!

Michael 2
July 22, 2014 10:24 am

Goodmongo says: “During the 1950’s and 1960’s over 500 MT of yield was exploded with no nuclear winter.”
Strange that global cooling existed at that same time — a dip between 1930 (warm) and present (warm) — 1970’s were an era of fear of the next ice age.

Michael 2
July 22, 2014 10:33 am

rgbatduke says: “Note that in two separate years the threshold of 100 atmospheric bombs/year was exceeded, and these were not small bombs — in the 1961/1962 tests the largest bombs ever exploded were set off.”
Producing negligible “black carbon” I suspect. Do it over cities and see what happens.

DD More
July 22, 2014 10:35 am

From Wiki on List of Test – Largest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
Date (GMT)Yield (Mtons)Deployment Country Test Site Name or Number
23-Oct-61 12.5 air drop Soviet Union Novaya Zemlya Test #123
30-Oct-61 50 parachute air Soviet Union Novaya Zemlya Tsar Bomba, Test #130
5-Aug-62 21.1 air drop Soviet Union Novaya Zemlya Test #147
25-Aug-62 10 air drop Soviet Union Novaya Zemlya Test #158
19-Sep-62 10 air drop Soviet Union Novaya Zemlya Test #168
25-Sep-62 19.1 air drop Soviet Union Novaya Zemlya Test #173
27-Sep-62 20 air drop Soviet Union Novaya Zemlya Test #174
24-Dec-62 24.2 air drop Soviet Union Novaya Zemlya Test #219
166.9 166,900 Kiloton
So the old USSR had a nuclear war with itself and in a little over 14 months air dropped 166,900 Ktons. Where is the data showing the vanished ozone layer? India & Pakistan have 50 nuclear weapons between them??
The real question is do these ‘researchers’ believe no one is alive that remembers these things?

catweazle666
July 22, 2014 11:03 am

So 100 15kt nuclear detonations – amounting to 1,500kt – will cause all sorts of mayhem to the climate, will they?
Wikipedia’s “List of nuclear weapons tests” indicates that so far there has been a total of 2119 nuclear tests with a total yield of 540,739kt.
Some difference there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
More alarmist rubbish, in other words.
Don’t these frauds do ANY research before publishing their drivel?
Ah, I forgot, these are “climate scientists” we’re discussing…

Doug Proctor
July 22, 2014 11:07 am

I picked up (and read!), those nuke-winter tomes in the ’80s. Even drew circles on maps of Calgary of air blast overpressure for 1, 3 and 6 megaton strikes. Conclusion: we’re screwed. But interesting in a forensic way. Clearly simplistic physics, though. Very linear, minimal moderating influences. Really a Michael Bay look-how-it-all-blows-up drama. Sort of like the Vietnam War narrative of holding the line so the Commies don’t take over the world. Zombie-cool horror imagery but obviously an extreme scenario.
One result was supposed to be high temperatures at altitude that would melt all the alpine glaciers and catastrophically flood the lowlands while everyone down there froze and starved in the dark. That seemed weird: an unstable situation as it is so unlike how the planet operates. And then, once you spotted the first stretcher, as Twain called this stuff, you started a line that was very unpopular.
You couldn’t object to the science without the world jumping down your throat. Smart people – Sagan for one – had done the math. Who the hell are you to have an opinion on such an important subject. It’s for a good cause: nuclear disarmament. Pointing out errors was evidence you were a right-wing, Reagan-loving, military-industrial bastard who tortured small animals for fun.
Sound familiar?

Crispin in Waterloo
July 22, 2014 11:09 am

“Knowledge of the impacts of 100 small nuclear weapons…”
“Knowledge”??

Goodmongo
July 22, 2014 11:44 am

Michael2 says: “Strange that global cooling existed at that same time — a dip between 1930 (warm) and present (warm) — 1970’s were an era of fear of the next ice age.”
So is that really your definition of nuclear winter? If so we can sure live with it since we actually did live with it.

Michael 2
Reply to  Goodmongo
July 22, 2014 2:46 pm

Goodmongo says: “So is that really your definition of nuclear winter? If so we can sure live with it since we actually did live with it.”
That’s the spirit! We have lived through Roman Optimums and Little Ice Ages so what’s a degree here and a degree there among humans?

July 22, 2014 11:57 am

dbstealey says: “Mann’s Hokey Stick has been thoroughly debunked. It is nonsense. Deal with it, sycophant.”
Name calling, tsk tsk.
But until Mann ‘98 paper is withdrawn from Nature — it is not — it will be cited at the same high rate it has always been. I think that is the point that J Murphy (the sycophant) is making.

mikewaite
July 22, 2014 12:02 pm

Given the nature of this website most of the technical responses naturally concentrate on climate and meteorological issues, but there is a wider issue which is affected by the retrospective flattening of global or regional temperature variations by Mann and his followers.
Historians and archaeologists are interested in population changes in agricultural settlements , for example the abandonment of farms in the , now cold and wet, uplands of Britain after the early Bronze Age . Or the drift from rural to urban society to the towns in late mediaeval England , how much was that due to the Black Death , the collapse of feudal structure or the change in climate making agriculture even more difficult a way of life.
These studies have relied on , for example, the Greenland ice core analyses for some relative temperature scale, for northern Europe at least . If the Mann school brings these into disrepute much work by many scholarly folk over many years will have to be revisited.
An extreme scenario could be as follows:
A respected Prof in Mediaeval History is giving a freshman class in norse settlements in Greenland and remarking on the gradual abandoning of the settlements as the benign MWA comes to a close. A polite but baffled student raises his hand in enquiry . “My girl friend ” he says is a student of climate science with a Prof who is – like – just brilliant. She says that he says there is no MWA – and he has more prizes than you can shake a stick at – so maybe your norse farms were just Inuit settlements all along ” Exit respected Prof , sobbing , his life work in tatters. Shortly afterwards there is the muffled sound of a shot from the study.

Alx
July 22, 2014 12:14 pm

In some far-off corner of the internet an alert for J Murphy just came up. Time to rush off and polish Manns imaginary nobel prize.

KevinM
July 22, 2014 12:17 pm

J Murphy

KevinM
July 22, 2014 12:18 pm

J Murphy wins

KevinM
July 22, 2014 12:19 pm

J Murphy wins by netting a new record response count.
Congratulations, you’ve hit the sweet spot.

July 22, 2014 12:20 pm

Pippen Kool says:
But until Mann ‘98 paper is withdrawn from Nature…
Nature was forced to issue a Corregenum [a correction] to Mann’s paper, indicating that the original was wrong. Other scientists have issued their own corrections.
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

July 22, 2014 12:21 pm

KevinM says:
J Murphy wins by netting a new record response count.
Yes, the Consensus says he’s wrong.
Live by the consensus, die by the consensus.

Mickey Reno
July 22, 2014 12:37 pm

On Billy Liar equating J. Murphy with Michael Mann: Given the smug tone of Murphy’s comment, I could imagine this is Mann speaking about himself in the 3rd person. But the Liar surname hints that your hypothesis is just a throwaway laugh line. Either way, it warms my heart to think of Mann reading WUWT, frequently becoming outraged by what he reads, desperately wanting to respond, but knowing the PR value of his participation in the lair of his self-imagined enemies, knowing that his side too will castigate and excoriate him for such an indiscretion, and thus understanding he could never comment here under his own name, but eventually a Steynian level offense will be given, his stick mocked beyond its pale, when a verbal torpedo holes his ship of mute resolve below it’s waterline, he fires up a trusted sock puppet to defend his own honor. Wouldn’t that be great?!

J Murphy
July 22, 2014 12:49 pm

No conspiracy. No connection with any bogey-mann. I look here now and again just to see what the latest obsession is, or what the latest A-B-C (Anything-But-Carbon) hope is. Anyway, I know no-one here likes it but unfortunately for you, Mann and his hockey-stick are still relevant. Doesn’t matter what I or you think: his work can only be refuted by peer-reviewed science that cannot itself be refuted. Hasn’t happened yet…
(A real J Murphy!)

Reply to  J Murphy
July 23, 2014 1:40 pm

@J Murphy – of course the mann and the hokey stick are still relevant! People need to be shown what hack science is.

rogerknights
July 22, 2014 12:50 pm

Typo: RGB wrote:
Krakatoa, in comparison, was only around 200 megatons — a paltry four Tsar Bombas (TB) if one makes superbombs into a scale. It, too, caused a 1.2 C “volcanic winter” of somewhat shorter duration (as might be expected) than Tambora in the five years following 1983.

That should be 1883, right?

DirkH
July 22, 2014 12:51 pm

ferdberple says:
July 22, 2014 at 7:01 am
“I’m reminded of Bertrand Russell’s lecture on belief. That if you accept just one thing to be true that is in fact false, then you can prove that anything is true.”
That reminds me of the late Terence McKenna who said about science “Give us just one free wonder and we can explain the rest.” The wonder being the Big Bang.

DirkH
July 22, 2014 12:54 pm

Pippen Kool says:
July 22, 2014 at 11:57 am
“But until Mann ‘98 paper is withdrawn from Nature — it is not — it will be cited at the same high rate it has always been. ”
Well it sure is a remarkable paper.

Michael J. Dunn
July 22, 2014 1:08 pm

The whole “nuclear winter” notion is groundless. The practical predictions were falsified by the outcome of Gulf Wars I and II, where massive burndowns did not cause the slightest weather blip. And they are substantially falsified by catastrophic volcanic eruptions, which cause short-term havoc and maybe a year or so of slightly depressed temperatures, but nothing that causes us to think back and be thankful humanity wasn’t wiped off the map (e.g., Mt. St. Helens).
Read “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons,” by Glasstone. In it, you will find that nuclear detonations below a certain yield fail to have their clouds rise above the troposphere. Therefore any dust or “black carbon” (known to us from the 20th century as “soot”) will rain out. End of story. If a bomb has a yield big enough to cause the cloud to puncture through the tropopause, it is rising so fast it doesn’t have time to collect any soot from surrounding burning trees and climate research repositories.
The devil is in the assumptions. They assume that the post-detonation conflagration is fast enough, and the fireball is rising slow enough, that all the soot will be entrained in the fireball as it ascends into the atmosphere. Just watch films of real detonations and see how quickly everything happens. It is not a realistic assumption at all.
They also assume that the particulate matter persists, which can only be true if the fireball/cloud gets into the stratosphere (as mentioned above). Why? Because natural clouds go up to the tropopause. Natural clouds are (wait for it) rain clouds and the tropopause is a permanent thermal inversion that caps the altitude of most clouds. You would actually be surprised at the statistics of having clear skies. No matter where you are, it almost never happens. (I was in the business of figuring out where to situate ground-based laser weapons and had to look into these details. It turned out we needed to find three different sites around the world, to make sure we had a reasonable chance of a cloud-free line of sight.)

papiertigre
July 22, 2014 1:09 pm

Here’s an interview of a William J.Murphy who is an auditor or as they describe
National Leader, Climate Change & Sustainability Services at KPMG
In the vid they discuss the latest trends in sustainability reporting and ESG disclosure in the USA and internationally:
http://youtu.be/Wy0QJKk-TGw

July 22, 2014 1:11 pm

J Murphy says:
…Mann is ‘refuted’ only in your particular corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet, and not in real life or the real world…
WUWT is the premier climate site on the internet. It has won the Best Science & Technology award for the past 3 years running. It has almost 200 million unique views in only 7 years, and a million reader comments. That is huge. No alarmist blog comes close. Mann’s own blog, realclimate, is populated by head nodding alarmists, and has relatively little traffic.
Furthermore, the OISM co-signers list has the names of more than 31,000 professionals, all with degrees in the hard sciences. NO alarmist group comes anywhere close to the OISM numbers. OISM co-signers state unequivocally and in writing that CO2 is harmless and beneficial to the biosphere. The fact is that the ‘Consensus’ is on the side of scientific skeptics. The alarmist clique depends on false propaganda to spread the misinformation that scientists and engineers in general believe that CO2 is a problem — witness the deceptive articles pretending that “97%” of scientists agree that “carbon” is a threat. Nonsense. That was fewer than 80 respondents, compared with the OISM’s 31,000+.
So when J Murphy claims that WUWT is just a “corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet”, he is whistling past the graveyard. The truth is that Mann is being marginalized, and that could not happen unless skeptics had the truth on their side. The truth is that the evidence shows CO2 is harmless, and global warming has stopped. Refute that if you think you can, J Murphy. Otherwise, you have been debunked.

papiertigre
July 22, 2014 1:22 pm

I’m not saying this is the same J.Murphy, just that there is a J. Murphy who derives some or possibly most of his income from tabulating businesses carbon footprint in anticipation of a global warming tax of some sort.
I bet that J. Murphy, if it’s not the same J. Murphy, at least matches this J. Murphy’s anxiety level regarding the health annd well-being of Michael Mann’s research.

David, UK
July 22, 2014 1:38 pm

Bit of a distracting read for me. Maybe P. Wayne could get someone to proof-read his submission next time?

tty
July 22, 2014 1:46 pm

This was actually field-tested on a large scale in 1945. The bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki together burned about 16 km2 of built-up area. If we assume that the 100 nuclear bombs over India/Pakistan are all used against urban targets (unlikely) and are equally destructive this would amount to 800 km2 of built-up area. Now the bombing of Japan in March through August 1945 destroyed at least 350 km2 of built-up area of which 240 km2 in May alone. Add in Dresden, Pforzheim, Dortmund etc and the very extensive destruction during ground-fighting in Germany in spring 1945 (including most of Berlin) and the total destroyed area must have been well over 400 km2 of which c. 250 km2 during one month (may).
No climate effect whatsoever was noticed.

Michael 2
Reply to  tty
July 22, 2014 2:34 pm

tty says “No climate effect whatsoever was noticed.” (from the bombing of Hiroshima).
Yeah, I also didn’t notice it UNTIL I observe a depression in temperature from the 1930’s reaching a low in the 1950s and 1960s.
Now I notice it.
Your mileage may vary.

chuck
July 22, 2014 1:49 pm

Bill Illis says:
July 22, 2014 at 4:46 am
” Above ground nuclear weapons tests in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were many times higher (number and power) than this simulation and nothing like the consequences proposed in this study occurred.”

The difference being that all the testing was spread out over the course of 30 years, and a “war” would have them all detonated in a matter of days. (or weeks)

chuck
July 22, 2014 1:55 pm

dbstealey says:
July 22, 2014 at 1:11 pm
“. It has almost 200 million unique views ”

Unfortunately, the web site counters are unable to distinguish between a skeptic and a non-skeptic.
[Reply: As there is no censorship here, the numbers include both. ~ mod.]

Michael 2
Reply to  chuck
July 22, 2014 2:30 pm

chuck says: “Unfortunately, the web site counters are unable to distinguish between a skeptic and a non-skeptic.”
Sure it does. Believers go to SkepticalScience or RealClimate and skeptics go to WUWT. Once or twice a year I go to SkepticalScience and once or twice a day I visit WUWT.
The last place you go for any kind of truth is the site that claims to be the truth — you want real climate? Don’t go to RealClimate. Are you skeptical about science? Don’t go to SkepticalScience. This phenomenon is true of many aspects of human life — Google “truth about Mormonism” (or any other ism) for examples.
WUWT lays out new science with plenty of citations.
Consider this list and see if you can find any SCIENCE or citations. It’s just a bunch of ridicule and heresay:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Myth: “Climate’s changed before” Factoid: “Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing.”
Oh? What makes humans the dominant forcing? Just because you say so?
Myth: “There is no consensus” Factoid: “97% of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.”
Oh? Got names? I didn’t think so! 72 out of 12,000 papers mentioning “climate” in some way assert human caused global warming. But I will agree that if you DEFINE “climate expert” to be those who assert AGW, then it ought to be 100 percent. But 97 percent looks better.
Myth: “It hasn’t warmed since 1998” Factoid: “For global records, 2010 is the hottest year on record, tied with 2005.”
Says you. I say, 1998 was the hottest year where I live. Since no agreement exists on what is “global temperature” the statment has no meaning.
Myth: “Antarctica is gaining ice” Factoid: “Satellites measure Antarctica losing land ice at an accelerating rate.”
Says you. Nice dodge, too, not denying that Antarctica is gaining ice. You just look for some PART that is losing ice.
Myth: “CO2 lags temperature” Factoid: “CO2 didn’t initiate warming from past ice ages but it did amplify the warming.”
Another dodge that implicitly accepts the truth of the myth.
And so on. It is quite entertaining if one tries not to be depressed by the propaganda.

Beta Blocker
July 22, 2014 2:06 pm

There is too much profit to made by too many people in too many places for today’s incarnation of climate science ever to be willingly discarded based upon the weight of slowly-accumulating observational evidence.
All of climate science as it is currently being practiced will remain a zombie science indefinitely into the future, until and unless fifty years or more of continuously falling temperatures have been experienced.

chuck
July 22, 2014 2:08 pm

J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 12:49 pm
“Hasn’t happened yet…”

Not to mention the dozen or so subsequent reconstructions using different proxies, and different statistical techniques that have confirmed Mann’s original work.

Chuck Nolan
July 22, 2014 2:13 pm

Looks like this online library agrees with J Murphy. It doesn’t provide the correctionfor MBH98.
Maybe when you cite it they tell you everything else.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/1999GL900070/abstract
cn

July 22, 2014 2:14 pm

As a public service to the many longtime members of this forum, I’ve taken J Murphy’s first post in this thread (the post that elicited a number of responses) and am reproducing it here.
Oh, I’ve removed all of the erroneous statements in the post.
J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
Perhaps you might have to acknowledge that … In reality, whether you like it or not,everyone should accept reality ..…

So, the reality is that the MWP did happen, the LIA did happen, and warming since the end of the LIA is not unprecedented.
Mann’s “hockey stick” graphic does not represent global temperatures during its timeframe.
I can accept that.

July 22, 2014 2:21 pm

“Nothing to see here … close the curtain and move on down the line …”
Any extended cold observed must be an error because it doesn’t agree with our modeling of the future. If something is too obviously a major cold spell, they obfuscate it time and time again (for those paying attention to primary data and detail).
Lake Michigan freezing over was the same scenario. They changed the way they presented the data as they saw it likely to occur, then a few days later they could show it not frozen over … because it would have represented the coldest winter ever recorded in the region. Chicago, at its southern end, had its coldest winter (Dec-Mar,2014) ever recorded in 140 years.
Now, the southern sea ice is so disruptive to the paradigm of propaganda … that it had to be changed as was noted on this blog several days ago (the manipulating data post and comments about the sudden loss of sea ice shown at the very depth of winter cold).

July 22, 2014 2:22 pm

Forgive me for repeating this.
Stopping by Yamal One Snowing Evening
What tree this is, I think I know.
It grew in Yamal some time ago.
Yamal 06 I’m placing here
In hopes a hockey stick will grow.
But McIntyre did think it queer
No tree, the stick did disappear!
Desparate measures I did take
To make that stick reappear.
There were some corings from a lake.
And other data I could bake.
I’ll tweek my model more until
Another hockey stick I’ll make!
I changed a line into a hill!
I can’t say how I was thrilled!
Then Climategate. I’m feeling ill.
Then Climategate. I’m feeling ill.

chuck
July 22, 2014 2:26 pm

dbstealey says:
July 22, 2014 at 1:11 pm
“… and a million reader comments. ”

Including items like Gunga Din posting poetry.

Reply to  chuck
July 24, 2014 4:24 am

@Chuck – and including ones like chuck posting patently false comments.

jones
July 22, 2014 2:29 pm

Mr Murphy,
You don’t also go by the name zed do you?

chuck
July 22, 2014 2:36 pm

Michael 2 says:
July 22, 2014 at 2:30 pm
“Sure it does.”

I checked the logs on an Apache Web server, and there is no “skeptic” or “non-skeptic” field that is countable.
It is entirely possible that many of the “unique” visitors looked once at the site, and never returned.

Michael 2
Reply to  chuck
July 22, 2014 3:04 pm

chuck says: “It is entirely possible that many of the “unique” visitors looked once at the site, and never returned.”
Indeed it is. A similar statement could be made of SkepticalScience.com which, among other things, includes this gem. I return for the entertainment value more than anything else, see if any new rebuttals have been made.
“Myth 174 ‘Removing all CO2 would make little difference’ SkS rebuttal: ‘Removing CO2 would cause most water in the air to rain out and cancel most of the greenhouse effect.’ ”
Well there’s a scary thought. All that water in the air raining out suddenly causing huge floods, followed by global drought because of “most water in the air rained out” and finally the next ice age because the greenhouse effect has been canceled out.
Obviously the solution to that problem is MORE CO2.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

July 22, 2014 2:37 pm

Gary Pearse says:
July 22, 2014 at 6:57 am
Bill Illis says:
July 22, 2014 at 4:46 am
“Above ground nuclear weapons tests in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were many times higher (number and power) than this simulation and nothing like the consequences proposed in this study occurred.”
And we even had a nuclear war in 1941.

=============================================================
So much for “Hiroshima Bombs” as a measure of the impending CAGW disaster.

DirkH
July 22, 2014 2:42 pm

J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 12:49 pm
“No conspiracy. No connection with any bogey-mann. I look here now and again just to see what the latest obsession is, or what the latest A-B-C (Anything-But-Carbon) hope is.”
The latest Anything But Carbon hope that could explain why we had no statistically significant warming trend for the last 26 years?
Personally I am convinced the boring static temperature is caused by the Null Hypothesis.

papiertigre
July 22, 2014 2:42 pm

Helliker and Richter showed that tree leaves maintain their own temperature. Now Michaletz and Enquist extend that to include the pulp of the tree.

“This means that plants in warm, wet environments can grow more because their larger size and longer growing season enable them to capture more resources, not because climate increases the speed of their metabolism.”

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-07-size-age-impact-productivity-climate.html#jCp
Treerings do not make thermometers. Mounting evidence shows.

July 22, 2014 2:47 pm

chuck says:
July 22, 2014 at 2:26 pm

dbstealey says:
July 22, 2014 at 1:11 pm
“… and a million reader comments. ”


Including items like Gunga Din posting poetry.

==================================================================
Usually, not always, with a point.
(Gosh! I wonder how high the count on sites like RealClimate and ScepticalScience would be if they didn’t censor opposing viewpoints so much?)

Reply to  Gunga Din
July 24, 2014 4:34 am

2 instead of 1.

July 22, 2014 2:49 pm

chuck says:
July 22, 2014 at 2:26 pm
“… and a million reader comments. ”
Including items like Gunga Din posting poetry.
So let’s amend the numbers: 999,989 reader comments.
Happy now?
I am  

July 22, 2014 2:58 pm

DirkH says at July 22, 2014 at 2:42 pm

The latest Anything But Carbon hope that could explain why we had no statistically significant warming trend for the last 26 years?
Personally I am convinced the boring static temperature is caused by the Null Hypothesis.

I quite agree.
It seems that the climate panicky can only see two opposite options:
A: Anything But Carbon
or
B: Carbon Does Everything
Yet, in reality there are many other possibilities like “Lots of things and CO2” that mean CO2 is not so critical…
But that is too subtle for climatologists (they should try to study a science to improve their minds).

Jim Francisco
July 22, 2014 3:12 pm

Looks like the CAGW crowd is looking for a replacement to scare the world with once the global warming plays out.

latecommer2014
July 22, 2014 3:23 pm

ANYONE,and I mean ANYONE who considers Mann as an esteemed scientist is just too corrupt or stupid to waste time on

Brute
July 22, 2014 3:28 pm

@J Murphy
Bingo! Thank you for that. I needed an argument to deny historical climate data and you just gave it to me. I’m in your debt.

July 22, 2014 3:46 pm

J Murphy,
Here is a list of highly questionable claims made by Michael Mann. It is hard to not conclude that he is a pathological liar. But I’ll leave you to make that judgement or not, after you read the list [and make sure you click on the red links — “Mann’s screw ups” — at the end of the first page, above the comments].
You too, chuck. You need to see what you’re trying to defend.

July 22, 2014 3:57 pm

dbstealey says:
July 22, 2014 at 2:49 pm

chuck says:
July 22, 2014 at 2:26 pm
“… and a million reader comments. ”
Including items like Gunga Din posting poetry.

So let’s amend the numbers: 999,989 reader comments.
Happy now?
I am ☺

==============================================================
OK, dbstealey, you use at least 11 more comments. 😎
(Chuck, no need to count this one.)

July 22, 2014 4:44 pm

OK, dbstealey, you use at least 11 more comments. 😎
(Chuck, no need to count this one.)

==============================================================
Another one for chuck not to count.
Make that, “OK, dbstealey, you owe us at least 11 more comments. 8-)”

Mac the Knife
July 22, 2014 5:01 pm

Hmmmm….
I think we may have had a couple of those ‘rare’ ringtailed hemorrhoid possums participating on this thread! They must be a lot more common than Professor Bill Laurance thinks……

Mr Right
July 22, 2014 5:29 pm

Now they are trying to tell us that nuclear weapons are bad too! When will the madness end? In fact my own simulations show a net positive impact of moderate frequency nuclear weapon detonations. If you have $500 and are willing to declare that you will never publicly disagree with my conclusions then I can send you an abstract.

Mary Brown
July 22, 2014 6:51 pm

More than slightly off topic…
Saw some dude in Whole Foods wearing a t-shirt with an American flag. On the back in said…
“United States. Winner of two consecutive World Wars”

NikFromNYC
July 22, 2014 7:33 pm

Mann’s hockey stick, when any and all objective observers accept that it transforms into a bowl by merely correcting his oddly mistaken wrong centering of his principle component statistical analysis over a mere century rather than the whole span of the plot, then becomes a skeptical centerpiece both in terms of demonstrating the junk science nature of climate “science” and for offering yet another demonstration that recent warming has clear precedent in the past. The likes of J Murphy seem to think the objectively bad old math can still be applied to temperature history, on purpose, as a political move, but that’s not how science works, where actual facts are actual facts and reason wins over consensus as the very definition of science itself. A technicality of contemporary peer review status of the paper isn’t a *scientific* argument, but a twisted and anti-scientific power play, likely to feed deep psychological problems involving both religious cultism and insecure status, boosted by public gloating in the face of determined opposition.

Greg Cavanagh
July 22, 2014 8:04 pm

I’m more surprised that human history is a mere 1,000 years.
…unprecedented in human history, would accompany the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years

noaaprogrammer
July 22, 2014 9:29 pm

JohnWho says:

“In fact, over the door to the entrance to the giant spaceship, we could hang a sign:
‘To Serve Mann’ ”
-OR-
“Glaube macht Frei!”

July 22, 2014 11:30 pm

This study is just scary tale. Detonating nuclear bombs cannot produce 5 million tons of black carbon because nuclear explosions do not produce carbon. They produce radioisotopes, neutrons and gamma rays. The mushroom cloud is condensed water vapor from the air. Unless black carbon is from the fires caused by nuclear bombs. But TNT bombs can also cause fires. The Allies detonated 3.4 million tons of explosives in World War 2. The Germans and Japanese could have denoted an equal amount. Maybe all that black carbon caused the slight global cooling in 1940-1970.

Tim
July 23, 2014 12:21 am

Hello J Murphy. I would be interested in your interpretation of the meaning of the famous comment: “Hide the Decline.”

jaymam
July 23, 2014 12:49 am

Chris B, “mrs murphys cow chicago fire” gets only one Google result, which is just your comment on this page.

Chris Wright
July 23, 2014 3:09 am

J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
“Perhaps you might have to acknowledge that Mann is ‘refuted’ only in your particular corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet, and not in real life or the real world?…….”
Yes, I’m sure that Mann is frequently cited, though some climate scientists have a pretty low opinion of him.
As for reality: it has been repeatedly demonstrated that Mann’s method generates perfect hockey sticks from random data. He must be aware of this but he has not retracted his paper. He is therefore a scientific fraud. And as for his tricks which enabled him to invert data to get the desired result….
The fact that Mann still gets awards etc shows the depths that climate science has descended to.
Chris

rgbatduke
July 23, 2014 4:57 am

That should be 1883, right?

Doh!

mjc
July 23, 2014 5:55 am

“Chris Wright says:
July 23, 2014 at 3:09 am
J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 3:21 am
“Perhaps you might have to acknowledge that Mann is ‘refuted’ only in your particular corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet, and not in real life or the real world?…….”
Yes, I’m sure that Mann is frequently cited, though some climate scientists have a pretty low opinion of him.”
Don’t forget to include ‘citing to refute’ in the totals…

Mary Brown
July 23, 2014 6:20 am

“…in your particular corner of the rarely-visited edges of the internet,”
Isn’t this the most visited site in the world on climate change?
This site located on the “edge” only if the world is flat

July 23, 2014 1:59 pm

Many of you have mentioned Carl Sagan and the ‘nuclear winter’ theory he was pushing in order to persuade the west to unilaterally disarm ourselves from nuclear weapons, even if the Soviet Union kept theirs.
I liked Sagan at first, then gradually came to the realization that he was a phony. Almost every time he appeared on the news or on talk shows, he would throw his anti-nuclear or anti-military views into the discussion. He was on Nightline or some other late night talk show, discussing Halley’s comet’s flyby in 1986. He was complaining that the USA was not sending a space probe out to examine the comet and that we could have funded one for the price of ‘just one B-1 bomber’! I think that space exploration is great but complaining about military spending is pointless because the two are apples and oranges. And there’s no guarantee that even if we cut military spending by the price of one B-1 bomber, that it wouldn’t be spent on something else instead of space exploration. More likely, it would go towards more perks for congressmen or more bureaucrats for the Dept of HHS.
His entire ‘nuclear winter’ scenario was merely a red herring for his political views. If he were still alive today, he would be one of the leading proponents of AGW, in prominence somewhere near Hansen or Mann.

wobble
July 23, 2014 2:09 pm

J Murphy says:
July 22, 2014 at 12:49 pm
No conspiracy. No connection with any bogey-mann. I look here now and again just to see what the latest obsession is, or what the latest A-B-C (Anything-But-Carbon) hope is. Anyway, I know no-one here likes it but unfortunately for you, Mann and his hockey-stick are still relevant.

I see this more and more. Warmists completely ignore the specifics with respect to the construction of the Hockey Stick. They simply state that he hasn’t been condemned by his own . . . yet. That speaks volumes.

July 23, 2014 2:10 pm

Am I slow or what? Now I get it. The watermelon people want nukes dropped because it will solve 2 problems at once. First, it will get rid of those pesky humans causing global warming. Second, a nuclear winter will halt that runaway warming in its tracks making the planet habitable again. What a solution!!!! ( Sarcasm of course, but nonetheless, people sit around and discuss such things. Wishing they could come back as a virus to wipe out mankind. Who said that?…. There are some scary people on this planet)

wobble
July 23, 2014 2:11 pm

chuck says:
July 22, 2014 at 2:08 pm
Not to mention the dozen or so subsequent reconstructions using different proxies, and different statistical techniques that have confirmed Mann’s original work.

Why does this matter? Do you want to comment on the specific construction of Mann’s Hockey Stick?

July 23, 2014 7:42 pm

McCown
Nuclear winter is not caused by nuclear explosion but by firestorm that may follow the nuclear or conventional TNT explosions. But I doubt the nuclear winter theory because black carbon is an aerosol and aerosols don’t stay 30 years in the atmosphere. It may affect the climate for 2 or 3 years. Being solid particles, black carbon eventually fall to the ground by gravity. If not, with all the dusts being blown to the air every day, we will be in an ice age.

July 23, 2014 8:03 pm

Dr. Strangelove says:
July 23, 2014 at 7:42 pm
McCown
Nuclear winter is not caused by nuclear explosion but by firestorm that may follow the nuclear or conventional TNT explosions.

That is my understanding. Sagan was claiming the fires ignited at oil & gas wells would be a major cause of the particulate matter in the air. However, during the first Persian Gulf war, the Iraqis ignited many of the wells in Kuwait as they retreated and there was little effect on weather.