The tale of the hockey stick

counters says:
“Hockey Stick – It still hasn’t been shown to be “debunked.” Debunked implies it is incorrect; if it’s incorrect, than we wouldn’t expect any other records to match it in any way”
There are two groups of proxy studies: those that are variations of the hockey methodology that use the same set of tree ring proxies and those that don’t. All of studies that use non-tree proxies show a strong MWP and LIA. There is no rational reason to believe that the stick has any connection to reality at this time. That means it has been debunked.

Thanks for posting this. I read Bishop Hill’s excellent summary of the whole affair and my reaction was, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” {Actually, I didn’t say kidding, but we want clean language here.}
In a similar vein, I found this interesting article at Climate Skeptic. It covers an interesting technique of backcasting with an interesting illustration:
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/images/2008/08/12/temp.png
This one looks like the type of model that may have been shown to one of our local TV weathermen to convince him that we are warming and it’s mankind’s fault. Unstated in the illustration {used in the draft CCSP Climate Change report} is any explanation as to why, in mid-century, the warming would suddenly reverse naturally. This appears to be just another variant of the hockey stick approach.
Now, should the climate cool over the next several decades, will climatologists then state that the cooling would be worse, were it not for the offsetting warming that the cooling is masking? What they should be prepared to do is to go back to their fundamental assumptions and admit that they may be wrong and that there’s more at play than they first thought. Of course, if anyone thinks that will happen, perhaps I can interest you in some prime real estate a hundred miles east of Miami that I can let you have for a pittance.

Re: counters’ “warming troposphere” point. The linked page says that the predicted signature of AGW is a troposphere “hot spot” plus cooling stratosphere, whereas the signature of GW due to a 2% increase in solar output is a hot spot with no stratosphere cooling. If so, then neither is happening, since the troposphere hot spot hasn’t been found. Right?
BTW, hasn’t “solar output” supposedly varied by less than 1% over the centuries, or am I remembering wrong?

counters
‘Climate Models – Model’s don’t “predict.” Models are used to establish a statistical measure of where we expect the climate to trend.’
In other words, models are used to forecast climate trend.
NCPA Study No. 308 February 2008 concluded
“The Forecasting Models Are Unreliable.”The Forecasters Themselves Are Unreliable.”
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st308/#a
Warming Troposphere. We arte still looking for the CO2 induced hot spot that the climate model say should be there.
Oceans warming from 1961 to 2003. Wow. No mention of oceans not warming since then.
“It’s true that the Antarctic Ice Cap has a slight positive trend;”
What do expect during a natural warming trend. The only problem is we may be headed for a natural cooling trend.

Hasse@Norway
it is on the 12th date on the home page of climate audit. Sorry to take so long to get bact to you been a long day.
Bill Derryberry

Mr counters (10:08:24) said :
“this episode merely demonstrates that very specifically, the Mann “Hockey Stick” should be re-evaluated and analyzed. This says nothing on other temperature reconstructions (bear in mind that the Mann one is what, a decade old now, and more modern ones have been constructed since its publication). Finding some evidence of some vast political conspiracy in this story is nothing more than confirmation bias by those who have already determined that such is the nature of AGW – a hoax perpetrated upon them by politicians for some reason or another.”
I agree with every word of that, Mr Counters, but would qualify your statement with four observations:
(a) the hockey stick graph was presented to the world as part of the argument that “the science is settled” and “the debate is over”, it was presented as a diagrammatic representation of indisputable fact;
(b) the hockey stick was the result of two things: (i) a set of temperature measurements (including extrapolations from ice core samples and the rest) and (ii) an analysis of those measurements;
(c) serious questions have been raised about the accuracy of the temperature measurements used to form the hockey stick;
(d) serious questions have been raised about the analysis used to create the hockey stick graph.
Once something has been set up as indisputable, as a definitive conclusion of a scientific exercise, it is a hostage to fortune. Once it has been said that THE conclusion has been reached, anything that undermines that conclusion cannot be dismissed by saying “OK, so maybe we were wrong in that little part of the analysis, but our overall conclusion is still correct.” Something that is declared to be indisputably and finally correct becomes disputed and not finally correct by even such a small concession.
I look forward to the terms “the science is settled” and “the debate is over” being expressly repudiated by you, Mr Counters, and other reasonable people who accept the AGW hypothesis. Once that has been acknowledged we might be able to get things back in perspective and relegate suggestions of conspiracy to the newspaper opinion columns where they belong.

@counters, and just in general:
Its good to have company of those like counters in a forum like this. Otherwise these things can tend towards a dittohead type atmosphere, IMO–the groupthink that Pamela speaks of.
But to chime in: I didn’t become a skeptic because of any of the stuff offered up by the anti-AGW blogosphere, although reading Anthony’s page has made me wonder more about the science of the modern climate models. Nope, my skepticism about climate models came from what we don’t know about the factors affecting Quaternary and Holocene climate. If we don’t have a good idea of everything that affected the climate in the past, how can we pretend to be able to derive trends for the future? (Ha! Reword this for a grant application…)
The biggest thing that struck me in studying Quaternary geology in a class last spring was that no one has a really good idea on what is behind the fluctuations in climate called Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles (in the Quaternary) and Bond cycles (in the Holocene). Certainly there are ideas, including changes in ocean circulation and perhaps solar cycles forcing Bond cycles. Are these taken into account in the physical computer models we read about–what I mean is can we accurately simulate Quaternary climate including these short-term wiggles? If not, are we missing something? (Though these are still long term wiggles w.r.t. the 2000-2050 trends from GCMs.)
Re: GISS. I missed the point where Hansen was under legitimate investigation by what counters’ post would seem to construe as “official” investigation by some sort of authority. What I’ve seen is the efforts of Anthony et al on trying to understand and question exactly how GISS comes up with its numbers since they don’t seem to be upfront in their methods. There should be absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to see bits of paper with the code used for data processing and specific methods related to GISS’s publicly funded climate research.
Re: The secular trend of decreasing NH ice. See Old Man Winter’s comments plus the discussion that some NOAA (?) scientists have had about it being partly due to changes in wind patterns and not increased temperatures. But this to me is rumors of rumors, as I’ve never actually seen that citation, but someone here has to have it…
Aside:
If you’re in for a long read from a skeptic scientist and some hard-line activist sentiment, I recommend:
<a href=”http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2007/02/global-warming-truth-or-dare.html”

Referring to counters (17:27:07) :
“Hockey Stick – . . . no one has debunked the Stick. The only thing that has been shown is that there is a great deal more uncertainty in that particular reconstruction than in others.”
“A great deal of uncertainty” is quite the understatement. If a central component of the Stick is debunked would the entire Stick then be also debunked? If a major component was based entirely on untested theoretical climatology and never attained a high degree of certainty or acceptance through rigorous peer review, would the combined Stick have enough “bunk” in the first place to ever be debunked? Frankly, I think the stick is all bunk as in “noun: unacceptable behavior (especially ludicrously false statements).”
Sometime ago an article appeared in Nature that concluded dendrochronology was good for dating, but a lousy proxy for temperature. If dendrochronology is such a good temperature proxy (according to some), why was it not used instead of the direct instrument data in the Stick for consistency? There are other temperature proxies of the past 1000 years. Why were they not referenced in addition to or rather than the very flattened dendrochronology used in the Stick?
Anthony Watt has quite the reputation for questioning the accuracy of the direct observation/instrument temperature data of the past century plus due to the urban heat effect. Indeed, there appeared in this week’s Nature an article that shows city temperatures are higher during the week when automobile traffic is up than on the relatively quieter weekends (study from Spain). Would it not follow then that city temperature measurements are artificially high compared with country measuring stations and revert to the “real ambient temps” when the autos are removed? If the direct instrument data is questionable, then would the Stick also come into question on that basis?
Venerate statisticians have hammered the Stick, so much so that the IPCC quit including it in the most recent report. Is that not the equivalent of debunking?
The problems with the Stick are not trivial. Reasonable criticism of the Stick puts a nasty stone in the hoof of the draft horse pulling the AWG band wagon.

@ur momisugly counters.
Models have been used for prediction. Hansen had predictions in his report 20 years ago, the A, B, C cases. His predictions were wrong. Even taking into account uncertainty (which can be bounded mathematically) his predictions were wrong. So either 1) we had a very rare occurrence outside the uncertainty bounds or 2) his models were wrong. After seeing what went into their methodology, I would bet his model was wrong.
The thing that worries me most, is the CO2 goes up but the warming has leveled or decreased. How is that explained rationally?

Reading Steve McIntyre’s latest post, I’m beginning to think he’s losing his mathematical mind. He wrote:
“I said very clearly that if I had been a manager or principal of the next IPCC report I would have wanted to understand very clearly what, if anything, was wrong with it, and how we could avoid such mistakes in the future.”
“mistakes”?
While his entire case shows a profound pattern of behaviour by scientists and the IPCC to deceive, he implies human innocence here. Huh?
Imagine if a taxpayer or accountant behaved like Ammann, Mann, etc.
In any other political, corporate or civic area, there’d a full-fledged investigation for fraud!
Of course maybe Steve is just trying not to add oil to the fire he himself has lit. But I wonder how far he thinks he’ll get appeasing the likes of Mann, Hansen, Schmidt, Amann, etc.
Attack their work like a pit bull, but pat them as if they are little warm kitty cats.
I don’t get it.

I think some missed the point of my previous post (way up the thread now). I personally could not care less if people here want to witch-hunt Hansen or any of the ‘team’. That’s up to you. My point is that it gives the impression that you’re obsessed with attacking these scientists as a substitute for having any science to talk about that can actually offer a significant and robust challenge to the prevailing view.
So, reading this site, I get the impression that the really big challenges you have to make to AGW theory is 1) Hansen is cooking the figures and 2)the HS is debunked & the scientists behind it are corrupt.
Ok, so then I look at the first charge. I’m well aware that all temperature records allow for error, both methodological and observational (and by the way, if you want to talk about the biggest error in the history of all this then that would be UAH’s hash of their satellite data, which wasn’t revealed until other scientists showed it to them in 2005). So, what I need to look for is evidence of human bias, right? If the records are being fiddled upwards, then GISS will be showing a greater increase over time than HadCRUT, yes? So, what is the truth of the matter?
Look at page 242 of the 4thAR, which shows GISS& HadCRUT, 1850 – 2005, based to the same mean. Do you see what I see? The GISS upward trend is less than HadCRUT!!! The idea that GISS has been fiddled upwards fails the first most basic test for evidence.
To illustrate this another way, here’s a graph borrowed from Climate Audit (with thanks to the poster Basil) –
http://i37.tinypic.com/6r20zb.jpg
You can see that sometimes GISS is ‘ahead’ and sometimes it’s HadCRUT, but any differences have not been cumulative. Recently GISS has been pulling ahead again, but so what? This is no more ‘evidence’ of GISS being fiddled than it would have been ‘evidence’ of HadCRUT being fiddled in 2000, when that was ‘ahead’. It doesn’t take much thinking to realise that since the two have differing methodologies they’re likely to show short-term divergences (for examples, different approaches to estimating polar regions where there is no observational data, or the fact that GISS uses satellite measurements for SSTs whilst HadCRUT uses ship-based).
So, where’s the evidence of the supposed human bias? That, surely, is the first question that any genuine sceptic would ask…..
(As for the second charge, just for now, for those who’ve picked up the idea that the IPCC has ‘dropped the hockey stick’, look at pages 466-7 of the 4thAR WG1, Chapter 6 on Palaeoclimate . It’s the first page of the section dealing with the last 2,000 years).