Just when you think it couldn’t get any more bizarre in Mann-world, out comes a new paper in Nature hawking hurricane frequency by proxy analysis. I guess Dr. Mann missed seeing the work of National Hurricane Center’s lead scientist, Chris Landsea which we highlighted a couple of days ago on WUWT: NOAA: More tropical storms counted due to better observational tools, wider reporting. Greenhouse warming not involved.
Mann is using “overwash” silt and sand as his new proxy. Chris Landsea disagrees in the Houston Chronicle interview saying: “The paper comes to very erroneous conclusions because of using improper data and illogical techniques,”
From the BBC and the Houston Chronicle, some excerpts are below.
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From the BBC, full story here
Study leader Michael Mann from Penn State University believes that while not providing a definitive answer, this work does add a useful piece to the puzzle.
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 The levels we’re seeing at the moment are within the bounds of uncertainty.  Julian Heming, UK Met Office
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“It’s been hotly debated, and various teams using different computer models have come up with different answers,” he told BBC News.
“I would argue that this study presents some useful palaeoclimatic data points.”
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From the Houston Chronicle, full story here
One tack is based on the observation that the powerful storm surge of large hurricanes deposits distinct layers of sediment in coastal lakes and marshes. By taking cores of sediments at the bottom of these lakes, which span centuries, scientists believe they can tell when large hurricanes made landfall at a particular location.
The second method used a computer model to simulate storm counts based upon historical Atlantic sea surface temperatures, El Niños and other climate factors.
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The two independent estimates of historical storm activity were consistent, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, the paper’s lead author. Both, for example, pinpointed a period of high activity between 900 and 1100.
“This tells us these reconstructions are very likely meaningful,” he [Mann] said.
UPDATE:
What is funny is that with that quote above, Mann is referring to the Medieval Warm Period, something he tried to smooth out in his tree ring study and previous hockey stick graph.
Now he uses the MWP to his advantage to bolster his current proxy.
Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit writes about “check kiting” related to this study:
The Supplementary Information sheds no light on the methodology or the proxies.
The Supplementary Information contained no data sets. The proxies used for the Mann et al submission are not even listed.
The edifice is built on the SST and Nino3 reconstructions, both of which are references to the enigmatic reference 17, which turns out to be an unpublished submission of Mann et al.
17. Mann, M. E. et al. Global signatures of the Little Ice Age and the medieval climate anomaly and plausible dynamical origins. Science (submitted).
At the time that Nature published this article, there was precisely NO information available on what proxies were used in the reconstruction of Atlantic SST or El Nino or how these reconstructions were done. Did any of the Nature reviewers ask to see the other Mann submission? I doubt it. I wonder if it uses Graybill bristlecone pines.
Hockey sticks and sand residue: It sounds like a bunch of “high sticking” to me.
Photo caption competition entry:
“Look into my crystal ball”
Computer modeling results are not data.
He’s such a duffer, isn’t he?
I become more embarrassed over time that Mann resides at my alma mater. There are so many possible causes for sand/silt action that it boggles the mind. Could the pattern he “sees” have been caused by hurricanes? YES. But so can 10-20 other probable and even more likely events.
The man is genuous. Usually a trick with “creative” science works only once.
A quote from Mann in another recent article.
“We can project meaningfully what the average temperature of the globe will be, but there’s quite a bit of uncertainty about how El Niño will change,” Mann adds. “It’s a little bit of a dirty secret that there is very little consensus on something that fundamental.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-change-records-geoducks-clams-tree-rings
The article is on the use of clams as a proxy. Not a very interesting article but why does someone who was discredited get quoted in every article on temperature reconstruction even when as in the article i linked to, he was not even involved in the study?
“and a giant leap for Mann-kind”, ….. my apologies to Neil A.
Has anyone else noticed that Michael Mann now looks very like Kane [snip] in the Command and Conquer computer game series ?
All this article tells us is that there is no penalty box in the game of climate hockey.
Anthony, good title, but I think a better one would be, “Mann High-Sticks Hurrricanes.”
To quote a Chron commenter, “What accounts for the high between years 900-1100? King Arthur’s SUV?”
“The levels we’re seeing at the moment are within the bounds of uncertainty”
I doubt uncertainty has bounds but presumably if it does, anything within them is uncertain. More likely this is a wholly meaningless statement.
I’m telling you, these guys are walking in the same steps as McCarthy. It’s only a matter of time…..
Another stupid example of the use of the Drake Equation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
http://www.classicalvalues.com/Mann_explains_treemometer.jpg
Can we see the hurrihockey stick somewhere?
I’m embarassed to be from PSU because of him; what a joke. Maybe the football team will do good this fall…
Absolutely unbelievable… How can these “scientists” say such things with a straight face? O_o
Richard Heg (08:46:25) :
“Not a very interesting article but why does someone who was discredited get quoted in every article on temperature reconstruction even when as in the article i linked to, he was not even involved in the study?”
I have the same question.
As I said yesterday, and I was right:
NOAA: More tropical storms counted due to better observational tools
Then…: If more counted, there will be more!. That’s nice!…but for who
We now know for who!
It seems they are preparing the “Mis en Scene” of some well known “prophet”.
I like the picture with the Matrix at the back… I guess he did not take the right pill and is still asleep.
He should “peer reviewed” by a team of independent……..psychiatrists
Take the observed record of major hurricanes in the Atlantic from 1944 to the present. Assume that each year is an independent, random trial of hurricanes, and a Poisson process.
An expected value of 2.76 describes the statistics of hurricane numbers (frequency data) remarkably well. Now give the process an additional degree of freedom let the expected value be (a+bt) and fit the data to the process using maximum likelihood. What you will find is no trend over these 65 years–i.e. b=0 to even 80% certainty.
I’d love to do the same with Mann’s proxy, but really, if the data do not show a trend in this “unprecidented period of change” then what does Mann’s analysis of change during periods without the suspect input do, other than confuse the issue?
Does this Mann have no shame? Apparently not!
Stephen Wilde (09:00:13) : [commented]
“Has anyone else noticed that Michael Mann now looks very like Kane [snip] in the Command and Conquer computer game series ?”
LMAO….now that you mentioned it!!! But are we ready for The Brotherhood of NOD!?!?
hmmmm (09:09:05) :[Commented]
“I’m embarassed to be from PSU because of him; what a joke. Maybe the football team will do good this fall…”
I was suprised to find out that he is associated with Penn State. I have always had great respect for the institution, guess every family has a crazy relative. I hope you are correct about Joe Pa & his boys, it just does not feel like a proper football season without the Nittany Lions in the mix.
The MWP, during which are now told there was a supposed hurricane maxima from 900-1100m AD, was dramatically reduced to a small bump by Mann in his hockey stick proxy studies. So the next step will be to state that the high hurricane numbers during the small MWP bump suggests catastrophic numbers for the large projected temperature increases by 2100.
Its all very logical, don’t you know 😉 .