From Jo Nova a look at how the MWP looks when other data is used, not just a few trees in Yamal.
These maps and graphs make it clear just how brazen the fraud of the Hockey Stick is.
Click to enlarge
It’s clear that the world was warmer during medieval times. Marked on the map are study after study (all peer-reviewed) from all around the world with results of temperatures from the medieval time compared to today. These use ice cores, stalagmites, sediments, and isotopes. They agree with 6,144 boreholes around the world which found that temperatures were about 0.5°C warmer world wide.
What follows is a sordid tale of a graph that overthrew decades of work, conveniently fitted the climate models, and was lauded triumphantly in glossy publication after publication. But then it was crushed when an unpaid analyst stripped it bare. It had been published in the highest most prestigious journal, Nature, but no one had checked it before or after it was spread far and wide. Not Nature, not the IPCC, not any other climate researcher.
In 1995 everyone agreed the world was warmer in medieval times, but CO2 was low then and that didn’t fit with climate models. In 1998, suddenly Michael Mann ignored the other studies and produced a graph that scared the world — tree rings show the “1990’s was the hottest decade for a thousand years”. Now temperatures exactly “fit” the rise in carbon! The IPCC used the graph all over their 2001 report. Government departments copied it. The media told everyone.
But Steven McIntyre was suspicious. He wanted to verify it, yet Mann repeatedly refused to provide his data or methods — normally a basic requirement of any scientific paper. It took legal action to get the information that should have been freely available. Within days McIntyre showed that the statistics were so flawed that you could feed in random data, and still make the same hockey stick shape nine times out of ten. Mann had left out some tree rings he said he’d included. If someone did a graph like this in a stock prospectus, they would be jailed.
Astonishingly, Nature refused to publish the correction. It was published elsewhere, and backed up by the Wegman Report, an independent committee of statistical experts.
In 2009 McIntyre did it again with Briffa’s Hockey Stick. After asking and waiting three years for the data, it took just three days to expose it too as baseless. For nine years Briffa had concealed that he only had 12 trees in the sample from 1990 onwards, and that one freakish tree virtually transformed the graph. When McIntyre graphed another 34 trees from the same region of Russia, there was no Hockey Stick.
The sharp upward swing of the graph was due to one single tree in Yamal.
Skeptical scientists have literally hundreds of samples. Unskeptical scientists have one tree in Yamal, and a few flawed bristlecones…
…
Climate models don’t know why it was warmer 800 years ago.
The models are wrong.
The so-called “expert review” is meaningless. The IPCC say 2,500 experts review their reports, but those same “experts” made the baseless Hockey Stick graph their logo in 2001.
Craig Loehle used 18 other proxies. Temperatures were higher 1000 years ago, & cooler 300 years ago. We started warming long before cars and powerstations were invented. There’s little correlation with CO2 levels.
Sources: Loehle 2007, Haung and Pollack 1997, See co2science.org for all the other peer reviewed studies to go with every orange dot on the map. McIntyre & McKitrick 2003 and 2005, and update, Mann et al 1998, Briffa 2006, read McIntyre at climateaudit.com, see “ClimateGate”, and Monckton “What Hockey Stick” (Science and Public Policy Institute paper)
This is Page 8 & 9 The Skeptics Handbook II. 20 page PDF
I know a similar graph went up a couple of days ago around the web. The skeptics Handbook II was published on Friday Nov 20.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thanks to Craig Idso of CO2science.org for his fabulous collation of research and his Medieval Warming Project which is an excellent resource, try the animated map! A big thank you to John N for his work in helping to create the map.
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Just Googled ‘Climategate’ 26,800,000
anyone know which one of these is Obama ?
The BBC programme, “The Report” is, I believe, the one for which Bishop Hill was interviewed. Keep an eye on his site for more details.
Agreed, using smoothed data is fine for certain charts and graphs but you must always refer to the RAW base data. If you keep smoothing and massaging the data, it stops being data and therefore useless.
Henry chance (07:34:45) :
said, “Houston this morning broke a record with the earliest snowfall ever recorded in the city’s history.”
There have been 1268 record temperature, rainfall and snowfall events in the continental USA during the past week, including 147 record high temperatures. Many records are broken almost every week.
If you want to mislead people you just pick out one of these (eg record early snowfall in Houston) and don’t mention any of the others. And if you want to be misled, because the tale you are being told corresponds with what you want to hear, then you don’t bother to look any further to check out the partial information you are being fed.
You don’t have to lie to people to mislead them – you just give them partial information and let them reach the wrong conclusion all by themselves.
Here is the summary of record events in the continental USA over the last week:
Continental USA
Record Events for Fri Nov 27, 2009 through Thu Dec 3, 2009
Total Records: 1268
Rainfall: 687
Snowfall: 83
High Temperatures: 147
Low Temperatures: 74
Lowest Max Temperatures: 153
Highest Min Temperatures: 124
See: http://mapcenter.hamweather.com/records/7day/us.html?c=maxtemp,mintemp,lowmax,highmin&s=20091204&e=20091204
3×2 (06:40:06) :
“You really don’t need a formal conspiracy when I offer you a reasonable share of a Trillion dollar pot of money from fresh air. Your answer is .. sign me up.”
Money would not work with me but maybe a redhead. Oops! They require money!
Seriously though, evil need not win every inning or even ANY inning. When it becomes obvious to the greediest among us that they risk killing the goose that lays the golden eggs then maybe they will quit playing games with our common future.
If not, I am hedged with respect to the end of the world.
JohnV (07:30:07) :
“McIntyre’s reconstruction shows the MWP as warm as+0.5C around 1400”
Careful, Steve McIntyre would be the first to say the his work merely corrects the statistical errors in Mann’s processing. He states that he does not agree that tree ring width == temperature!
My reading of his comments is that he believes it is conceptually possible to get temperatures from tree data, but the dedrocronologist methodology (in the litrichur) is not yet adequate to reliably retrieve temperatures.
@Slioch (06:44:29) :
I am afraid that you may be relying on GISS and related databases more than they deserve. As E.M. Smith (http://chiefio.wordpress.com/) has documented extensively, it would appear that none of the land temperatures are comparing apples to apples. Let me explain. In the last several decades, there has been a great change in the number and location of the thermometers/stations that are used to calculate the global anomalies and the “Global Average Temperature”. As a result, the thermometers from 1978 to 2006 are being compared to different thermometers that were used in the period 1921 to 1949. Indeed, Mr. Smith has documented huge differences in thermometers used within the period 1978 to 2006. These changes do not appear to have been documented or justified within the peer reviewed literature. Until Mr. Smith started posting his analysis, the only inkling of these very large changes was that the total count of thermometers used for the land temperature data worldwide had decreased sharply in the last couple of decades, although there did not appear to be any explanation or justification for why these changes were appropriate. In the U.S. alone, all but 136 thermometers were deleted from the land temperature data used to calculate anomalies and the “Global Average Temperature.” For example, the entire state of California was represented by only 4 thermometers – all of them on the beach (IIRC, San Francisco, Santa Maria, Los Angeles and San Diego). After Mr. Smith published his work on his blog, NASA very quietly a couple of weeks ago reinstated about 2000 thermometeres in the U.S. that had previously been deleted. As far as I know, this major change was only noted on Mr. Smith’s blog (other than a circumspect notice posted by NASA I believe). In conclusion, it is fair to question whether any reasonable conclusions can be drawn from the dog’s breakfast that the land temperature data apparently is and that is not counting micro-siting issues (such as those documented on http://www.surfacestations.org), macro-siting issues (such as urban heat islands or UHI), instrumentation issues (such as MMTS vs. Stevenson screens), etc., etc., etc. The sea surface temperatures also have issues (such as buckets vs. engine intake temperatures). Given all of this, differences in the tenths let alone hundredths of degrees C may not have any significance.
Slioch,
I think the point of the article is that the MWP is real and global. Mann and Briffa doctored their data to eradicate it.
You say that the Loehle dataset doesn’t go far enough and today is still warmer than the MWP. You may be correct. Isn’t that why we need access to all the data, code and methods?
I find Ja Nova’s work to be consistent with the hundreds of studies that I have read on proxy studies and analyses of temperatures through the centuries. One note of curiosity: Recently, I read a statement by Mann that he recognized that medieval times were warmer in Europe and maybe other parts of world, but these regions were offset by cold anomalies in the southern Pacific Ocean. Interesting claim. We can verify proxy studies in most of the world by looking at physical evidence – such barley fields in Greenland, northern migration of tropical plants in China, trees and other organics uncovered as glaciers retreat in North America, South America, Asia, and so forth. However, it is difficult to find physical evidence in the South Pacific Ocean to either confirm or disprove Mann’s claim.
Phil (10:21:50) :
said, “I am afraid that you may be relying on GISS and related databases more than they deserve.”
It is not I that started using the GISS data – it was Loehle. Loehle used GISS land+ocean without any suggestion on his part that it was considered unreliable.
Loehle’s paper was cited with approval by Jo Nova because she considered that it showed that the MWP was warmer than “today”.
Now that I have shown that that conclusion is false, suddenly you pop up to claim that we can’t rely on the GISS data.
So, when it is considered that Loehle’s paper supports the belief that “today” is cooler than the MWP then it’s ok to use GISS. When the opposite is shown, suddenly it is not.
Do I really have to say what I think about that?
But, if you wish, let us use UAH to estimate the change in average global temperature since 1992. Here is the information about the difference between the five year averages based on 1992 and 2006according to UAH:
UAH 1992 5 year average = -0.032C
UAH 2006 5 year average = +0.225C
So, GISS gives an increase of 0.29C from 1992 to 2006, and UAH gives an increase of 0.26C.
Which translates as the 5-year average based on 2006 being 0.19C above the peak of the MWP.
If you want to use that figure instead, that’s fine by me. But I won’t hold my breath.
[REPLY – Actually, Dr. Loehle has stated quite strongly that it is impossible to know for sure if the MWP was warmer or cooler than today. (I heard him state it.) ~ Evan]
“Dr. Loehle has stated quite strongly that it is impossible to know for sure if the MWP was warmer or cooler than today. (I heard him state it.) ~ Evan]”
Yet you allow an article to be published on your site that refers to Loehle’s paper, with a graph that shows temperatures in the MWP c.0.3C warmer than today and with the associated statement, “Temperatures were higher 1000 years ago”, without any qualification from you. What sort of editorial control is that?
Actually, I would tend to agree with Loehle that it is “impossible to be sure”, because of various uncertainties. But what we can be absolutely sure about is that if we take the data and methodology of Loehle’s papers as given, then the conclusion is that today is warmer than the MWP. The only way to escape from that conclusion is to disregard either Loehle’s data or his methodology.
[REPLY – I did not post the article. I did not write the editorial. Dr. Loehle’s 2008 graphs I have seen indicate the MWP was a bit warmer, but he is not sure and has said so. (There is a mountain of non-climatology evidence, of course.) ~ Evan]
Jean Meeus (04:26:21)
If the people who generate all these wonderful proxy graphs of the paleoclimate really wanted to provide an accurate representation of the strength of the information they are offering, the pale grey areas, which represent the uncertainty range of the data, would be drawn in dominant colors and the squiggly lines, often graphed to a hundredth of a degree, would be drawn in the palest greys and pastels the printers could produce. This would provide anyone viewing the graphs with a more accurate notion of the level of information they demonstrate.
If you have followed the main data sets for the present day avg. global temp., you may have noted that from day to day, month to month, and year to year it is a rarity for all of them to provide the same number within +/- 0.1 degree and quite often the range is a half degree or more. If that’s the best all of our heralded modern technology can do, the implicit suggestion provided by almost all these graphs I’ve seen, that the various proxy media [tree rings, corals,sediments,ice cores, etc,] can encode a temperature signal that is better by an order of magnitude or two, is one of many reasons my response to much this completely “settled science” has always been similar to the comments of the gentleman from the CBC in the post from earlier today
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/03/you-wouldnt-accept-that-at-a-grade-9-science-fair-cbc-finds-a-moment-of-clarity/
Yes there has been. You might want to look at this report:
Atmospheric CO2 and Global Warming (Jaworowski & Segalstad)
http://folk.uio.no/tomvs/esef/np-m-119.pdf
Larry
To me Loehle’s results look something of a dog’s breakfast:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2393
The peak temperature around 1960 or so, followed by a decline looks very suspicious.
I also find it strange why Briffa is using 12 trees in the graph above (2000 I think ?), when he was using 400 in 1998, resulting in strong cooling after 1940.
Particularly with the big UHI component of hadcrut3, to me, it seems possible that there is no warming at all after 1940. Ironically, after 1945, the rate of fossil fuel burning increased 12 fold.
Back to basics.
Why is the past so important ? To indicate if measures warming and cooling is natural or not. To understand if the patient is sick or not. Thanks to climategate – noone knows.
I do not believe one can read temperature witihin 0,1 C accuracy from trees or mud 50 years later. Not even from fresh tree or last year. This can be conformed. I can bet a Jack Danies on that if it solved the global debate. Perhaps one can compare two trees or just hug them.
The tree ring data does not correlate with instrumental data and that why it was supressed after 1960 in IPCC ‘approved’ or ‘certified’ papers. That was the needed wooden hockey stick handle. The proxies are subjective bad data and leads to artistic and imaginative mathematics. That was the way to ‘hide the rise’ or MWP. At the same time there was measurements starting from year 1600 and 1800 with historical accuracy.
Tree rings depend on soil, chemicals, water, clould, CO2, insects, sun, other plans, other animals, fire etc. Wide ring does not necessary mean +0,4 C.
One can not say yes or no to this religion ‘fact’ of the history. Eg. Years 1400 was +0,5 C above average. Or +10 C ? How to conform ? Either you believe it or not. There is no truth available out there.
We are talking about mean temperature of a year= very complex problem=integral of the year devided with time.
Is the integral continuous or samples once a day at noon ? How to count dirrerent places with different temperatures ?
Even the main definiton changes because the measuring poists/ time changes and now one should use 0,1 C accuracy ?
Scientics can use their imagination and subjective mind to create the formulas and graphs. Just pick the right data and formulas.
The main AGW is science man made. I believe 50 % of the heating is such. The thermometers are heated with cities and kerosine at airports and warming pipes at thundra . The number of measuring points have declined globally recently to include mainly only UHI points. That does not make any sense if the climate is in danger. The rural points were bad for the warming, which they did not have. The raw city data indicates warming. Surface data indicates twice the warming of other instruments. Because it should at cities. After 1990 more money has been given to science and less measurents is the result. Perhaps CO2 heated 0,5 C or not. UHI is 0…10 C. There is no ‘consensus’ on that.
‘Idea of the consensus in the western critical science is mental illness’. (me)
But the is more data; data from year 1930 even though the measure site was found and manufactured 1952 at Helsinki,Finland site. Many measurents are artificial. The thundra measurement ordered from Russia were propably paid with black money to avoid tax according to CRU emails. It was cheap and easy. The best place to read the measurent is close to heat source, pipe or close to houses. The best measurements to ‘hide the decline’ are far away and hard to confirm.
What is the precision we can get from this data?
The series of comments I have read after this post are reason enough for me to believe that if I were a policymaker, I would definitely say the science is “not settled” and that far more research and long-term study is necessary before ANY policy is made in regard to CO2.
Enlarge picture not available.
http://joannenove.com.au/globalwarming/skeptics-handbook-ii/ppt/mwp-global-studies-map-i-ppt.gif
That top picture doesn’t make sense. It says it shows the results of 752 scientists etc, but there are just 24 numbers. OK, joint authorships, but not averaging 31 per paper. So are we just seeing the top few?
@Slioch (12:06:27) :
Dr. Loehle only specifically refers to GISS one single time in Loehle and McCulloch 2008 and that only in an aside where he states:
In addition, I would also say that the results that E.M. Smith is posting are very recent and surprising and therefore unknown to Dr. Loehle in 2007 and 2008.
Slioch:
Other than the single instance cited in the previous paragraph, I have found no other reference to his using GISS land+ocean.
Slioch:
3 points:
First, I don’t think it is fair that say that is is “ok to use GISS” when “Loehle’s paper supports the belief that “today” is cooler” than the MWP. IIRC, all of Dr. Loehle’s work was not based on GISS, but rather on previously published peer-reviewed proxy reconstructions.
Second, Dr. Loehle, as I have quoted above, says that the instrumental data is not strictly comparable to the proxy reconstructions. I would suggest that the appropriate method to bring this study forward into more recent decades would be to update the proxies, so that apples can be compared to apples, but that may not be possible for Dr. Loehle to do personally.
Third, given the developing story about GISTemp that E.M. Smith is posting, I would have to preliminarily disagree. The results that Mr. Smith is posting are suggestive of an artificial positive anomaly in recent decades, since colder thermometers appear to have been replaced with warmer thermometers over time in many places around the world. However, I will grant you that his work is still developing and I probably do not have enough certainty at this time to say categorically that you are wrong.
Slioch:
I apologize if I wasn’t clear before, but I was focusing on the comparison between this decade and the thirties. I don’t believe that UAH can be used to compare these two decades.
Let me close by quoting the final statement in Loehle and McCullock 2008, as I think it is very appropriate to this discussion:
Alexey (21:50:29) :
“Enlarge picture not available.”
Reply: Picture is available on this link:-
http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/skeptics-handbook-ii/web-pics/mwp-global-studies-map-i-ppt.gif
We will never have an accurate global average temperature for the long-term historic record due to the number of assumptions made for each proxy measure and the assumptions made about how a spatially sparse data-set can be scaled to give a global result. The fact we are dealing with a highly turbulent dynamic non-linear system only serves to compound the problem. Thanks to CRU/GISS it looks like the short-term record has been lost, due to there destroying the raw temperature data records.
Unprovable assumptions are the kiss of death for any science, as this allows anyone to find a basis to confirm what they believe, as exampled by the IPCC data and hockey stick graph. The anecdotal historic record, however, does confirm that the MWP and LIA exist, beyond that, science can say no more.
Phil (23:23:12)
Your query concerning the NASA GISS results is little more than a smokescreen.
The bottom line, as far as this thread is concerned, is that Jo Nova presented a graph, hosted on this site, in which the temperature for 1935 was falsely labelled as “today” and where it was falsely stated that “Temperatures were higher 1000 years ago”.
Neither conclusion is either present in or supported by the Loehle paper and is contradicted by the use of either NASA GISS or UAH data (or, indeed, HADCRUT3 or RSS) to update the Loehle data.
It is yet another example of how people are being misled by false information.
As for some of the details of your post, briefly:
1. Phil: ” “though the difference is not significant”. (emphasis added) ”
Why add emphasis? Did you not notice that I said the same earlier?: “according to Loehle 2008, the 29 year average global temperature centred on 1992 was marginally (indeed insignificantly) below the MWP peak by 0.07C.”
2. Phil: “Other than the single instance cited in the previous paragraph, I have found no other reference to his using GISS land+ocean.”
Loehle used the NASA GISS series to update his proxy data from 1935 to 1992.
I used it to update it from 1992 to 2006.
Of course, he didn’t use it elsewhere – the bulk of the paper was concerned with proxies. What is the point of your statement? It has none.
3. Phil: “so that apples can be compared to apples”.
Are you seriously suggesting that we should not make comparisons of temperatures derived from proxies with those derived from direct instrumental records? That if a proxy record gives a temperature for 1935, and we have evidence of global temperature changes since 1935, that we should just ignore such evidence and pretend that nothing has changed in the meantime? Of course, we should always use evidence with caution and with full cognisance of the errors involved, but your stance seems very similar to that frequent redoubt of those who refuse to accept AGW: that because we don’t know everything and that errors exist in our data, that therefore we can know nothing. It’s a very handy last ditch defence against inconvenient evidence.
Incidentally, there is reasonably good agreement between the four temperature series, NASA GISS, HADCRUT3, RSS and UAH, as shown here:
http://cce.890m.com/temp-compare.jpg
The average of the temperatures shown on the map is 0.86. As I suppose the map is meant to be representative, I assume that is the established temperature anomaly of the MWP from the literature cited. Also, I assume that ‘above present’ means above the 1989-2008 global mean.
It would be very interesting to have some of the scientists whose work is cited comment on this.
Jo Nova finds the Medieval Warm Period
was it in the couch cushions?
[REPLY – Actually, Dr. Loehle has stated quite strongly that it is impossible to know for sure if the MWP was warmer or cooler than today. (I heard him state it.) ~ Evan]
impossible is a strong word
did he mean ‘with 100% certainty’?
anecdotal is fine—Vikings called it Greenland. receding glaciers are exposing tree stumps, extinct tree lines in high elevations of lower elevation trees in california from 1000 years ago
class dismissed