IPCC changed viewpoint on the MWP in 2001 – did this have effect on scientific results?
Guest post by Frank Lansner Latest News (hidethedecline)
A brief check indicates a “warm MWP-consensus” before IPCC published the Mann hockey stick graph in 2001. But after 2001, results on MWP seems to approach the IPCC viewpoint.
In April 2009 I collected a series of results concerning Holocene, Historic and recent temperatures for an article on WattsUpWithThat.
Here I found approximately 54 datasets (almost 100% peer reviewed results) that I used for analyzing the claimed difference on MWP on the Northern vs. the Southern hemisphere. I also used the 54 datasets to see if the tree ring method has an impact on MWP results.
Another aspect of MWP results caught my interest:
fig. 1.
It is often debated how IPCC changed its viewpoint concerning the Medieval Warm Period in 2001.
– Was the pre-2001 MWP viewpoint simply “wrong” ?
– When IPCC launched their new viewpoint on MWP in 2001, was this new viewpoint in fact the consensus in 2001?
– Or did the IPCC actually claim to know better than the consensus in 2001?
– What is the consensus on the MWP today?
– And finally, did the results after IPCC change of viewpoint in 2001 have changed, how can this be explained?
Here are the 54 temperature datasets covering the MWP divided in two groups :
1) 1976-2000 vs 2) 2001-2009
fig. 2. (Geographical origin see)
First we see that both 1) and 2) shows the MWP was warmer than today. (This is partly due to my criteria for the 54 datasets: Max 15% tree ring data, due to possible problems with tree ring data and thus a need to see data not dominated by this one method. Quite a few of the excluded tree ring data are frequently used by the IPCC, yielding the well known hockey shapes from IPCC AR4, 2007.)
Second, we see a MWP for group 1) 1976-2000 more than twice as warm, compared to recent years, as the group 2) 2001-2009. A significant and surprising finding. The distance between 1) and the IPCC hockey sticks, with all the tree graphs of recent years, is even bigger.
One might argue that the data choice for my Watts article was not quantitative, fully exact, etc. But I simply cannot come up with any explanation for such a big change in the trend of results when just dividing by the year of publishing. Therefore I will assume that there is in fact a development in the results regarding the MWP after 2001.
Further, if you compare graph 1) 1976-2000 on fig. 2 with the original temperature graph IPCC 1990-2001 on fig.1., you will see a stunning match. This indicates that the consensus of a WARM middle age before year 2001 was likely to be a real consensus. If true:
How could the IPCC publish the hockey stick in 2001 and ignore the consensus at the time?
Several results came later that confirmed the IPCC’s 2001 Opinion: Hockey sticks, mainly tree lines. But how could the IPCC know what the future results on the MWP would be?
If the conclusions of “climate gate” are even remotely true, then this would explain that the IPCC controlled the future results.
richard verney (10:00:16) :
“the IPCC have had a revisionary approach to history”.
——————
Yes, indeed, all part of the psychological warfare. That’s why they employ people like Connelly.
That, along with (deliberate) dumbing down of the population in general, and using the threat of economic meltdown as the financial terrorists bankrupt nations, is how they will get their agenda through.
They bide their time. It is incremental. This to them is not a short term project (although the schedule has been very hectic recently).
I think Winston – the hero of 1984 – was employed by the Ministry of Truth, re-writing news stories…. Orwell was way ahead of his time and well placed to have insights into what was going on.
Re 54 proxies:
One of the closest proxies is Arctic’s Geomagnetic field (reverse proportionality).
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC8.htm
If you whish to see more see today’s posts on the WUWT other thread:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/nsidc-reports-that-antarctica-is-cooling-and-sea-ice-is-increasing/
Thanks for bringing this up. I just followed up on the story. If true, I think this is quite an incredible scientific breakthrough in paleo-climate reconstructions. It is so big that it has already made this post about the Medieval Warm Period dated and irrelevant.
The first graph of temperature reconstructions from the shells suggests the Roman Warm Period was probably warmer than the MWP as well as the recent period. Quite astonishing! If this technique can be further developed and improved upon, it will revolutionise paleo-climatology. No doubt we’ll hear more about it in the future.
I understand the ‘disappeared’ title of the article perfectly: it alludes (through the South American reference) to the IPCC (or rather their ultimate masters) as ruthless gangsters, who own politicians.
JonesII (12:05:05) :
Yes, JoneZ, I agree with you, this is just one more “iron in the fire” so to speak, but a very important “iron in the fire”.
Additional “irons in the fire”:
The Law of the Sea treaty was another attempt at global governance with royalties (from minerals mined from the international seabed, think hydrocarbons and other minerals) paid to the U. N. (read tax).
The idea of a global financial transaction tax is another mechanism for global governance.
And, there are more items.
Fox News — February 25, 2010 — money quote from news report: “The new Rio summit will end, according to U.N. documents obtained by Fox News, with a ‘focused political document’ presumably laying out the framework and international commitments to a new Green World Order.”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,587426,00.html
Think I’m exaggerating?
Not in the slightest.
There are global (and American) elites that have no use for American sovereignty except as a vehicle for signing away power (via treaties) to the U. N. and its masters.
Ah, links to the Nature article and the graph (congrats to Bishop Hill for being the first blog to carry the story):
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100308/full/news.2010.110.html
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100308/full/news.2010.110/box/1.html
You gotta love the way Nature downplays the importance of the new technique as though its greatest relevance is to the study of Norse Sagas.
L (11:28:02) :
“I continue to be incredulous that there is a controversy over the MWP…..”
It certainly doesn’t help when you sagas are then backed up with the physical evidence of Norse farmsteads uncovered by retreating glaciers too! Darn I can find the website and I have to leave…
Justa Joe (10:43:45) :
“AGW is the ultimate protection racket”
Couldn’t agree more….
The MWP reconstruction in the IPCC AR2 was produced by HH Lamb for England, mainly from documentary evidence. Not withstanding the large areas of pink in every schoolboy’s atlas, England covers a rather small proportion of the earths surface. To claim this curve to represent the whole earth would be a gross extrapolation. Correctly, the AR2 expresses uncertainly as to whether the pattern in the MWP was global in extent. Indeed, they had some evidence of cooling in other regions. China I believe – the report is in my office, not my head.
This was the state of the art when the AR2 was written: it was an unsatisfactory state of affairs.
When the AR3 came to be written, several reconstructions puporting to represent the northern hemisphere existed. Regardless of how reviled these reconstructions are amongst readers here, it would have been bizarre for the IPCC to have continued to pretend that England could represent the world.
Did the MWP exist? Certainly in the N. Atlantic region, perhaps associated with a strenghtening on the AMO. The evidence for a globally warm MWP is less clear, but I have seen some interesting unpublised model data that suggests it is plausible, given what we know about climate forcings over the last millennia.
Frank Lansner,
Thanks for the reply. But the issue is not one of differing Hemispheres (last time I checked Europe was in the N.H) but data from a couple of small countries representing a small geographical area (in the earlier plots) vs lots more data representing an entire hemisphere in later plots.
Secondly you’re comparing plots weighted to provide a geographical picture – for part of Europe and later an entire Hemisphere against plots for individual proxies. I hope it is obvious why such a comparison is nonsensical.
Thirdly, your accusation that the IPCC (what with it’s four members of permanent staff) is systematically controlling the results and reporting of scientific endeavor, despite an open review process that anyone can check, is an extraordinary claim, and as Laplace tells us, must be backed up by proportional evidence.
L (11:28:02) :
“I continue to be incredulous that there is a controversy over the MWP. As a student, long ago, I took a course in Scandinavian literature and the first semester was devoted to the medieval Icelandic writings.”
I’ve run into similar when dealing with some “post-modern mappers” –
anything “anecdotal” is to be dismissed as beneath consideration
Conspiracy to commit fraud.
Tim L.
I don’t believe it’s meaningful to try to get a trend from the wildly diverging 54 datasets in the spaghetti graph. Why not group the similar datasets together (by eye will do) and see if there is a common reason for each group – e.g. location in the world, type of dataset i.e. tree ring etc), the organisation who got the data.
This is the main problem with attempting to arrive at a “global temperature” – there is no such thing. It would be meaningful to show the temperatures in a few dozen regions in the world.
Please can everybody stop averaging wildly different things together.
The average person has one breast and one testicle!
“Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week
Was there a Medieval Warm Period? YES, according to data published by 809 individual scientists from 482 separate research institutions in 43 different countries … and counting! This issue’s Medieval Warm Period Record of the Week comes from the Southern Canadian Tundra, Southwestern Keewatin, Nunavut, Canada. To access the entire Medieval Warm Period Project’s database, click here.”
http://co2science.org/
Geologists (in the private sector) understand climate history far better than ‘climate scientists’ who have become besotted with the concept of AGW and ultimate doom for our planet unless we tax ourselves back to the Stone Age.
There is a simple analogy to all this: in the world of geology it is called Bre-X.
Most of ‘the great and the good’ in the mid 1990s were conned by slick presentations and bad science. Eventually it all fell apart when true independents were allowed to examine the actual data – this was the equivalent of real peer review, not pals and cronies’ review as practiced by the IPCC et alia.
When the Bre-X story began, a colleague of mine and I did a statistical analysis of the then published results. Very simply, the gold grade distribution was impossible in nature – but it took over two years for us to be proved correct. WUWT and others are doing exactly the same thing now – investigating dodgy science and embarrassing the establishment with the facts.
The point is this: it will take several more years before the manipulations, the bad science, and the distortions of raw temperature data become widely accepted.
AGW is Bre-X. In the case of Bre-X, the amount of gold present was wildly exaggerated. In the case of AGW, it is also a case of wild exaggeration; but this time of something intangible, namely temperature.
Re mine upstream at (10:15:59) : –has anyone done any work showing the impact the uncertainty in the dating issues of proxies has? Surely part of the “hockey stick handle” shape is driven by just those dating uncertainties really wanting to flatten that handle. Probably Steve McI has and maybe expressed it a little too technically for me to go “oooh, right!” as to that’s what he meant.
Tho it would certainly be interesting as a thought experiment to take all these proxies that show different “neighborhood” date ranges for the MWP “locally” and assume that really the dating is wrong, rather than the data, and recenter them all by the “best guess” we have for when the MWP really was, and then see what you see about what kind of shape you get. I suspect the MWP and LIA would then jump out quite sharply (and perhaps some other interesting bumps and valleys as well).
Imagine what an average of UAH and RSS would look like for 2008 and 2009 if you oopsied on assigning a start date of UAH to six months later than it should have been and a start date for RSS of six months earlier than it should be.
Is this a photograph of the top level IPCC meeting where it was decided to get rid of the MWP?
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/MechanixIllustrated/1-1946/rose_wisdom_die.jpg
Telford — Did the MWP exist? Certainly in the N. Atlantic region, perhaps associated with a strenghtening on the AMO.
Can any of you guys do some homework? Google “Idso” for a start.
Meanwhile…
http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/norse-vikings-iceland-greenland.html
“Richard Telford (13:30:43) :
..
Did the MWP exist? Certainly in the N. Atlantic region, perhaps associated with a strenghtening on the AMO. The evidence for a globally warm MWP is less clear, but I have seen some interesting unpublised model data that suggests it is plausible, given what we know about climate forcings over the last millennia.”
Even in Europe, tree graphs used by IPCC shows hardly any MWP. So its no surprice that they dont show much of a MWP anywhere else.
Here the Alps:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/lanser_holocene_figure9.png
And here we see the MWP reaching as far as the South pole:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/lanser_holocene_figure7.png
(black graph has samples every 2-3 years, highest quality, but i have never seen it use by the IPCC – only the blue, Vostok).
I believe that anyone that suggests that for instance SH had a cold MWP or the like should proove this before using it as a fact.
Language: I have applied for “license to AWFUL English”, im still waiting for approval.
However, a miracle has happened. We have been contacted via our site http://www.hidethedecline.eu all the way from New Zealand by volounteers to review our articles in the future, and im sure this came about due to this article on WattsUpWiththat. So.. i believe we are better off in the future with language.
Jay (13:38:54) : “[yatta-yatta-yatta]Thirdly, your accusation that the IPCC (what with it’s [sic] four members of permanent staff) is systematically controlling the results and reporting of scientific endeavor, despite an open review process that anyone can check, is an extraordinary claim, and as Laplace tells us, must be backed up by proportional evidence.”
Lynch mobs have zero ‘members of permanent staff’ and are quite effective in suppressing dissent. And the “open review process” you refer to is a hideous joke.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
Your reference to Laplace is pathetic. It is CAGW itself that is the extraordinary claim that must be backed up by proportional evidence. So far, all the evidence that has been exposed to the light of day is turning out to be no more relevant than beetles crawling on the underside of a rock.
Vincent,
no offense but the hair splitters convention has moved to another forum entirely. I think its called real climate or something.
My use of the term latent was in reference to the heat in the system which is either consumed by or made available by the phase change of water to vapour and back to water and or ice, plus CO2 from ice to gas and back to ice.
Latent means hidden, or absorbed. But we are now walking the line of semantics and this line is not a line at all, it is a circle is it not?
33º C is just where I stand on the issue. Personally I doubt that either 15 or 33 are correct. I am just going by the average temperature of the Moon with no atmosphere calculated from space which is -18º C. Its just a starting point. 18+15=?
The point of the post which you neglected to comment on and which believe it or not is at the heart of AGW fraud, is that oxygen and nitrogen are not transparent to radiant heat as is maintained by the “science is settled” crowd and I provide good reproducible evidence to substantiate that.
Still we’re not here for that are we. We’re here to travel in circles and play semantics right?
Veronica (England) (12:28:59) :
“I can’t fathom out what this shows… your graph looks like a plateful of colourful spaghetti to me. As many lines above the recent data as below… where’s the trend?”
I can’t figure it out either, although the spaghetti is making me hungry.
Jay, Some of your points i dealt with in answer to Richard, including:
“I believe that anyone that suggests that for instance SH had a cold MWP or the like should proove this before using it as a fact.”
So this is your task.
Both sides in this discussion has a data-problem because data in general is not that overwhelming, especially from SH. This i why i have collected more datasets than you normaly see for analysis.
And I think you jumped smoothly over what i showed you:
“jay, as i wrote in the above article, the first thing i did was to check out differnces NH/SH in the data. it looks like this:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/lanser_holocene_figure61.png
A very little difference between NH and SH trend in these exact datasets, so this is not the reason.
”
Jay, you believe that if Europa MIGHT have different trends of temperature for centuries, then its no problem that the SH resembles the NH?? So there is also som area at the SH that is warm – just like Europe?
You are behind on the “Prove your claims” score.
For the record, here are the geological areas from where the 54 proxiea are taken:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/IPCC%20-%20an%20opinion%20changes%20results/geo.jpg
Green: 1976-2000 Blue 2001-2009
So the 1976-2000 is: Greenland, Idaho, Tasmania, West Africa, South Africa, Schweitz, China, North East Russia, Antarctica, Sargasso(Atlantic), New Zealand and Venezuela.
How does this proove your idea?
A CRU email regarding the MWP is mentioned above as an alternate title. Here it is courtesy of Mann:
Contain the putative MWP.
Email from Michael Mann to Phil Jones and others, Jun 4, 2003, (Subject: “Prospective Eos Piece?” [http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=319&filename=1054736277.txt]).
“it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet
have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back”