Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In my usual peripatetic wandering around the web, I came across an interesting paper called “Millennial- and orbital-scale changes in the East Asian monsoon over the past 224,000 years”, in Nature Magazine (subscription required), 28 Feb. 2008 , with Supplementary Online Information.
The paper uses “speleothems” to estimate past climate conditions. Speleothems are secondary mineral deposits formed in caves. Stalactites and stalgmites are speleothems, and they come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes. Here’s a photo of some speleothems:
Figure 1. Speleothems in a New Zealand Cave.
What can we learn from the speleothems?
The authors used the speleothem data from two caves in China to investigate the climate changes over the last two glacial periods, a quarter million years or so. Being more interested in the recent past, and noticing that one of the datasets extended up to the year 1490, I decided to see what speleothems could tell us about the temperature changes in more recent times. So I got a large group of speleothem records from the NOAA Paleoclimatology web site.
I wasn’t interested in what happened thousands and thousands of years ago, so I got all of the long records that covered all or part of the period from the end of the last ice age to the present. This gave me 20 records.
The speleothems give us a record of what is called the “delta oxygen 18” (∂18O) value. This value is related to the temperature. The paper does not give the associated temperature values, so I converted them using the relationship described here as:
This is based on the average d[delta]18O/dT relation in modern precipitation (~0.6‰ °C-1), and the water-calcite fractionation that accompanies speleothem deposition (~-0.24‰ °C-1).
Decoded, this means that the change in temperature is equal to the change in ∂18O divided by (0.6 – 0.24), or ∂18O/0.36. Using that relationship, I calculated the temperatures from the various speleothems, and graphed them all with no further adjustment.
Figure 2. Raw data from 20 speleothem records. All of them have been converted from ∂18O using the relationship Temperature = ∂18O/-0.36. Black line is a 200-point Gaussian average. Different records are different colors.
While this was interesting, it appeared to me that the various records were likely not vertically aligned quite properly. After all, there is no a priori reason to think that they would all fit together, since they were simple anomalies (data minus average of that data) over different time periods.
So how to adjust them? There are several methods that are used to make this kind of adjustment to temperature anomalies for the global temperature records. GISS takes an average of two records in the area where they overlap, and adjusts on that basis. That was possible here, but seemed inaccurate. GHCN, on the other hand, uses one type of “first difference” method. However, their method requires that all of the datasets be on the same basis (annual, monthly, etc.), where in this case the measurements are at various random times that differ between datasets.
After some thought, I realized that I could use “first differences” in another way. The “first difference” is a new dataset that is made by calculating the difference between successive datasets. For example, if the dataset is {1, 2, 4, 8, 10}, then the first difference of that dataset is {(2-1), (4-2), (8-4), (10-8)}, or {1, 2, 4, 2}. This represents the differences between the points in the original dataset.
I realized that the standard deviation of the first difference is a measure of how well the various datasets fit together. (Standard deviation, “SD”, is a measure of how scattered the data is.)
So to adjust them, I first combined all of the 20 speleothem datasets into one single large dataset. Then I took the first difference of that single dataset. I measured the SD of the first difference data.
Then I adjusted each of the individual speleothem records by moving it slightly upwards and downwards, and used the increase or decrease of the SD to indicate which way it should be moved. I repeated this until the match was not improved by further testing and moving of the individual datasets. The result is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Adjusted data from the same 20 speleothem records. All of them have been adjusted vertically to give the best fit. Black line is a 200-point Gaussian average.
This has improved the accuracy of the reconstruction. This is shown by the greater vertical range of the Gaussian average line.
So, what does all this mean? Heck, I don’t know, I’m investigating, not drawing conclusions. A few comments, in no particular order:
• As is shown in the Greenland ice core records, we are currently at the cold end of the Holocene (the current interglacial).
• Recent phenomena (Roman Warm Period, Medieval Warm Period, Current Warm Period) are scarcely visible at this scale. So much for the “uprecedented” nature of the recent rise.
• The polar bears are not in any danger from the recent rise.
• What’s up with the big jump and drop about 12000 years ago? I have not seen that in the ice core records, but it is present in these speleothem records from around the planet. [Update] A number of people have pointed out that this is almost certainly the “Younger Dryas” event. I hadn’t noticed it in the Vostok record, but a closeup of that record shows it.
• The amount of the temperature change depends on the coefficient used to translate from d18O to temperature. So the numbers are likely in the right range, but may be somewhat too large or too small.
Anyhow, that’s my thoughts about what I’ve found out, I welcome yours. I continue with the investigation. It strikes me that I may be able to adjust the conversion factor (d18O/T) to see if that improves the fit of the data … should be interesting. Onwards …
DATA:
The caves used in this study were:
Cave, Location
Borneo_sch01, Borneo
Borneo_sch02, Borneo
Buckeye, Central US
Chilibrillo, Panama
Cold_Air, South Africa
Crystal, Midwest USA
Dayu, Central China
Dongge, Eastern China
Dongge04, Eastern China
Dongge05a, Eastern China
Heshang, Central China
Liang_Luar, Indonesia
Lianhua, Southern China
Lynds, Tasmania
Mystery, Midwest USA
Sanbao08, Central China
Sanbao10, Central China
Soreq_Bar, Israel
Spannagel, Austria
Venado, Costa Rica
In two cases, where there were several speleothem records from the same cave analysed by the same investigators, I have combined them into a single longer record. Data from different studies of the same cave have a year (e.g. “08”,”10″) appended to the name.
I have posted the data I used, along with the R file that I wrote to analyze the data, as a zip file here. Enjoy!
Is there any correlation with the Milankovitch cycles?
Just to chime in some more logic to this incoherent post. Thanks phd student for trying to bring truth to this mess.
Independent evidence: marine sediment cores from the tropics measure an upper limit of 3 degrees C cooling for the tropics during the LGM compared to present. So why are stalagmites from Indonesia, Borneo, Panama, Oman etc showing more than a 10 degree C temperature change according to the “I’m just playing around” excel graph?
Because they are records of hydrologic changes. NOT temperature. This post is randomly using a transfer function based on thermodynamic equation of fractionation in the formation of calcium carbonate, which yields bogus conclusions in these records. Obvious ploy. NOT science. No clap-clap, backslap from me for this post.
William Roberts says:
May 28, 2010 at 8:37 am
Oh, please. You may hold different views than I do, but that’s no reason to be childish. I have been very open about the fact that we don’t know the sizes of the swings, and that the coefficient of the transfer function is unknown, and that this is preliminary investigation, not a finished report. If you don’t like that, go crawl back into your hole.
You say these are records of “hydrologic changes, NOT temperature”. Well, thanks for your puerile abuse, but speleothems have been used many times as temperature records. So you’d better rush to let the scientists involved in those studies that they have made a stupid mistake. In addition, the shape of the swings of this group of speleothem records fits the historical temperature record quite well. So your asinine assertion doesn’t even pass the laugh test.
As for your “clap-clap, backslap”, I hope I never get that from you, I would take it as a mark of abject failure. I do this so that I can learn something, not for the approbation of fools. Please leave your nasty point of view at the door when you come here, it is not appropriate in a scientific forum. speleo PhD student disagrees with me, but unlike you, he has provided information and ideas way beyond your infantile “NO IT’S NOT! NO IT’S NOT!”, and I have learned from him. You might take the opportunity to do so as well.
PS – If you can’t tell an Excel graph from a graph done in “R”, particularly after I’ve said that it was done in “R”, and provided the R code for the graph, you lose bonus points …
speleo PhD student says:
May 28, 2010 at 2:33 am
Not sure what you are talking about here. I had assumed (wrongly, as my most recent post clearly shows) a negative slope to the d80O/temperature relationship from the start.
Huh? Before you were saying that the d18O/temperature relationship is positive. I post a citation that says it may be positive, negative, or zero. Now you say (without admitting that you were wrong) that yes, it can be both ways.
But then you go on to say that in the “very long term” the relationship must be positive. Where do you get that? While the Sofular cave record is the positive in the very long term, the ones I showed are negative in the very long term. So why “must” the long term relationship be positive?
So your position is that we have 20 records, and it is just happenstance plus “something special” that they agree with the historical temperature record of the emergence of the world from the last ice age????
Please point to where I said that temperature always goes hand-in-hand with rainfall. I said that the records that I investigated show the shape of the historical temperature record, and that if they are rainfall records, then the temperature is doing what the rainfall is doing. I said “a warmer world is a wetter word”. But I am a seaman, I’ve seen lots of cold rain as well as lots of warm rain, I know temperature in some regions doesn’t go hand-in-hand with temperature.
Length of time is not the issue. In your citation, in Figure 7 they show a cave record from Israel with negative correlation for the same time period during which the Spannagel stalagmite has a positive correlation. So the idea that the relationship can’t be negative over the long term is falsified.
Look, speleo PhD student, I argued passionately that the d18O/temperature relationship has a negative slope. You argued equally passionately that it was positive, and good on you for doing that.
However, both of us were wrong. It can be positive, negative, or zero. But a negative correlation is not uncommon. Most of the records in the NOAA repository that cover the last glacial termination have negative slopes, which had misled me into thinking that all of them should be negative.
So we are moving forward. Sorry your time is short, and I’m even more sorry that you are in a position where you can’t express your scientific opinions.
I was perplexed, however, that you wouldn’t tell us why you need to be anonymous. It couldn’t do any harm for you to tell us that, you know, because … well … because you are anonymous …
Anyhow, thanks for your contributions, and for pushing back. No thanks for lecturing me when we were both wrong. And finally, thanks for the tone of your postings and your willingness to engage in public on this issue.
My best to you,
w.
nice duck and dodge. here are two nice compilations of SST measurements from marine sediment cores. I’m surprised you didn’t know of them, being a mariner and all.
Leduc, G., R. Schneider, J. H. Kim and G. Lohmann (2010). “Holocene and Eemian sea surface temperature trends as revealed by alkenone and Mg/Ca paleothermometry.” Quaternary Science Reviews 29(7-8): 989-1004.
Waelbroeck, C., et al. (2009). “Constraints on the magnitude and patterns of ocean cooling at the Last Glacial Maximum.” Nature Geoscience 2(2): 127-132.
These are reviews of a whole lot of paleo SST reconstructions. NONE of them have a 10 degree cooling of the tropics during the LGM.
Did you not know about this entire branch of paleoclimate research???
So I say, AGAIN, that the tropical speleothem records you have plotted above (in whatever program you want to use) are NOT simply records of temperature. They are records of changes in hydrology. I’ll be glad to lose bonus points on incorrectly guessing the program you used as long as I get an “A” on the science. …you get an “F” on the science. Unfortunately, your bonus points don’t help you to pass.
William Roberts says:
May 28, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Geez, what’s with the attitude? I may be wrong, but you walk in here swinging insults … whats up with that?
Back to the science. You say that the records I have used don’t show changes in temperature, they show changes in something that you call “hydrology”. Perhaps you can explain:
1. Why my results are a very good match to the shape of the temperature record for the last 15,000 years, and
2. Why speleothems have been used in a large number of temperature reconstructions.
Yes, the swing in my results (about 8.5° and not the 10° you keep quoting) is assuredly too large. The swing in global average temperatures is usually taken to be about half the swing at the poles, which the Vostok ice cores put at about 12°C, which means the real number is on the order of 6°C. So my numbers are likely about 25%—30% too large … so? I said this was a preliminary investigation, I said that the coefficients were somewhat arbitrary, what more do you want?
Next, the idea that tropical sea surface temperatures represent “hydrology” is a curious one. Tropical SSTs vary much less than land temperatures, and are only a tiny part of the hydrological cycle.
I await your answers, but please stop slagging me. I said in front that this was an investigation, not a finished report. I’m happy to have errors pointed out, but nastiness is uncalled for.
You happy now? Can we get back to the science? I await your answers to my questions.
“This is so, because the temperature difference between glacial/interglacial is so high that the first-order temp-d18O relationship (temp+ -> d18O+, which Willis derived correctly at the very beginning, but strangely utilized in the opposite way) dominates, unless your record comes from an area where the d18O-precip amount relationship (precip + -> d18 -) dominates even the first-order temp effect. The inverse relationship is, on the long term, not with temp but with precip. ”
While that may be so, I still don’t see any rationalization for the idea that that the slope can not remain negative indefinitely. Is it physically impossible to find microclimates that would behave in such a way for a long time period? All you seem to have said is, “it depends on your area which of the terms contribute most greatly.” and yet you seem to be implying that Willis’s chart should be flipped upside down, with the ice age being the hottest temperature on record?
For the record, I’m largely uncomfortable deriving hard numbers from ANY sort of proxy data, because the scientist brings too many assumptions to the table to be anything other than a “decent approximation.” So, a proxy may show a trend, and a shape, maybe… but I rail against anyone trying to use things like this as proof of much of anything that requires any accuracy/precision because the numbers are neither accurate nor precise as you note… if the slope can be positive, negative, and anything in between, then no good independant numerical data can be derived. All you can do is try to guess based on fitting data to other data. Of course, that means that your new data is really no better than the old data.
As a shape, Willis’ curve seems largley consistant with other sources. None of the curves can be declared very authoritative in terms of magnitudes as far as I can tell though.
William Roberts says:
May 28, 2010 at 8:37 am
Just to chime in some more logic to this incoherent post. Thanks phd student for trying to bring truth to this mess.
With characteristic narcissistic arrogance AGW drones are trying to bring mess to the truth.
What is remarkable looking at the data as a whole is that speleothem records from every corner of the globe give a coherent record which is consistent with ice core and other reconstructions of terrestrial temperatures. This of course undermines one of the AGW “we’ve got to lose the MWP” strategies of trying to argue that any climate temperature change recorded in a palaeo reconstruction must be only local and not global, unless it involves CO2 emitted by enemies of the people.
The disorganised barrage of factoids presented by assorted trolls and PhD students include the idea that the relationship between d18O and temperature is variable and dependent on location. If so, why the coherence in the data? If this were true then the data would indeed be a mess and show no trend. But they’re not.
The left-field introduction of SST reconstruction by William Roberts is indeed irrelevant and bizarre. Obviously an attempt to confuse and muddy the waters. Obfusticating further, we are told “tropical speleothem records … are NOT simply records of temperature. They are records of changes in hydrology.”
O how interesting! According to CAGW, the weak effect of CO2 in increasing atmospheric temperature is amplified by positive feedback from the hydrological cycle, clouds and precipitation – which one would assume implies a correlation between temperature and the hydrological cycle. But here, for the sake of rubbishing speleothems as a temperature proxy we need to imply no correlation between temperatures and hydrology.
This is of course all diagnostic of AGW professional training – any signs of being able to hold more than one idea in your head at once and it is “go directly to the job centre, do not pass go, do not collect 200”.
On your next outing you might try searching for cockles and gastropods – they tell quite a story:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091027170853.htm
Bob Dylan was wrong – the answer isn’t blowing in the wind, it’s buried under our feet.
The Older and Younger Dryas, and the coldest event cluster since then, the LIA, can all be mapped out astronomically with ease and precision. The larger period to be concerned with at this level is the period between Heinrich events. This is a product of the all important angular relationship between Earth/Venus, and the four big Jovians. They return to produce the most similar condition, every 4627.33yrs. Three of these periods are between the Older Dryas and the LIA, so three steps on from the Youger Dryas leads to a return cold cluster, starting around AD2450. The period between the two Dryas events is half of the Heinrich event period. One quarter of the 4627.33yr period maps the RWP, MWP, modern warming events, and the LIA, Dark Ages, Greek/Homer cold periods.
I do not think that the general slow fall since the Holocene Optimum (Bronze Age) will fully mitigate the return of some very warm periods over the next 300/400yrs.
On the longer scale, the older 41,000yr (40979) ice age sequence still shows in the last c.100kyr cycle;
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cHhMa7ARDDg/SmDoZBIkB3I/AAAAAAAABAc/KkUzrz2abwI/s1600-h/Vostok-140Kc.jpg
20,000yrs to the next super cold episode.
Correction
so three steps on from the Youger Dryas leads to a return cold cluster, starting around AD3600AD.
Willis, I see that Matt Ridley used your graph and gave you credit in a post at Rational Optimist:
http://bit.ly/ctFoa0
Caves are an integrator of temperature, Willis informs us. Are they not also an integrator of rainfall (precipitation)? Ground water tables only change level slowly in response to several years with increased or decreased rain. So for precipitation / hydrology not to confound speleothems as a temperature proxy, hydrology would have to correlate with temperature averaged over several years, not on a year by year basis.
The representation of the current interglacial including the Younger Dryas by Dr Eschenbach’s speleothem temperature reconstruction, including the highly plausible central peak and overall symmetry, seem compelling. This could emerge as a very important temperature proxy. The dip before the interglacial is curious (13-14 ky ago) – has this been seen before?
—
Having myself no dog in this fight (PETA be damned), I comment here only to observe that these exchanges represent what I conceive to be one of the best uses of such fora in the advancement of scientific inquiry.
This is something akin to an extended wrangle among graduate students and post-doctoral fellows without the suppressive intrusions of the professoriate – or a wrestling match among resident physicians and subspecialty fellows without a preceptor attending physician’s nose stuck into the give-and-take.
Reminds me of time-wasting sessions down in the bowels of Medical Records when we were supposed to be dictating discharge summaries and instead sought salvation from agonizing boredom in disputation on specific cases and on clinical medicine in general, with the added benefit conferred by present participants’ abilities to open a browser tab or window on the side and search the literature for supporting information and citations.
This is damned healthy, and I’d be interested to learn to what extent something substantive gets into the published literature as a direct or indirect result.
—
@phlogiston says:
May 29, 2010 at 11:25 pm
“Caves are an integrator of temperature, Willis informs us. Are they not also an integrator of rainfall (precipitation)? Ground water tables only change level slowly in response to several years with increased or decreased rain.”
Good point. Cave temeperatures vary less than open air changes, and in some caves, can be very stable.
phlogiston says
“The dip before the interglacial is curious (13-14 ky ago) – has this been seen before?”
I am also puzzled about that, I would also like to find to know the answer to that question? It seems not quite to fit in with the greenland ice core data.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data
henry@ur momisuglyphlogiston
Sorry about that, it seems the 6th graph of
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data
does seem to confirm to me that temperatures did go down a bit @ur momisugly 12-13 kyr BC
HENRY@Willis
I must say that the data towards the end (the current warm period) do have a wide spread, ranging from -6 to +5 . Do you know why is that? I am puzzled that the average here does not show the 0.7 degrees or so increase of the last 150 years. So, what are we saying? If you look inside the caves, there really was no global warming (outside) ? Or was it just too little to notice? Or is the 0.7 perhaps wrong?
Henry@Willis
Oh yes, it was also not clear to me until what year the data go.
Henry Pool says:
May 30, 2010 at 12:17 pm (Edit)
Henry, I suspect that the spread of the data is because the transfer function between d18O and temperature has a different constant for each cave. I’ve been giving some thought as to how to overcome that, but I haven’t come up with the Rosetta stone yet.
The most recent data go to 2006, but most of them stop before 1950.
It seems to me that there must be some kind of iterative process, similar to the iterative process that I used to adjust the data up and down, which would allow me to adjust them for the spread of the data as well … anyhow, when and if I find it, I’ll post it here.
Thanks for your good questions,
w.
The northern hemisphere speleothem records look like temperature records because the earth was deglaciating (IOW, the ice caps were melting). That is sure to cause a worldwide response – in temperature and in the hydrologic cycle. However, the nature of this change is not simply “warmer, wetter” all over the planet. There is actually a hemispheric “see-saw” of more rain the southern hemisphere when it was colder and less in the northern.
here’s a good ref:
Wang, X., et al. (2006). “Interhemispheric anti-phasing of rainfall during the last glacial period.” Quaternary Science Reviews 25(23-24): 3391-3403.
That is a speleothem record from Brazil, by the way. …AND the authors interpret it as rainfall changes. Like many of the other authors you claim do not.
Also, global average cooling was ~6degC during the LGM. ~12C at the poles. ~3C in the tropics. …so your guesstimation of only being 25-30% too large is… well… wrong. You are about 180% off. 8.5degC vs. 3degC.
Too call this investigation preliminary is a bit premature. It needs quite a bit of work before you could categorise it as a preliminary investigation.
Also, you say:
“Tropical SSTs vary much less than land temperatures, and are only a tiny part of the hydrological cycle.”
Uhhhhh, so ocean SST changes minimally affect the hydrologic cycle? I guess El Nino is a myth, eh? …El Nino causes tiny changes in rainfall. ….rriiiiiiiiiiggggghht.
I eagerly await your dodges.
William Roberts
How bizzare would it be if global temperature correlated with glaciation and ice extent?! O thank you for correcting such a foolish error!
Odd how such a fuss is being made of Arctic extent and glacier retreat / advance, when they are unrelated to climate temperature. At least now we know that ice is not affected by cold or heat.
What a truly educational site this is!
William Roberts says:
June 1, 2010 at 11:52 am (Edit)
I’m not sure what you are saying here. You appear to be saying that the speleothem records were precipitation records that also look like temperature records because … well, you don’t say why. However, you say that this does not mean “warmer, wetter”. However, you say that it is “warmer, wetter” in the Northern Hemisphere.
Perhaps you could simplify this, as it is unclear.
Reading comprehension. Another example of why I say that if you disagree with something that I have said, QUOTE IT. Nowhere did I say that the authors did not interpret a particular cave record as reflecting rainfall changes.
A citation or two would help your case. The ice age changes at the poles were on the order of 10-12°. Here is a citation saying that Brazil cooled by 5°C during the last ice age.
In addition, a number of the caves I reported on are not in the tropics, so I’m not sure why you are focusing on the tropics.
And in any case, these are estimates, we don’t have much in the way of undisputed, accurate numbers for these changes.
Reading comprehension. Tropical SSTs are only a small part of the hydrological cycle, which comprises all of the water in the atmosphere, all of the water on land, all of the water in the ground, and all of the water in all of the ocean. There are literally hundreds of measurements of this totality, measurements of salinity, evaporation, changes in humidity, differences in rainfall, variations in ground water, Arctic SSTs, and many, many more … and of those hundreds of measurements, tropical SSTs are only one single measurement. You tell me what percentage that represents.
Yes, El Niño has a large effect … but that’s only a small part of the tropical SSTs. And my comment was about which one of those two?
Most tropical SSTs don’t vary much. As an example, there has been no warming trend in tropical SSTs since the start of the satellite record (1979).
And I eagerly await your embracing the normal standards of civility and decorum in discussions. You may not like my ideas, but that doesn’t justify snide comments.
All in all, William, I truly don’t understand your point. The records I show have a common signal. This may be just rainfall, but it fits well with what we know about temperature records of the last glacial termination and the Holocene. So we are left with a few possibilities:
1. They are temperature records.
2. They are rainfall records, but they are running in parallel with rainfall (warmer = wetter) for these 20 caves.
3. They are a record of a mixed rainfall-temperature response of d18O, which again implies warmer=wetter for these 20 caves.
Which of these is your position? Or is there another possibility I’m missing?
you say: “You appear to be saying that the speleothem records were precipitation records that also look like temperature records because … well, you don’t say why.”
uhhh – reading comprehension. Yeah, that’s what to say here. I DID say why. The earth was deglaciation. Continental ice caps were melting. That little speed bump caused worldwide changes – including, but not limited to, temperature and precipitation.
Alternatively, over the course of the Holocene, insolation changes caused the see-saw pattern in hemispheric precipitation. And I DID give you a ref. You should’ve read it before you asked your question. So reading comprehension again. Read the Wang ref.
I’m focusing on the tropics b/c they are the biggest hole in your initial plot for this post. To say those records are temperature is a way off the mark.
Also, I think you should read a bit more about the effect of tropical sst’s on global climate. Where do you think most of the water in the atmosphere comes from? Hint: warm, tropical waters.
Since you want quotes of what you said, here’s one “Yes, El Niño has a large effect … but that’s only a small part of the tropical SSTs.”
No. El Nino is directly related to/a manifestation of changes in tropical SST. And the changes in tropical SSTs/El Nino are substantial worldwide, not a “small part”. If you say “no” to that, then now you are just disagreeing with no scientific basis.
you say: “Most tropical SSTs don’t vary much. As an example, there has been no warming trend in tropical SSTs since the start of the satellite record (1979).”
wrong again. try here
Cravatte, S., et al. (2009). “Observed freshening and warming of the western Pacific Warm Pool.” Climate Dynamics 33(4): 565-589.
or here
Lyman, J. M., et al. (2010). “Robust warming of the global upper ocean.” Nature 465(7296): 334-337.
read the wang reference and then see if that addresses your 1,2,3 questions.
hopefully you will focus on the science and not trying to act like a martyr and correct me like you were my dad.
William Roberts says:
June 3, 2010 at 12:02 pm (Edit)
William, thanks for the reply. So you are saying that the record I showed is a precipitation record that also shows temperature? It’s very hard to try to dig out your meaning.
Regarding the warming of the sea surface, both the RSS and the UAH satellite records show no statistically significant warming over the tropical ocean. Regarding Lyman et al., see my previous comments on the paper here.
Finally, you say I am trying to correct you as if I were your dad. You came in here saying in your first post:
Now you’re upset with the tone of my replies? Dude, you get back what you put out. Some people think karma is some slow retributive process. I, on the other hand, see your comments as akin to hitting a golf ball in a tiled bathroom. You showed up here and from the first sentence, you were lecturing us on how stupid we are. And now you’re surprised to get it back? Now you want to lecture me as if I’d never heard of Lyman and his “robust” study?