NOTE: This has been running two weeks at the top of WUWT, discussion has slowed, so I’m placing it back in regular que. – Anthony
UPDATES:
Statistician William Briggs weighs in here
Eduardo Zorita weighs in here
Anonymous blogger “Deep Climate” weighs in with what he/she calls a “deeply flawed study” here
After a week of being “preoccupied” Real Climate finally breaks radio silence here. It appears to be a prelude to a dismissal with a “wave of the hand”
Supplementary Info now available: All data and code used in this paper are available at the Annals of Applied Statistics supplementary materials website:
http://www.imstat.org/aoas/supplements/default.htm
=========================================
Sticky Wicket – phrase, meaning: “A difficult situation”.
Oh, my. There is a new and important study on temperature proxy reconstructions (McShane and Wyner 2010) submitted into the Annals of Applied Statistics and is listed to be published in the next issue. According to Steve McIntyre, this is one of the “top statistical journals”. This paper is a direct and serious rebuttal to the proxy reconstructions of Mann. It seems watertight on the surface, because instead of trying to attack the proxy data quality issues, they assumed the proxy data was accurate for their purpose, then created a bayesian backcast method. Then, using the proxy data, they demonstrate it fails to reproduce the sharp 20th century uptick.
Now, there’s a new look to the familiar “hockey stick”.
Before:
After:
Not only are the results stunning, but the paper is highly readable, written in a sensible style that most laymen can absorb, even if they don’t understand some of the finer points of bayesian and loess filters, or principal components. Not only that, this paper is a confirmation of McIntyre and McKitrick’s work, with a strong nod to Wegman. I highly recommend reading this and distributing this story widely.
Here’s the submitted paper:
(PDF, 2.5 MB. Backup download available here: McShane and Wyner 2010 )
It states in its abstract:
We find that the proxies do not predict temperature significantly better than random series generated independently of temperature. Furthermore, various model specifications that perform similarly at predicting temperature produce extremely different historical backcasts. Finally, the proxies seem unable to forecast the high levels of and sharp run-up in temperature in the 1990s either in-sample or from contiguous holdout blocks, thus casting doubt on their ability to predict such phenomena if in fact they occurred several hundred years ago.
Here are some excerpts from the paper (emphasis in paragraphs mine):
This one shows that M&M hit the mark, because it is independent validation:
In other words, our model performs better when using highly autocorrelated
noise rather than proxies to ”predict” temperature. The real proxies are less predictive than our ”fake” data. While the Lasso generated reconstructions using the proxies are highly statistically significant compared to simple null models, they do not achieve statistical significance against sophisticated null models.
We are not the first to observe this effect. It was shown, in McIntyre
and McKitrick (2005a,c), that random sequences with complex local dependence
structures can predict temperatures. Their approach has been
roundly dismissed in the climate science literature:
To generate ”random” noise series, MM05c apply the full autoregressive structure of the real world proxy series. In this way, they in fact train their stochastic engine with significant (if not dominant) low frequency climate signal rather than purely non-climatic noise and its persistence. [Emphasis in original]
Ammann and Wahl (2007)
…
On the power of the proxy data to actually detect climate change:
This is disturbing: if a model cannot predict the occurrence of a sharp run-up in an out-of-sample block which is contiguous with the insample training set, then it seems highly unlikely that it has power to detect such levels or run-ups in the more distant past. It is even more discouraging when one recalls Figure 15: the model cannot capture the sharp run-up even in-sample. In sum, these results suggest that the ninety-three sequences that comprise the 1,000 year old proxy record simply lack power to detect a sharp increase in temperature. See Footnote 12
Footnote 12:
On the other hand, perhaps our model is unable to detect the high level of and sharp run-up in recent temperatures because anthropogenic factors have, for example, caused a regime change in the relation between temperatures and proxies. While this is certainly a consistent line of reasoning, it is also fraught with peril for, once one admits the possibility of regime changes in the instrumental period, it raises the question of whether such changes exist elsewhere over the past 1,000 years. Furthermore, it implies that up to half of the already short instrumental record is corrupted by anthropogenic factors, thus undermining paleoclimatology as a statistical enterprise.
…
We plot the in-sample portion of this backcast (1850-1998 AD) in Figure 15. Not surprisingly, the model tracks CRU reasonably well because it is in-sample. However, despite the fact that the backcast is both in-sample and initialized with the high true temperatures from 1999 AD and 2000 AD, it still cannot capture either the high level of or the sharp run-up in temperatures of the 1990s. It is substantially biased low. That the model cannot capture run-up even in-sample does not portend well for its ability
to capture similar levels and run-ups if they exist out-of-sample.
…
Conclusion.
Research on multi-proxy temperature reconstructions of the earth’s temperature is now entering its second decade. While the literature is large, there has been very little collaboration with universitylevel, professional statisticians (Wegman et al., 2006; Wegman, 2006). Our paper is an effort to apply some modern statistical methods to these problems. While our results agree with the climate scientists findings in some
respects, our methods of estimating model uncertainty and accuracy are in sharp disagreement.
On the one hand, we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data. The fundamental problem is that there is a limited amount of proxy data which dates back to 1000 AD; what is available is weakly predictive of global annual temperature. Our backcasting methods, which track quite closely the methods applied most recently in Mann (2008) to the same data, are unable to catch the sharp run up in temperatures recorded in the 1990s, even in-sample.
As can be seen in Figure 15, our estimate of the run up in temperature in the 1990s has
a much smaller slope than the actual temperature series. Furthermore, the lower frame of Figure 18 clearly reveals that the proxy model is not at all able to track the high gradient segment. Consequently, the long flat handle of the hockey stick is best understood to be a feature of regression and less a reflection of our knowledge of the truth. Nevertheless, the temperatures of the last few decades have been relatively warm compared to many of the thousand year temperature curves sampled from the posterior distribution of our model.
Our main contribution is our efforts to seriously grapple with the uncertainty involved in paleoclimatological reconstructions. Regression of high dimensional time series is always a complex problem with many traps. In our case, the particular challenges include (i) a short sequence of training data, (ii) more predictors than observations, (iii) a very weak signal, and (iv) response and predictor variables which are both strongly autocorrelated.
The final point is particularly troublesome: since the data is not easily modeled by a simple autoregressive process it follows that the number of truly independent observations (i.e., the effective sample size) may be just too small for accurate reconstruction.
Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models. We have shown that time dependence in the temperature series is sufficiently strong to permit complex sequences of random numbers to forecast out-of-sample reasonably well fairly frequently (see, for example, Figure 9). Furthermore, even proxy based models with approximately the same amount of reconstructive skill (Figures 11,12, and 13), produce strikingly dissimilar historical backcasts: some of these look like hockey sticks but most do not (Figure 14).
Natural climate variability is not well understood and is probably quite large. It is not clear that the proxies currently used to predict temperature are even predictive of it at the scale of several decades let alone over many centuries. Nonetheless, paleoclimatoligical reconstructions constitute only one source of evidence in the AGW debate. Our work stands entirely on the shoulders of those environmental scientists who labored untold years to assemble the vast network of natural proxies. Although we assume the reliability of their data for our purposes here, there still remains a considerable number of outstanding questions that can only be answered with a free and open inquiry and a great deal of replication.
===============================================================
Commenters on WUWT report that Tamino and Romm are deleting comments even mentioning this paper on their blog comment forum. Their refusal to even acknowledge it tells you it has squarely hit the target, and the fat lady has sung – loudly.
(h/t to WUWT reader “thechuckr”)
Henry Pool August 18, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Esterbrooks results are consistant with my presentation within the limits of estimated errors in wave length, timing, and magnitude of cycle swings. His analysis is based on a relatively few cycles of data yet they show an upward trend to around the turn of the century with the next max at around 2060. I believe temperature leads CO2 but I think the lead is less than thirty years. Background levels of CO2 have been accurately measured since 1957 and that data reveals statistically significant sign waves with wave lengths of 5.1, 9.93, 20.5 years. These could be associated with el-Nino, sunspots, and PDO, responding harmonically with a delay for each. Thus, monitoring the natural background level of CO2 is probably our best lagging indicator of climate change. All bets are off if on one of these cold cycles the Arctic remains frozen in summer and the oceanic conveyer belt pump is shut off or slowed down. I believe we should be concerned about that tipping point.
latitude says:
August 18, 2010 at 1:30 pm
NeilT says:
August 18, 2010 at 8:44 am
lattituide, you should go back and read the document. That figure shows that they stopped using the proxy at 1968 and then used the statistical method to try and predict the warming from 1969 to 2000. At the same time they put in the real recorded figures (the black line).
=========================================================
“It’s not dumb luck that takes a program that’s all over the place, that random numbers give the same or better results, then all of a sudden at the end, it pulls it’s act together.”
———————————————————————————————————–
Latitude, I don’t mean to intrude, but reading your back and forth with NeilT, I think there is some confusion about what graph is tied to what test.
Form the paper, “We pursue that strategy here. First, we fit on 1880-1998 AD and attempt to backcast 1850-1879 AD. Then, we fit on 1850-1968 AD and forecast 1969-1998 AD. These blocks are arguably the most interesting and important because they are not ”tied” at two endpoints. Thus, they genuinely reflect the most important modeling task: reconstruction.
Figure 18 illustrates that the model seems…….”
They are referencing the graph that plots the results. Fig. 18 not fig. 16. Fig 16 was fitted on 1850-1998 and then forecasted backwards(backcasted) from there.
If I followed your conversation properly, I think that will help. In fig. 18, neither going forward to back or back to forward did very will in detecting the uptick in the 1990’s.
“Better than chance” isn’t a bench mark I’d look for in anything but a roulette wheel.
Romm also goes on to question the MWP, saying that it is “open question” whether it was real or not. I provided him with peer-reviewed literature, and my response fell down the rabbit hole. What a joke!
Thanks James, I really wasn’t wanting Neil to answer. 😉
Someone has already mentioned that the strength of the hockey stick was in the handle, not the blade. That’s correct.
What confuses me is that they got as much of an up tick as they did in the last thirty year block.
They said:”the backcast is both in-sample and initialized with the high true temperatures from 1999 AD and 2000 AD, it still cannot capture either the high level of or the sharp run-up in temperatures of the 1990s” and “it was better than chance”
What happened exactly that would have made that last thirty year block “better than chance”?
Mr. Watts, I first heard of ENSO at its AMS symposium debut in 1985. As the Southern oscillation is global in scale and decadal in duration, and McS&W lay 4 to 1 odds of ’98 topping the hottest decade of the last millennium, to dismiss it is” a super El Nino anomaly event, not a super global warming event. Weather, not climate.“ does such Moranic violence to the English language that the mind is repelled.
It would be wonderful to see the reception afforded your reply were you to repeat it at the next AMS meeting on the subject- it is far too good for yack radio, and only wants the attention of an SNL writer to assure its 15 seconds of fame.
REPLY: There’s no reason to call me a moron simply because you disagree.
In March 2006, Dr. James Hansen wrote a paper saying the following:
If that isn’t enough, I always say a picture is worth 1000 words, so here is a picture…or two:
Like it or not, 1998 was indeed a super El Nino event, temperatures soared, and in 1999 subsided.
Here is another image worth looking at, which shows sea level change related to the ENSO event, but also illustrates how quickly a strong positive anomaly went to a negative one, just like we see in the temperature plot.
From: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/teleconnections/enso/enso-sigevents.php
Now if you have something you’d like to present (besides calling me a moron) that shows 1998 was a uniquely warm year out of the past millenium and it had nothing to do with ENSO, but only CO2, feel free to present it here.
But if your reply is like the last one containing personal insults, it will be snipped, MIT physicist or not.
– Anthony
duckster says:
August 14, 2010 at 9:20 pm
“So is this how you get around the fact that McShane and Wyner is showing almost 2 degrees of warming since 1850? This is way beyond what Mann et al show – and would be truly unprecedented, wouldn’t it?
……
Actually no. That would only be true if you used the bottom portion of the error bars for 1850 and the top portion of the error bars for now. That’s an apples to bananas to oranges comparison.
RR Kampen says:
August 18, 2010 at 1:29 am
“Are you trying to say that in the year 1998 CO2 played no role for just that year? ”
Time and time again, people put the horse before the cart when discussing CO2. It’s the role of scientists to prove that CO2 played a role not to disprove it didn’t. To be clear, if you accept that it is necessary to disprove the point, then you shouldn’t stop there. You’ll need to disprove the data was corrupt, temperature variations were due to natural weather variations and the Greek gods weren’t simply having a bad day.
Over to you to prove CO2 played a role. From MW it appears no material data to suggest otherwise.
It’s back to drawing board old man.
latitude says:
August 18, 2010 at 4:05 pm
“What happened exactly that would have made that last thirty year block “better than chance”?”
Yeh, well, I was doing that more for Neil’s benefit anyway. 😉
Flip a coin 100 times. At some point, I bet you’ll get heads or tails 4 times in a row, which would be better than chance. Chance always looks better than chance sometimes. I think that is where many fallacies start. Something occurs every Wednesday while it is observed, so the natural tendency is to attach the occurrence to every Wednesday. I think that sums up the CAGW alarmism pretty well.
“Dave Springer says:
Ozone is a different story as it has a strong absorption band in ultraviolet where the sun emits strongly as well as in infrared where the ocean emits strongly”
Dave, answer me this. About 6% of the solar energy that hits the Earth is uv; and this shorthwave radiation is absorbed by Ozone. This energy must be reradiated, half going DOWN. So what is the emission spectrum of the ozone layer during daylight?
1998 was caused by CO2!?!?!?!?! Did the CO2 content of the earth’s atmosphere suddenly drop then next year? Odd, I don’t recall that occurring. I keep looking at Mauna and I don’t see the spike in the angle nor do I see a drop in the content. Strange.
Holy simplistic bloviating bs Batman!! Will the sophomoric class of 2010 please rise?
McShane and Wyner:
As can be seen in Figure 15, our estimate of the run up in temperature in the 1990s has a much smaller slope than the actual temperature series. Furthermore, the lower frame of Figure 18 clearly reveals that the proxy model is not at all able to track the high gradient segment. Consequently, the long flat handle of the hockey stick is best understood to be a feature of regression and less a reflection of our knowledge of the truth.
What we now have is the HEISENBURG HOCKEY STICK:
either the handle is real but the blade is illusory
or the blade is real but there is no handle
McShance and Wyner attempted to validate the proxies by testing their ability to model the recent upturn in “measured” global temperature in the last 3 decades. The model result from the proxies was also a temperature increase but a much smaller one.
They assumed implicitly that the measured temperature rise is real or “actual” – so thus the proxy modeled result was falsified.
(However logically the proxy based model result could be correct, and the adjusted “measurements” wrong”.)
So they conclude that the failure of the proxies to model the recent and well known temperature curve, combined with other statistical considerations, means that the reconstruction of the last 1000 yrs climate temperature is not statistically valid.
There are two possible conclusions:
(1) M&W are right, the recent temperature rise is real; the failure of proxy based modeling to track it, with recent data where proxies should be most reliable, shows that the whole proxy reconstruction 1000 yrs back must be rejected. So, blade but no handle.
Or
(2) M&W are wrong. The climate temp reconstruction from the proxies both recently and back 1000 yrs is in fact valid. This means however that the proxy reconstruction of a recent shallow temperature rise in the last 30 years is correct and the “measured” steep temp rise is wrong, an artifact of UHI and data massaging. So, handle but no blade.
Thus the “Heisenburg” hockey stick: if the blade is solid, the handle is uncertain. If the handle is well known, the blade fades into uncertainty.
Either blade or handle, not both.
Or in language Joe Romm might recognise, CHECK MATE.
Russell Seitz says:
August 18, 2010 at 4:10 pm
Mr. Watts, I first heard of ENSO at its AMS symposium debut in 1985. As the Southern oscillation is global in scale and decadal in duration, and McS&W lay 4 to 1 odds of ’98 topping the hottest decade of the last millennium, to dismiss it is” a super El Nino anomaly event, not a super global warming event. Weather, not climate.“ does such Moranic violence to the English language that the mind is repelled. […]
REPLY: There’s no reason to call me a moron simply because you disagree.
He didn’t call you a moron, he called you “Moranic.” Maybe he was comparing you to actor Dick Moran. Of course, that would be no less of an insult…
phlogiston says:
August 18, 2010 at 5:53 pm
I think that possibility had been mentioned quite a bit earlier in the thread, maybe only once or twice. I’ve been waiting for someone to articulate that thought as well as you have.
While your point wasn’t specifically stated, I think the statement, Although we assume the reliability of their data for our purposes here,…. probably applies.
Ditto what James said…..
…..that’s what I’ve been getting at
The strength of the hockey stick is showing unprecedented warming.
The only reason it’s unprecedented, is because of the handle.
But even when they initialized with the high true temperatures from 1999 AD and 2000 AD, they were not able to reproduce the blade.
They were not able to reproduce the handle or the blade.
Thank you phlogiston
“What we now have is the HEISENBURG HOCKEY STICK:
either the handle is real but the blade is illusory
or the blade is real but there is no handle”
Richard,
Nonsense. I have repeatedly stated that there was a MWP. For example, this was in my last post to you.
You are mistaken that the “all” the warm peaks in the interactive graph fall within 750 – 1250 AD (same goes for the other hundreds of proxies not included in that map). It won’t harm you to acknowledge that. But it might lead you to a more nuanced view of the difficulties establishing the amplitude, timing and spatial coherence of the MWP.
There is an excellent paper that examines many of the thorny issues with millennial reconstructions. Therein a good number of studies, including MBH are considered and combined. As part of the testing, the controversial US tree proxies are discarded, the Yamal series, Mann’s PC analysis eschewed, and other methods and proxies are either reworked or left out, or retained if they are considered robust.
http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/ghegerl/cp-2006-0049.pdf
If all of Mann’s studies were discarded, the story generally told by other, multi-proxy, millennial reconstructions matches that which appears in the IPCC.
That is, the MWP seems to have been as warm as the mean of the 20th century, but probably not as warm as the last few decades of the 20th century.
With that in mind, I cannot fathom why there is such triumphalism surrounding criticism of Mann’s 12 year-old papers. Except, perhaps, that the graph from it was much promoted in Canadian schools, at the governmental level, and appeared in people’s letter boxes (it was not so promoted anywhere else), and Canadian Steve McIntyre took exception to that. Now some people seem to believe that this graph was ‘iconic’ worldwide and changed the course of history.
In fact, in the rest of the world, very few people read the IPCC TAR Summary for Policy Makers, very few people would have known what the graph was had it been given to them unlabeled, and the only reason it has emerged into the worldwide public sphere is because of the repeated attempts to portray it as the central pillar of the AGW argument.
That the argument is basically political is apparent in how critics generally do not discuss the findings of MBH 99 from the text of that paper, or even know what they are. It’s all about the graph and perceptions arising from it. As it is for you. Which is why you mistakenly repeat that MBH did away with the MWP and LIA. You would do well to read the paper.
Quote Barry “Now some people seem to believe that this graph was ‘iconic’ worldwide and changed the course of history.
In fact, in the rest of the world, very few people read the IPCC TAR Summary for Policy Makers, very few people would have known what the graph was had it been given to them unlabeled, and the only reason it has emerged into the worldwide public sphere is because of the repeated attempts to portray it as the central pillar of the AGW argument.”
As a non scientist living in the UK I became aware of this graph as part of a presentation in a popular science program on television. It really was the clincher for me that global warming was a fact and that GW was lated to C02 levels. I am quite sure the use of he hockey stick in that program, and others like it, has convinced many ordinary people like me to believe the science was settled and that if we did nothing about burning C02 we were all doomed.
Once I had joined the mindset I discarded listening to the alternative views; my mind became closed on the subject. As a non scientist i only give a small portion of my time to looking at science and questioning what I have been told to believe.
We can see how the media is working; scare stories are picked up and published, rebuttles are boring and under reported. This mechanism has been the engine of the CAGW propaganda success.
Imagine you are a second rate charlatan scientist that craves respect and money, where would you position yourself in this environment? The answer is obvious and it explains why the case for CAGW has often been made by rather disreputable characters. I am of course talking of people like Pachauri (who harvests money through his “charities” that own stakes in the Carbon exchanges and made his “Voodoo Scientist” remarks during the Himalayagate episode. I am talking about M Mann who fakes his own CV to look better than it really is and inverts graphs to suit his wished for conclusions.
Reading this thread I can see that there are many respectable scientists in the side of CAGW debate; there is so much that is not understood and so many counter arguments to the sceptics that need to be thrashed out. I can see that, but I can also see the company the AGW keep and the type of science they defend. I used to have a closed mind towards the sceptics case, nowadays I am rather the other way. I think many of my non scientist friends are also sickened by the constant exaggeration and misrepresentation and plain rudeness of the people making the case for CAGW.
Science has no right to happen in a vacuum; you have to embrace the real world that provide your funds and be moral. The whole hockey stick saga is imbued with immorality. This immorality seems to emanate from flawed characters like Michael Mann and Pachauri.
@NofreeWind
But have the 20th Century even warmed since 1940?, except for the step up with the 98 El Nino. Why not look at the data. The thermometer record from 1940 to 1979 shows NO WARMING, both of them, the satellite record from 1979 to 1997 show NO WARMING, both of them.
Something is very wrong here!
#######################
duckster says:
August 17, 2010 at 7:31 pm
Yeah there’s something very wrong here! You’ve cherry picked the dates to show there was no warming in the 20th century, by choosing the (warm) early 40s, and then comparing them to a date (1979) where warming had not advanced significantly. Extend the satellite records out by even a couple of years and you’ll also get a completely different picture (and one who’s trends match the overall temperature trend). I strongly advise anyone doing this little plot to extend the dates out to cover the whole century, not just the dates that have been pre-chosen for you here.
But nice cherry picking though.
###############################
Duckster, most of here understand and agree there was a step-up of global temperature in 1998, but that was from an El Nino, there is no CO2 footprint whatsoever, the oceans released a tremendous amt of heat in an enormous El Nino, it is likely still with us.
Cherry picking? I showed you 57 years of data, 1940-1997 while CO2 was rising exponentially, from 1,000 MMT of Carbon to almost 7,000 MMT’s!!!!
OK. Let’s extend the data, and this time we’ll use an index which combines the 2 land-based and the 2 satellite series. We’ll go back to 1910, and use Hadley from 1910 to 1979 (BeforeSatellites). Here is what you get, “no-cherry picking”.
What you get is RISING GLOBAL temperatures before 1940, which man made CO2 was “minimal”, so maybe?????……. there can be other forces at work besides “bad-man”. Then we have FLAT GLOBAL temperatures from 1940-1979 while man, in your opinion, is working furiously to poison the world with CO2, natures doesn’t seem to notice though!, then we have the Big El Nino in 1998 and StepUp a paltry .2C? That’s the only REAL global warming that has occurred since 1940??? And it all happened in one year! 1998.
So we are talking about .7C warming in 100 years?? That is all we are talking about. And you trying to convince me that no way jose, the world could never warm an average 1F over a Century? Do you know anything about the geological history of our world. How about the historical record, I suggest you read any of the Brian Fagan books, Little Ice Age and The Great Warming and El Nino. Fagan is a “warmer” – he says so in his preface, but just about every single page of his books give archeological and historical proof of climate change must more drastic than we happen to be experiencing right now. We haven’t seen nothing yet!!!
The weather from literature:
the mwp:
http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/751_999.htm
Many notably cold winters
the lia:
http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/1650_1699.htm
Many notably hot summers.
Of course, to accept what the temperature chart and mans CO2 contribution chart really tell use, you would have to accept that just about every scientific organization in this world is completely corrupt. You would have to believe that every high school biology textbook in the US and much of the world is nothing but ideological “drivel”. You would have to believe that just about every TV and major print outlet have been printing nothing but propoganda and capitalizing on your naivetity. You would have to believe that we are completely wasting billions of dollars and millions of man hours, (such as in reading this blog), on absolutely nothingness. You would have to believe that there are vast wings of Government(s) employing and funding thousands of highly educated, VERY smart people, who in reality are doing nothing but wasting their time in frivolous pursuit, living in an imaginary world, that will ultimately make our world a worse place to live.
In the end you would have to believe that the bad are good and the good are bad. Many would have to accept that in the quest to “be good”, they have been duped into “being bad”. For many, what I would term their religion, would be lost.
Pamela Gray says,
“Do the models have a CO2 variable that reproduced the recent rise?”
Do all thousand year hockey sticks have a variable that reproduces, or encourages, 1,000 year hockey sticks?
1ky graph
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/graphics/lawdome.smooth75.gif
Law Dome CO2 ice data
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/lawdome.html
Interesting how the CO2 levels and multiproxy temp series are a neat fit. Of course if you believe that temp changes in the past 1,000 years could only be due to anthropogenic CO2 inputs, then the proxies graphs would have to visually feel like the historic CO2 graphs. And if one believes the proxies graphs must look like the CO2, one can mess the CO2 data into the mishmash of inputs.
MIT physicist
Uhh…like shootin’ ducks in a barrel. They typically are over confident, so they over extend, etc.
barry says:
August 18, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Hi barry!
You amaze me in how correct you can be while missing the point entirely.
You said, “……With that in mind, I cannot fathom why there is such triumphalism surrounding criticism of Mann’s 12 year-old papers. Except, perhaps, that the graph from it was much promoted in Canadian schools, at the governmental level, and appeared in people’s letter boxes (it was not so promoted anywhere else), and Canadian Steve McIntyre took exception to that. Now some people seem to believe that this graph was ‘iconic’ worldwide and changed the course of history.
First, Mann has 2 papers out that say essentially the same thing. It isn’t simply the oldest one, but you know that already. (Many others use the same data and/or methodologies.) The graph wasn’t simply promoted in Canadian schools. But you know that, also. The graph was/is “iconic”. But you know that, still.
You said, “In fact, in the rest of the world, very few people read the IPCC TAR Summary for Policy Makers, very few people would have known what the graph was had it been given to them unlabeled, and the only reason it has emerged into the worldwide public sphere is because of the repeated attempts to portray it as the central pillar of the AGW argument.
Only because it was a launch, of sorts, for the AGW argument. True, very few read the IPCC TAR Summary for Policy Makers, but there isn’t a soul that has a TV or a computer in a first world nation that hasn’t seen the graph tied to the AGW movement/theory.
You said, That the argument is basically political is apparent in how critics generally do not discuss the findings of MBH 99 from the text of that paper, or even know what they are. It’s all about the graph and perceptions arising from it. As it is for you. Which is why you mistakenly repeat that MBH did away with the MWP and LIA.
I agree, however, it is disturbing to note that Mike Mann didn’t correct the errant perception. Certainly he had ample opportunity. Neither did any other AGW scientist of note. The graph was iconic. The press conveyed it as truth. The populace perceived the press as truthful. All the while, nary a correction or clarification from anybody until after a couple of studies that refuted the graph. Oh, and a few international agreements and several laws passed on the basis of the belief in the graph’s representation of truth.
Barry, I’d be happy to discuss CAGW with you or anyone else on an hypothetical level. But that isn’t where the world is at in this discussion. The world is acting upon impressions. Laws are being passed. Treaties are being signed. Lives and livelihoods are being destroyed. Why? Because the perception of the graph is deemed scientific proof.
And no one but a skeptic stands up to say, “wait”, there may be a misconception about reality here! All the while people like Mann, Hansen and Jones, ad nauseum remain silent while people like you say, “He didn’t explicitly say that!”
Barry, I didn’t say that to be mean or condescending in any manner. It’s just I don’t think you’re aware of the ramifications of pursuing this question in the manner the world is presently pursuing it. We can’t starve people while we try to understand all of the dynamics of our climate! We may never know all of the dynamics of our climate. IT IS WRONG on any and every level.
825 responses, quite a bit of debate.
Funny though that the masses of people don’t listen to the science. There are some who do actually care about the science. But for the average person who hasn’t taken the time to check the science for themselves (it’s a shame, and a bit frightening, that most people verify nothing) ClimateGate, and longer winters, are the ruling factors. So poll numbers show most people are not worried about global warming.
The average person has never heard of the Hockey Stick, or Steve McIntyre, or Anthony Watts, and unfortunately never will. They know about Al Gore’s movie, they know longer winters, and they’ve got a whiff that global warming scientists have been doing tricks. That’s it—then they go back to texting, the internet, 3D movies, video games, tv, and porn.
WattsUpWithThat really ought to be in the top 100 web sites in the world instead of down where it is. What most people like to go to is in the top 100. (Some of the top 10 would shock most people.)
This debating over graphs, positive/negative feedback, and Arctic ice, etc, is interesting and fun for most here. And I’d like to think we are changing the world. But, unfortunately, the debate never gets into the mainstream of life. If it did it would fly immediately over people’s heads.
SO THANK GOD FOR CLIMATEGATE!!! 🙂
That all too familiar 2001 IPCC graph, together with Gore’s horror sci-fi movie version, would have left millions (including me) with the impression that the N H temperature (and by implication the global T.) was on a steady slight downslope, varying little more than 0.2°C from a linear mean until c. 1900 then suddenly shot up concurrently with a rise in CO2 concentration, while the Armagh and Central England records show swings of 1°C either side of a mean.
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/cet-1659.gif
In that context, the 0.8°C leap c. 1900 – 2010 is unremarkable.
Why was a graph conjured up by a clique of already committed CAGW shysters based on dodgy proxy data accepted as kosher, while two perfectly acceptable instrumental records, even accepting the limitations of the early data, were ignored?
Richard,
As an experiment since my last post, I removed all the labels from the graph, printed it and showed it to some of my family and a couple of friends (5 people). None of them knew what it was. I asked them all to make a guess, and only one of them figured it was a global temperature graph – but they thought it was for the thermometer record.
They all have televisions and personal computers. 🙂
I would guess that a few thousand people in the world (outside climate scientists) would know what that graph represents unless they read the labels.
Anyone else wants to try the experiment, here is a link to the unlabeled graph.
Select friends and family who don’t spend their time in climate blogs and see how many can accurately tell you what it is. I intend to press on and see how many people guess. I will select people who are unaware of my interest in climate science so that I don’t skew the results.
(1 family member and 1 of my friends knew of my interest – it was that friend who guessed incorrectly that the graph represented the global thermometer record)