Mann's new sea level hockey stick paper

I do not pretend to understand the technical presentations. However, I think I recognize a familiar shape in the graphs. Can I safely conclude that it is worse than we thought?

I like the way the phrase ‘the team’ is used over and over again.

I didn’t see any reference whether or not the land rose, fell, or remained stable during that entire period Mann referred to above. Nor did I see any mention of soil erosion.

“During a warm climate period beginning in the 11th century known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly, sea level rose by about half a millimeter per year for 400 years.”
My, my. After all the efforts The Team made in trying to remove this period, or to turn it into a local phenonemum.
“assuming a linear relation between temperature and the rate of sea-level rise.”
Any evidence for this?

If it cast doubt leave it out , seems to Mann’s standard approach to what ever he does , in this case the last ten years when in fact there are more not less accurate data to be had .

Funny how everything Mann touches turns into a hockeystickish shape. Did he use these fancy half-3D graphics to make it harder to see noncorrelation?

I can’t WAIT to see what Willis does with this hanging curve ball.

I visit Wrightsville Beach and Fripp Island most every Summer. I love the Outer Banks also and have never noticed any of this man’s alarmist proclamations. Tarheel born and bred(though I despise Carolina). NC State here. A working man’s institution rife with veterinary, scientific, engineering, and architectural glory.
That said, next visit to the old North State, come say hello and we will hold an evening of climate change exchange in friendly confines…….my study. Plus, I make the best Old-Fashioned you will ever bring to your lips Mr. Watts. Have I had one too many already? Thanks for what you do every day……every single day.
Your friend in Charlotte,
Edward Lee

I can see some obvious issues here immediately,
Firstly the comment “consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.”
I am not sure how you can have several hundred years of cooling and simultaneously have rising sea levels and call it a “consistant link”!!!
Secondly, no link is actually proven and thirdly, two points on the north carolina coast can not be assumed to be a proxie for a) the entire world b) the entire USA!

Did Al Gore check with Mann before his recent Montecito purchase?

BTW, Anthony, kudos for your adherence to ethics and protocol regarding announcement of this paper.
Mann? Not so much. It’s fun to read his resume, he’s never had a real job in his life! BS->MS->PhD->faculty.
So typical.

I’m with David. Sea level rise started its steep incline well before CO2 was even an issue. But the proxies used for the past???? Not sure about that.

Once again we see calibrated and measured (recent) data compared to filtered (old) proxy data and amazingly it produces the required hockey stick. I have not read the paper yet, but my spidey senses are telling me that there’s a mannomatic PCA somewhere in the filtering process.

I bet they used the data upside down… Just kidding. That trick has already been pulled. I can’t wait to see what Steve McIntyre does with this paper. I wonder if they archived the data and code? Has this method of sea level reconstruction ever been used before? I have a hard time believing this approach will be as valid tree rings… and we already know those don’t make good thermometers.

tallbloke tide gauges and several hundred years records where is no proof of reading continuity are better ?
The reality is just like the ‘magic tress’ there a other factors that can affect what is observed here , the default to AGW its not proving, even if you start with the premiss it has to be .

A curiousity in the figure showing Mann’s temp record with the sea level rise record:
The temp record peaks (until very recently) just before 1000 AD. Temps then fall.
Meanwhile, sea level starts a 400 year steady rise just about the time that temps peak and start to fall. The sea level rate of increase of about 0.6 millimeters per year starts around 1000 AD and finally levels off about 1400 AD.
Am I wrong, or isn’t sea level rise, if causally correlated with temperature increase, supposed to be reasonably synchronous?

[snip – over the top – Anthony]

[oops, too much italic – Mod, can you remove my last post, please?]
jack mosevich says:
June 20, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Why just this region? What about the global sea level rise? Seems like a cherry picking exercise.
Not at all! It’s only cherry picking if the intent is to mislead. The paper looks at North Carolina because that is the data they are using. It quite clearly states that, but they also go to the lengths of correcting for GIA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound
RHS says:
June 20, 2011 at 12:05 pm
How difficult would it have been for Mann to include recent data points? Is there a good reason (besides the ones I want to see) why he stopped data collection/recreation ten years ago?
That would be because it is a paleo-reconstruction of a 2000+ year period. Proxies generally don’t exist right up until yesterday. And even if he could and did go the extra 10 years, it would only add 0.05% to the length of the x-axis. Welcome to non-cherry-picked science.
Jeff Carlson says:
June 20, 2011 at 12:13 pm
So now Mann says there was a MWP ? Its so confusing …
Mann never denied these phenomena, only their extent and amplitude. The data says what it says!

Sea levels were higher during the “roman warm period” and the “mwp”, not lower, at least in Europe, Africa and Asia. “The team found that sea level was relatively stable from 200 B.C. to 1,000 A.D. During a warm climate period beginning in the 11th century known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly, sea level rose by about half a millimeter per year for 400 years. There was then a second period of stable sea level associated with a cooler period, known as the Little Ice Age, which persisted until the late 19th century. Since the late 19th century, however, sea level has risen by more than 2 millimeters per year on average, which is the steepest rate for more than 2,100 years.” I myself, have a collection of books ranging from Archaeology to History and related subjects, mostly covering the time period 1,500 B.C.E. to Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The quote above flies in the face of current Archaeological research and Historical knowledge. The microflora that they mention in research are often used by Archaeologists to gauge ancient tsunamis, not permanent high water.
But most people on this forum will probably want websites, and not a list of books:
http://www.politics.ie/environment/127371-sea-levels-were-higher-roman-times.html
http://www.salt.org.il/frame_arch.html
http://www.lundyisleofavalon.co.uk/history/sealevels.htm
http://www.everythingselectric.com/forum/index.php?topic=357.0
The principle reason 300 elite Spartans, 600 Helots, 1,000 Phocians and possibly 2,000 Thebans were able to hold off the Army of Xerxes for three days had as much to do with sea level as it did to the fanatical training of the Spartans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopylae
http://www.historynet.com/battle-of-thermopylae-leonidas-the-hero.htm/6
http://heritage-key.com/blogs/owenjarus/reconstructing-thermopylae
The sea levels in the Malian Gulf were much higher than today, allowing the Athenian Navy to support the land forces. The pass at the cliffs of Zastano was probably less than 100 meters wide.

Corrections for GIA were estimated from local (13) and US Atlantic coast (15) databases of late Holocene sea-level index points. Detailed methods are presented in SI Text.
The crucial step to go from local subsidence and relative (to local) sea level to the Global GIA sea level is in the correction factors from these two holocene databases, which are unaffected by the work in this paper.
What is the correction f(t) and what error bars are on their data points?
The corrections result in the diagonal sides of the rombus data points on the GIA graph.

i pulled my head out my kiester just long enough to drop it on the ground
got sand in my eyes now i cant see
good thing the water is close by
i can wash the crap off
good luck

Wasn’t this demolished two years ago on WUWT?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/29/north-carolina-sea-levels-rising-3mm-a-year-uc-sea-level-data-says-differently/

Tide gauges on a passive (subsiding tectonically due to slab cooling) margin, and to boot, the isostatic rebound in the northern continental interior results in additional down tilt in the Carolinas.
Hey hockey team: Where is that Ft. Point tide gauge? That one is far more interesting than the ones on the swampy flat Carolina shore.

how can you trust anything Mann does?
I’d like to see the emails they had to make this paper?

Amazing the results you get when all of your conclusions are predetermined and you don’t mess with actual data.

the moorings of major ports like Benghazi, Libya, Istanbul etc are in exactly the same sea level place that they were constructed with hundreds of years ago.
the Tower of London – another Medieval construction along the Thames is at the same relation to the river, if you compare a contemporary photograph with artistic expositions of the time of its construction.
Just a few empirical facts there, so I rather suggest that Mann cam to his conclusion first then worked backwards to make the data fit

AJStrata has the right idea with photographs. I bet there are hundreds of photos spanning 100+ yrs of various parts of the US coastline. As many have suggested, beach front prices are not falling off the cliff !
Good fun at Bishop- Hill site re. IPPC report – clever people needed to help.

PME, Paleo Marsh Elevation (above local mean sealevel) is between 0.07 and 0.25 meters throughout the entire 2000 year history of the location. We are to believe that any collection of 3 or 4 nanofossils can have a AVERAGE mean sea level value with a precision of 1 or 2 cm when superimposed upon by tides, hurricanes, local river meanders, and reworking of sediment?
I also note that the nanofossils chosen are different at the two locations, at least as depicted in Fig 1. So what did they do? Use a different transfer function for each location?

Bioturbation warning on this one among other warnings.
Benthic foraminifera in a lagoon environment present in a core sample have probably been through the gullet of some animal or displaced by some burrowing organism multiple times. To be crude, lagoonal sediment like this have been best described as worm sh*t. The forams did not die and lay undisturbed on the bottom.
When you look at relative abundance of the different foraminifera species, are you looking at preservation issues (some foraminifera shells are delicate). Are human influences considered (i.e. pesticide runoff killing the little critturs). What about, temperature, salinity and lets not forget the occasional hurricane coming through and giving everything a good mixing. Sea level IS NOT the only environmental factor in benthic micro faunas.

I’d offer a comment – but I’d likely be hauled through the courts and banned for life from WUWT !
Seriously though – semiempirical this and reconstruction that? and THIS is modern science?

A quick internet search shows, as others have already attested, that isostatic rebound and tectonic subsidence can exceed the measured rise attributed to temperature change by an order of magnitude, and even groundwater pumping can match the magnitude. The paper states that “all records from the Atlantic coast of North America, Gulf of Mexico, and New Zealand (23) show stable or falling sea level between AD 1400 and 1900…” Reference 23 is from New Zealand. Meanwhile, there are pages and pages of botanical references to a steadily rising relative sea level on the Atlantic coast of the US in the form of buried stumps and roots. This paper is just a thin veneer of empirical data swabbed over a modeling approach that uses Mann’s hockey stick as input.

RHS says:
June 20, 2011 at 12:05 pm
How difficult would it have been for Mann to include recent data points? Is there a good reason (besides the ones I want to see) why he stopped data collection/recreation ten years ago?
====================================
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John B says:
June 20, 2011 at 1:03 pm
That would be because it is a paleo-reconstruction of a 2000+ year period. Proxies generally don’t exist right up until yesterday. And even if he could and did go the extra 10 years, it would only add 0.05% to the length of the x-axis. Welcome to non-cherry-picked science.
========================================
========================================
John, I know it’s a press release, but it says “any time in the past 2,000 years”.
That would include the past 10 years.
In their conclusions they say “salt-marsh sediments for the last 2100 “, which also includes now.
Even their title implies now “over the past two millennia”
Biggest problem is, they used Mann’s reconstruction that does include measured data. Then turned around and picked a time frame for their sediment paleo that didn’t include the measured data of the past decade.
Yes, they could have included the last decade.
They’ve done it before.
They cherry picked……

Wow, I never knew that Bristlecone’s could be used to track sea levels.

The best counterpoints in the above comments are enough to discredit this paper, but what if it were right, that there was a sea level rise of 6-7 inches in the 100 years leading up to 2000? Something similar would be expected in a warming climate, but it doesn’t add a single ounce of weight to the AGW hypothesis. The temperature record isn’t that seriously contested – so far – and on its own is only proof (so far as it’s accurate) that the temperature has risen. Nothing else can be deduced from it. Same applies to this paper – the sea level at one point appears to have risen and that’s all. It’s a pointless exercise from a scientific point of view – except for one little thing . . . . if the supposed rise in sea level can be explained away by, let’s say, reverse glacial rebound (northern Canada is on the rise and therefore there might be an opposite effect at work on the area measured in this paper) then that would cast some doubt on the temperature record! . . Long shot, but not impossible . . .

Last time I looked it seemed to me that water tends to run downhill.So even if readings are higher in one place than another equilibration will surely occur,though there may be a time lag as water does take some time to run downhill.So, if rising levels were to be of any significance they would have to rise everywhere, wouldnt they? Localised “rise” will, of course appear to have ocurred where there has been land subsidence.Then the issue becomes subsidence against what set point.Logically the centre of the earth ? But I doubt even the most sophisticated satellite can get a fix on that.Even then if land subsides anywhere must it not bulge elsewhere as the earth is surely not compressible. Trivial(by terrestrial standards) subsidence can of course occur by pumping out ground water etc,but this wouldnt affect ocean level. Enough, my head is beginning to go round.

Same shape (the graphe), so same statistical method? Old wine in a new barrel? A bad and cheap sequel? Trade mark is clear anyway. Mann, you know our names, give us the numbers…

when did the Medieval Warm Period get renamed the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly?’

“Time and Tide wait for no man” is a very old saying.
It’s the 21st Century so it is now “Time, Temperature and Tide wait for no Mann”
Guess that Mikes’ accelerating sea-levels are hiding in the same pipeline as Trenberths’ (The Travesty) missing Heat.
Jeesh Guys, it must be getting a tad over-crowded in there!

“The principle reason 300 elite Spartans, 600 Helots, 1,000 Phocians and possibly 2,000 Thebans were able to hold off the Army of Xerxes for three days had as much to do with sea level as it did to the fanatical training of the Spartans.”
Yes — there are actually TWO monuments to the 300. The original is about a mile from the ocean, the new one is closer to the coast road. The sea has withdrawn/the land has risen enough that the site would not make an effective choke point today!

@ Latitude
“Yes, they could have included the last decade.
They’ve done it before.
They cherry picked……”
Yes, you are right. I apologise. They only showed 99.95% of the available timeline.

I can’t wait for the analyses from McIntyre of this new hockeystick.
Won’t take him long to break this one too, I guess.

. Litho-, bio-, and chrono-stratigraphy of the Sand Point (A) and Tump Point (B) cores (North Carolina, USA
The data from North Carolina reveal four phases of persistent sea-level change after correction for glacial isostatic adjustment
Sea level was reconstructed by subtracting estimated PME from measured sample altitude.
================================================================================
Sand Point NC is subsiding
Tump Point NC is rising
I would really be interested in seeing how they did that…………..

I live in an area here in Alberta what was once under salt water known as the shallow Western Interior Seaway. Here in oil sands country we often dig up marine mammals dating from approximately 110 million years ago. I’m not far from the Rockey Mountains and I would like to remind Mann if and when I see salt water creeping back into this region that’s when I’m gonna start being delighted with my new beach-front property. Now that’s when I will buy my first sail first boat and install a wharf.

I’m having a ‘here we go again’ reaction to this paper. When I first got interested in MBH98, I was struck by the contrast between the really messy input data (tree ring widths) and the pristine, clean-room like precision of the output. My initial attention was drawn to two questions (1) how can you measure the width of a tree ring to a claimed precision of 1/10 the diameter of a tree cell, and (2) how can you claim to know that certain trees are suitable temperature proxies and others are not without using post hoc data selection techniques. 12 years later, no one can satisfactorily answer these basic questions.
Now with this new study, Mann and Team claim to be able to measure sea level to sub-millimeter precision using the equivalent of chicken bones and tea leaves and they do so while asserting tight error bars. This is the kind of magic act that leaves competent engineers a bit skeptical. So I’ve got some questions…

From the press release:

An international research team including University of Pennsylvania scientists has shown that the rate of sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years and that there is a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level.

So they did a few reconstructions in North Carolina, confirmed them with a single one done is Massachusetts, which gave them a result for the entire US Atlantic coast, which will be cited as evidence of dangerous global sea level rise, thus proof of dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming.
I await the consistent calls from the (C)AGW faithful against using regional results to claim global effects, and against “cherry picking” which seems to be broadly defined as looking at particular records instead of the entire record when addressing those presenting evidence against (severe) CO2-caused (C)AGW effects. Yep, they should start rolling in any second now…

After reading the paper for a second time and the supplemental material once ( http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2011/06/14/1015619108.DCSupplemental/pnas.1015619108_SI.pdf ), I failed to see any discussion of correlation factors or r^2 values. Given how Mann has been bitten by his previous misuse of statistics regarding hockey-stick data forms, I would have assumed that he would have at least included this information it the supplemental materials.
(Please let me know if I have accidentally overlooked this information. I did my best, but I’m not a expert.)

It is the same trick. Mann is a one trick pony. The one-trickiness of this is uncanny. This study presents all the same problems as the study behind the hockey stick. The reliability of the proxy is questionable, just as Briffa’s tree rings were questionable. The site selected is highly questionable and there is no justification offered for the selection. (In this case, the site selected is bizarre. If you know that area, you know that the top ten feet have been disturbed regularly.) The main finding flies in the face of history and recent experience, just as the hockey stick did. (If the water level had risen 2 mm per year in this century then my mother would have experienced a rise of 19% of a meter. She is quite capable of conducting a tour to the spots and demonstrating that no such rise took place. For those who have not visited those beaches, a rise of eight inches in sea level would put the foam six to eight feet farther up the gently sloping beach.)
Apparently, Mann and his team are playing the Tar Baby. They expect the same kind of criticism that they received for the original Hockey Stick and they expect to survive that criticism in the same punch drunk, snaggle tooth way once again. Their true believers will stick with them come hell or high water. It seems to me that this is not scientific publication but something entirely different, more akin to theatre, and sceptics are cast in the role of Brer Rabbit. As another pointed out, the presentation is so darned artsy. I think science is not Mann’s calling or goal.

Its easy to find fault in other peoples work!
/sarc.

To quote jv
“Looks like Mann’s modeling software is good for all kinds of things. Add air you get a hockey stick shaped warming graph, add water and you get a hockey stick shaped sea level rise. I suspect he is selling the idea that if you add enough money you can get a hockey stick shaped stock market graph as well.”
Ah: so that’s where he got them from. Let’s see: here’s an experiment we can directly measure:
– start buying shares, now. Sit on them. There will be an oopsy-daisy up and down around 2017 (the end of the first, smaller “hockeystick”) with a short recession until 2020 but we stay on the roller coaster maybe buying more shares over this period. Then we sit, riding the second larger hockey stick, and sell ALL over the last quarter 2025.
2026 will be a repeat of 2008 … and the end of the hockeystick :-).

And after all that work (harde har har) and fuss (omg) one can still walk to the beach and not notice anything going on over the course of a lifetime. Silly Millimeters/Silly Mann. Of one thing we can be certain of: The certainties are robustly uncertain. Assume.

They have apparently not read Houston and Deans work that is more up to date and finds SLR decelerating.
http://www.jcronline.org/doi/pdf/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00157.1
The World Climate report web site has updated Houston’s result.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2011/04/07/sea-level-rise-still-slowing-down/

Is there any way of finding out who actually peer reviewed this paper? (I know it’s supposed to be kept under wraps – but would anyone here like to be charged with having to ‘pass’ this work – and more importantly, would said reviewers be happy to be tarred with the same brush?)
Honestly, I think reviewers should be given as much, if not more hassle, as the author(s) when something is shown to be wrong/misleading/etc, etc – after all – aren’t they supposed to be doing a ‘proper’ job and checking the work?

How does the temperature hockey stick, which is known to be faulty, reinforce the validity of a sea level hockey stick? Two wrongs apparently do make a right.
I have real doubts about the data obtained beneath the water in North Carolina for the obvious reasons. That land is low lying, often soft and swampy, often disturbed or rearranged by storms, and recently frequently remodeled by man. Another proxy should have been chosen. I also doubt the accuracy of the dating techniques to such fine resolution. I almost appears that he used his temperature hockey stick to calibrate seal level proxies. I also find it odd that, during the LIA, when cooling occurred, there was no corresponding drop in sea level according to his proxy. Isn’t that a bit of a problem?

Whether it is faster than at any time in history or not sea level is not rising at an alarming rate, so what difference does it make.

So……. the temperature during the “Medieval Climate Anomoly” was within 0.3 degrees celcius of current values (plus or minus 0.2 degrees) with no explanation as to why the temp was that high a thousand years ago.
Then….. the temperature during the Little Ice Age was 1 degree celcius below current values with no explanation as to why the temp was so low then.
And…. we are instructed that both temperature and sea level began thier inexorable rise in the mid to late 1800 hundreds, prior to any possible influence from human generated CO2.
So even if I accepted the methodology and conclusions (which at this point I don’t) it would seem that we have, at best, an exposition of natural variability in climate. The study gives absolutely no joy to those who promote AGW as it really is a case of premature uptick.

I found at least one major problem already with the temperature data. Mann did not use the available HADCrutv3 data. It appears that he had a 0.5C offset in the data. Might be a splicing issue, but the offset is real from the available data.
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/2011/06/what-instumental-record-did-mann-use/

What have we been seeing most recently? Deceleration, flattening and now falling. It’s worse than we thought. Head for Al Gore’s $8 million new beach front villa!!!!!!
http://www.jcronline.org/doi/abs/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00157.1
http://crozon.colorado.edu/
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/ipcc2007/fig68.jpg
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/409.htm

I really wouldn’t go using the Kent coastline and Richborough Roman fort as evidence of sea level falling since Roman times – Richborough was on the end of the Wantsum Chanel, which gradually silted up and vanished in about the 16thC, partly due to land use change, improved drainage but mostly due to natural silting. There’s plenty of evidence of old jetties etc – in Sarre for example, which is miles from the sea now, there was a ferry crossing in the 1400’s. Look where it is on a map – its on the end of the Thames and is massively influenced by silt from the river and the tides from the sea (the famous Goodwin sands aren’t far away) – there’s massive erosion and transport happening on that spot of the coast.

OK, I have to hand it to Michael Mann for his smooth transition from alarmist Climate activist to Climate Cartoonist. His new Hockey Schtick is a HOOT!!!

“During a warm climate period beginning in the 11th century known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly, sea level rose by about half a millimeter per year for 400 years. There was then a second period of stable sea level associated with a cooler period, known as the Little Ice Age, which persisted until the late 19th century.”
Were these events global? In his interview, Phil Jones said:
“There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not.”
Would the team be interested in doing a similar study in the southern hemisphere to answer this question?

Jeff Carlson says:
June 20, 2011 at 12:13 pm
So now Mann says there was a MWP ? Its so confusing …
Convenient, huh? Like it when it serves ya, don’t like when it d’un’t.
A forminifera (2 mm) can detect a (2 mm) sea level rise? Mighty interesting. While plankton can indicate marine zonation on a geologic time scale, HTF can the MWP, now elevated to convenient star status, be resolved? Quick…time to look into Foraminiferaproximal behavior!

This historical rate of rise was greater than any other persistent, century-scale trend during the past 2100 y.
I think the optimal word here is “persistent”.
If you notice the boxes get smaller and smaller as you move closer to the present…ie the averages of the far past are averaged over longer periods of time and as you get closer to the present the averages shrink to cover smaller periods.
So as you get closer to the present you get more of the “grainy” ups and downs. There very well could have been huge rises and drops in the past but they would not be seen because the “grain” has been lost due to longer periods of averages….but they show up closer to the present.
It looks like Mann has found a new trick….though it probably is not hiding a decline so much as exaggerating the rise by hiding past fluctuations.

Where is the post 2000 data??? Mann, does this guy cherry pick the facts or what! But the media will swallow it and love it.

Joshua Corning may have a valid point; Manns’s graph could be logarithmic in nature. It’ll be an easy check.
The issue of using modern plant distributions as a yardstick should also be examined for validity. Uniformitarianism is a cosy paradigm; shame that it’s a crock.

Some time ago I started looking at sea levels, using tidal gauge info, to see how it correlated to temperature. The So. & East coast of the US was chosen, since that seemed to have the least seismic activity, including uplift. I would have preferred the East coast of S. America, but the data records were not as good as US records. Looking at the records, noted in the figure below:
http://www.imagenerd.com/uploads/n_amer_s_e_composite_3-MKDwk.jpg
seven stations were selected, to form a composite anomaly. These included Galveston, Pensacola, Key West, Charleston, Baltimore, Atlantic City & New York. The composite was filtered with a 10 yr. Fourier filter, and compared a Trend line:
http://www.imagenerd.com/uploads/us_se_tidal_composite-EZEn2.gif
It was noted that, after ~1915, the trend line held fairly close to the filtered composite, in spite of increasing CO2. The HadCRUT3 global anomaly was also included as a comparison
An addition, some long term records were evaluated, comparing temperature to CO2. These were from stations that began recording prior to 1800:
Central England – 1659-2010
Debilt Netherlands – 1706 – 2010
UPPSALA (LÄN)Swed. – 1722-2010
BERLIN (TEMPELHOF), Ger – 1701-2010
PARIS (14E PARC MONTSOURIS) Fr, 1757-2010
GENEVE (NASA), Switz. – 1753-2010
BASEL (BINNINGEN) Swiz.- 1755-2010
PRAHA (KLEM.-RUZYNE) Czech – 1775-2010
STOCKH (GML-LAN) Sw – 1756-2010
BUDAPEST (Hungary) – 1780-2009
HOHENPEISSENBERG, Ger – 1781-2010
MUNCHEN, (RIEM FLUGHAFEN ), Ger – 1781-2010
EDINBURGH (SCOTLAND), GB- 1785- 1993
WROCLAW (SOUTH WEST), Pol – 1792-2010
CEL & Debilt were from:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/data/download.html
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/ilabrijn.dat
The rest were from the Rimfrost site:
http://www.rimfrost.no/
The anomaly of each site was computed (1969-1999 base) & a composite average was formed for each year. The data set was then filtered with a 50 yr. Fourier Convolution filter, and compared to the CO2 Mauna Loa & Law Dome (DE08 & De08-2) ice core data.
The result is shown below:
http://www.imagenerd.com/uploads/co2_temp_1650-2010-6OeMR.gif
Since all the long term temperature data was taken from central & western Europe, the HadCRUT3_NH anomaly was also included.
A few items noted were:
On a long term basis, there was little CO2 change, while Europe went through some temperature swings, comparable to the present.
While the Ave14 & HadCRUT3_NH seem to follow each other (especially the post 1900 rise, 1940 dip & subsequent rise), CO2 seems to have little correlation.
Ave14 seems to lead the HadCRUT3_NH curve by about 10 years, so we may be in for a NH dip, or are already in it.

Dag nabbit !! I still can’t use pasted to put stuff in the comments box.
Note #2
Now, wait just a second. No part of North Carolina was covered by a glacier within
the past 18,000 years. We <i. can't be talking about isostatic uplift or subsidence
of this North Carolina region that has any reason or need to be somehow
compensated for in sea level calculations.
See:
http://upload/wikimedia.org.wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Iceage_north-intergl_glac_hg.png
And
http://www.zonu.com/fullsize-en/2009-11-09-10972/Wisconsin-glaciation-in-North-America.html
I know our corner of northeasten Ohio has been going through a slow isostatic
uplift, A.K.A. a “Glacial Isostatic Adjustment” for at least the past 10,000 years.
All that means is the land is several hundred feet higher in altitute (relative
only to the current sea level) than it was a couple thousand years ago. It
means the water from Lake Erie flows a bit faster in Lake Ontario. What goes
down the Ohio River watershed gets to the Mississippi River faster than it
did centuries ago. But the rise in land level doesn’t increase the amount
of water reaching the Atlantic throught the Saint Lawrence River. It doesn’t
add to the amount of water flowing down the Mississippi and dumping into
the Gulf of Mexico either.
See:
http://www.ohiodnr.com/LakeErieLiteracy/LakeErieLit_Principle2/tabid/9384/Default.aspx
To credit any type of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (whether it’s a rebound
or a subsidence) t the Atlantic shore regions of North Carolina is superficially
unrealistic or, at worst, deliberately deceptive and misleading.
The paper’s footnotes:
(13) Horton, B.P., Holocene sea-level changes…, , 2009. Deals only
with calculating sea level changes in Scotland and the North Sea.
(14) Peltier,W.R. Global sea level rise…, 1996, Geophysical Letters.
Nowhere in the regular text is there any mention of a sea level rise
at the North Carolia shore, nor is there a specific citation footnoted in the
text for this “rise”.
However, See Figure 5 of this paper, especially the note
within the Figure 5 box which contains the comment that the Mid-Atalntic
shores (which would include North Carolina) seem to reflect roughly
twice the global SRL norms.
Additionally, the Peltier paper distinguishes the differences between
using geological and a geophysical to measure any sea
level rise. The Kemp, Horton, Mann et al. paper above doesn’t differentiate
between the two methods, and doesn’t specially state which method they’re
using.
See:
http://journals.ametsoc/doi/full/10.1175/1520-0442%282004%29017%3AEOTRDO%E2.0CO%3B2
This study includes the following: [ Golly, I wish I could paste this in ! ]

For the gauges with the longest record, there is a geographical bias with
many more records in the Northern Hemisphere (particularly the North
Atlantic) than in the Southern Hemisphere. Cabanes et al (2001)
suggest this geographical bias resulted in significant overestimate of
twentieth century sea level rise. To date no sea level rise has been
detected for the twentieth century (Woodworth 1990, Douglas
1992) although the longest records do indicate an increase in the rate
of sea level rise over the last two or three centuries (Woodworth 1999).
(15) Engelhart,S.E., Horton, B.P.,Peltier & Tonqvist, 2009. This paper
specifically includes the specious GIA “subsidence” in North Carolina in
their calculations for the sea level rise (SLR) for that stat’e shoreline
and by inference, the entire U.S. East Coast.
See:
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/earth/bph/Res2009/Englehart%20etal_Geology_2009.pdf
Again, I can’t paste in the links, so they may or may not work.

Dr. Dave says:
Use of Mann’s 2008 temperature reconstruction seemed rather weak (if not entirely foolish). The statistical analysis seems a bit hinky to me, but I do not possess the expertise to challenge it.
+++++++++
If you are referring to the Dec 08 paper, it was dissected within 10 days of publication showing the trickery used to again suppress the magnitude of the MWP temperatures. The method used was to carefully select from a wide range of proxies, data that would give hockey stick-ish shapes while not being so wildly inaccurate as to place the confidence index at lower than 95%.
Using a filter mechanism, he selected enough data sets that when average, produced a 95% confidence index, but which still gave a suppressed MWP and an elevated modern era temperature. The paper discusses how he eliminated (undesirable) data sets and kept others.
As I recall the dissection looked at what happened if all the data, or the best data, or the most detailed data were used instead. The MWP reappears (as per usual) and the suppression of the MWP is lifted.
You will notice in the MM08 paper there is a lot of emphasis on the confidence index. He was playing the ‘95%’ card which is to say that by convention, something with a statistical confidence index of 95% is considered to be considered ‘true’ scientifically. The trick was to find data set selection criteria that would meet the double need for 95% confidence and a hockey stick shape. I was surprised that he put his name to a study that had such a hump of an MWP because it is much more pronounced that the 1998 paper where it was all but not there. Quite a climb down.

From the paper:

“Sea level in North Carolina was reconstructed using transfer functions
relating the distribution of salt-marsh foraminifera to tidal elevation (7, 12).
Application of transfer functions to samples from two cores (at sites 120 km
apart) of salt-marsh sediment provided estimates of PME with uncertainties
of <0.1 m. …"

From reading the study, I’m sorry but I fail to see the correlation between foraminifera and sea level. Can anyone explain the so-called “transfer functions”?

Floor Anthoni says:
June 20, 2011 at 1:45 pm
Measuring sea levels with salt-marsh foraminifera micro fossils is quite a sensitive and valid method to measure the depth of the sea bottom in the past. We should not, therefore suspect fraud in the data. However, this technique does not measure sea level, but marsh bottom instead. It is well known that marshes have been in-filling in modern times due to sedimentation from accelerated land erosion. What this report in essence measures, is the rate of land erosion, which has very little to do with sea level rise. That this fact is omitted from the paper may be called fraud.

This sounds like a much more credible explanation of the observed data. Thanks for the cogent argument.

Anthony,
I want ao take one step away from my Notes 1 & 2 above, as poorly formatted
as they have been, and toss an off-the-wall politcal comment into the ring:
This paper appears to be yet another part of the recent effort
to make Mike Mann’s original hockey stick, and subsequesnt Team studies which
include it’s data and/or conclusions even more critical to the academic,
scientific and political communities.
There are still petitions and letters circulating to challenge the FOI request
under court order at the University of Virginia, and another batch trying quash
the Virginia Attorney General’s inquiry.
Here in Ohio it’s now being proposed that our State University system be given
new leeway in NOT having to comply with our state’s Freedom of Informaton
Act and parts or our Open Meeting Act (ORC 121.22)
The sponsors don’t SAY this is in reaction to Mike Mann’s situation at the
University of Virginia, or that it’s even a response to the recent Ohio State/NCAA
sports program problems with it’s own little e-mail scandal.
Watch for more of these hide-the-sausage tactics between now and the end
of August.

My thoughts on “hockeysticks”
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/amending-the-past/#more-11786
Sorry. They just seem so darned non-intuitive to my simple engineering mind.

Should plot CO2 concentration from 1800 to 2011.5 vs sea level. You will see sea level rise started nearly 100 years before significant CO2 increase. Also during the 2000s the sea level and CO2 diverge once again. Bogus science once again by Mann’s team.

@- Jim Barker says:
June 20, 2011 at 4:32 pm
“I thought that some actual statisticians, some time ago, showed that by mis-application, statistics could make hockey-sticks out of any data set, even phone numbers from any phone book. Without even any need to cherry-pick.”
True, but the size of the ‘hockey stick’ blade produced by such mathematical missapplication is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the rise found in the actual data.

ferd berple says:
June 20, 2011 at 4:40 pm
A great post with a sensible observation.
Below is what I posted at Bishop Hill a couple of days ago.
“The Dieppe maps are a set of maps produced in Dieppe, France in the 16th century, thought to provide clues towards the Portuguese exploration of Australia’s east coast two hundred years before Captain Cook and even earlier than the first confirmed sighting of Australia by Jansz in his 1606 expedition along the eastern coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The maps show part of what might be Queensland, and name the land mass “Java a Grande “”
This map shows clearly Hervey Bay and Fraser Island and the smaller islands in Hervey Bay.
On my living room wall hangs, framed, two 19th century maps of Hervey Bay used by my Great Grandfather. The serveys were done by Captain Owen Stanley, and Matthew Flinders, and these 2 maps show the smaller islands in Hervey Bay as well.
Duck, Picnic, and Little Woody Islands are today are less than a meter above the high water mark.
Further, in my 67 years of fishing and collecting bait along the foreshore, I have not seen any change. I still collect shell fish for bait from the same rocks as I did 60 years ago.
My Question is, if the seas have gone up and down as much as we are led to believe, how come these low lying islands still exist after 500 years and seemingly unchanged.
If the seas have gone up and down, it hasn’t been by much !

Also, doesn’t the team say there is a ~30 year lag between when the CO2 is released into the environment and the time the warming shows up? I believe that’s the rational for why even if we stop emitting CO2 today we are going to be doomed to another 30+ years of ever increasing warming. Thus, since there is lag between CO2 release and temperature increase, should compensate the CO2 vs sea level graph by offsetting the CO2 rise by 30 years as well.

This paper looks and feels familiar – in the same way that most new bands first ‘hits’ are always similar sounding.
I have one message for Mr Mann
CHANGE THE FLIPPIN RECORD!

I do like the mention of a “Tump point”. According to my SOED, one meaning of the word “tump” is:
“Trivial writing, bad prose. (E20)”. How apt.

Where are the unconformities in these cores? In both cores, the average rate of accumulation of peat is 1 mm per year. It is beyond belief that these 1.5 and 3 meter stacks of muddy peat remained undisturbed by wildlife for 3000 years. A single turtle scooping out a nest or a heron chasing dinner would easily displace 2 inches of peat — oops there goes 50 years of data….
Where are the hurricane storm surges? I’m not asking much: One Cat 4+ hit every 50 years on average. That means there should be over 40 of them in each core.
The C14 error bars in Fig. 1 average about 200 years. These are likely not instrumentation problems. They are probably more indicitive of the degree of bioturbation of the peat. every layer of the core is a churned mix of the top 20 cm of peat. Instead of a nice undisturbed tree core to analyze tree rings, the authors are faced with trying to make dendochron sense from a pile of sawdust turned into press board.
Core B, btw 1.45 and 1.15 m (30 cm) spans according to the C14 data about 900 years, so the RSL rate is only 1/3 of the average. They couldn’t bring themselves to change the slope of their line from 300 to 1200 AD, which would probabably point to a fall in GIA after correcting for subsidence.. They could only increase their error band. You sure don’t see and change in slope in Fig 2 RSL plot — nice and straight, constand rate of change.
Do we have another instance of “hiding in plain sight”? Core B (Turning Point) on Fig 2 RSL has a minimum date of 800 AD. But if you go back to the B chart of Fig 1, the minimum error bar goes to 600 AD. But if you honor the C14 data, you ought to carry it left to about 300 AD. Interesting that the RSL graph inset (B) sits atop where these earlier data points for Core B should plot, say 400 AD at RSL 1.4 m. The curves would not look like the agree so well any more.

He’s a “one trick poney” with these hockeystick graphs.

This paper is utter pap and yet another example to those with open minds of the nonsense that Team AGW is spouting. Once again they rely on the laughable Church and White tide gauge data which has never been corroborated by any other researcher. The proxies they use do not corroborate with each other but nevertheless they have somehow managed to come up with a linear trend. The two sites they have chosen do not corroborate each other but somehow they have concluded they are a model for the rest of the globe. To achieve this astounding result they had to give all the data to a person who is known not for his ability as a statistician but because of his involvement in highly contraversial analysis techniques, despite recent advice that this kind of data should in fact be analysed by proper statistiticians.
If this research was given to me by a student I would simply throw it back in his face. It is lazy and ill-conceived and appears to have been thrown together deliberately in order to support a pre-determined outcome.
It doesn’t surprise me that Penn State is involved in this fiasco again, but what does surprise me that other reputable scientists are so willing to sit back and watch this kind of dreadful hysterical tripe be publised without so much as raising their eyebrows. Meanwhile those that do stand up to attack this kind of bullshit are branded as “dangerous deniers” that put the lives of millions at risk and have their reputations trashed in the mass media.

Bob Tisdale says:
June 21, 2011 at 1:49 am
Hmmm. Isn’t that interesting. I’ve just scrolled through the comments and I didn’t notice any trolls defending this paper.
Should I be pleased you no longer consider me a troll?
I took issue with the accusations of cherry picking and particularly wirth the guy who seemed to think that two photographs somehow prove that the 4 inches or so of warming claimed for the last 50 yesars an’t possibly have happened.
I have a serious question for you all: Irrespective of what you think of Mann et al, why do “regular commentators” here not call each other on obvious nonsense like that? It would strengthen your case if you did.

This guy opened his mouth again and proved he is a data manipulator working backwards from his bosses suggested answer. His income is derived from his scientific credentials that have been shattered by his own petty ego driven hacked emails. This is so laughable it’s silly. It’s clear this work is based on cherry picked data smoothed and adjusted to support the answer already disproved. Sad.

The eastern seaboard is a passive continental margin that is subsiding at variable rates locally.
Long­Term Sea­Level and Dynamic Topography of the Eastern United States
David Rowley argued that the results obtained from mantle flow simulations show that eustatic sea-level cannot be derived from continental margins because of the influence of dynamic topography. For the Eastern coast of the United States, variations of the sea-level only represent local variations. Other authors (e.g. Müller et al, 2008;
Spasojevic et al., 2008) came to the same conclusion as Rowley while using Miller et al. (2005) data taken from an assumed passive margin in New Jersey thought to represent eustatic sea-level. They both used a mantle convection model and came to the conclusion that the discrepancies between their results and those of Miller et al. (2005) could be explained by dynamic topography.
http://eps.mcgill.ca/~courses/c666/Rowley_Report_Final.pdf
David Rowley has been a professor and faculty member at the University of Chicago since 1993, his current research deals with mantle dynamics related to dynamic topography, modelling of global plate kinematics with links to geodynamics, long-term sea level variation, and reconstructing global paleogeographic evolution.

Independent of my belief that tying the North Carolina coastline (a barrier island, salt marsh ecosystem) SLR directly to Global Warming without considering other causes such as land use, dredging, sea grass mortality, fresh water erosion, hurricanes, etc. is naive, the NC Sea-Level Assessment Report of 2010 (not the study headlining this post) clearly states that predictions of future SLR are based on the ASSUMPTION that the rate of Global Warming over the next 90-years will “accelerate”, and therefore so will the “consequent” SLR in NC. They provide a range of SLR based on three “acceleration” scenarios. If acceleration of global warming , as the sole causal factor, does not occur then all bets are off. Moreover, I have not verified this but if no global warming has occurred in the last decade, and Sea Level in NC is still rising, then the stated causal relationship link is broken.
The Report states:
“It is important to understand that the curves were generated using a constant acceleration rate to reach the selected endpoints derived from the literature, and are not projections of actual sea level at specific future dates.”
http://dcm2.enr.state.nc.us/slr/NC%20Sea-Level%20Rise%20Assessment%20Report%202010%20-%20CRC%20Science%20Panel.pdf
Best,
J.

I have never been to a political rally in my life, but if someone can organise it I’LL BE THERE just let me know where and when.

In the matter of ordinary people’s observations of sea level rise, there is a serious conceptual problem that the Warmista must address. If a rise of six inches over a century is undetectable by a person who was at the site for 95 of those years, then why should we expect a rise of two feet to be detectable? If a rise of two feet is not detectable, then why should we care about it? At some point, the scientist who wants to be believed must address the experience of the ordinary citizen.

Assuming a linear trend?
I assume a linear trend between their funding and the hockey schtick temperature curve. And I think my assumption has the higher probability of being correct. Somehow I fail to assume anything else.