In China, there are no hockey sticks

ob says:
December 8, 2011 at 12:57 am
i’d love to know what mcintyre and jeff id think about that reconstruction. guess they would debunk it.
well they would debunk it if the people that did this used bad science or made major mistakes. they look at things to see if it is scientifically valid or not if not they call it out.

Of course people here fail to talk about the sample depth in the W3 and W4 warming periods.
See figure 4. The sample depth there is Less than Yamal.
reading the paper helps.

Matt says: “Does Bull stand for bulletin or bullshit? – ”
If you knew anything about science, you would not find it necessary to ask that question.

Re: “And thank god someone is doing a Fourier Analysis instead of this statistical drivel about principal components. Given we live of a rotating planet with a large orbiting satellite and are part of a spinning and orbiting solar system with all this evidence of cyclical effects from sun spots to whatever , the idea that one would not go to a Fourier Analysis FIRST is simply mad or utterly incompetent as far as I can see. Me, I am and engineer who chases vibration signals and ocean wave spectra but what would I know?”
This whole CAGW nonsense just makes me grind my teeth. I thought for sure that this *must* have been done (Fourier) and that it came up empty. However, I was on the verge of dragging out my textbooks and doing it myself because it only makes sense and since they got everything else wrong, maybe they messed this up too. I guess they did.
My experience with real world data is that signals work just the way we see here. I think it is likely to be real. I expect this will be replicated and confirmed. Once this has been shown to match up with other data sets, we will have about as good an answer as we are going to get. The rest of the short term variability is likely not predictable except for very short term weather prediction as we have it now.
The CAGW hypothesis does not pass the ‘smell test’ in many different ways. I never gave it any credence at all. It was not until Climagegate that I paid much attention to it. It is nonsense on its face. Since then, though, I have done a little digging and followed CA/WUWT/JoNova for the past couple of years. This particular thread and its comments that I am responding to here is a nice little view on the problem. People have said that they don’t trust the Fourier analysis. WTF? This is absolutely the ideal circumstance to do such a thing and it is plain that it works. Fourier analysis does not and cannot attribute causes to the signals. That has no effect at all on its predictive power as can be clearly seen in the paper under discussion. The analysis predicts that those are the component signals. Next steps are to identify the underlying causes and I would predict, as implied by the posting I quote above, that they will be ‘cyclical’. The obvious things to investigate are things that periodically affect the light we get from the sun. Seems to me that includes stuff like gravitational effects on planetary orbits.
I quoted the comment above, because it expresses a sentiment similar to mine that the CAGW analysis is simply illiterate. Where do you start? McIntyre was, so I understand, immediately aware that something was wrong when he saw the ‘hockey stick’. Me too. The curve did not look like anything I see in real data sets. A brief inspection of what is known about this stuff shows this one curve in conflict with just about everything we know. You don’t even see the hockey team themselves promoting this original ridiculous graph any more, even though they claim it was fundamentally correct. What they are showing in places like Wikipedia now, though still misleading, is closer to reality and contrary to their claims that the original hockey stick is vindicated, their new ‘hockey stick’ is not nearly as pathological as the old one. In some ways, the original ‘hockey stick’ was “not even wrong”. It was incoherent.
I have not done a fit to the original curve, but eyeballing the original hockey stick blade, the original has been refuted by the last decade of empirical data as supplied by the planet itself. Would it not be considerably warmer already if they had been correct? There is no reasonable defense of the original, but the alarmist camp persists.
Why would the alarmists keep going back to ‘warmest decade on record’ as if this is somehow remarkable? That is the way sinusoidal curves work. If we were near the high point of a sinusoidal curve we would expect exactly what we see. In fact, were we still climbing the curve, we would be expecting to be setting new highs constantly. The fact that we are not is an indication that we are near the top or even past the top and on the way down. This is absolutely the commonplace situation that anyone with a bachelor’s degree in a real science or engineering or even pure mathematics would expect. The ‘climate scientists’ must have missed a few classes or be fibbing. Likely both.
The ‘hockey stick’ graph was wrong. Similarly, the ‘hide the decline’ graphs are wrong and just as obviously so. In fact, the error/deceit is even more obviously wrong on both scores where it has been criticized. You can’t honestly stitch a second data set measuring something else on to a graph. I realize that their data is sketchy, but this does not improve it in any way. As a whole, the spaghetti graph is absolutely dishonest. The addition of different data is wrong, but you can maybe understand why people would be confused by the rationale provided. The deletion of the data at the end of the set being graphed is wrong, at least at an undergraduate level and I doubt even a good high school would tolerate it. My old one wouldn’t. Choosing end-points that you know or should know are not appropriate for the thing you are illustrating is also dishonest. Putting everything together in a single graph and pretending that the monster you have created is a result of the underlying data is academic fraud. Unless and until the perpetrators are called up on the carpet for this, it besmirches the entire scientific enterprise. If you are involved in ‘science’, your reputation is taking a hit over this.
There have been many references to the old chestnut “if you torture data long enough, eventually it will confess”. If you keep re-choosing starting points and end points and do things like the IPCC’s mutant math, you get howlers like this: “The linear warming trend over the last 50 years is nearly twice that for the last 100 years”. If you look at the treatment of the topic at WUWT (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/12/the-new-math-ipcc-version/), it is plain that the ‘scientists’ at the IPCC flunk high school math. The hockey team specializes in misleading half-truths and I find it impossible to attribute all of that to incompetence. To be sure, they are incompetent enough to think that their sophistry is convincing to educated non-experts. It clearly is not. However they can’t consistently choose the mistakes that support the lie without being somewhat committed to the lie itself.
When you look at real data that contains a real signal, the signal is fairly easy to find and not very ambiguous. There *is* a signal in the climate data and the signal looks, I expect, very much like the paper under discussion (Lui et al 2011). Rather than some arcane sequence of ‘torture’ a la Michael Mann, Lui et al have done what I would do and what my engineer friend above would do FIRST and they appear to have gotten an excellent match to the data with a predictive fit that I find convincing. Real data and real data analysis looks like this, not like the ‘hockey stick’ or the ‘hide the decline’ graphs.
I apologize for the long TL/DR rant covering ground covered over and over and OVER by the skeptical community. Like our engineer friend above (note: I don’t know any non-climate-skeptic engineers), I find the analysis or lack thereof by ‘climate scientists’ unconvincing. Actually, I find it irritatingly witless.
The Lui et al paper is a bracing breath of fresh air and LONG overdue. This paper may well mark a turning point in this dreadful political episode. Even for non-interested people with a technical background, this must be infinitely more compelling than ‘CO2 forcing’ pushing climate to a catastrophic tipping point.
The CAGW ‘climate science’ climate zombie has proven extremely adept at popping nails from its coffin, but I have a good feeling that this one may stick.