Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In three previous posts here, here, and here, I discussed problems with the paper by Shakun et al., “Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation” (PDF,hereinafter S2012)
Commenters said, and reasonably so, that I had not fully addressed their claim that warming progressed from south to north. Their Figure 5a shows the trends by latitude band. It purports to show that the further north, the later the warming.
Figure 1. Figure 5a from S2012. ORIGINAL CAPTION: Figure 5 | Temperature change before increase in CO2 concentration. a, Linear temperature trends in the proxy records from 21.5ā19 kyr ago (red) and 19ā17.5 kyr ago (blue) averaged in 10Ā° latitude bins with 1 sigma uncertainties.
Now, that seems pretty clear. Less blue and more red as you go up towards the north pole. What could be wrong with that? Well, as usual, nature is not that neat. When you look at it closely, it’s nowhere near as clear as that chart seems to indicate.
The first thing that’s wrong is that out of the fourteen bands with data, only five of them show a significant difference between the early trends (21.5 to 19 thousand years ago [kyr BP]) and the late trends (19 to 17.5 thousand years ago [kyr BP]). In the other nine bands, the uncertainties overlap, so we can’t even say if they are different. (The uncertainties for each band are shown as red and blue long thin lines with short vertical ends.) As a result, they are meaningless, and should not be shown.
But that’s just a symptom of the real problem, which is that there is very little data in many latitude bands, and the proxies are very different from each other.
To investigate each of the bands, I started by expressing all of the temperatures as anomalies around the average temperature from 21.5 to 17.5 kyr BP. Then I divided them by bands and graphed them. Figure 2 shows the results for the Northern Hemisphere.
Figure 2. Trends by latitude band. The background colors correspond with Figure 1, with red for 21.5 to 19 kyr BP, and blue for 19 to 17.5 kyr BP. Dark red lines are centered Gaussian averages of the individual proxies, with the data shown by the green squares.Ā
Let me discuss these panel by panel. First, let me note an oddityāwhy is the early period longer than the later period? But I digress …
Panel a: Only two proxies, and one of them has a hump right at 19 kyr BP.
Panel b: Five proxies. Three have a hump right at 19 kyr BP.
Panel c: Two proxies. One is dead level, one rises during the later (blue) period.
Panel d: Three proxies, but one of them starts just before 19 kyr BP. Seriously, folks, do you think an average of these is meaningful?
Panel e: Hard to tell what’s happening here. Several of the proxies go either up or down just after 19 kyr BP.
Panel f: All trends in the blue section are about the same, except the poor proxy taking a dive right after 19 kyr BP
Panel g: Another goofy one. Right after 19 kyr BP, two of the proxies head for the sky.
Panel h: No trend before, no trend after.
Figure 3. As in Figure 2, but for the Southern Hemisphere
Again, by panel.
Panel a: Not much difference, red or blue period.
Panel b: Three proxies. Two go up at 19 kyr BP. One goes down at 19 kyr BP. Is this supposed to be meaningful?
Panel c: Three proxies. Neither the red period nor the blue period shows much.
Panel d: Two proxies. Two. One goes up after 19 kyr BP. So what?
Panel e: Here, a lot of the proxies have a low point at about 19 kyr BP … and they have a high point about 500 years before that.
Panel f: These four, all ice cores from Antarctica, agree pretty well. However, only one of them has a significant trend, and that only in the blue area.
Now, to me those results don’t mean much. Of the eighty proxies, only eight of them have a significant trend in both the red and blue periods … and that’s without adjusting for autocorrelation. The proxies show no clear pattern. They are too varied, and too few, to tell us much of anything.
Let me close with what may be a more revealing graph, dividing the globe up into 45Ā° latitudinal bands.
Ā 
Figure 4. S2012 proxies divided into four bands. Colors go from blue at the north pole, to yellow at the equator, and end up with red at the south pole.
Let me say that Panel a shows something very curious. The rise in temperature started quite early the two Greenland proxies … and timing of the others are all over the map. I can’t see how that supports any claim of late warming in the north.
BOTTOM LINE: I see no evidence in any these latitudinal bands of proxies to support the claim that the warming progressed northwards. It certainly may have done so … but these proxies are not useful for supporting that claim.
My goodness, I certainly hope that I’m done with these proxies.
w.
Come on Mr. Eschenbach: Don’t brabble here too long about the Shakun paper.
If the Shakun paper is so full of mistakes. Just submit the rebutal to Nature magazine and ask for the chief editor’s resignation, because the peer-review process clearly failed here.
Correction: Rebuttal not rebutal.
It’s sad when all that is necessary to disprove a point is to do a full graph of the data proported to prove it.
So nobody found these issues in peer review?
jeff 5778 says:
So nobody found these issues in peer review?
That was a rhetorical question, right?
A better observation would be that these are the problems that inevitably crop up in papers when “pal” review is substituted for peer review.
jeff 5778 says:
April 11, 2012 at 6:55 am
So nobody found these issues in peer review?
_____________________________
It is not peer review it is PAL review and that is why submitting a rebuttal to Nature Magazine will be completely ignored.
You can see the “gatekeeping” in this selection of e-mails: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/06/250-plus-noteworthy-climategate-2-0-emails/
(Just do a search for gatekeeping)
The CO2 increase starts at 17.4 Kya (not between 19.0 Kya and 17.5 Kya) so the temperature increases lagging CO2 have to start after the blue section, not inside it. I’m not sure what Shakun what trying to show with the blue versus red Trend C/Kyr-1.
Over the last century, GISS data support the claim that the Arctic is especially prone to warming.
Trouble is, the data has been fiddled, with mid-20th century temperatures depressed by sleight of hand: http://endisnighnot.blogspot.com/2012/03/giss-strange-anomalies.html
You left off the Sarc tag. Admittedly he COULD submit a rebuttal, but given history, what chance would there be that it would be accepted and printed by Nature? And if, as is likely, it were published in another journal, you know that the response would be, a) why was it refused by Nature and b) everyone knows journal Y is owned by big oil.
The fact is that until there’s a cleansing of the Augean stables of the CAGW crowd, blogs like Climate Audit and WUWT ARE the journals of record.
All too often lately ‘peer-review’ of papers is done by indentured servants (graduate students or post-docs), in the names of their masters (research professors whose reputations warrant their selection as reviewing ‘peers’). The professors themselves are far too busy (usually re-reading papers those same students have written which will eventually be published with the professor’s name as lead author) to review papers written primarily by another professor’s students.
Thanks Willis for your excellent review of this paper.
My goodness, Iām certainly hope that Iām done with these proxies.
=======================
Me too! LOL
..cause I’m hoping you’ll tackle the latest retroactive sea level adjustments
I am sure the grant justified the conclusions, or the conclusions justified the grant. Some of these guys must must have business cards stating, “Will research for money. Your results guaranteed.”
So nobody found these issues in peer review?
It’s not surprising that they didn’t. A reviewer doesn’t actually generally try to replicate and extend the results — no time and that’s as much work as the original researcher did if not more. If they had some reason to doubt the results or the quality of the work they might do this sort of thing, but otherwise one generally assumes the competence and honesty of the author and looks to see if their arguments are sound and clear, not necessarily if they are correct.
rgb
Unfortunately, I don’t have time right now to look at this, so I will just raise the question:
I am wondering how they derived their (bar) graph.
My *guess* is that the N hemisphere data is dominated by some form of proxy which is not present, or only rarely, in the S hemisphere.
Throw out, or weight proxies to get an even N-S distribution of proxies, and I bet the skew disappears.
“jeff 5778 says:
April 11, 2012 at 6:55 am
So nobody found these issues in peer review?”
——————————————————————
Of course not.
What you thought Peer Review checked the science? Then you have been fooled by the paper mills. Peer Review does no such thing.
Thanks Willis. Any further examination may be labeled necroscopy!
“So nobody found these issues in peer review?”
Well its a bit like Nelson at Copenhagen, what’s at issue is the motivation to look and then to see the signal……
It is time to promote a new higher quality mark than peer reviewed: willis reviewed
Faster to.
Jeff,
If this paper was submitted for no other reason than to set the scene prior to Rio then no one will be looking for any errors in the paper. It is submitted for no other reason than to support the green advocacy that will come out of Rio.
Mailman
Will well done and thank you.
It’s sad that in the real word 2+2 = 4 – simple I know but to the Shakun’s of the world they are so desperate that they will torture a factās so it suits their own predetermined outcome.
Even though it is obviously a lie, a manipulation and a fraud. But they don’t release these so called Studyās for us (Sceptics) they produce them for the grants, travel and rewards of alarmism. Their fiction is a Frankenstein of fiction blended none to skilfully with science = an inconvenient D grade movie! They produce this garbage for the sheeple, the converted, the blind and the stupid, who also have the power and the purse strings to keep this hoax going.
So: To a Sceptics and 99.99999 % of the worlds population, 2+2 = 4
To Shakun’s and the other nefarious actors 2+2 = can be 5 or any number they choose.
Such is the state of climate science to day!
Robbie may believe the Shakun paper is a “dead horse” by now with WUWT multi-coverage, but until “professors of climate or earth science” like Jeremy Shakun at both Harvard U and Columbia U stand down from their spurious claims, they deserve heaps and heaps of exposure and ridicule. We already know that Nature Magazine is a rag for CAGW; there will be no peer review worthy of the name coming from Nature. The focus should be on our universities, the professors of pseudo-science therefrom, and the negligent education budding scientists have received since the 1990s and are receiving today. Every baseless or questionable claim and/or method should given the fine-tooth-comb treatment and no one does it like WUWT.
Also think of the millions (billions) of dollars (taxpayer, mostly) going to spurious “science” and be grateful for these attempts to correct the balance.
Thanks to Anthony, Willis, and others we have science, especially earth and climate science, to read, consider, discuss, and debate.
My observation of peer review is that the reviewers mainly look to make sure any and all of their own papers even remotely related to the topic are cited in the text.
“If they had some reason to doubt the results or the quality of the work they might do this sort of thing, but otherwise one generally assumes the competence and honesty of the author and looks to see if their arguments are sound and clear, not necessarily if they are correct.”
My question was only partly rhetorical. Maybe I am naive. Willis makes it look so easy. I would be embarrassed if I were the author(s).
Thanks for the replies.
Gives new meaning to an old term “Shakun Bake” when applied to “climate science” diastrophism. Good job, Willis, on this and prior expose`s. Most incisive!
Willis,
Your last line reads funny.
“My goodness, Iām certainly hope that Iām done with these proxies.”
[REPLY] Thanks, fixed. -w.
Willis,
I’m almost certain a rebuttal sent to Nature would fail but send it anyway for the record and later post it on WUWT.
Someday Winston, you will understand CO2 can and does do whatever Big Brother says it does.
We just have to re-educate you, that’s all. You’ll see………..someday.
Well done. A good illustration of what can be done by simple data analysis methods, using good displays and lucid supporting descriptions. But it can take a great of hard work and steady concentration to get there and then make it look simple! I am impressed, and I think at this stage in the approach to AR5 it is particularly important to get penetrating reviews of papers which the agenda-pushers of the IPCC are likely to seize upon for their next wave of machinations.
OK, so something happened at 19 kyr BP, was that the point of the paper?
Why bother with Nature, crowd source a paper that deconstructs the whole thing. Until the journals fix themselves, ignore them.
I await the ritual debunking of this by the folks at SkS…
Two things we can be sure of are:
i) The BBC and other pro-CAGW organisations will not be taking notice of, or publishing, Willis’ findings.
ii) The next IPCC fantasy report will include the Shakun report, but can be guaranteed to ignore the shredding of its findings by Willis and other commentators.
Jimbo says:
April 11, 2012 at 8:44 am
I agree, Jimbo. They do have to reply, don’t they? And if they don’t reply, that’s an indicative response, too.
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present ā and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
-Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, Dartmouth College, 1961
“If you want to get laid, go to college; if you want an education, go to the library.”
-Frank Zappa
I am sure Shakun is aware of Willis’ rebuttals. If his research is so sound then why doesn’t he post a counter here on WUWT and show us why and how his conclusions are valid.
Come on Mr. Eschenbach: Donāt brabble here too long about the Shakun paper.
If the Shakun paper is so full of mistakes. Just submit the rebutal to Nature magazine and ask for the chief editorās resignation, because the peer-review process clearly failed here.
“peer review”..what an absolute FRAUD. More like “tribal approval process”.
NO ONE in the “peer review” ever goes into these papers in this depth. PEER REVIEW IS COMPLETE NONSENSE!
And the other problem with these sort of NONSENSE DATA REVIEWS PARADING AS “SCIENCE” is that they are INHERENTLY WORTHLESS.
There are far too many variables and the data is far to NOISEY to really see anything.
It’s like saying, “It’s summer, it’s warm..” It’s winter, it’s cold.
Mental “self gradification” for those who can’t build, can’t design, and can’t do real research. (I recommend looking at the work of Dr. Stephan Hell, Max Planck, with regard “Breaking the Abbe Limit”, or Kawanee Bohanden of Stanford (Brains in Silicon), or the work of Dr. Barry Marshall (H. Pylori bacterial, Nobel Prize, Medicine, 2005) to find out what REAL science is about.)
Max
Peer review is not nonsense: it is a necessary filter to keep the nutters out of the scientific press. At the same time, one does not expect the Reviewer to check the paper’s arithmetic, or soil samples, or observations: that would be to do as much, or more, than the original author. Peer review is a sanity check, not a guarantee of truthfulness or accuracy.
That said, it does seem that the system can be corrupted, or – less seriously – just get sloppy. But Quis Custodiet ipsos Custodes? Can we peer review the Peer Reviewers?
āSo nobody found these issues in peer review?ā
Well, I’ve done my share of “peer-reviewing” for engineering journals (it was simply called “reviewing”).
What I have always understood was required was a statement to the editor:
– This paper is worth publishing as it contains original material of value to the readership (either as it is or with minor changes)
OR
– It would be worth publishing if re-written, bearing in mind the following things (X,Y, Z)
OR
It should be rejected for the following reason (not original, erroneous, outside the scope of the journal – maybe submit to journal J)
A reviewer will check that the paper is well structured so that it flows logically, that it makes proper reference to related work by other authors with appropriate references. They will point out any errors they have noticed and minor improvements that could be made.
I think it would be very unusual, in any field, for a reviewer to attempt to duplicate the work as a check. If others could not reproduce the work – a complete rarity in normal physical science – this would eventually lead to “communications to the editor” discussing the problem. An editor would normally forward such communications to the original authors for their comments, which very often will be published together with the “communication to the editor”.
Tom_R says:
April 11, 2012 at 8:19 am
My observation of peer review is that the reviewers mainly look to make sure any and all of their own papers even remotely related to the topic are cited in the text.
Yes! Although reviewers are supposed to be anonymous, you can often figure out who they are by their insistence that paper X, Y and Z (by a particular author) should be cited.
The way this is playing out makes me think that “peer review” is practised at a local sports bar featuring half priced drinks between 5-7pm. We would know for sure if there were stains on the paper from the chicken wings!
@ Brent Hargreaves …
well done !
(same to you, Willis ! … š … )
Willis Eschenbach: In the other nine bands, the uncertainties overlap, so we canāt even say if they are different. (The uncertainties for each band are shown as red and blue long thin lines with short vertical ends.) As a result, they are meaningless, and should not be shown.
The conclusion is to strong. For an analogy, consider two groups at risk for a disease, one of which has been vaccinated (or otherwise treated, say aspirin for heart attack), the other not. After a week, there is no difference between the groups, after a month mabey a little difference, etc. Eventually the difference is clear and statistically significant with p < 0.0001. It would be foolish to suppress the intermediate stages where there is no statistically significant difference. Rather, you should model the result as a function of duration, and estimate the statistical significance of the duration. In this case, you should model the warming as a function of distance from Antarctica.
Further, you say that there are not enough proxies with enough global coverage. Well sure: this is a pioneering study. Its results should encourage other groups of people to conduct the follow-up studies. It took more than 1 study to confirm the effects of aspirin in reducing heart attack and stroke rates.
Everything that is known is known through proxies, such as mercury expansion for temperature increase. The only scientific questions are the reliability and accuracy of the estimated proxy relationships.
oops, I do not mean that “you should model the warming as a function of distance” as an imperative, only that it is the functional relationship over the whole range that matters, not exactly which intermediate distances produce statistically distinguishable effects.
Hopefully this analysis of these proxies will end up in an easily accessed and cross referenced database to prevent similar errors in the future. Quality control and verification is the only way to improve accuracy of future studies and predictions.
Willis, you shook this paper to death. All in all, some very nice deconstructing. I don’t think peer review was ever meant to be as thorough as this. I wonder how many climate science papers would survive this level of analysis?
Still, I think the Shakun et el paper was a worthy publication. It really stirred things up, the thought that CO2 may have led us out of the last ice age. So maybe shaken, not turd.
Martin A’s comments on the peer review process are very useful, and confirm the expectations I would have, having reviewed documents in a commercial environment. It’s a sanity check but not a confirmation that the paper is correct..
However, once a paper is published, the “it’s been peer reviewed” mantra is used to imply that the reviewers endorse its conclusions.
So either peer review is a thorough review of the paper’s methods and conclusions so that the authors can legitimately claim that the reviewers endorse it, or it’s a review of methods that weeds out poor science without endorsing the content. The scientific world can’t have it both ways: a simple sanity check not intended to find errors in the results and a full endorsement of content.
My observation of peer review is that the reviewers mainly look to make sure any and all of their own papers even remotely related to the topic are cited in the text.
Naaaa, not so much. Look, I review papers in physics, not exactly all of the time, but at least occasionally. I review papers in a certain narrow range of statistics as well. Editors choose reviewers in lots of ways, but they don’t necessarily send a paper to be reviewed by either a competitor or a star in the field or a “pal” of the author, as many have alleged above. Yes, I think there is evidence that gatekeeping is alive and well and living on Nature’s editorial board, but it isn’t universal or even particularly common across the board. Even at Nature, everything isn’t about the climate.
“Usually” an editor will pick somebody who is participatory and knowledgeable enough to be able to see if egregious claims are being made or blatent errors being asserted, but who is not directly affirmed or challenged by the work being reviewed. They may or may not also send it to an interested or party — rather more likely if the work is highly critical of somebody or their work or conclusions — but they then read the resulting comments with a grain of salt.
If I were reviewing Shakun’s paper, I wouldn’t be inclined to reject it. At most I would pass back some questions, things that they (he) didn’t look at that might be interesting or things about the results they present that might be questionable. I certainly wouldn’t — as part of the review process — go to download the data and work through it myself as Willis has done to see if I can or cannot tell a different story from the same data. There may be many stories that can be told from the data, and it is up to the reader to judge which stories make sense and hence support the conclusions the authors offer and which ones do not. A referee review should not itself be a rebuttal article — it should confine itself to a narrow critique not of the conclusion but of the methodology and support offered.
As I’ve pointed out and suggested (as have many others) there is nothing stopping Willis from taking the Shakun data, augmenting it with data from other sources (as he has done), and writing his own paper and arriving at his own conclusions. Those conclusions can also either be framed as “rebutting Shakun” or “conclusions in and of themselves”. To be honest, given the extension of the results with the additional CO_2 data (and perhaps the further extension up to the modern era instead of stopping mid-Holocene), and the distinct methodology used to both present and analyze the results, I think it should rather be a paper in its own right, not a “refutation” paper. In fact, it would be most effective by simply presenting all of the data just as Willis has presented it and asserting no conclusion, asserting the null conclusion that it is not possible to infer from the data whether CO_2 fully lagged or fully led temperature, that there is no particularly convincing scheme of southern warming preceding northern warming on a global basis, that CO_2 clearly followed temperature (and not the other way around) across the Younger Dryas, that CO_2 and temperature have if anything countervaried across most of the Holocene, that the temperatures now are not the warmest encountered in the Holocene, and that all of these statements are still rather dubious as global statements because the proxy sites are tremendously biased with respect to coastal, inland, and oceanic and do not uniformly sample latitudes.
That kind of paper would actually have a rather good chance of being accepted, actually. First of all, it is saying nothing that any given reviewer doesn’t already know — that the data is weak to support any sort of definite conclusion. That this overrides Shakun is almost irrelevant — simply pointing out the lack of samples from continental interiors or mid-ocean locations makes that a foregone conclusion anyway. The main point is that by presenting only “cooked” figures — the results of some partially specified aggregation processes — Shakun may have been misled by their own methodology, not from malice or confirmation bias but by simply not looking at the actual data as thoroughly as Willis has, or in the same way. By presenting the data itself in a digestible form, the reviewer can really decide for themselves what, if anything, it means.
rgb
Septic Matthew/Matthew R Marler says:
April 11, 2012 at 10:10 am
…you should model the result as a function of duration, and estimate the statistical significance of the duration. In this case, you should model the warming as a function of distance from Antarctica.
———————————————————
This is problematic. If you review each proxy individually you will see good correlation with the Antarctic as you move further north. But some proxies, even close by, are quite different. So already you have a problem (further proxies being more highly correlated to the Antarctic than local proxies). So what to do? You can throw all the proxies into an averaging filter and pull them out in slices of latitude (what Shakun et al did) or you can cry foul (kind of what Willis did) and claim the proxies can’t be combined.
It would be worthwhile to select bands of constant latitude and then move northward from Antarctica to the Arctic showing how the proxies change. I’m not sure they would withstand that analysis. And if they wouldn’t why do we think they would be any better if we lumped them all together?
The other issue I have with global averaging is whether the earth can even be treated as being relatively uniform. Taking proxies along an ocean shore is one thing, but what about the entire mountain range of North and South America? Does this have any effect on climate? Or most of China, Russia and Europe? Almost all of Canada and the continental US? There is virtualy no data in any of these places (i.e. where people live). In fact the sampling density of the Shakun paper is the exact opposite to that of the world land based temperature record (which is dominated by American sites). Does leaving these entire regions out have any effect on the climate proxies?
Imagine if you were estimating race or skin color (not that we are allowed to do that anymore). What would happen if you left out only two countries out of 200 – say China and India. Would that make a difference? Is the climate record like that? Or is it so uniform that sampling basis (huge in the Shakun study) is not an issue. And if that is true why do many of the proxies vary so greatly over a relatively short distance?
Mr. Eschenbach, I have never seen such a complete and total evisceration of any piece of so-called scientific study as your series on this paper.
Well done!
Sorry, should have been bands of constant longitude.
Yet another bogus study by some lame propagandists with their freshly minted PhDs earned at an ultra-lefty universities whos proffesors were much more interested in insurring that the students learn to think like Marxist ( and thus vote “correctly”) then to think like scientist.
Dang, I sure hope my new glasses get here soon …….
pyromancer76: You are talking nonsense. Debunking a paper in a blog is easy, but to debunk it in a peer-reviewed paper is something different. This is how science is done the right way. Beat them at their own terms. As long as the skeptics are not willing to do that they have no credible case and will never be taken seriously.
It is impossible to get around the data Mr. Eschenbach has presented here in different blogs on WUWT. Even a magazine like Nature cannot and will not reject the factual evidence (if true and honest) presented here by Mr. Eschenbach.
However if Nature chooses to do so. Their rejection of the submitted paper should be made publicly available on WUWT to show that the credibility of the magazine is questionable.
Come on Mr. Eschenbach: Be a man and submit the paper. You are spending an awful lot of time writing these Shakun blogs. So it should be easy to write a simple rebuttal to Nature. Science is not done via blogs but by peer-reviewed magazines.
Latitude says:
April 11, 2012 at 7:25 am
Which ones are those, and do you have a citation?
Thanks,
w.
Steve from Rockwood: So already you have a problem (further proxies being more highly correlated to the Antarctic than local proxies). So what to do? You can throw all the proxies into an averaging filter and pull them out in slices of latitude (what Shakun et al did) or you can cry foul (kind of what Willis did) and claim the proxies canāt be combined.
Do more studies, formulate and test hypotheses, and investigate what relationships you can. For example, at the latitude of Buenos Aires, what differences are there at the longitudes of Buenos Aires, the pampas, the peak of the Andes, and the longitude of Sucre and of Santiago? If the warming was generally from the south to the north, it surely wasn’t exactly the same on the mountain spine of N. and S. America as through the central Pacific, but neither could it have been too discrepant over long distances and long time spans if there was “global warming” in that direction.
Robbie says:
April 11, 2012 at 12:40 pm
Oh, my dear friend, it’s a good thing I haven’t gotten my coffee this morning or I might have ruined my keyboard. You really haven’t been around climate science long, have you?
I submitted a paper a while ago to AGU about how to handle gaussian or other averaging at the beginning and end of the dataset. It discussed Michael Mann’s crazy ideas about how to handle averaging at the beginning and end.
They rejected my paper. Six months later Mike Mann wrote a slightly changed version of my paper and AGU published it. You can’t convince me that a) I didn’t get published because of my unorthodox beliefs, or that b) one of the reviewers didn’t give my paper to Mann, who saw that I had eviscerated his previous ideas, so Mann claimed my work as his own. Pathetic.
So yes, even a magazine like Nature can reject true, honest factual evidence. And not only that, but they may give your ideas to someone else to claim credit for.
w.
Thanks for the reply Mr. Eschenbach, but I don’t belief that Nature will reject your paper on dubious grounds or give the ideas to somebody else, because you already secured your standpoint via WUWT in your blogs. So fraudulent behaviour by the magazine will be impossible.
If they resort to fraudulent behaviour you can sue them for that. Proof enough on WUWT. They would have no case and lose the lawsuit.
If you would have secured the submitted AGU paper than Mann could not have conducted fraudulent behaviour with your rejected results.
In short Mr. Eschenbach: Beat these people on their own terms. In science and not in blogs. That’s not the way. BĆ¼ntgen et al 2012, Xia 2012 were also published. I don’t see no reason why your results won’t be published.
So: Publish, publish, publish.
>>(The uncertainties for each band are shown as red and blue long thin lines with short vertical ends.) As a result, they are meaningless, and should not be shown.
Even worse, these are 1 sigma bands, instead of the usual and more meaningful 2 or 3 sigma bands, giving a huge overlap.
Willis, It would be nice to see CO2 plotted in the same format and as well as summer irradiance at 65 degN (or other measure of the Milankovic cycle.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2012 at 1:03 pm
Willis, if that’s true (and I don’t doubt your word!) I would have thought at the very least a plagiarism case would be warranted? Is there proof the paper was receieved and read by the AGU?
Is there appreciably obvious plagiarism within the content? (you say slightly changed).
Other than that, I half agree with Robbies view and half agree with your own. But it really is a case of horses for courses and obviously the strength of the individual and the case they present IMO.
rgbatduke says:
April 11, 2012 at 10:52 am
I’m not sure I can agree with that. I’m no published scientist but have been taught and informed of the peer review process (granted some 30+ years ago, so may be a bit outdated). If I recall correctly, the primary function of peer review was to establish if the claims/findings were reasonably valid and based on reasonably accurate data/methods. The main outcome being that ‘published’ works are subsequently relied upon or quoted by others in further work(s). Thus by being ‘peer review’ published, to all intent and purpose, would indicate that the paper is ‘correct’ – that’s not to say that future findings would disprove the paper, just that ‘at the time’ or ‘with current knowledge’ it would be deemed correct.
The scientific objective of peer review is therefore to validate the science and methodology, is it not?
Clearly, if a person can easily refute the science with current knowledge – this has not been adequately peer reviewed!!
rgb – sorry, I should clarify that I don’t agree you wouldn’t necessarily be inclined reject it!
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 11, 2012 at 12:50 pm
Which ones are those, and do you have a citation?
Thanks,
w.
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Willis, reading these two posts will bring you up to speed faster….
http://suyts.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/sea-level-rises-to-new-lows/#comments
http://www.real-science.com/sea-level-data-corruption-worse-than-it-seems
Willis, I’m curious as to why you didn’t do the latitudinal analysis for the period covering the Younger Dryas. The YD has a very clear NH signature, but shows up earlier and much weaker in Shakun’s Antarctic proxies. At least one other Antarctic proxy (the Taylor Dome cores) shows an almost identical YD signature as the NH/Greenland proxies. It would be interesting to see if a latitudinal analysis supports Shakun’s Antarctic proxies or the Taylor Dome proxies as being correct.
I still say stop obcessing about this obvious junk science since it is not worth all the time and effort and get on with beating up on Nature for publishing is foolishness in the first place. These people have lost so much credibality in the past few years I am amaized that anyone ever bothers to read it.
Frank says:
April 11, 2012 at 2:06 pm
Dang, I’m trying to get out of this madness, not further in … the data is all there, anyone can do it.
w.
Philip Bradley says:
April 11, 2012 at 3:24 pm (Edit)
Since the generally accepted timing of the Younger Dryas is 10,000 to 11,000 yrs BP, and my Figure 4 covers that period plus some, I’m curious as to what you are referring to.
Also, it doesn’t have a “clear NH signature”. Looking at the top panel in Figure 4, you can see that one record shows it, two records kinda show it, and the other six proxies never heard of the YD … and in the Equator-45Ā°N second panel, a few of the northernmost proxies kinda show it, but the other northernmost proxies are immune to it …
So again, I’d say that this group of proxies isn’t suitable for what you want to find.
w.
The reasons why global warming does not correlate with carbon dioxide levels can be explained as follows …
On Josephās thread at tallbloke, Tim Folkerts said ā¦
So if we see a collection of photons with ābitesā in the CO2 bands (as is indeed seen from satellites), we can surmise that there is cool CO2 in front of a warmer material.
He was citing a well known fact in spectroscopy that we only see evidence of absorption when the gas in front is cooler than the source of emission. As soon as the gas is warmed above the temperature of the emitter it ceases to absorb the radiation
This is just like a region on the Earthās surface which, if warmer than some region of the atmosphere, will also not absorb radiation from that cooler region. It does not reflect it either. The radiation undergoes what physicists are now starting to call pseudo scattering. It has to do this, because this is the natural process by which nature ensures that the Second Law of Thermodynamics (SLoT) is upheld when radiation goes from cold to hot bodies.
This pseudo scattering (or what I have previously called resonant scattering) does in fact involve a resonating process and is thus quite different from reflection, even though, energy-wise the end result is the same. During the resonating process the energy from the electromagnetic radiation is used by the target instead of its own thermal energy. But such energy goes straight into new radiation (making up a part of the targetās S-B quota) which is identical to the incident radiation in both frequency and intensity, although scattered in direction. This is why it is called pseudo scattering because it looks just like diffuse reflection.
The important thing is that the energy at no stage gets converted to thermal energy. If it did, then that thermal energy could transfer to some other body by conduction or other sensible heat transfer mechanisms, rather than only by identical radiation. So no thermal energy is deposited in the target (and the SLoT is not violated) but the target does cool more slowly because it didnāt have to convert some of its own energy in order to produce that portion of its radiation quota.
There is no indication anywhere that the IPCC are aware of this process of which Iām sure Joseph Postma is, because it has been well explained by Prof Claes Johnson and others in internal correspondence to which I am a party. The IPCC energy diagrams clearly imply that the energy in backradiation is converted to thermal energy in the surface, but, as indeed was originally thought by the early physicists like Boltzmann and Planck, the IPCC think compensating radiation in the other direction somehow has a ānetā effect. The only trouble is, the energy may not go the other way by radiation at all, and it doesnāt have to go anywhere immediately. What if it warmed a layer of water just below the surface? Well, it canāt, because no such radiation penetrates even a millimetre into water because it is scattered at the surface.
The same thing actually happens to the low frequency radiation in your microwave oven. It is not absorbed at the atomic level in any target, even water. Instead is is scattered by the hydrogen and oxygen atoms (unlike sunlight) but it resonates with whole water molecules. This happens only within a certain narrow range of very low frequencies (in which each photon has very low energy) and it causes the water molecules to āsnapā through 180 degrees in synch with each half wavelength passing by. This generates thermal energy by friction and so the process is nothing like the warming caused by the Sun. That is why most other matter is not warmed in a MW oven, unless it contains water molecules which can then get warmed themselves and transfer thermal energy by conduction.
So, both spectroscopy and microwave ovens confirm what I have been saying this last year or so, that radiation from a cooler source (recognised by the shape of its Planck curve) does not transfer thermal energy to a warmer target.
The effect that such radiation has on the rate of cooling of the warmer target depends on both the temperature of the source and the number of frequency bands within that radiation which can resonate. (This is explained in more detail in my paper.) If it does not have a full distribution under its Planck curve (but just a few spectral lines as for a specific gas) then it is very ineffective in that role of slowing radiative cooling. Of course other sensible heat transfers and evaporative cooling rates are not slowed, and do in fact speed up to compensate, resulting in no net slowing of the overall rate of cooling of the Earthās surface.
Very thorough and insightful review.
The fact is there are too few with: (1) the relevant skills and knowledge (2) a healthy skepticism and (3) the freedom to say what one thinks without fear or favour.
That’s why the “climate wars” are inevitably about liberty versus tyrany. Those who favour the former should count themsleves fortunate then (given the vast mismatch of resources) that there are any Willis’s at all who satisfy all of these criteria, and sites like WUWT, willing to publish their findings. That liberty can win given the odds stacked against it, is because it is founded on the bedrock of reason and truth.
I agree with others, worth submitting,if only to disavow the excuse that no rebuttal was received…
rgbatduke says on April 11, 2012 at 7:31 am:
ā—- —- –. A reviewer doesnāt actually generally try to replicate and extend the results ā no time and thatās as much work as the original researcher did if not more. —- — — -.ā
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Thatās right rgb ā if what you say was not the case then theories like the ones about Relativity, The Bing Bang, Evolution and many more would never have been published. āClimate Scienceā peer review however seems to have become a case on its own.
Submitting criticisms to Nature is like posting on Real Climate. You merely defer and give power and credibility to corrupt incompetence. If you are going to publish or comment, publish elsewhere and let the corrupt incompetent whither from neglect and contempt.
RE
John H says:
@ April 11, 2012 at 4:40 pm
John, grateful for the full reference of your paper you mention (or link if publicly available).
What are the responses of the warmists to this information? Do they ignore it or offer counter arguments?
Jimbo says:
April 11, 2012 at 8:44 am
Willis,
Iām almost certain a rebuttal sent to Nature would fail but send it anyway for the record and later post it on WUWT.
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I second those ideas. Now, if we were all to clamour loudly and together for a Willis rebuttal submission to Nature, we’d have a good peer group pressure thing going. Just saying. Brings back fond recollections of Spring Break chug-a-thons with frosted mugs and the chant, “peer-group-pressure, peer-group-pressure!”
Funny, John H and Andrew sound exactly like Doug Cotten talking to himself …
typo: Cotton.
You would expect warming coming out of glaciation to show a latitudinal pattern. The ice sheets covering the northern hemisphere would have made it warm at a different rate to the south. In the south extra energy would show up pretty much straight away as increased temperature. In the north it would melt ice first. Consider two pitchers, one with mostly water and a little bit of ice, and one with a lot of ice. Put them in a warm room. The one with more ice will warm slower. In fact temperatures will not rise much in that pitcher until the ice is all melted so if you were only looking at a record of temperatures you might think there was nothing much going on in that pitcher in the time that the ice was busy melting.
Even if the North warmed after the south, which is at least plausible, the south started warming before CO2 levels rose. The temperature rise in the North may have been delayed because the ice had to melt first. Only once the ice was mostly gone would the temperatures in the north have started to kick up to modern levels. That means there would have been melting going on in the north before the main part of the temperature rise started, which would make it before the CO2 rise. What warmed the south and melted the ice in the North in the time before CO2 levels started to kick up. CO2 didn’t do it.
This Shakun study if I am correct in its assumptions, says that heat from the south oozed its way to the north over time. It has been cooling down here in the south for some time, is that the cold from the north, oozing down to the south, or is our cold about to ooze up to the northern climes?
Willis, I wrote a grant and one of the key components was to use a very specific, yet robust and obscure assay system. I had already tested it and validated it. The grant was rejected.
18 months later a paper was published by a competitor, the Prince of Darkness, using exactly the same methodology I had proposed to examine exactly the same thing.
I submitted a paper a while ago to AGU about how to handle gaussian or other averaging at the beginning and end of the dataset. It discussed Michael Mannās crazy ideas about how to handle averaging at the beginning and end.
They rejected my paper. Six months later Mike Mann wrote a slightly changed version of my paper and AGU published it. You canāt convince me that a) I didnāt get published because of my unorthodox beliefs, or that b) one of the reviewers didnāt give my paper to Mann, who saw that I had eviscerated his previous ideas, so Mann claimed my work as his own. Pathetic.
Wow. Can you document this, that is, do you have the reviewers comments and original submission in hand? I would think that this warrants a strong letter to the editorial board and publishing board of this journal. If, in fact, Mann was one of the reviewers (or good friends of one of the reviewers) this is a most serious charge.
rgb
rgb ā sorry, I should clarify that I donāt agree you wouldnāt necessarily be inclined reject it!
The point is that one should not reject a paper because you disagree with its conclusions. You might reject it because the science in it is badly done or poorly presented. Those aren’t the same thing. If I refereed a paper (say) that claimed that a certain body of observational evidence drawn from red-shift determined rotational velocities of orbits in distant galaxies was proof of the existence of dark matter, I would not be justified in rejecting the paper just because I personally don’t believe that “dark matter” (a new kind of matter that exists in great profusion but that doesn’t couple to the electromagnetic field for some reason) exists. I would be justified in asking for a revision if the paper didn’t fairly consider alternative theories. I would very much be justified in rejecting the paper if it made actual errors in its mathematical analysis or made unjustifiable assumptions about the data in order to arrive at its conclusion.
On this basis, the referees of the Shakun paper might well have been justified in asking for some revision, in particular for a less biased presentation of the alternative theories wherein CO_2 is a minor driver rather than the major one and for some sort of explicit quantitative support for any alleged mechanism wherein it is a major one. In particular, failing to address the YD is a serious problem. Failing to address the obvious coastal bias of the sites is a problem. Failing to note the lack of resolvable correlation in much of the data is a problem, but not one that a referee is likely to pick up.
A referee is absolutely not likely to or responsible for going back to all of the original data and replotting it with an eye to disproving the paper being reviewed in order to reject it. In fact, this is borderline inappropriate — a referee is not supposed to steal ideas or co-opt a method at the review stage, reject a paper, and then publish later (which is why Willis has a serious case against AGU above).
However, a referee is well within their rights to accept a paper they might disagree with (after raising their objections with the authors and being ignored) or to recommend rejection but be overridden by the editor (as might well happen because the editor is not supposed to be “involved” in the science review or to take sides in a controversial issue) and then write their own paper presenting their side of the story! In fact, that is good science, whether or not a scientist is a reviewer. Reviewers simply get to see the papers in question first — the advantage of being a reviewer — and hence are more likely to be first to submit just this sort of paper either extending or rejecting any given finding.
rgb
rgbatduke says:
April 12, 2012 at 7:56 am
I concur, but I wasn’t meaning you would reject through disagreement either – I was meaning I would anticpate that you would do a reasonable job of assessing it and finding it wanting! My primary point was that the peer review process by either referee(s) or reviewers was inadequate in this case IMHO. The reviewer has a ‘duty of care’ to assess the content objectively in order for it be presented for general publication. Yes, they may request a clarification or minor alteration on points – but they must reasonably assess the scientific content, not just that the conclusions ‘drawn’ from the paper are acceptable – which in this particular cases, also seem somewhat stretched – as Willis has amply, and somewhat easily, demonstrated!
What Ian H says on April 11, 2012 at 9:20 pm about the delay in detectable warming rate in the northern hemisphere seems quite logical ā as far as I can see.
As a matter of fact places like Greenland, Svalbard and āPerma-Frostedā Siberia can be said to still be in an āIce Ageā. ā Which is why some people like to point out that the Holocene is just one of the many short “Interglacial periods” during the present Ice Age which started some 2,5 ā 3 million years ago (or YBP).
So, as far as āTrumping the Sunā the chances are that CO2 didnāt do it – and never will.
Isn’t there a fundamental chemistry problem here? You are looking at latitudes and using oxygen and carbon isotopes as proxies. How do you correct for the chemical differences in each latitudinal band? The southern hemisphere has much more water than the northern hemisphere. Wouldn’t this distort your results when you sort them out by latitude? I am not paying to read the paper, I can’t afford it. My question is, was that addressed? How?
rgbatduke says: April 12, 2012 at 7:38 am
I second this proposal.
Mann seems to be of particularly despicable character, and the alleged act adds to his despicability. He should be held to account.