From the University of Melbourne, I’m sure Julia and Flannery are thrilled at this paleo-reconstruction, and of course, the blame goes on Mann, er man. I find it interesting though that the lead author, Dr Joelle Gergis, thinks of her science work as a “guerrilla war”. From “Science Matters”:
Seems like just another angry Michael Mann clone to me.
At the outset of this project in 2010, they said:
Australian climate scientist Professor Chris Turney from the University of Exeter, UK says this meeting will allow us to place Australian records in a global context and gives us an opportunity to fully understand natural climate variability.
Yet in the current press release, the phrase “natural climate variability” is not mentioned. WUWT?
1,000 years of climate data confirms Australia’s warming
In the first study of its kind in Australasia, scientists have used 27 natural climate records to create the first large-scale temperature reconstruction for the region over the last 1000 years.
The study was led by researchers at the University of Melbourne and used a range of natural indicators including tree rings, corals and ice cores to study Australasian temperatures over the past millennium and compared them to climate model simulations.
Lead researcher, Dr Joelle Gergis from the University of Melbourne said the results show that there are no other warm periods in the last 1000 years that match the warming experienced in Australasia since 1950.
“Our study revealed that recent warming in a 1000 year context is highly unusual and cannot be explained by natural factors alone, suggesting a strong influence of human-caused climate change in the Australasian region,” she said.
The study published today in the Journal of Climate will form the Australasian region’s contribution to the 5th IPCC climate change assessment report chapter on past climate.
She said using what is known as ‘palaeoclimate’ or natural records, such as tree rings, corals and ice cores, are fundamental in evaluating regional and global climate variability over centuries before direct temperature records started in 1910.
Dr Gergis collated these natural records provided by decades of work by more than 30 researchers from Australia, New Zealand and around the world.
The reconstruction was developed using 27 natural climate records calculated in 3000 different ways to ensure that the results were robust.
She said reconstructions of regional temperature not only provide a climate picture of the past but also a significant platform to reduce uncertainties associated with future climate variability.
The study is part of a global collaboration, PAGES, Past Global Changes Regional 2K initiative, which is working to reconstruct the last 2000 years of climate across every region in the world in order to reduce uncertainties associated with future climate change projections.
Collaborators include the Climate Change Research Centre and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, University of New South Wales where the climate modeling was conducted.
###
The study was funded by the Australian Research Council, Federal Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency and Past Global Changes (PAGES).
Of course, in true Mannian form, the press release has no link to the actual paper. We aren’t supposed to look to closely at this things don’t you know?
And, searching the JoC journal index of the most recent issue shows no mention of this paper, so it must have just been accepted. Does anybody have a copy of this in part or full?
UPDATE: via Marc Hendrickx, thanks.
Briefing powerpoint presentation (PDF)
sunshinehours1 says:
May 17, 2012 at 6:54 pm
“Only records that were significantly (p<0.05) correlated with the
226 detrended instrumental target over the 1921–1990 period were selected for analysis."
Oh Oh. Cherry picking?
Have a look at figure S7.1 in the paper. Here they discuss the possible divergence problem after 1995. But look at the “divergence” in the other end of the x-axis – before 1920!
So I say this is yet another case of hockey-matic methods – by selecting proxies that match the 1921-1990 warming in their instrumental record, they almost automatically get a hockey stick (I hope e.g. Steve McIntyre or Jeff Condon can provide further insight on that), because their proxies fluctuate quite randomly outside of that calibration period.
But the fact that they (despite introducing all that noise outside of the calibration period) still find traces of MWP and a very clear LIA, is excellent. Now we can finally put an end to the “MWP and LIA was an European phenomenon” nonsense.
[snip. Labeling others here as “deniers” violates site Policy. ~dbs, mod.]
The paper by Gergis at al can be pulled apart piece by piece. For example, we can knock Tasmania out of the mix. Most contribution was by Ed Cook, who wrote a cited paper (“Climatic Change in Tasmania Inferred from a 1089-Year Tree-Ring Chronology of Huon Pine”, Cook et al. 1991, `Science’ v.253, p.1266- 1268“) “A Climatically sensitive huon pine tree-ring chronology from western Tasmania allows inferences about Austral summer temperature change since A.D. 900. Since 1965, huon pine growth has been unusually rapid for trees that are in many cases over 700 years old. This growth increase correlates well with recent anomalous warming in Tasmania on the basis of instrumental records and supports claims that a climatic change, perhaps influenced by greenhouse gases, is in progress”.
Elsewhere,
From: Edward Cook
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: Re: hockey stick
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 15:25:41 -0400
0988831541.txt in part –
I do think that the Medieval Warm Period was a far more significant event
than has been recognized previously, as much because the high-resolution data to
evaluate it had not been available before. That is much less so the
case now. It is even showing up strongly now in long SH tree-ring series.
So, at this stage I would argue that the Medieval Warm Period was probably
a global extra-tropical event, at the very least, with warmth that was
persistent and probably comparable to much of what we have experienced in
the 20th century. However, I would not claim (and nor would Jan) that it
exceeded the warmth of the late 20th century. We simply do not have the
precision or the proxy replication to say that yet. This being said, I do
find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global
event to be grossly premature and probably wrong………..
Then, using modern temperatures is a problem: http://www.john-daly.com/huonpine.htm
“The huon pine trees they chose to examine were located in the western half of Tasmania. However, the temperature records they chose to correlate them with were all located in the eastern half of Tasmania, in a totally different climate zone, at an average distance of 100 miles from the tree site. They might just as well have correlated their tree rings with temperatures in Brisbane or London. Having taken their records from the wrong half of the island, Cook et al selectively chose only three weather stations to represent the whole of Tasmania, and all three are affected by significant urban heat islands (ie. localised heat from urban growth distorting historical data). They selected Hobart, Launceston (the two biggest urban centres), and finally Low Head Lighthouse”.
What has changed since Wally Broecker wrote in 2001 “Tree ring records are useful for measuring temperature fluctuations over short time periods but cannot pick up
long-term trends because there is no way to establish the long-term
evolution in ring thickness were temperatures to have remained constant.
Corals also are not accurate enough, especially because few records
extend back a thousand years. The accuracy of the temperature estimates
based on floral or faunal remains from lake and bog sediments is
likely no better than ±1.3°C (4) and hence not sufficiently sensitive for
Holocene thermometry.”
[snip – Eric we simply don’t care for your snark, and stop switching screen names around – policy violation- – Anthony]
MarkW says:
May 17, 2012 at 11:37 am
In a world that’s some 4 billion years old, they declare that if something hasn’t happened in the last 1000 years then it can’t possibly be natural.
Right
_______________________________
Here are the graphs that show they are “cherry picking” the time interval
Isotope data for Antarctic and Greenland Ice Cores
Lucy put together several of these graphs that show it is a matter of picking the time interval.
However E.M. Smith nailed it a few years ago in April of 2009 with Bond Event Zero
As Chiefio says, I really hoped not to have lived long enough to suffer through a Bond Event especially not a Bond Event just after they have crammed us all into cities using Agenda 21, Sustainability, Smart Growth, Eminent Domain or what ever other term they use for confiscation of our property, have taken away all our private transportation, cheap energy and most of all our right to grow our own food.
People forget the big problem with cities is RATS and rats have fleas that carry disease like the black plague. In a city you can not eliminate the bugs and rats, you only can make them move for a little while. When people (or animals) are crowded you get the perfect conditions for epidemics especially when you add food shortages.
A paper on the “Bond Events”
Someone else may have already covered this and I missed it, but the biggest rhubarb factor for this study appears to be its reliance on anthropogenic forcing in Australasia. There are 25 million people within NZ and Aus, influencing a land area around the size of the United States, and an ocean area even larger. We are not large CO2 generators per km2. If this study had genuinely found human forcing in our part of the world, then forcing in the northern hemisphere should be exponentially larger and more easily identified. Of course, we all know this is just the usual suspects interviewing their keyboards and counting the rings on the pot plants in their offices as a proxy for actually getting out and doing some real science.
Follow the Money says:
May 17, 2012 at 1:58 pm
“The study was led by researchers at the University of Melbourne and used a range of natural indicators including tree rings, ”
Tree rings? Really? Australia has boreal forests? The theory tree rings MIGHT be more temps than water budget meters only was surmised to apply to tree-line flora. That’s why bristlecones and trees at Yamal in Siberia are looked at. Is this Australian study a new avenue in climate science??
_________________________________
At least in the Chinese study Anthony posted in a recent thread, comes right out and states:
Seems like that means the temperature correlation is at MOST 50%. Also the above paper I linked to makes it clear there are changes in the precipitation.
To add to that you have the paper:
Yes it is for the Arctic but the mechanism would still apply changes in summer sea ice could change precipitation.
So what was happening in the solar cycles before the nose dive during cycle 24?
paper: http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/Sola2-PRL_published.pdf
So we have “the Sun is more magnetically active now than it has been for over a 1000 years.” possible changes in precipitation as a result and a climbing CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere, at least according to the Climate scientists. On top of that trees are C3 If the ice core measurements of CO2 were correct they were darn close to starving. According to the following paper the C3 plants had reached a lower equilibrium point which explains the development of C4 and CAM plants who could be more competitive at these lower levels of CO2.
There is also the limiting factor of the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
“calculated in 3000 different ways to ensure that the results were robust”
This must be badly phrased. Anyway, it looks like they have filed the data for others to look at. This is refreshing. I trust we will see error bars (meaningful ones). One powerful benefit of serious skepticism is clear here. The easy-clubby-love-in work of unchallenged science seems to have been disappearing (some case hardened nodes remain). Skeptics have driven them to sweat out studies that they know will be worked over by bright people (useful idiots on both sides notwithstanding) and a loosened up stranglehold on publication has resulted in some competitive sparring and new ideas. No doubt the formerly foregone-conclusionists have been forced to swot up on statistics and the scientific method. I know they do this as if it is guerilla warfare (war metafors are popping up on books and press releases) – , rather than for purer motives, but wars do advance technology and science. The metafor also grudgingly identifies thinking skeptics as a worthy foe, too. They wouldn’t feel the need to gird themselves for battle otherwise.. I think the dismantling of the gung ho, hysterical, ultra-green stuff is a sign that we have mercifully escaped the maw of a new Dark Ages.
atarsinc says:
May 17, 2012 at 4:28 pm
Greg O’Donnell, on May 17, 2012 at 2:06 pm, said: “… correct me if I am wrong, but doesn’t this mean that they use models which ignore some natural factors to prove that the model they are using is correct?”
Consider yourself corrected. As Steven said, you need to look at the methodologies, code, etc. Then you can make statements about their models’ validity. You haven’t shown that their models “ignore some natural factors”. JP
___________________________________
As Steve McIntyre says: @ur momisugly May 17, 2012 at 3:06 pm
She was coauthor with Neukom in an article last year on SH proxies, cited in AR5. Much of the data is not archived. I asked Neukom and he told me to suck eggs.
__________________________________
The refusal to put the data and code out for validation and verification means this is just more propaganda not science. This is especially true of studies funded by the tax paper.
Should you actually TRUST a scientist? I really do not think so.
Look like this comes under the 72% using “questionable research practices” at a minimum if they do not release the data and code.
At this rate scientists are earning themselves a place just above politicians on the honesty scale and that is the real shame in all this. The old requirement that science must be reproducible seems to have given way to Lysenkoism, it must please the politicians.
From the greatest speaker and one of the most brilliant thinkers
“In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
– Life on the Mississippi
Ally E. says:
May 17, 2012 at 1:36 pm
All I can tell you is that its getting colder here in NSW. We’re not officially into winter yet but we’ve been getting frosts on and off over the last two months. This morning, as I type, it’s -5.5 C. (around 20 F, I believe) and the countryside is white with frost. I don’t know how long they can keep insisting it’s getting warmer when it clearly and obviously is not.
____________________________
Well it is not getting very warm here in North Carolina either. It is almost 11 am, almost June and a chilly 67F (20C). Compare that to 2004 when we had seventeen days over 90F (32 C) and two hitting 98F (37). The normal max temp for today is 79F (26) I noticed that out max temperature for yesterday got adjusted up 2F overnight for the “official record” (The station is rural)
“goldie says:
May 17, 2012 at 7:02 pm
“. . . England was the best wine growing area in Europe.”
Can you give a reference, please, to the date and circumstances of the competition that determined the above? Were all the judges drunk monks from Kent or were there a few winegrowers from Burgundy and Tuscany?”
You can find the reference from Dr. Brain Fagan (professor Anthropology UC Berkely). In the decades leading up to the Famine of 1315-1320, the wine from England was so good that in France, imports from England were prohibited. This was during the last 100-150 years of the MWP, when the UK had long, very warm growing seasons. If you want I can look into his Book, “The Little Ice”, and find the exact reference. Or you can look it up yourself on Google Books or check the book out from your library (or buy it on Amazon).
Almah Geddon says:
May 17, 2012 at 11:54 pm
Something, as an engineer, that always amazes me about these papers is the number of significant figures and the supposed accuracy of the data….
_________________________________
Yes, that was my first big clue that Climate Science was errr…. questionable. (Do not want to make the Moderators snip)
Having looked a little more at the paper, it looks totally “hockey-o-matic” to me. They use the same period for calibration and verification (!!?). In addition, they use the “early verification period” 1900-1920, but if I understand figure 3 correctly, the RE score against this period is far too low before 1600.
27 records calculated 3000 different ways
I cannot believe a scientists or modeler in any profession would say it that way unless there is an underlying motive of promotion and public manipulation along the lines of marketing methods that say leading doctors agree or a 1000 pharmacists recommend…..
It should raise a red flag with people that think and those that model.
After the debacle of “hide the decline” I want all proxy resconstruction papers to contain a control section that graphs every land based proxy to measured temps from the nearest stations and establishes FIRST that the proxy methodology can track the actual temperatures during the instrument record. I don’t want statistical contortions here, just a clear picture that your stinkin’ proxy anomalies show the same picture as actual.nearby thermometers.
This paper had 27 proxies. Most of the proxies that went back prior to 1600 were tree rings. So let’s see control graphs for every tree ring proxy. They SHOULD have nice matching curves. Is this asking too much? After these folks start doing this, then I’ll be somewhat more interested in what tree ring proxies are suggesting about previous dates..
First things first. Everyone understand this: there is nothing wrong with the climate.
What is most annoying to me as an Australian is that this load of rubbish is our input to the IPCC for AR5. As soon as I read about tree-ring temperature proxies and the remarkable figure of 3000 (such a nice, round, number!) ways they tortured the data, plus the other nice, round number of 1000 years, my BS detector started clanging.
There are so many things wrong with this study at the conceptual level, it’s not even necessary to delve too deeply into the numbers to discount it. But, I hope someone with more patience and expertise than me can bring themselves to do it. 🙂
Anthony, I haven’t switched any screen names. I’ve only ever used sceptical at your sight. Not sure what you didn’t like about my post.
REPLY: This isn’t you? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/14/nws-chicago-demonstrates-that-climate-math-is-hard/#comment-985445
– Anthony
I had a quick read of the paper after I checked the references. the usual suspects were there so I , I knew the conclusion before I even was halfway through the abstract. One is left with more than an uneasy feeling that the result determined the data. If only some of the selected proxies show the desired trend (shades of Yamal 061) that sound more like a raffle than a real trend.
It is fairly easy to rubbish the data used. A lot of the upturn comes from the podocarps on the West Coast. Look at the “selected” proxies. There are a lot of other factors known to affect the treeline growth. The nearest temperature measure is Hokitika. The “corrections” for this site is the subject as much controversy. It turned the raw data’s 120 years of flat lining into a strong warming trend. There is a pending court case about it.
An upturn in the tree rings width post 1950 is easy to explain as well. This is when the deer hunting and more lately, possum extermination campaigns targeted the upper river valleys. The lack of predation does wonders for the forest growth.
The Age has a story on this research this morning. The final couple of paragraphs make interesting reading:
‘The veracity of the proxy methods used is not universally accepted. Professor Graham Farquhar, a biophysicist at the ANU’s Research School of Biology, says the use of surrogates is problematic. For example, he says trees are likely to have grown faster between 1921 and 1990 due to the increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, not just the rise in temperature. ”It is obviously very useful to have such data, but I can’t see it as being definitive,” he says.’
‘The authors dismiss this concern. Karoly says that nothing is certain in science, but the results draw from a range of sites and using state-of-the-art statistical methods can be accepted with high confidence: ”It is reinforcing that barrage of scientific information that confirms that the climate is warming and increasing greenhouse gases are the major cause.” ‘
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-research-has-a-ring-of-truth-20120518-1yw1x.html#ixzz1vI0iKiSM
This is yet another example of the limitless expertise of ‘climate scientists’. Note Professor Farquhar’s biography:
Distinguished Professor Graham Farquhar FAA, FRS., has undertaken and led research across a broad range of fields and scales, from integration of photosynthesis with nitrogen and water use of plants, stomatal physiology, isotopic composition of plants and global change. He is a fellow of The Australian Academy of Science and of the Royal Society. He has over 220 research publications and is a leading Australian Citation Laureate.
Professor Karoly holds a chair in meteorology, yet he dismisses the view of Professor Farquhar on the basis of ‘state-of-the-art statistical methods’ and a lot (a ‘barrage’) of similar studies.
Unfortunately, this appears to be typical of the current state of ‘climate science.’
I just followed the first 3 dataset links in the metadatabase link Mosher posted.
Camp Stream: “Data storage 1: http://n/a”
G5-2-05P; g5-2-054B: “Data storage 1: http://n/a ”
BJ8-03-31MCA, 32GGC & 34GGC: Data storage 1: http://n/a
Data storage is Not Applicable to climate science.
Professor Graham Farquhar sounds like he knows what he is talking about and has the real world experience to back it up unlike the climate collaborators. It is nice to see someone stick his head above the parapet.
I have never known Graham Farquhar to indulge in ‘political’ science — in either direction. Tells it as he sees it. Old fashioned. But admirable.
The university of NSW has been quick off the mark with a graph and would you believe it, they have found a southern hemisphere hockey stick.
http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/news/news/2012-05-17_1000years_graph.html