Between this withdrawal and the Esper et al paper showing the MWP and RWP warmer than today, Mike Mann must be having a really, really, bad day. Even SuperMandia in tights can’t help. Thanks to Richard Tol (and Marc Morano) for this tip:
Readers may recall Steve McIntyre’s evisceration of Gergis et al. Steve’s question has now been answered. In retrospect, it looks like David Karoly’s puffed up legal whining was just that, puffed up.
Retraction Watch reports this update:
In June, we wrote about the withdrawal of a paper claiming that temperatures in the last 60 years were warmest in the last 1,000 years. At the time, we reported, following posts by others, that the authors had been made aware of errors in their work and were withdrawing it to correct their calculations.
For several months, the page housing the Journal of Climate study read:
The requested article is not currently available on this site.
It still does. But another page that should house the paper now reads, as commenter Skiphil notes:
Due to errors discovered in this paper during the publication process, it was withdrawn by the authors prior to being published in final form.
In June, one of the authors, David Karoly, told us and others he expected to resubmit the paper to the journal, and that’s what the University of Melbourne also reports on top of the original press release about the paper (also noted by Skiphil):
Scientific study resubmitted.
An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in the study, “Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium” by Joelle Gergis, Raphael Neukom, Ailie Gallant, Steven Phipps and David Karoly, accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate.
The manuscript has been re-submitted to the Journal of Climate and is being reviewed again.
========================================================
For all that posturing and mannian bluster displayed by Gergis and Karoly, in the end, it was simply bad science that required retraction. Given the screening errors Steve has pointed out, I wonder if retooling it can make it publishable again.
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This is what happens when Australians try to play hockey.
kcrucible says:
October 18, 2012 at 9:59 am
RE: Polishing Coprolites
I respectfully suggest this may be the humble origins of Joe ‘Malarkey’ Biden
“Shouldn’t we trust that our scientists are kept in check by the professional peer-review process…?”
Joelle Gergis
Cosmos Magazine
27 July 2007
So, I wonder what the deal is. I bet they found the detrended data didn’t correlate with anything. Or even worse, the re-screening produced the opposite to the claim that warming is anomalous.
Either way, it’s pretty obvious they are going to let the dust settle, and then try again. I wonder who the reviewers were, and which associate editor(s) were responsible for this reprehensible corruption.
I’ll give a free bag of virtual lollies to the person who can find who the JoC associate editors are, information that was easily accessible in the recent past but now seems unavailable?
Very often the people where compare ‘climate science’ to ‘cargo cults’. May I point out how we can show this to be true? Above is a youtube video of the ‘climate scientists’. You can tell they are scientists because they are wearing Lab Coats. I wear a lab coat because I am an experimentalist, I also have interesting stains on most of my work clothes, lots of bleach being used in Cell Culture, but also a lot of dyes.
They are wearing lab coats, not because their sitting in front of a computer demands it, but because they want to look like real scientists, indeed they want to look like chemists/biochemists/medics.
Not only does the King have no cloths, but these little cargo cultists are wearing mine.
But you can polish a pebble. That’s what colleges are for.
(Blogs are for rough diamonds.)
I said at the time this paper would never again see the light of day.
They could not fix the math and get the results they wanted, and they are not honest enough to publish the results with the methods corrected whether or not it fit their intent, so it’s down the memory hole.
1. You may be able to polish a turd, but in this case it still remained stubbornly unflushable.
2. Note to Gergis: this is commonly called “statistics”.
Jimmy Haigh says:
October 18, 2012 at 8:40 am
As we say in scotland: Ye cannae polish a shite!.
Been done –
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/polishing-a-turd-minimyth.htm
– but it’s still not climate science!
A Rude Girl wrote a paper with statistics all a kimbo,
When this was pointed out to her, Rude Girl went full-on bimbo,
When other folks discovered that her math was full of beans,
Rude Girl withdrew her faulty fallacy as it was smashed to smithereens…
roy;
I gather the M-M experiment has now been repeated with more sensitive modern instrumentation, with positive results.
Oops.
Ro-ro-rotate Your Owl
John Shade says:
October 18, 2012 at 11:16 am
Future generations will … think we were pretty dumb.
========
Pretty much how we regard the past generations that invented everything we use. In fact we are no smarter than they were and we make the same mistakes given half a chance.
University of Melbourne climate change scientist David Karoly said Australians were in fact responsible for .45 per cent of total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
==============
That seems very unlikely. Maybe 0.45 percent of human produced CO2, but not of total CO2. Ozzie populations is way too small for it to be that high. That is saying that Ozzies are responsible for 10% of the Co2 produced by humans. Simply not possible,
This could be considered progress in scientific intergrity for climate science. Some people will remember an earlier recontruction in 2006 which was formally criticized in an open review process. Despite many of the same flaws as the Gergis paper, it was still published and the valid criticisms ignored. See the story at http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/2/1001/2006/cpd-2-1001-2006-discussion.html and read the comments edited by Willis Eschenbach.
No, you can’t polish shite. However, shite is moldable. If your audience doesn’t like the shape its in, massage it into another shape. Rinse and Repeat.
I’d love to know what the revised result was. And I do wonder why the paper was retracted rather than published with corrections. If it turned out that it did show the temperatures in the last 60 years weren’t the warmest or even that prior temperatures may have been at least as warm then that would have been a significant scientific result.
One thing’s for sure the end result didn’t show a hockeystick otherwise it would have been published.
With a bit of luck Karoly and Gergis will be awarded a Wikipedia page by the Connolley gang… Bet that notability will be off the chart!!! LOL
If I were SteveM I would refuse ever to work with Gergis again. She has shown herself to not only be wrong on the science and incompetent on the analysis, she’s also rude to those who lack her deficiencies but are willing to help anyway. I wish her well as she moves in a new direction away from serious climate science.
Steve from Rockwood says:
October 18, 2012 at 3:15 pm
This is what happens when Australians try to play hockey
———————————————————————————–
Actually, Australians play field hockey very well. Olympic gold medalists and World Champions in recent times. It is only the silly ice hockey game that we do not play. Not cold enough for ice in Oz.
Points I would love some competent statistician to discuss:
1) How many random replicate observations are needed to obtain a 95% CI on a daily temperature mean ?
according to my feeble knowledge, something north of 30 random replicate observations seems about right but we have ONE non-random minimum and ONE non-random maximum per day for most of the historical record.
2) How can ‘scientists’ compile monthly averages when daily temperature observations are drawn from different populations of temperatures ?
I seem to recall a requirement that observations must be drawn from the same population.
3) How can temperature drawn from liquid in glass thermometers be assigned precision of tenths or thousandths of a degree when the manufacturers of such devices claim plus or minus 1 to point 5 degree C ?
clearly this claimed precision is just so much bull.
Why do we even bother to give any credence whatever to historical temperature studies ??
How can we state an observed increase of .8 degrees per century as reality when we do not have a valid approximation of reality and the observed value is smaller than the instrument error alone?
Would these be some of the climate scientists that make up the consensus?
Hmm, well Richard Toll may say “now permanently”, but I am a real skeptic so I followed the link. The retraction watch article says nothing about “now permanently”. The retraction watch paper just gives a minor update referring to later publication.
So give us a more accurate link to prove what you say.
Truthseeker said
Quote
Not cold enough for ice in Oz.
Unquote
Not yet
“No, you can’t polish shite. ”
Politely beg to differ, they did it on Mythbusters, left open the question as whether the activity is worthwhile…….
“That seems very unlikely. Maybe 0.45 percent of human produced CO2, but not of total CO2. Ozzie populations is way too small for it to be that high. That is saying that Ozzies are responsible for 10% of the Co2 produced by humans. Simply not possible,”
Given the history of this particular episode, are you surprised that he is an innumerate dick?