I had to chuckle at the cacophony of Twitfests going on today over this new study from Marcott et al. I especially liked the Mother Jones headline being Tweeted: “The Scariest Climate Change Graph Just Got Scarier”.
It rather reminds me of some people being fearful of certain religious icons.
![marcott-A-1000[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/marcott-a-10001.jpg?resize=640%2C430)
Yes, be afraid, very afraid, of that “unprecedented” (there’s that word again in the abstract) 0.7C temperature rise is the message I suppose. While the MSM will trumpet this I’m sure, we’ll get down to finding out just how good the science is. One potential problem is that the pollen data median sampling of 120 years, which is 4x the 30 year climate normals periods used today. That’s pretty low resolution for a study that is focusing on 2000 years and leaves lots of opportunity to miss data. Further, when they say the last 100 years was the warmest (with higher resolution data) they really aren’t comparing similar data sets when the other data has a 120 year median sampling.
Here’s the press release:
Press Release 13-037
Earth Is Warmer Today Than During 70 to 80 Percent of the Past 11,300 Years
Reconstruction of Earth history shows significance of temperature rise
March 7, 2013
With data from 73 ice and sediment core monitoring sites around the world, scientists have reconstructed Earth’s temperature history back to the end of the last Ice Age.
The analysis reveals that the planet today is warmer than it’s been during 70 to 80 percent of the last 11,300 years.
Results of the study, by researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) and Harvard University, are published this week in a paper in the journal Science.
Lead paper author Shaun Marcott of OSU says that previous research on past global temperature change has largely focused on the last 2,000 years.
Extending the reconstruction of global temperatures back to the end of the last Ice Age puts today’s climate into a larger context.
“We already knew that on a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past 2,000 years,” Marcott says. “Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years.”
“The last century stands out as the anomaly in this record of global temperature since the end of the last ice age,” says Candace Major, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences. The research was funded by the Paleoclimate Program in NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences.
“This research shows that we’ve experienced almost the same range of temperature change since the beginning of the industrial revolution,” says Major, “as over the previous 11,000 years of Earth history–but this change happened a lot more quickly.”
Of concern are projections of global temperature for the year 2100, when climate models evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that temperatures will exceed the warmest temperatures during the 11,300-year period known as the Holocene under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.
Peter Clark, an OSU paleoclimatologist and co-author of the Science paper, says that many previous temperature reconstructions were regional and not placed in a global context.
“When you just look at one part of the world, temperature history can be affected by regional climate processes like El Niño or monsoon variations,” says Clark.
“But when you combine data from sites around the world, you can average out those regional anomalies and get a clear sense of the Earth’s global temperature history.”
What that history shows, the researchers say, is that during the last 5,000 years, the Earth on average cooled about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit–until the last 100 years, when it warmed about 1.3 degrees F.
The largest changes were in the Northern Hemisphere, where there are more land masses and larger human populations than in the Southern Hemisphere.
Climate models project that global temperature will rise another 2.0 to 11.5 degrees F by the end of this century, largely dependent on the magnitude of carbon emissions.
“What is most troubling,” Clark says, “is that this warming will be significantly greater than at any time during the past 11,300 years.”
Marcott says that one of the natural factors affecting global temperatures during the last 11,300 years is a gradual change in the distribution of solar insolation linked with Earth’s position relative to the sun.
“During the warmest period of the Holocene, the Earth was positioned such that Northern Hemisphere summers warmed more,” Marcott says.
“As the Earth’s orientation changed, Northern Hemisphere summers became cooler, and we should now be near the bottom of this long-term cooling trend–but obviously, we’re not.”
The research team, which included Jeremy Shakun of Harvard and Alan Mix of OSU, primarily used fossils from ocean sediment cores and terrestrial archives to reconstruct the temperature history.
The chemical and physical characteristics of the fossils–including the species as well as their chemical composition and isotopic ratios–provide reliable proxy records for past temperatures by calibrating them to modern temperature records.
Analyses of data from the 73 sites allow a global picture of the Earth’s history and provide a new context for climate change analysis.
“The Earth’s climate is complex and responds to multiple forcings, including carbon dioxide and solar insolation,” Marcott says.
“Both changed very slowly over the past 11,000 years. But in the last 100 years, the increase in carbon dioxide through increased emissions from human activities has been significant.
“It’s the only variable that can best explain the rapid increase in global temperatures.”
-NSF-
A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years
1College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA.
2Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
- *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: marcotts@science.oregonstate.edu
Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2°C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.
===============================================================
UPDATE: Andrew Revkin emailed me a link to his piece where the issue is commented on by Mann and Robert Rhode of (BEST). Being a cheerleader, Mann has little useful to add, but Rhode has some useful comments:
The Marcott et al. results may refine our understanding the last 10,000 years; however, the broad picture of Holocene climate does not seem to have been significantly changed by their findings. Previous work had already pointed towards a period of early Holocene warmth somewhat higher than recent centuries.
…
In discussing their result, there is one important limitation that I feel deserves more attention. They rely on proxy data that is widely spaced in time (median sampling interval 120 years) and in many cases may also be subject to significant dating uncertainty. These effects will both tend to blur and obscure high frequency variability. They estimate (page 1, column 3) that only 50% of the variance is preserved at 1,000-year periods. This amount of variance suppression is roughly what you would expect if the underlying annual temperature time series had been smoothed with a 400-year moving average. In essence, their reconstruction appears to tell us about past changes in climate with a resolution of about 400 years. That is more than adequate for gathering insights about millennial scale changes during the last 10,000 years, but it will completely obscure any rapid fluctuations having durations less than a few hundred years. The only time such obscuring might not occur is during the very recent period when dating uncertainty is likely to be low and sample spacing may be very tight.
Because the analysis method and sparse data used in this study will tend to blur out most century-scale changes, we can’t use the analysis of Marcott et al. to draw any firm conclusions about how unique the rapid changes of the twentieth century are compared to the previous 10,000 years. The 20th century may have had uniquely rapid warming, but we would need higher resolution data to draw that conclusion with any certainty. Similarly, one should be careful in comparing recent decades to early parts of their reconstruction, as one can easily fall into the trap of comparing a single year or decade to what is essentially an average of centuries. To their credit Marcott et al. do recognize and address the issue of suppressed high frequency variability at a number of places in their paper.
Ultimately, the Marcott et al. paper is an interesting addition to the study of millennial scale climate variability during the Holocene. Their results are broadly consistent with previous findings, but the details are interesting and likely to be useful in future studies. However, since their methodology suppresses most of the high frequency variability, one needs to be cautious when making comparisons between their reconstruction and relatively rapid events like the global warming of the last century.
Revkin has a video interview with co-author Shakun also, see it here:
let me get this right, over the last 2000 years, the 100 -150 year droughts happened when the co2 levels were lower.
OSU, well that says it all.
Why does Mann’s reconstruction extend a century into the future, according to the chart?
And why does it not align with the new effort?
And why are we not seeing how the proxies tie to the instrumental records?
droughts in the US.
If the paper is correct and the world was cold until the industrial revolution then it’s hard to argue that global warming is a bad thing.
The paper shows an uptick in temperature at exactly the point that lifespans increase, infant mortality decreases and we all got more capable of surviving disasters.
they say “warmer than 70-80% of the previous 10,000 years” so the obvious question is:
What happened during the missing 20-30%?
Would those just happen to be the Holocene Optimum, the Minoan Warming, the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warming and all the other unprecedented warmings we haven’t named?
And how much warmer were they, to be so carefully omitted?
Here is my take away: The current temps are not as high as past interglacials. The warming trend of the past 100 years is not duplicated in the paleo record. The rest of the press release is the normal propoganda. Warmer than 70% of the previous record? Spin baby spin!
A drought of science and intelligence.
I’m with you, Anthony, no point in acting scared. One question though. How long did it take to warm up the first time 10,000 years ago compared to how long it’s taken to warm back up now? Looks a steep rise. When will the temperature flatten out again? Not that I’ll be around anyway lol.
I’m going to go shopping later today for some flowery tropical shirts…..
I predict more and more nonsense of this sort, right up to the moment it starts costing governments money. Interesting to note how quickly major, independent, news organisations are getting out of the climate reporting business…
There’s nothing wrong with the climate, and CO2 has nothing to do with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg&info=GGWarmingSwindle_CO2Lag
Ok, why do I say that? First, there’s no hockey stick. To create the h stick the MWP was squashed, the LIA was ironed out, and the moderate 20th century warming was accentuated by a host of manipulations. Without the hockey stick, there’s just nothing wrong. It’s not broke, don’t try to fix it.
And second, we’ve heard: “most scientists agree” that CO2 will raise temperatures by x amount? Funny that the IPCC claimed a causal correlation between CO2 & temperatures, until about 2004 when the ipcc was reluctantly forced to retract their claim. Yes, the ipcc has retracted their claim of a CO2 / temp causal correlation. As it stands there’s no empirical evidence of any sort that CO2 causes climate warming, and indeed now the ipcc is maintaining that CO2 is both a cause and an effect of temperature change, which, unless CO2 was only an insignificant contributor to warming, would without a doubt lead to a runaway greenhouse with boiling oceans. But we never had a runaway greenhouse, despite co2 being as high as 7000ppm in the past. No, most scientists shouldn’t agree. The evidence is that CO2 does nothing to climate temperatures.
Not another!!! For Heaven’s sake.
The spin is on. The Swedish national news had it as one of its top stories, and we learned by the reporter responsible for the public Television that 40% of the terrestrial land will be impossible for humans to live on. For our amusement the weatherman directly afterwards told us we just had the coldest 24hours for the month of March in Sweden since 1979.
Dang, it’s worse than we thought. /sarc
Don’t any of these “scientists” have a clue? Don’t any of these “scientists” have any shame? Don’t any of these “scientists” realize how hostile the public is going to be towards them when they decide they have had enough and rise up?
I thought these people wanted to make a name for themselves. You know, go down in history for something noble, something wonderful. Do they really want their children and their children’s children ashamed of them? Do they really want to go down in history as clowns and puppets at the very least – thieves and murderers at the worst?
They’re all bloody scienTITS, the lot of them.
A search for “shakun” on WUWT yields 20 previous encounters.
is warmer than it’s been during 70 to 80 percent of the last 11,300 years…….
….is colder than it’s been during 20 to 30 percent of the last 11,300 years
Early Holocene warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene….
…present day warmth of 0.7C is back to business as usual
and this makes it all look ridiculous…….
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo3.png
97% of Climate Scientists recommend Sensodyne for sensitive teeth.
Woulnt human activity in the last centuary significantly affect pollen levels through agriculture.Would this inself create a hockey stick?
Methinks this also has all the same problems as tree rings for measuing temperatures.
What about CO2 contamination of results – Higher CO2 means more plant growth therefor more pollen, therefore contaminated results.
Is this contamination of results not exactly the same as what happend with the Tiljander Sediments used upside down by Mann.
I think Craig Loehle’s head just exploded.
My take away from the headlines, even if it IS true (maybe it is, maybe it isn’t), is that over the past 11K+ years, current temperatures have been exceeded 30% of the time (today’s temperatures are basically only slightly above average), even though CO2 levels were lower then than they are today.
This one raises even more questions then Mann’s work did. Where I am sitting here in Calgary ±12,000 years ago we have about 4km of ice. By ±10,000 years ago none and I am supposed to believe all that melt happened at temperatures lower then today. I think I am being asked to make some large leaps of faith. Faith is not science. Methinks the calibrations being made are via thin air.
All this talk of ‘record’, ‘unprecedented’ and ‘alarming’ temperatures and we’re only in the 2nd quartile? Meh.
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0938018124.txt
I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. … I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of years as Mike appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) that require explanation
Until someone can explain why there was pressure to tell a nice tidy story, and why (if) that pressure went away, I’m not going to take reconstructions like this seriously.
They are mendaciously spinning false facts. The planet is currently in a cooler part of the Holocene. The Holocene has been quite a bit warmer than now, and those episodes were all beneficial for the biosphere.
It appears that we are cresting the hill, with no warming trend over the past decade and a half. What we really should be concerned about is a return to pre-Holocene temperatures. Instead, we get this alarmist propaganda.
OK.
How about:
Over the past 11,300 Years, 20% to 30% of the time it was warmer than today.
There. that’s not so scary, is it?
from the paper–
Although our temperature stack does not fully
resolve variability at periods shorter than 2000 years,
such high-frequency changes would only modestly
broaden the statistical distribution of Holocene
temperatures (Fig. 3 and fig. S22).Moreover,
we suggest that accounting for any spatial or seasonal
biases in the stack would tend to reduce its
variability because of the cancellation of noise in
a large-scale mean and the opposing nature of
seasonal insolation forcing over the Holocene, causing
the Holocene temperature distribution to contract.
Just another sad case of grant addiction..
So 20-30% of the last 10,000 years has been warmer than today without any EVIL SUVs spewing out BABY-KILLING CO2.
What are we supposed to be worried about again?
It gets better.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2013/03/07/339.6124.1198.DC1/Marcott.SM.pdf
So, from 73 records (not databases, but “n”) and 1000 Monte Carlo simulations you interpolate and get your error bars for 12,000 years of data. All I can say is WOW. Talk about Pure F’in Magic. Do climate scientist work at all these days?
“beesaman says:
March 7, 2013 at 2:54 pm
I predict more and more nonsense of this sort, right up to the moment it starts costing governments money.”
Ohoh. Not good, beesaman. I don’t know about the EU, OZ, etc, but in the good old USSA, they never run out, as long as there is a tree for them to make into paper to print money with.
Another hockey stick – this one billed as ‘scarier’ than Mann’s
Here is the real hockey stick=> the solar activity of the last 100 years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:1056/normalise
Okay, so that was worded different than further down,
I will wait for the cliffnotes 😉
Try to fight against the tide of misinformation out there about AGW is akin to being a zoo keeper giving an enema to an elephant that has been constipated for 3 months. !
It’s scary all right. In the same way that horror movies are scary. Nothing to do with reality though. I doubt it will fool many.
love how stable temps were before the deep fall in the little ice age. maybe that fall is the cause for the rebound warmth. After all the scientists have proven temps used to be stable.
‘projections of global temperature for the year 2100,’
when none of us will be around to be reminded of this BS , which is really ‘useful’
I knew it was hotter than I always feared, and now I have a graph by some scientists to prove it! When will Marcott get his Nobel?
(Read with total lack of interest) Oh wow, I am sooooo fearful, now I want to give up all my freedoms and money to a bunch of mindless bureaucrats. (Come on alarmists, you can do better than that.)
Something crooked this way comes….
Anthony add an update with the GWPF’s excellent headline,
EARTH COOLER TODAY THAN 28% OF THE PAST 11,300 YEARS
Who would like to bet which way the distinguished Prof Mann tweets about this study?
Will he proclaim it as a major breakthrough and justification for his own reconstructions?
Or will he tweet abuse because they have upstaged him with an 11000 year reconstruction?
This is another excellent one from Reason,
Earth’s Average Temperature Lower Now Than It Was 5,000 Years Ago
Which strip barks did they use? Or was is sediments? Archived data? Methodology? Can’t wait for Steve to completely disassemble this one. Will be fun….
Better question, did they as Steve McIntyre to be a reviewer?
The big problem with this particular hockey stick appears to be the temporal resolution of the proxies – which is about 120 years average for the historic temps, but is only 1 year for the 20th century data they have tagged on the end.
This is effectively like using a large span running average and automaticatly smears out and removes peaks or hollows in temperature from the past – like the minoan, roman and medieval warm periods that were quite short in duration (1-200 years) but saw large 2°C rises in temperature .
To make this graph more honest you would have to run the same 120 year moving average over the modern temp record – in which case you wouldn’t have anything news-worthy as it would remove the modern peak and fill in part of the little ice age. Alternatively you have to use proxies with high temporal resolution (like ice cores such as Gisp2)
Just horrible pretensions to science. If the paleo part of the chart has a granularity of 120 years, and the present temps are the annual instrumental record (tortured to bend upwards), then it is clear that the medieval warm period (error bars) still make it stick up above the most stretched out hockey stick to date. Lets see what happens if we average the temp of the last 120 years to make an apples to apples comparison. This must be against some law or another or should be.
Just look at the first 500 years of the graph. Less then .01C variation for 500 years!!! Simply Amazing!!!
Borenstein gets into the act:
http://www.usnews.com/science/news/articles/2013/03/07/recent-heat-spike-unlike-anything-in-11000-years
That “Mann et al reconstruction” in the figure is certainly not the original hockey stick in the 2001 IPCC report. Among other things, the original only went back 1000 years.
So we are now convinced that the MWP, the Roman Period, the Minoan Period were all COOLER than today. The Dorset people of Newfoundland, Labrador and the Northern Arctic, did not have a warm spell that allowed the Inuit to move east 5500 years ago or so and ended their culture: the Inuit seized the north because it was LESS easy to live along the coast than in Alaska at that time.
Further, the historical records, plantings of vinyards, wheat, cheery trees, all indicate that the vegatation of those periods only did as well as today further south than today. Greenland and Iceland were not as warm as today. The climates of Scotland, Norway and Denmark were never as pleasant and conducive to civilization and living outdoors as they are today. The Romans went to Britain because they thought a tough life with poor growing conditions was where people produced goods of value to the Empire.
Hmmm. Methinks we need less silos in academia. Perhaps some “social” could be organized between the History, Anthropology and Climate Science Departments.
Better question, did they ask Steve McIntyre to be a reviewer?
Michael Mann even gets an “I told you so,” in Borenstein’s piece:
Go tell it to the Vikings?
What was that Mark Twain quote about science?
I see in climatology circles, desperate times call for more desperate distortions.
Abstract
Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time.
=========
Now let’s define some terms in this first sentence:
We have “suggest”, “recent”, and “unprecedented in that time”.
Suggest is a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, recent will come back on the data, as will, unprecedented in that time.
Nothing was said, that didn’t have a cover story.
———-
Science by tabloid ?
The real question is whether they used Mannian statistics to generate their hockey stick. Looks pretty suspicious from the graphs. I’ll wait for McIntyre or other tireless sleuths to wade through the details . . .
1. This is data linking temperature with pollen count, how do we know that the increase of temperature is not causing the increase in pollen count (increased land available for growth, longer growing seasons, etc) ?
2. Does the full report state at which point in the temperature graphs we hit those 20% – 30% times of higher temperatures that they mention? (I see the last 2k years as a flat line, so if we go by thier report, years 11300 – 2000 BP should show those higher temps, right?)
3. If that grey line is Mann’s temperature line… does that mean the pollen count is showing a temperature increase years before the measured increases in Mann’s graph? (for that matter, can pollen data be a proxy that can smooth out that much more than tree ring data?)
Yes the first thing I saw was it was armer 29 to 30 % of recent history, doesn’t that make it fraudulent to use the term “unprecedented” ? answers on the back of an open big oil cheqyue please!!
It is beneficial to flatten the paleo temperature record as much as possible. Low spatial and temporal sampling can be advantageously employed to effectively low pass filter any temperature transients that may have existed. Better yet is the use of tree rings, which respond to so many different forcings that temperature dependencies are completely smeared out.
It allows the climateers to argue that almost immeasurably small global temperature changes can result in huge changes in ice and sea levels. For example, a change in global T of a few tenth’s of a degree can be argued as sufficient to move us from the MWP into a mini ice age. The climate sensitivity must be ginormous! We are all doomed!
How come the graph in this story does not resemble the one a Andy Revkins site or the story on MSNBC.com which is much less misleading?
http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/07/17225440-warming-fastest-since-dawn-of-civilization-study-shows?lite.
1. This is data linking temperature with pollen count, how do we know that the increase of temperature is not causing the increase in pollen count (increased land available for growth, longer growing seasons, etc) ?
… I seem to have an extra “not” in there… Do we know how they eliminated other factors to prove only temperature is causing the increase of pollen?
Again calls into question the love of the word “unprecedented”.
Now they agree that 20 to 30% of the last 10,000 years was warmer than the present and they choose to spin it the other way? Of course!
It seems the dictum “we must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” lives on.
chris y says:
“It allows the climateers to argue that almost immeasurably small global temperature changes can result in huge changes in ice and sea levels.”
Prof Lindzen has commented on that:
This chart shows a rational view of the planet’s past temperature, using a normal y-axis.
Not so scary, is it?
Shakun and Marcott were on the team who published the paper last year that reversed the thinking on the subject of whether increases in CO2 occurred before or after periods of warming. They “proved” it occurred before periods of warming and therefore concluded that CO2 was the likely cause of the warming.
I wouldn’t have expected any less.
Here is the paper I referred to in my post above:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v484/n7392/fig_tab/nature10915_F2.html
Looks like another bunch of pseudo scientists is getting into the business of writing science-fiction now. Its very lucrative and why not – everyone else is doing it. Its very cheap to do just get a bunch of random samples draw a graph load a paper with Eco-babble and presto the money keeps flooding in. No peer reviewer would dare criticize for fear of being marginalised and wiped off the available list. Yes folks the new World Order.
Greenland ice cores show that 9,100 of the past 10,000 years were warmer in Greenland than in any one of the past 100 years. The temperature fluctuations derived from the Greenland ice cores delineate the Holocene Climatic Optimum, Egyptian, Minoan, Roman, and Medieval Warm Periods and their relative warmth, as well as intervening cool periods such as the Little Ice Age. Serious climate reconstructions should begin (and could even end) with a thorough reading of the works of Dr. Hubert H. Lamb (“Climatic History and the Future” would be a good place to start), the founder of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. None of the Mann-ian et al works give even a nod of recognition to the high bar Lamb established by demonstrating the enormous volume of studies by many scientists supporting natural climate change. Before today’s researchers can build a tower to celebrate their theories of anthropogenic climate change, they first need to tear down the Great Wall that Lamb and others constructed demonstrating thousands of years of natural, often dramatic, climate change. The evidence to date is that they are still working at taking the first brick from the Wall.
pottereaton,
Shakun & Marcott take the position that ∆CO2 causes ∆temperature. But empirical evidence shows just the opposite cause and effect: changing temperature causes changes in CO2 to follow.
It is obvious from that empirical data that changes in temperature cause changes in CO2, not vice versa. Only in climastrology do scientists claim that computer models trump real world evidence.
Pure propaganda. But the scary thing is… millions of left-leaning sheeple will lap it up and recite it as gospel.
Y’know, it may be an attempt at ‘come clean’ honesty…. they could have sat back happily with Mann’s “current warming is unprecedented in the last 1500 years” (with all the smoothing involved in that!
But instead they have come out with a paper showing that in fact 20 to 30% of the Holocene was warmer than today.
Something I love to point out to my CAGW alarmist friends. (well, they are mostly not really CAGW alarmist, having not thought about it very much, they just tend to believe what they are told in this case).
Note the paragraph about IPCC projection seems to be obligatory in any recent publication (I’d suspect it is now a requirement of most reviewers) and gives no indication of the actual opinion of the article writers on the matter.
A bit more detail here:
http://simpleclimate.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/projected-warming-set-to-exceed-civilisations-experience/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ResearchBloggingAllEnglish+%28Research+Blogging+-+English+-+All+Topics%29
Seems to disprove my theory above … they are perhaps just doing the usual “here is a proxy temperature record, now please look over here at the model ‘projections’ .., yes, the same ones we showed you last time….!”.
And to me, their figure B on that page makes it look a bit like we are in the process of saving ourselves from the next ice-age.
Years before present is defined as Years before 1950 in the data file.
It starts at 10 with a 0.6C so the 0.6C blade at the end of the hockey stick chart is really 1940 .
And was it 0.6C in 1940 compared to the 1961-1990 average which is what their paper states was used as the baseline. Snicker. Not according to NCDC, GISS or Hadcru.
It was only 0.1C according to Hadcrut3, 0.02C according to Hadcrut4, -0.06C according to GISTemp, and -0.13C according to the NCDC.
And they cut off the data at the point where the last ice age was just ending so that one could not see if their methodology would extend back in time and reach the generally accepted -5.0C of the last glacial maximum, which it clearly would not since they have the Holocene maximum at only +0.4C.
These type of reconstructions made Mann famous and well-funded and allowed the warmers to feel better about their theory. Marcott and Shakun want to join the club.
Someone should have a go at the database file – Database S1.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2013/03/07/339.6124.1198.DC1
I can also make such a graph. I just apply a low pass filter with a cutoff frequency of 1000 years and leave the last 100 years unfiltered using GISS data.
pollen? really??
just like tree rings they will increase with water… decrease without it.. Increase with CO2… Decrease without it… Increase with warmth… decrease without it… and it is all relevant to minor changes in all of these…
And we paid for this in grant monies?
NOT AGAIN…. and MANN to boot..
Garbage In = Garbage Out
I love the headline.
Earth Is Warmer Today Than During 70 to 80 Percent of the Past 11,300 Years
Not
Earth Is Cooler Today Than During 20 to 30 Percent of the Past 11,300 Years
Alarmism ‘r’ Us …
w.
By ignoring Nyquist’s criterion one can make a fool of one’s self.
I’m sure all the people on the east coast of the US will read this paper and realize the cold white stuff that keeps getting dumped on them isn’t really snow but the ashes from the planet catching on fire.
I’m not too worried about whatever proxies they come up with. As long as the planet continues to thermally flat-line these folks will just look like clientologists.
Mann’s own recons can’t be validated prior to 1500 CE, a measly 500 years. He knows damn well that something going back 11 frickin’ thousand years is a fairy tale.
Yet once again, temperature numbers assigned by way of mere statistical scaling. No physical theory. No science. No material meaning. The article just goes to show how thoroughly paleoclimatology has become an accepted pseudoscience.
Is the graph in the post from the paper? It doesn’t make any sense. I’m assuming that BP means “before present”.
Interesting that the two lead authors are post docs and Shaken not surprisingly comes off cocky with Revkin like a giddy school girl. It is fascinating Revkin gives Mann so much space in some desperate attempt to salvage his farcical hockey sticks while using his NYT honed “journalism” skills to not even bother looking for a critique.
This NYT post demonstrates just how far Revkin is in the tank with them, any facade he tried to create before has been completely obliterated.
“…when you tack on where we are headed in the 21st century …and BOOM! we’re just outside the [reaching really high], outside the elevator you know, its up and out [reaching high again] so I think that is the kind of interesting perspective you get …a super hockey stick”
– Post doc Shaken giving a “scientific” review of his paper.
Key Statement in the abstract of the paper: “Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.”
Temperatures in past decade have not exceeded peak interglacial values! So comments claiming unprecedented warming are wrong and have misinterpreted the paper. Does anyone know if these authors have avoided the statistical problems of Mann’s reconstructions?
In the second video the first person Shakun mentions is “Bill McKibben” …what does that say for Shakun’s ideology?
Could someone tell me how it is possible to reconstruct paleotemperatures to fractions of a degree using any kind of analysis. How do the proxies compare to actual measured temps since the invention of thermometers? As someone in a comment in an earlier post pointed out, early thermometer records are probably not even accurate to fractions of a degree, so just how can anyone come up with this conclusion regarding heating or cooling?
Weird.
They just concluded that as much as 20-30% of the holocene may have been warmer than today and every savant here attacks a study they didnt read.
1. You think it was cooler?
2. You think it was warmer?
Which is it? If you think it was warmer.. On what basis? a piece of driftwood?
Simple: we have evidence to reconstruct past temperatures. That evidence is all we have.
We have methods for estimating. They are what they are. You take the data. You apply the methods and you get the answer that you do.
The nice thing about the study is that there are no tree rings.
The other nice thing is the methods are known.
So, if you think it was cooler during the holocene, on what basis?
Warmer? on what basis?
Show your work.
Personally, Im with Robert on this ( as we discussed it earlier this week )
Its broadly consistent with other work and they had an interesting aproach to handling the loss of high frequency signals with proxies that have resolutions varying between 20 and 500 years.
They figured all that from just 73 sites. Well, that’s it then.
Mosher, B.A. English who has no scientific papers published is with Robert Rhode his BEST team member …didn’t see that coming.
How would a non-scientist recognize if the work was shown? Would he do a “review” of the grammar?
Mosher;
The problem is that many people don’t trust a single word out of the mouths of people who claim to be claim to be climatologists.
And with good reason as you well know.
Next time you have a chat with Robert please discuss the risible image of climate science held by the savants.
Steven Mosher says: March 7, 2013 at 8:34
“….They just concluded that as much as 20-30% of the Holocene may have been warmer than today ….”
That is the big thing to come out of it. Something oft quoted and oft refuted in discussions. And here we now have some additional evidence.
The only problem is how it gets headlined, and the emphasis on ‘is worse than we thought’ model projections from this point forward.
Every time climate science has another crack at misanthropy the cool headed skeptics in the scientific community become more determined to show the world just how much of a laughingstock they are, in my opinion, the “Man Made Global Warming” alarmists are kicking a sleeping giant!
Am I allowed to say thank god it is warmer than most of the last 10,000 years?
Life is good, enjoy!
The title of the graph says Years (BP). Is that Years (Before Petrol)?
So the claim is that one can reconstruct, to within +/- 0.2C, what the so-called “global average temperature” was 2000 years ago using proxy measurements from only 73 sites?
Such claims not only strain credulity, but toss it in the blender.
“Stephen Singer says:
March 7, 2013 at 4:55 pm
How come the graph in this story does not resemble the one a Andy Revkins site or the story on MSNBC.com which is much less misleading?
http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/07/17225440-warming-fastest-since-dawn-of-civilization-study-shows?lite.
”
I agree with Stephen – the graph is totally different. WUWT? Can some bright spark point out why? If not then we should make a big deal of it.
There is so much freely available evidence that temperatures over the last few millennia have not followed any kind of “hockey stick” curve that any paper which claims that they did is ipso facto not credible.
Next?
After reading all the comments I’m finding it hard to figure out whether people come here to find out stuff or if they really prefer the science just all went away.
I probably got this blog all wrong. I’m just learning. People told me it was a really good place to get info from a skeptics viewpoint. I thought it was about questioning science not dismissing any new study. (The reactions here almost makes you wonder if there’s not something to this CAGW after all.)
Steven Mosher says:
March 7, 2013 at 8:34 pm
So, if you think it was cooler during the holocene, on what basis?
Warmer? on what basis?
The obvious answer to that is: It was both much cooler and much warmer. The problem is (probably – I haven’t read it) not the study, but the press releases. Since, as pointed out in Revkin’s article, the resolution is low for most of the Holocene, you can’t really compare it to today’s temperatures at all without doing a ~400 year average – and if we do that, the CWP is smeared together with the LIA. We have evidence from the Greenland ice cores that previous warming spells (Minoan, Roman, Medieval) lasted for a short time, so from that point of view we have all reason to believe that the current warming is also just a short-lived warming spell, and that in the big 400-year-smoothed picture, we’re still on a long trip downwards to the next glaciation.
But it’s nice that the picture confirms what we already knew: That it was much warmer 6000 years ago than in the last couple of hundred years (we’ve known that for a long time, I learned in school decades ago that in Norwegian mountains which are now Arctic tundra, there were huge forests back then – the preserved roots of those trees can still be found in marshes).
Study shows climate changes – it has been hotter and colder in the past.In what way does this add anything to the debate?
Why not show the graph of the entire period of the study? JP
[do you have a link to the entire graph that you would like to share? . . mod]
Peter Plail says: “Study shows climate changes – it has been hotter and colder in the past.In what way does this add anything to the debate?”
In two ways. It adds credence to similar results using differing methodologies. And, within the constraints of that methodology, it shows an unprecedented rate of change. JP
Martin says:
March 8, 2013 at 1:11 am
“After reading all the comments I’m finding it hard to figure out whether people come here to find out stuff or if they really prefer the science just all went away.”
Martin. It’s definetly the latter. JP
[I suppose your spelling is a clue as to why your comment is content free. . . still why not read around the other threads too and learn just how much science is discussed here. You will find the effort most rewarding . . mod]
Here’s Steven Goddard breakdown with graphs and references.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/new-data-tampering-record-disappearing-the-ice-age/
“What that history shows, the researchers say, is that during the last 5,000 years, the Earth on average cooled about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit–until the last 100 years, when it warmed about 1.3 degrees F.”
Then after applying “Mikes Nature trick” we made this graph
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/marcott-a-10001.jpg
Martin, when you have seen enough of these paleoclimate studies having been shown to have major flaws you don’t believe any of them until they have been properly audited by someone like Steve McIntyre. What climate scientist discusses Bill McKibben in an interview and expects to be taken seriously?
“Steven Mosher says:
March 7, 2013 at 8:34 pm
Weird.
They just concluded that as much as 20-30% of the holocene may have been warmer than today and every savant here attacks a study they didnt read.
1. You think it was cooler?
2. You think it was warmer?
Which is it? If you think it was warmer.. On what basis? a piece of driftwood?
Simple: we have evidence to reconstruct past temperatures. That evidence is all we have.”
Mosher, the problem is…. it isn’t evidence that is all the warmists have. They also have motive (billions of dollars and politics) ever since the formation of the IPCC to fudge/manipulate/construe/etc the data to fit a predetermined narrative. They have been caught numerous times doing so.
After it was decided that CO2 was to be the evil culprit which would destroy civilization as we know it, the IPCC replaced Lamb’s temperature graph with Mann’s fraudulent temperature reconstruction. Leading climate scientists praised Mann’s work as the Holy Grail of climate science, whereas in actuality the way in which the graph was constructed and sold to the public was nothing short of scientific fraud in the opinion of many who actually examined how Mann’s graph was constructed and what was shown and what was NOT shown.
Climategate demonstrated that a number of prominent climate scientists were willing to lie and/or exaggerate to further the NOBLE cause.
Published temperature histories for the time period since 1800 that keep changing every few months or couple of years, and always “corrected” to show the problem is even worse than we thought previously.
Satellite sea level rise histories that change (“corrected”) with time, just like the temperature graphs have done… always with the same result, the sea level rise is even worse than we thought previously.
The claim that man-made CO2 is making the ocean more acidic and will lead to catastrophic results in the very near future if we don’t stop producing CO2.
The IPCC claims the oceans are rising at an ever accelerating rate. However, the tide-gauge literature data shows the current, rather slow but steady as opposed to accelerating, rate started in 1850, long before CO2 warming could have been the cause.
The melting antarctic icecap fiasco (Steig et al).
And you ask, what evidence is there to show that temperatures in the past were warmer than today?
1) Ice cores
2) Old Viking farmlands in Greenland.
3) Lamb’s temperature reconstruction
These are things come to mind quickly, I am sure I could come up with even more if I wanted to think about longer.
What evidence do we have that current and 100 yr projected CO2 concentrations will not be a catastrophic problem?
1) CO2 concentrations in the past have more than once been several thousands of ppm, there was NO runaway global warming. In fact the earth still manages to go into and out of ice ages on a regular bases regardless of what the CO2 concentration is at the time.
2) Plants start to die off at concentrations under 200ppm. Thus 200ppm is BAD for life on earth. It is not too likely that at CO2 concentrations that are still quite near the low end as far as what is good for plants and is far less than levels that have occurred in the past will lead to mass extinction of the animals.
3) Like essentially all stable systems, It is highly likely that earth’s climate systems have predominantly negative feedbacks, otherwise the earth would have become uninhabitable LONG ago before man arrived on the scene.
4) Most plants grow much faster at 1000ppm CO2 than they do at 200 ppm. That is really great news for a world with billions of inhabitants that need to be fed.
5) Updates to the estimate of climate sensitivity to CO2 are begrudgingly, but continually revised downwards. What is is now?? 1.5 to 2C? It used to be much higher, seems not long ago best guess was 3.5C with possibly something as high as 7 or 8 C for a doubling of CO2. My intuition says it will be less than 1C since the feedbacks are expected to be negative, not positive.
I think I am done for now.
Alcheson
11300 years ago we were suffering a severe ice age. It has since warmed up, quelle suprise.
The two graphs are taken from Marcott et al, Fig.1. A) is the one on WUWT. B) is the one on DOT earth and MSNBC covers the full period of the study.
They explain
The real mystery for me is from whence came the very hungry caterpillar on New Scientist and Bishop Hill. I can’t see it in the paper.
A link to the entire graph is here,
http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2013/03/holocener.jpeg
poptech: “properly audited by someone like Steve McIntyre”
Thanks, poptech. Is that another climate scientist? I found a statistics website that looks interesting and a couple of climate scientists websites that seem to know what they are talking about. I’ll do a bit more digging and maybe compare. It’s sometimes hard to tell what’s what but I did some high school science so understand a bit of it. Pretty well starting from scratch with climate though. I think I’ve figured out the greenhouse effect but that’s about as far as I’ve got so far. It’s very complicated isn’t it.
Martin says: March 8, 2013 at 1:11 am
“…After reading all the comments I’m finding it hard to figure out whether people come here to find out stuff or if they really prefer the science just all went away…. I probably got this blog all wrong. I’m just learning. People told me it was a really good place to get info from a skeptics viewpoint. I thought it was about questioning science not dismissing any new study. (The reactions here almost makes you wonder if there’s not something to this CAGW after all.)…”
Martin, I think most of the frustration in here is that it appears this is probably useful information, but the spin is applied to the story immediately.
We don’t get a headline that makes us say: “Hey, for 30% of this interglacial (The Holocene) it was actually warmer than we are today! Isn’t that interesting? I wonder if this brings up a need to approach this all a little more cautiously?”
The very first line manages to slip in the phrase unprecedented warming, but is really talking about only the last 1500 years (and many, including me, doubt that is really the case, taking into account unadjusted mid 20th century data, and the sparsity of the MWP proxy data, but that is another story).
Nope, title, press release and headlines, and extracted charts all imply we are now hotter than ever, (to the average man who does not look at data very hard). The body of the abstract is fine, other than the obligatory paragraph saying “It’s worse than this, because it’s going to get a whole lot hotter, according to our models”.
In fact, they plainly state it has been warmer than today (pretty amazing , eh?) in this interglacial for 20 to 30% of the time, and the temperature is only now perhaps reaching the level of smoothed early Holocene temperatures, and is nowhere near as warm as the preceding interglacial.
To add insult to injury we get an illustration with a spliced on instrument temperature which looks like we are experiencing a massive temperature spike (well, all of 0.4 C), when we all know full well that the smoothing effect of the sampling and the nature of the proxy itself has removed most variance (spikes) from the older part of the proxy record. ie There were very likely a huge number of equivalent (to the recent record) or greater spikes and dips across the whole time span.
In other words, this is good and useful science, but written up and presented in a preconceived alarmist manner. And spun completely by some CAGW alarmists in their blogs and in the MMS.
Martin. If you can’t recognize when someone is using a data set to tell you a particulate story, you won’t see why more astute people may overreact.
I can’t explain it any better than this. I’d appreciate your comments on this.
Get ready for the next installment: “Today’s temperatures are warmer than the Holocene Climate Optimum and the Roman Warm Period and as for the MWP it was as cool as LIA.”
I vaguely recall that over the past several decades the biosphere has been greening. I also vaguely recall that the ice core records shows co2 rise follows temperature rise. Could it be a case of the chicken or the egg?
And now the NYT weighs in, screaming Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/science/earth/global-temperatures-highest-in-4000-years-study-says.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130308
The good doctor and wanna-be Nobel Prizewinner Mann opines:
“We and other living things can adapt to slower changes,” Dr. Mann said. “It’s the unprecedented speed with which we’re changing the climate that is so worrisome.”
Yeah. There’s no human fingerprint on the recent warming that they can point to, but gosh, just look at the “unprecedented speed”.
Atarsinc
“And, within the constraints of that methodology, it shows an unprecedented rate of change. JP”
Please explain how taking samples at 120 year intervals allows anyone to draw any conclusions about short term (a few decades) rates of change of global temperatures. The periods weren’t necessarily consistent either, so all you are getting is snapshots taken at irregular intervals. And this from what is inevitably a noisy source.- given year to year variability.
As to your claim that this study adds credence to other studies, then I an puzzled. I wasn’t aware that anybody seriously disputed that temperatures have varied above and below current values in the past.
Anthony — Thank you for including Rohde’s very important warnings from Professor Revkin’s blog at the NY Times.
This is another case of “mixed data sets” — combined into one graph as if they were the same type and kind of data, leading the unwary into thinking the parts of the graph can be compared to one another.
Just not so.
It is a scientific error to combine such data into one graph in the first plce.
Yep. Don’t believe anyone who tells you it’s basic physics.
Earth Is Warmer Today Than During 70 to 80 Percent of the Past 11,300 Years
Thank (insert preferred name of chosen deity here) !!!
Martin – a vital discipline entirely lacking from the majority of whatever ‘climate science’ is is statistics – one of the ‘top guys’, Phil Jones, cannot even use Excel, according to his admission in climategate emails, hence our delight with, admiration of and praise for Steve. He has shovelled the dirt back where it belongs, the hole ‘The Team’ have dug for themselves with their political science, wonky guesswork, cheap shots in lieu of evidence, poor skillz and near-zero-finesse.
Our beef is mostly with the enablers, handlers and promoters of this sorry state of affairs – most of whom could not give a flying **** about the environment, starvation and drought, true pollution, overfishing, your health and prosperity or anything but their bottom line being nourished by the fake alarm in question.
How does one get a single global temperature record from 73 different individual temperature records from around the planet.
Well, actually, 73 is a pretty good number of records to get a global record from (especially if you are not using tree-rings this time).
But it depends on what you do with those 73 records.
These guys used Mann’s math called RegEM (which was just made-up by Mann and is not really a proven statistical technique – its a cherrypicking weighting method depending on how you set it up – so we will have to see how they really did it – complex enough that only a few people will be able to figure it).
I would simply use an average over a grid system which is not what they did.
————
Secondly, they are using temperature records from 4 different isotope methods, dO18, mg/ca, Tex86 and Uk37.
Most of the individual studies which use these methods also are based on certain assumptions. Tex86 has consistently been off in my opinion. UK37 works pretty well. mg/ca depends too much on local conditions to be useful since the chemistry changes over time. dO18 is by far the best when it is controlled according the international SMOW standards. But too many people are using incorrect tempC/dO18 conversion formulae (especially the ones that have been recalibrated based on bore-holes).
———-
So, does that make this a good reconstruction.
Not a chance given the authors and how the isotope methods have been misused on many of the individual records.
Another scandal !
Where is the data?
poptech, thanks for posting the whole graph. Compared to GISP2, it looks like the whole graph is severely dampened. This proxy reconstruction shows +/-0.5°C over the past 12K years, yet GISP2 shows +/-9.5°C over the same time period.
“The analysis reveals that the planet today is warmer than it’s been during 70 to 80 percent of the last 11,300 years” also tranlates into:
“The analysis reveals that the planet today is colder than it’s been during 20 to 30 percent of the last 11,300 years”
So, actually there’s nothing to see here except that during certain periods in the past, the earth was warmer and contrary to all the warmist hype and catastrophism, we are nowhere near something unprecedented.
(apologies to anyone who has said it before me sincve I have not gone through the comments yet.)
Pops, meant to include GISP2, http://i49.tinypic.com/oji4b7.jpg
The desperate, almost frantic enthusiasm of many posters to reject the findings of this research are almost amusing. This research seems to have hit a nerve! They are perhaps indicative that it is the findings, and implications of the the research that are unwelcome rather than any real skepticism about the methodology or data.
As other posters have pointed out the research is in line with other methods and the results are consistent with other findings. The Holocene has had very stable GLOBAL temperatures during the rise of agriculture and city based civilisation. Cooling in the northern hemisphere is largely a result in the change in the date of perihelion.
The finding that the last century has seen an exceptional rise in global temperatures at the same time that physics indicates that extra energy is being retained by the rising CO2 is common to many paleoclimate studies.
Either people accept that these scientific studies are presenting reasonable findings derived from legitimate methodologies, or they invent conspiracy theories to justify the claim that the vast majority of scientists working in this field are falsifying the data and research.
Creationists already occupy this territory, claiming that evolution is not a scientific finding but an ideological campaign to impose empirical materialism. Climate science rejectionists seem to heading down the same road, but with the ideological motivation to enhance global governance to deal with the implied problem indicated by climate research.
The problem is that both sides tend to see a conspiracy both in the promotion of the results of science like this and in opposition to the research results which it is claimed is funded by commercial interests like the Donor fund and promulgated by the same tactics and often the same people that undermined the science on tobbaco, asbestos, DDT, CFCs, lead…..
REPLY: You mean in contrast to the desperate, almost frantic enthusiasm to accept it without questioning it?
One more thing: By the end of this century, the global mean atmospheric temperature is predicted to increase, due to increasing CO2-induced warming, by some 4C according to the warmist-catastrophic cli-mythologists. However, we are already 13% into the century and the rise in this predicted temperature is ACTUALLY ZERO C.
If one were to take the century as commencing in 1997 and ending in 2096, the years without warming would be 17%. I don’t know by what kind of ‘science’ warmists keep on hanging on to their catastrophic warmist meme.
Markx:
Well and kindly said.
I want my hockey stick back.
Mine, Mine Mine!
Hello, (me=newbie)
I was wondering what would the graph look like if one were to use the highest resolution available prior to 1880, then a 120 year smoothed resolution for the 20th century temps? Would the authors of this paper accept that methodology?
Mosher wrote:
” …every savant here attacks a study they didnt read.
1. You think it was cooler?
2. You think it was warmer?
Which is it? If you think it was warmer.. On what basis? a piece of driftwood?”
Well Mosh, if you had actually read the comments of the savants you are attacking, you would have seen the answer to your question in Doug Proctor’s comment. To that I will add the local effects of the Holocene Thermal Maximum in the Paciific Northwest, when sagebrush and Ponderosa pine reached the shores of Puget Sound, treeline was hundreds of feet higher, and cactus colonized the San Juan islands. I frankly cannot believe the magnitude of ignorance you expressed with “a piece of driftwood.” Go read “After the Ice Age” by E.C. Pielou and get a clue.
Steven Mosher says
Show your work.
Henry says
A simple random sample of mine showed we are cooling, for at least the last 12 years
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/02/21/henrys-pool-tables-on-global-warmingcooling/
Others seem to agree with my dataset
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2014/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2014/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2014/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2014/trend/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2014/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2014/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2002/to:2014/plot/gistemp/from:2002/to:2014/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2014/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2014/trend
Furthermore, my data set on maxima shows we will be cooling for some time to come.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
this will cause a shift in cloud formation and condensation causing some places to get much cooler whilst other countries might get some GH benefit- even though they will see less sun…
an example is Alaska (getting much cooler) and CET (getting warmer)
If you remove the part of the graph that represents the future what does it really look like?
Hard to see from what is provided.
Right on Time for AR5… “Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records.”
In the abstract, not a word about the methodology. In the press release, “The research team, which included Jeremy Shakun of Harvard and Alan Mix of OSU, primarily used fossils from ocean sediment cores and terrestrial archives to reconstruct the temperature history”.
All this is pretty vague and indeed subject to caution: another multiproxy, orange and apple study that just happens to generate a hockey stick… On top of the methodology, the stats will have to be looked very seriously. Of course, these kind of studies dispense with meteorology, its processes and how they can affect the samples and the meaning of proxy measurements.
Not a problem for Mosher who should become Michael Mann’s PR guy, as he should know better to be quite suspicious of these kind of ad hoc studies, especially in view of regional detailed studies such as Clim. Past Discuss., 9, 507–523, 2013.
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/9/507/2013/ doi:10.5194/cpd-9-507-2013
The graph shown at the top of the page covers the last 2k years. T
As mentioned in the update above there is further information on:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/scientists-find-an-abrupt-warm-jog-after-a-very-long-cooling/
This includes a full version of the graph extended back the full 11K years. I am struggling to see the similarity between this and a hockey stick. Looks like the 2k year graph was cherry-picked for its visual impact.
@- REPLY: You mean in contrast to the desperate, almost frantic enthusiasm to accept it without questioning it?
There will be some enviro-activists who may use it as a cudgel to beat rejectionists over the head without much critical assessment of the research.
But most of the informed scientific community that are accepting this are doing so in the knowledge that it is valid research using legitimate methodologies with credible results.
[snip – not going there, especially when such accusations come from a feckless anonymous coward such as yourself – Anthony]
In Spanish media, citing the Europa Press Agency, the press release is quite different. They mix the findings of the scientific publication with nonsense declarations of one of the authors (Shaun Marcott) which lead to confusion, as they are personal opinions unrelated to the publication. He says that Global Temperature will increase between 2 and 11,5C by the end of the century. Which is the most absolutely crappy alarmist nonsense that I have heard in a long time, and definitely has nothing to do with the findings of his scientific publication. But there it is, in the newspaper and wrongly associated to a scientific publication, as if that was science at all.
Sorry, the declaration is from Peter Clark, one of the coauthors, not from Shaun Marcott.
I’m curious, is it normally acceptable to mix resolutions this way? I can see all sorts of erroneous interpretations arising, the kind that can get people killed in disciplines where physical objects and forces are involved.
e.g. I don’t think I would trust these guys to design a bridge, they might say it was stable over hundreds of years even if it fell down several times in a single year 🙂
“Well Mosh, if you had actually read the comments of the savants you are attacking, you would have seen the answer to your question in Doug Proctor’s comment. To that I will add the local effects of the Holocene Thermal Maximum in the Paciific Northwest, when sagebrush and Ponderosa pine reached the shores of Puget Sound, treeline was hundreds of feet higher, and cactus colonized the San Juan islands. I frankly cannot believe the magnitude of ignorance you expressed with “a piece of driftwood.” Go read “After the Ice Age” by E.C. Pielou and get a clue.”
I said show YOUR WORK. not point to somebody elses.
plus, you havent answered the question.
Warmer?
And dont just pick one location ti compare with 73.
“These guys used Mann’s math called RegEM (which was just made-up by Mann and is not really a proven statistical technique – its a cherrypicking weighting method depending on how you set it up – so we will have to see how they really did it – complex enough that only a few people will be able to figure it).”
##############
wrong.
another savant bites the dust.
tapio created this method.
http://www.clidyn.ethz.ch/imputation/index.html
I agree with Steve Mosher there is nothing wrong with RegEm so long as it is applied properly to the problem .
As Bruce Cobb points out above, the NYT news story fusses about now being the warmest period in 4,000 years. Well, yeah, if it was warmer 5,000 years ago, then that is correct. Did Man cause it to be warmer 5,000 years ago?
Poptech says:
March 7, 2013 at 8:48 pm
Mosher, B.A. English who has no scientific papers published is with Robert Rhode his BEST team member …didn’t see that coming.
How would a non-scientist recognize if the work was shown? Would he do a “review” of the grammar?
##################
Funny story. I started undergrad as a physics math major ( won some math competitions as a kid– like Mcintyre) but wasnt really challenged by those two areas. Philosophy, Literature and linguistics were a lot harder, so I got BAs in those. For grad school I attended UCLA working on a Phd in English,. I wandered into computational linguistics and of course to work in information theory ( as it pertains to textual analysis) I needed to go back and take stats courses. Since I was on a full ride scholarship I could basically sit in any classes I wanted. never bother to pick up a degree, already had too many. While working on my dissertation I found myself at Northrop Aircraft in Advanced Design, first working as a Operations Research specialist ( stats ), later I moved into crew systems design and finally into simulation and threat analysis. I had a boss who believed in moving people from department to department to turn them into experts in as many things as possible. he called me the sponge. Of course Northrop had great educational resources for people who were willing to learn, so If you were assigned a job to understand IR threats, then you had all the resources and training you needed.. I’m forever grateful to President Reagan without his foresight and funding choices.
Grammar? Funny thing there too. I find that when I switch my brain from art mode to math mode that I care less about it. Weird. anyway. have a nice day.
Finally: no scientific papers published?
personally, I never thought this was that big a deal, since I’m more well know for 600 page engineering reports ( most classified sorry ) You can probably find some of the unclassified ones if you know how to search DTIC. Science papers published? If that is your criteria, I’ll make you a big dollar bet.. say 25K
D.B. Stealey,
I like the “warmer than now” graph in your March 7, 2013 at 3:21 pm post. Is it available with an end date say to 2010? Thanks,RR
They hid the Dark Age Cold Period, the Roman Warm Period and the previous peaks and valleys. Most notably missing (I realize it’s off scale but I assume their “noise and oscillation free” trend continues to the earlier dates) is the Holocene Optimum. The sad thing is, the dumber than dumb media and herd, being unaware of the real paleoclimate indicators, have lapped it right up.
as usual, Steven Mosher always ignores my posts
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/20/its-the-sun-stupid-the-minor-significance-of-co2/#comment-1230143
Why waste time discussing this paper? It concerns climate and it comes from Oregon State University. Thus the probability of its being politics-driven and fraudulent is 100%.
Do you deny 15+ years of no warming in the face of rising co2?
Hooray – fun with statistics – This paper is just like saying it is unprecedented for a basbeball player to hit 3 for 3 in a game because he’s never hit over .290 in any previous season.
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Indeed, how was RegEm used in this new paper Marcott et al 2013 published by the journal Science?
We can see the past relevance of inappropriate use of RegEm to hockey sticks in A.W.Montford’s book ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’ chapter 14 ‘A New Hockey Stick’. The following is from the book.
RegEm was used Mann et al 2008 PNAS ‘Proxy-based reconstruction of hemispheric and global surface temperature vriations over the past two millenia’. From that Mann paper,
In the ‘Hockey Stick Illusion’ Montford said,
So, since we have a new hockey stick in this new paper, have the authors applied RegEm like the inappropriate application of RegEm by Mann et al 2008 did? In other words, has the Mann et al 2008 precedent been used by Marcott et al 2013? Let’s look closely at that new paper.
John
… looks like a hockey stick via dipstick statistics.
How about statistics such as:
“Earth is now much COOLER than it was for 99% of the past 542 million years.”
or
“Earth is now slightly COOLER than it was four previous times during the past 500 thousand years.”
Somebody check my numbers.
What is so magical about 11,000 or so years, anyway, that trumps all the variations during all the other spans in Earth’s history?
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That is a false premise. It invalidates an argument that uses it.
John
I’ve had a quick look at the data, and it seems to be a mixture of different behaviours.
One set of five series shows a peak around 9k years ago, a dip from 7k-3k and a rise to the present day.
Another set of around thirty five series shows pretty much of nothing. It looks like random noise.
And the third set of around twenty series shows the holocene optimum we know, with a peak around 2 C warmer than today.
(There were a few others that didn’t cover a long enough interval to make a proper comparison, I think.)
The ‘Holocene Optimum’ series have been mixed in with a bunch of ‘random noise’ series and some ‘Holocene dip’ series which has the effect of bringing the Holocene peak down to below a degree. All they have to do then is paste the instrumental temperature series on the end. (Note, the end spike is not in any of the 73 series.)
Of course, that might be saying that the Holocene peak did not occur everywhere, and that in many places the temperature didn’t change, which is how they’re interpreting it. You would need to look at the individual data sources to tell.
Whether the Holocene Optimum was global or not, it’s definitiely very naughty to splice on the instrumental record and talk about anything being ‘unprecedented’. The proxy data smooths anything going on at less than 300-3000 years (figure S18 in the SI). Apples and oranges.
“We already knew that on a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past 2,000 years,” Marcott says. “Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years.”
So 20% – 30% of the last 11,300 years was at least as warm as today. If that is the latest and best reconstruction, the result should be more widely known. That’s a huge change from the claim of “unprecedented”.
Steven Mosher says:
March 8, 2013 at 9:10 am
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I knew it !!
I can never find your “cv” when I need it.
It bothers me when people disparage you.
Of course, your writing style is inflammatory at times, but what the heck.
I always listen.
This article is so dishonest in its wording.
“‘This era is warmer than 80% of the time in the last 11,300 years’?!? BTW: did you remember to tell people that the last glacial period ended 12,500 years ago…What’s that you say? You remembered but you deliberately omitted it because it would hurt your attempts at fearmongering…Why thank you for being so candid with us.”
It’s too bad the global warming cult will never be this honest with the global community.
Steven Mosher says: March 8, 2013 at 8:41 am
“…I said show YOUR WORK. not point to somebody else’s.
plus, you haven’t answered the question….”
Now you’re just being silly.
Sure, we get the point; Nice work by Marcott etal …
…. just some poor emphasis on their part, their smoothed chart data with spiky instrumental record tagged on is a bit deceptive, and it was followed poor and dramatized headlining and reporting by almost everyone else.
“Steven Mosher says: March 8, 2013 at 9:10 am, Funny story. I started undergrad as a physics math major ( won some math competitions as a kid– like Mcintyre) but wasnt really challenged by those two areas.”
Right… except McIntyre has a degree in Mathematics.
“Philosophy, Literature and linguistics were a lot harder, so I got BAs in those.”
So do you have BAs in English and Philosophy or Philosophy, literature and linguistics? I am only interested in what the degree from the university you attended actually says on the piece of paper.
“I wandered into computational linguistics and of course to work in information theory ( as it pertains to textual analysis) I needed to go back and take stats courses. Since I was on a full ride scholarship I could basically sit in any classes I wanted. never bother to pick up a degree, already had too many.”
Of course! Too much trouble to pick up the degree.
The rest of your mentioned “experience” relates to the defense aircraft industry and anecdotes, nothing science related. “Operations Research” is a very vague job title that can mean almost anything. You could have been associated with any number of projects but your actual contributions to them could be almost anything. You forgot to mention you wound up doing sales and marketing at Northrop. Which is not something an engineer or scientist goes into.
Writing technical reports is something an English major should be able to accomplish so long as they have enough people to ask questions to.
“u.k.(us) says: I knew it !!”
You knew what? That he has no scientific education or experience and forgot to mention a bulk of his career is in sales and marketing? Don’t fall for resume padding. It is obvious to anyone with experience reading resumes and hiring personnel. People in sales are usually very good at this.
It is not hard to find his CV, it is right here,
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/steven-mosher/1/b07/27b
THE LITERARY HISTORY OF THE WORLD
(by the same authors)
Methodology: We averaged the page contents of 10000 books spanning all topics, ages, and regions of the world.
Results: Our results show unprecedented recent developments.
We obtained a uniform 5% gray. Except for a slightly (1%) lighter tone in the upper third of the page. Likely due to the presence of titles.
As our results did not match the What’s Up With That page, since yesterday we used the actual What’s Up With That page instead.
Our evidence shows that FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 1000 YEARS, ACTUAL LETTERS FORMING ACTUAL WORDS WERE USED YESTERDAY. On What’s Up With That.
This is a frightening development, from a relaxing gray to letters. Especially since it all happened in a single day.
Expert modeling by a literary consensus group shows that continuing this trend, by the end of the month, every surface on Earth, inanimate, vegetal or animal, will be black, covered with letters.
Life as we knew it is in grave danger.
A trillion dollars a year to be used on clean communications might not be enough to stem the problem, as humanity is already almost too late for meaningful action.
PS The authors thank the media for making this their top subject of concern since yesterday.
It is interesting that they acknowlege the early holocene was much warmer than now.