Steve McIntyre has made what I can only describe as a stunning discovery as to why there is a sharp uptick in the main Marcott et al graph being touted by the media from its publication in Science.
![marcott-A-1000[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/marcott-a-10001.jpg?quality=83)
It seems the uptick in the 20th century is not real, being nothing more than an artifact of shoddy procedures where the dates on the proxy samples were changed for some strange reason.
McIntyre writes:
The Marcott-Shakun Dating Service
Marcott, Shakun, Clark and Mix did not use the published dates for ocean cores, instead substituting their own dates. The validity of Marcott-Shakun re-dating will be discussed below, but first, to show that the re-dating “matters” (TM-climate science), here is a graph showing reconstructions using alkenones (31 of 73 proxies) in Marcott style, comparing the results with published dates (red) to results with Marcott-Shakun dates (black). As you see, there is a persistent decline in the alkenone reconstruction in the 20th century using published dates, but a 20th century increase using Marcott-Shakun dates. (It is taking all my will power not to make an obvious comment at this point.)
Figure 1. Reconstructions from alkenone proxies in Marcott style. Red- using published dates; black- using Marcott-Shakun dates.
…
In a follow-up post, I’ll examine the validity of Marcott-Shakun redating. If the relevant specialists had been aware of or consulted on the Marcott-Shakun redating, I’m sure that they would have contested it.
Read his entire post here.
This is going to get very interesting very fast.
Re Trafa guy leave him/her on.WUWT These types our the BEST allies of the skeptics and D******rs. So far the ranting s of Trafa, Mann, Romm, Ramsdorf, Lewanski etc have been responsible for shifting thoughts of millions people from believers to skeptics. In fact in may turn out the the absolute killer of the whole AGW team will be this paper (Marcott)
The only reason Traf (and most others like him/her) post here is for personal edification…to see how many responses they can get to their comment…so a troll, but a special kind of troll. Definitely needs the attention, which many readily provide.
Just sayin.
Jim
I don’t understand why anyone would do this. Evidense of the medieval warm period is quite strong and getting stronger. Methods that wash it away simply show that the method and/or data is shit.
The researchers should ask themselves, “where’s the medieval warm period?”, “why isn’t it showing at least as warm as now”, “we can’t publish this, we need to find out what went wrong.”
Instapundit this morning linked to this story for hundreds of thousands of readers:
“CLIMATEGATE 3.0 UPDATE: The Hockey Stick, Broken Again.
Posted at 7:21 am by Glenn Reynolds”
His link: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/03/the-hockey-stick-broken-again.php
“If this is not flat-out fraud–which, sadly, has come to typify the climate alarmism movement–then what is the justification for Marcott’s wholesale re-dating of samples?”
Here are some charts of the Marcott proxies – all the proxies versus Marcott’s Global temperature stack , and then the same for the three regional stacks.
Individually, they are all quite strange in my opinion.
http://s11.postimage.org/6m5wcjavn/Marcott2013_All_Proxies.png
http://s8.postimage.org/63alcnobp/Marcott2013_NHX_Proxies.png
http://s24.postimage.org/bfmr455bp/Marcott2013_SHX_Proxies.png
http://s15.postimage.org/s2x6aua6z/Marcott2013_Tropics_Proxies.png
Hmmmmn.
Northern hemisphere took a BIG “bounce” (from way low near -12,000 years, then up above 0.0, then right back down again to very low at -8000 years, then back up to the “usual” curve shown in the Southern hemisphere proxies and sea proxies.
Ice Age results at -10,000 years? Very cold, warm, very cold, back to the Holocene “warm” point and gradually declining since the -6000 year point?
Now, WHY did the original writer NOT point that out as his dissertation and his findings?
Bill Illis says:
March 18, 2013 at 6:10 am
RACookPE1978 says:
March 18, 2013 at 6:24 am
—————————–
Sorry, the NH 30N-90N chart looked strange enough that I had another look and I guess I copied the wrong column.
Here is the fixed NH 30N-90N chart.
http://s23.postimage.org/kn2mp9zjf/Marcott2013_NHX_Proxies.png
Sweet Old Bob says:
March 17, 2013 at 11:52 am
urm.. do0es Marcott suffer from Shakon baby syndrome?
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Maybe – but he’s certainly become a marcott man…
D.B. Stealey says: March 17, 2013 at 4:32 pm
Latitude quotes Marcott:
“In 100 years, we’ve gone from the cold end of the spectrum to the warm end of the spectrum,” Marcott said. “We’ve never seen something this rapid. Even in the ice age the global temperature never changed this quickly.”
That is flat wrong. Past global temperatures have abruptly changed by tens of degrees on short, decadal time scales, and during a time when CO2 was very low.
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I’m in no sense of the word ANY sort of scientist; I am, regardless, trying to educate myself, on the fly as it were, regarding climate science. Much reading here and at associated blogs, a coupld of Lamb’s tomes and some sceptical tomes (Bishop Hill’s excellent books, for example)
Yet I knew that the past had included rapid and dramatic temperature changes on decadal time scales.
How on earth did the peer reviewers of this “paper” let Marcott’s quote above get published? It really DOES seem that the propaganda message now far outweighs evidence and truth for the warmist community (cult?)
But there has been a sudden increase in temperature since the mid 1990`s at least in Eastern Canada … just look at the environment Canada stats … this increase also happened in the UK.. I can`t see how people can deny this … unless they don`t spend much time in the outdoors! The only question is what caused it?
Clay Marley says:
March 16, 2013 at 5:22 pm
OK so I read the post but I’m not seeing where the hockey stick comes from.
Clay, you have many proxies, some go up some go down. In the average there are only limited variations, each proxy by iteself may have higher variation then the group but most do compensate each other, they do not run synchron. If you take them “as is” you get to the red curve – most of them go down at the end.
But if you shift them around so that all – or a majority – go up at the same time, you suddenly have an annomalous warming at that point where the phases are synchronised.
The way how these proxies were synchronised was to achieve the black curve instead of the red one.
The data shows the same small variation as obtained by other scientists. Here the data worked by Hank who independently tried to find what’s wrong:
http://suyts.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/image207.png
It looks very much like the result of Ljungqvist. That is an honest work-out of the proxies:
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/ljungqvist-2010.jpg
Hank said that the end is not robust – too few proxies to give a result.
What we see in Marcott et al is fiting these few proxies to give at the end a hockey stick, doesn’t matter that the rest is screwed-up. Incredible.
Let me give you a simple example. You can have a statistics with the number of birth in any american city. Some days may have bigger numbers some less. Now if you make a statistic and move all those which have the bigger number at the same date you get suddenly the terrible “birth day” when suddenly you have tripled the number of birth. But it is no real day, it is just a statistic artifact. If you fit that day as the last day of your graph you can then cry wolf: american population in danger to double in 10 years with this trend. Simple isn’t it?
Prof Peter Clark of Oregon State has been very successful in obtaining NSF grants which total $700K over a four year period. Here are the grants with links to NSF at the amounts:
Grant 2008 195,098
Grant 2010 219,783
Grant 2011 198,468
Conference 2010 98,700
Paul Dennis, scientist at the University of East Anglia, published the following blog comment today at Bishop Hill (“OMG” thread) regarding <Marcott et al 2013:
I’ve refrained from making any comment on the recent Marcott et al paper for the simple reason I hadn’t read it. I’ve now had a chance to read it. It is an unremarkable compilation of various palaeoclimate proxies that span the Holocene. Most of these are marine with limited temporal resolution, averaging 120 years, but some with 500 year resolution. Most of the proxy records have limited age control and as a result the age models are poorly constrained. The upshot is, that despite the use of standard and non-standard statistical techniques, the records are necessarily low pass filters that effectively restrict reconstruction to multi-centennialto millenial scale variations in average temperature. The cut off period is on the order of several hundred years. Below this there is considerable attenuation of any signal.
Thus the paper is an unremarkable Holocene record that loses definition on time scales of less than three to five hundred years. As such it would not be considered by Nature or Science for publication. If it’s not publishged in Nature or Science then it doesn’t impact on the public perception and the climate change debate.
The game is given away in the opening paragraph where the authors discuss the fact that it hasn’t yet been demonstrated wether recent warming is anomalous compared to the Holocene record. Unfortunately there is nothing in the properties of the proxy records, nor in the statistical compilation of these that will allow this question to be answered. The uptick in the Marcott et al record is purely an artefact (end effects, manipulation of core end dates thus severely distorting the age models and estimates of sedimentation rate) and contains no information about modern temperatures.
Where we do have high resolution records of climate change (noting that there are problems with many of the transfer functions between the proxy and temperature) that also have excellent dating control we invariably find evidence of rapid and high amplitude fluctuations in the Holocene. One only has to look at some of the speleothem and Greenland ice core records.
I am surprised by the implicit support and promotion this paper has received from scientists who should know better. I call on colleagues to be open and honest about the limitations of some of these proxy studies and to give honest assessments both in professional circles, but also in press briefings and other public domains such as blogs etc. After all it’s not rocket science!
Unfortunately, this paper and the way it has been publicly received is symptomatic of virtually every paper and research proposal that comes across my desk these days for review. They all have a variation on the the same opening sentence that seeks to place the work in the context of ‘current CO2 induced warming’. A few years ago I even had a paper to review on gas diffusion in butyl rubber that started out with a statement to the effect that given the onset of anthropogenic global warming it was necessary to investigate the diffusion of greenhouse gases through butyl rubber septa that are used in gas sampling systems!
In one sense I see such statements as a form of confirmation bias. This is a very serious issue in modern science that is being driven by government policy, funding organisations etc. If ones views run counter to the prevailing orthodoxy then chances of funding, tenure, career development etc. are all affected. We have to move away from such a stance and try to re-establish the scientific method. Developing hypotheses and experiments or measurements of nature that attempt to refute these hypotheses. We mustn’t torture data to fit an apparent paradigm. One can only guess at what Marcott et al were attempting to do when they made gross adjustments to core top dates. It is one thing to run a new, for example 14-C calibration, that will make small adjustments to age models but a completely different issue to redetermine core top dates by such gross margins.
So we are left with a study that is unremarkable in that it shows the broad millenial decrease in global temperatures from the Holocene climatic optimum. It has nothing to say about centennial and decadal variations in temperature, temperature maxima and minima or rates of change, nor does it have anything to say about the modern era. Attempts to picture it any other way are an egregious example of confirmation bias.
Mar 18, 2013 at 9:20 AM | Unregistered Commenter Paul Dennis
Paul Dennis, if you remember, is one of the UEA scientists questioned by Norfolk police regarding the Climategate email leak.
[snip . . OT . . mod]
The paper is under revision?
From Jeremy Shakun’s page,
Marcott, S. A., Shakun, J. D., Clark, P. U., and Mix, A. C. A reconstruction of global and regional temperature for the last 11,300 years. Science, in revision.
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~shakun/
Followup to my previous comment,
I posted the same comment in Climate Audit. SteveM found that Jeremy Shakun’s page has not [been] updated for a while. So the ‘in revision’ must predate the current controversy
D.B. Stealey says:
“That is flat wrong. Past global temperatures have abruptly changed by tens of degrees on short, decadal time scales, and during a time when CO2 was very low.
Surely Marcott knows this. It appears that he is lying, no?”
No, you are confused. The graph you link shows central Greenland temperatures, not global. It makes sense that rapid change can occur in a regional climate, as may have happened in Greenland. If winds or currents shift the warmth goes somewhere else. It seems hard to imagine a cause short of large asteroid impact which could make global temperatures change by tens of degrees on short, decadal time scales.
BA,
I am not confused. Here, let me help you to understand, using facts rather than emotion.
Both hemispheres correlate extremely well with past temperatures during the Holocene and before.
Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic all warm and cool simultaneously. You can observe more evidence here.
Warmth is not ‘going elsewhere’ as you claim. The planet has warmed and cooled in both hemispheres at the same time. Marcott is simply being deceptive.
If you accept the large body of empirical evidence showing the abrupt warming/cooling on decadal time scales, then you will understand the propaganda war being waged for control of your mind. But if you refuse to accept those empirical observations, then your mind is made up, and you have become an acolyte of a religious cult.
The choice is yours.
D.B., you’re piling up the accusations. But can you find any evidence for declaring global temperature changed by tens of degrees on decadal time scales?
Sam, I think he simply had not updated the CV yet. It does raise the interesting question of whether the status of the paper as listed on his CV could go from “under revision” to “withdrawn” or “retracted” without ever being listed as “published”??
He’d better hurry up now and update that CV…..
BA says:
“…can you find any evidence for declaring global temperature changed by tens of degrees on decadal time scales?”
BA, wake up. I already posted an R.B. Alley reference that provided empirical evidence showing abrupt temperature change. I then posted verifiable references showing that global temperatures change in unison in both hemispheres. Apparently you want to argue about something else now, since you don’t have a leg to stand on scientifically in your first assertion.
People like you are unable to accept scientific facts. You are a typical wild-eyed alarmist, rejecting real world evidence simply because it doesn’t fit your catastrophic AGW belief system. That is why your side is losing the debate.
DB!!
Are you not forgetting that “all” the temperature changes we have actually measured since 1800 (now 210 years) amount to “only” 9/10 of ONE degree?
The entire rise since 1950 through today is 2/10 of ONE degree.
Thus, although it is possible that the Medieval Warm Period was 1 to 1.2 degrees warmer than the coldest part of the Little Ice Age valley at 1650, that too, would NOT be “tens of degrees in a decade”! Why let him get away with exaggerations and self-serving screams of fear?
davidmhoffer says:
March 17, 2013 at 8:16 am
tramafadore;
Scientist’s strong point is not accounting and drudgery.
followed by:
tramafadore;
And whoever said details of work should not be kept? That is silly.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are right. You’re being silly. Please try to aim for a higher standard. BTW, the Mann reconstruction you keep touting was demonstrated before a congressional inquiry to have been produced by an algorithm that drew the same graph regardless of the data. That anyone continues to cite that study is silly. Again, aim for a higher standard.
Indeed you should, rather than touting the work of a serial plagiarist misrepresenting data obtained by others which didn’t draw “the same graph regardless of the data”, what they showed was that if 10,000 runs were made then 12 of the results looked the same!
RACookPE1978 says:
March 19, 2013 at 6:37 pm
would NOT be “tens of degrees in a decade”!
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Agreed. The proxies show about 11C in natural variability over the past 600 million years, with the average varying between 11C and 22C. Most of the time it was 22C, and the next most likely was 11C. Our current temperature of 14.5C is unstable looking at the paleo records, so it should be no surprise that natural variability is quite high at our current temperature.
This range has been maintained during times of both very high CO2 (much higher than if we burned all the fossil fuel reserves on earth) and during times of very low CO2. This is strong evidence that CO2 plays little or no role in determining climate. This is confirmed by the ice cores that show that CO2 lags temperate. Thus temperature forces CO2 and the climate models have the relationship backwards. Which explains why the models have gone off the rails over the past 15+ years. They have cause and effect backwards.