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)
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: Abstract from Nylo’s comment above:
The PAST DECADE ?? Marcott’s data used Time (BP) (Before Present, Year Zero = 1950) The latest data in Marcott’s paper is the year 1940. Marcott’s data stops at least fifty years short of “the past decade.” There is no data in Marcott’s paper to support any comment about “the past decade” in his abstract.
Is it possible that “Before Present” was a source of confusion to the reviewers AND the author?
Or is he simply using Mann’s Past Decade in comparison to his mid Holocene proxies? In which case, he is in fact, splicing the Mann temperature record onto his own. No different than pasting the thermometer record onto his proxy set.
I liked this comment on Joe Romm’s blog (in a discussion of Marcott’s paper).
prokaryotes says:
March 8, 2013 at 5:08 pm
“Only experts read this blog (Joe Romm’s). These findings are a good indicator of our assumptions and past predictions.”
Can I reiterate the percieved problem here, because it has not been well explained so far.
You have three series of data, but one of them has an extra data-point (due, as I understand it, to the ‘modified’ and ‘shifted’ dates shifing one series ‘over the edge’ as it were)
The data ponts are:
a. -2, -3, -2, -3, (-)
b. -3, -2, -3, -2, (-)
c. (-), +3, +3, +3, +3
Av -5, -2, -2, -2, +3
Because series c. has an extra data point at the end of that series, we get a massive positive hockeystick. Childishly simple, really, but it has all the hallmarks of being criminally irresponsible too.
.
Assuming Steve is right, what the h—?
Who would think they could get away with that, regardless of whether it was sloppiness or more? Have they not heard of a now-prominent climate website called, er, “Climate Audit”?
The effect of the redated proxies can be seen for the last century (since 1850) in the two graphs below.
Regression of temperature anomaly vs published age:
http://tinypic.com/r/29gflw4/6
vs. Marcott age:
http://tinypic.com/r/2r3lg5f/6
The data can be found in the Excel file on Dropbox:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/75831381/Marcott%20temps%20including%20METADATA.xlsx
trafamador~ if McIntyre’s points are so easily countered, why are you not over there making your argument and blowing him away?
Yo, tram(p)~ I double-checked. I can’t find any of your arguments over at CA, destroying Steve’s claims. Can you point them out to us?
trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 11:15 pm
Look. The main point of the paper are temp records thousands of years ago. And you are like worrying about the last 0.1 %, which is pretty consistent with the known temperature increase shown in the 1998 Mann paper and in all the papers since.
WRONG. The main point of the paper is the comparison between “the last 0.1%” and the temp records thousands of years ago, as stated in the conclusions, in the abstract, and in all press releases about the paper. So you keep lying, first about McIntyre’s findings not affecting the result (they do), then about the important result being something different that the paper itself claims. I don’t know for how long your falsehoods will keep appearing here, but i do know I will continue to call you a liar every time they do.
Yeah, where is Mosher? He was all abusive earlier calling people “savants”. You see Mosher, over the last 11 days you have seen why it’s good to be sceptical. Let’s hope have learned something here. What if sceptics accepted the results – bad science would have crept into the literature and subsequently to be cited by others? Would this have been good for science? Next time hold back on your abuse and stop putting words into people’s mouths.
Here is Mosher’s confident comment:
Read your comment Mosher and compare it to what we have learned over the past 11 days. What I want to know also is:
“1. You think it was cooler?”
“2. You think it was warmer?”
“So, if you think it was cooler during the holocene, on what basis?”
Let this be a lesson to other Warmist faithfull.
Gary Hladik says:
March 16, 2013 at 4:34 pm
Alex the skeptic says (March 16, 2013 at 3:50 pm): “Marcott’s hockey stick has been murdered by the truth.”
Mr. McIntyre, at Climate Audit, with a magnifying glass.
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Very good. Younger readers who do not recognise the provenance of this statement, refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluedo 🙂
And another one bites the dust. All Hail Mr. McIntyre
Correction:
On my last comment the quote for Mosher should have been “savant” not “savants”
Instead of the sharp uptick I think McIntyre has shown that Marcott et al’s graph should result in a bloody great cross.
trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 6:12 pm
Tad says: “I think all reputable scientific journals should require every step of data analysis, including data and code used for said analysis, be made available by the authors prior to publication. Perhaps on the journal’s website.”
Grate, no, great way to make people submit to less reputable journals. Because, like really, we have better things to waste our time on. Scientist’s strong point is not accounting and drudgery. That’s more a conservative occupation
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If scientific work cannot be accounted for or audited, then it is not scientific work. Is it? And we know know that peer review is broken beyond fixing. The web is now where peer review is taking place, it’s in its infancy and being battered by all of the differing corps of the Climate Jihadis, but it is happening.
trafamadore,
If the time resolution is 200-300 years, how can the paper address anything about whether the rate of warming over the last 50 years is “unprecedented”? You say you are a scientist. Well, so am I, and from some of your comments it does not seem that you are applying the proper scientific skepticism.
Since when is it NOT important for people to be able to reproduce someone else’s results? If the paper is mainly about the past, why is it ok to throw in some “not robust” data and make unsubstantiated claims? And if the past is the main subject, why is it being trumpeted as being mainly about the present by Mann and the media? Why is it not ok to put it in proper perspective?
And to all of you out there saying it is different from his thesis, this is almost always the case. When I wrote my thesis (not climate science), it was long and boring and full of details I thought future students on this problem might need. And my PhD advisor was not all that interested in it being well done as he knew that only the published work matters (even thought, technically the thesis is “published” when it is archived by the university). My first version of the manuscript was better but still boring and lacked a “hook”, (i.e. something to make it interesting). By the time it was resubmitted and accepted a year later, it was shorter, had several boring tables turned into figures, and I had found a few small observations (new data) and conclusions that made it more interesting. However, it would be unusual for positive data points to become negative between the thesis and the publication. But, if the data in the thesis were found to be processed incorrectly or later they added more proxies and processed it in a different way, that would be fine as long as they gave enough details that others could reproduce their analysis. If it turns out that only a few proxies give rise to the spike at the end or that it is an artifact of the data analysis, that shows the work is sloppy and should not be hyped to the extent it is at the very least.
It would not surprise me (as others have also said) if one of the reviewers asked that the analysis be extended and compared to the present. It is obvious that this is the kind of thing that makes it of general interest and enough impact to make it into Science or Nature. They want flashy and novel. But it needs to be good science.
Looks like the Macott HS needs some Viagra.
Who could believe that so many errors in so many AGW scientific papers could be “mistakes” when those errors ALWAYS result in skewing recent global temperatures higher and older temperature lower? You really have to put your “truth detector” in storage to believe that one.
trafamadore says:
“Well, the hockey stick as survived quite well after McIntyre papers in the 2000′s, and more people have added sticks of their own. So root on for your hero.”
So, you think that junk science surviving is a good thing? That’s all I need to know.
ralfellis says:
March 17, 2013 at 1:15 am
“Because series c. has an extra data point at the end of that series, we get a massive positive hockeystick. Childishly simple, really, but it has all the hallmarks of being criminally irresponsible too.”
Coming from filtering and signal processing, I say it invalidates the conclusions, obviously. If commenters are right the shifting of the proxies has not been disclosed. Maybe Marcott and Shakun didn’t notice the logical consequences of the proxy re-dating; this renders them and the reviewers and mentors incompetent.
Or maybe they did notice it but decided to keep quiet about the shifting. This renders their behaviour scientific malfeasance.
I notice a trend towards Monte Carlo runs amongst the climatists who examine proxies; Rahmstorff also uses them a lot. Maybe it’s easier to cheat with them because the public has never heard of Monte Carlo simulations.
Joe Romm has some fun with Marcott and Shakun and extrapolates the spurious uptick.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/08/1691411/bombshell-recent-warming-is-amazing-and-atypical-and-poised-to-destroy-stable-climate-that-made-civilization-possible/?mobile=nc
I scanned the article and comments for “Monte Carlo”. No hits.
None of them understands what they are talking about.
Christoph Dollis asked:
“Who would think they could get away with that, regardless of whether it was sloppiness or more? Have they not heard of a now-prominent climate website called, er, “Climate Audit”?”
A professionally produced documentary called “Fishhead” offers a possible clue, namely that business, politics and now science are being infiltrated by highly functioning psychopaths who don’t feel such fear.
Otter says:
March 17, 2013 at 1:46 am
trafamador~ if McIntyre’s points are so easily countered, why are you not over there making your argument and blowing him away?”
Because trafamador is a biologist. Math is not taught to these guys. He’d be ripped to shreds and he knows it. He’s never even heard of the null hypothesis. Why? It’s not needed when all you’re doing is listing and classifying species according to phenotype.
Noblesse Oblige says:
March 16, 2013 at 4:52 pm
The victim in all this, besides all of us who have been scammed once again, is Marcott who was just trying to get a PhD. And once again Science magazine has reasserted its status as supermarket tabloid of science.
Yeah, my heart’s certainly bleeding for the poor lamb.
There’s a whole lot of going-on in Shakun (et pal).
Trafamadore –
Your comments are alarming and revealing all at the same time.
At March 16, 2013 at 5:59 pm you stated you couldn’t see what all of the fuss was about. While Marcotts PhD was about the long term signal, the Science paper is being trumpeted (Mann et al) about the ‘uptick’, which was arrived at ‘hiding’ adverse results and concocting NEW dates (10th century becomes 1950) for ‘favorable’ results.
As to your other comment on March 16, 2013 at 6:12 pm in response to a call for procedures, code and data, I find your argument an amazing insight into what is wrong today in science. You suggested that the reason to NOT do this is that these onerous burdens would “make people submit to less reputable journals” because “we have better things to waste our time on”? Am I getting this right?
Because we’re only talking about reshaping the global economy by eco-campaigners, right? From my point of view, it is an entirely reasonable thing to expect that scientists reveal every step of their analysis, all along the way to ensure that others can reproduce their work. Think of it as asking to see the modern day equivalent to a Lab Book….?
But I agree with your last point: if a “scientist’s strong point is not accounting and drudgery” – he shouldn’t be foisting mediocrity upon the rest of us as if it IS his strong point.
You know, I work in the science world. It makes me wonder why we fight with each other so much about our data and the validity of the conclusions we make based on the data. All we really need to do is substitue our own fabricated data whenever we feel like it, like they did in the above peer reviewed paper. It would be so much more pleasent around here. Life would be easy.
Oh I know why, because if someone found out we’d all lose our jobs, the company would go bankrupt, senior executives would go to jail, shareholders would sue and the only winners will be the forensic accountants and corporate lawyers. Yea that’s all.