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.
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.
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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.
trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 7:13 pm
Your comment leaves me speechless….ignorance always does that to me.
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clearly it is ignorance, not the comments that are the problem.
NikFromNYC says:
March 17, 2013 at 4:40 am
“Fishhead”
__________________
Thank you for that link.
In response to a comment by Nylo (March 16, 2013 at 10:19 pm), trafamadore wrote (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“.
Trafamadore please extend some charity to Nylo. I’m sure that like myself he and other commenters on this thread simply forgot the hundreds of other scientific papers (a) whose main point was the “temp records thousands of years ago”, and (b) were gleefully trumpeted by multiple press releases. It takes a rare kind of mind (thank goodness) to believe the main point of Marcott ‘s Science paper was the “temp records thousands of years ago;” but then trafamadore’s comments demonstrate he is blessed with just such a mind.
DirkH says: March 17, 2013 at 6:22 am
NikFromNYC says: March 17, 2013 at 4:40 am
“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.”
I was able to stand it for 5 minutes. Now obviously they’re interested in shooting at “corporate” leaders, ignoring the fact that the current POTUS has as a “community organizer” fought lawsuits to force banks to lend to people who can’t afford it etc. etc.
.
Well, DirkH, you made the right decision.
I watched the whole thing. (I’m retired). It starts out describing psychopaths, and how they unemotionally manipulate others. I was annoyed that they tossed snapshots of George W and Dick Cheney in among those of Hitler and Stalin, but that’s typical Hollywood. What I found remarkable is that every darn point they made perfectly fit President Obama.
They continued on to painstakingly (or rather ‘painfully’) develop a theory of what could be done to counter the evil of our psychopathic leaders. I listened carefully, and it turned out to be a secular restatement of 2000 year old Christian philosophy.
“Do unto others …” now has academic, peer-reviewed confirmation.
Trafamadore is certainly adept at “playing cute”, and completely immune to feeling any need to counter questions of science and statistics scientifically.
Pretending this is only about temperatures of thousands of years ago and the “hockey stick” uptick is irrelevant, whilst Mann, SKS and plenty of MSM are talking about nothing else other than “new hockey sticks is really a bit of a nose thumbing.
Stating it (the uptick) is simply a “bit of unimportant extra information added by co-authors” completely ignores the question of why they may have considered that a necessary, correct or interesting thing to do.
His type of approach appears to me as some sort of childish ‘religious’ extremism: the beliefs are in place, fates have been decided, the preachers are infallible, critics must be wrong, fingers in ears, tralalalalalalalalala ‘can’t hear a thing, sorry’ …..
But, we should be ignoring nitpicking nitwits like Trafamadore, as the other message of this paper, cleverly being obscured by this hockey stick debate, is that it openly states that 25% of the Holocene was warmer than today, and it is only their future modeled forecasts/projections/predictions/visions which (they foresee) may exceed that.
I am an editor on motor-magazines by profession.
We also have a system like “peer-review”, to avoid errors in the articles we are about to publish.
But, sadly, we have two kinds of “peers”, doing pre-publication reviews, too:
The first kind of reviewer takes their task very seriously and puts every claim and figure you make or give in your article in doubt, until proven correct.
The second kind of reviewer, on the other hand, is lazy and just checks the claims and figures you make and give for “implausibilities”.
But experience has proven time and again, that those reviewers, who only check articles for implausibilities only, in fact check them for NOTHING!
Therefore I know from personal experience that sometimes, it’s not so much the author, but the reviewer, who is to blame for the shoddy content of an article. Because reviewers are like firewalls: They are there to protect raging errors in articles from spreading.
But if they don’t work properly, you are screwed.
What’s the problem? This is a acceptable analytical technique and has been demonstrated in the literature.
It’s called “Upside down Mann.”
Sheesh.
Werner Brozek says:
“The final date of the Marcott reconstruction is AD1940 (BP10).
Could part of the problem be that they are confusing themselves and others with an archaic way of saying which year they are really talking about? If BP means before 1950, what would 2013 be?”
This isn’t really an archaic way of describing the year. It is based on radiocarbon dating with 1950 being BP0. 1950 was pretty much the year that Libby discovered radiocarbon dating and has been accepted as the standard 0 for a dating baseline (it wouldn’t be efficient to move it every year). Additionally, after 1950 radiocarbon dating does not work due to the increase in atmospheric C-14 due to thermonuclear tests.
Commenter ‘ZT’ at Bishop Hill has the quote of the week:
‘The half-life of papers purporting to show recent warmth based on proxies is declining. In the good old days you could siphon off a few grants, go to a conference in Bali, and collect a Nobel, before anyone noticed that you had the numbers backwards…’
trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 9:32 pm
D.B. Stealey says “Mann’s Hokey Stick was so thoroughly debunked that Nature was forced to issue an extremely rare Correction”
Nearly a dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions have repeated Mann’s study. So It would appear that Mann was correct.
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Shame then that REAL WORLD DATA shows it to be bollocks, eh, Traffy?
trafamadore says:
“Nearly a dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions have repeated Mann’s study. So It would appear that Mann was correct.”
Mann was wrong. Post those ‘model-based and proxy-based reconstructions’, and we will debunk every one of them, just like we did when they were first posted here by the anti-science crowd.
Empirical evidence trumps ‘model-based and proxy-based reconstructions’ every time, and the real world evidence and observations clearly disprove Mann’s Hokey Stick — which the UN/IPCC can no longer publish. Why? Because Mann’s hokey stick has been thoroughly debunked.
Is that clear enough for you? Post your “model-based and proxy-based reconstructions”, and we will deconstruct them using empirical evidence.
Mike McMillan wrote of the documentary:
“I watched the whole thing. (I’m retired). It starts out describing psychopaths, and how they unemotionally manipulate others. I was annoyed that they tossed snapshots of George W and Dick Cheney in among those of Hitler and Stalin, but that’s typical Hollywood. What I found remarkable is that every darn point they made perfectly fit President Obama.”
Exactly! Turning this sort of existing activist philosophy back onto its own lefty support system is the next and in fact only next step available now that conservatives are already on board. But the idea that recent Republicans are saints is just silly as well as a very bad PR move for skeptics to express, for under Bush Jr. both the crony banking housing bubble and the light bulb ban were allowed without any public protest, and the sciences of stem cells, evolution and Drug War era neuroscience are so proudly attacked by same. Understanding rather than mocking those you next need to convince is merely the proper art of influence. Divided is conquered.
Meanwhile… a mini ice age is about to start and Obama wants to make gas more expensive *sigh* US is headed for an apocalypse, I fear… all these warmists like Marcott, Mann, etc. must really hate humanity. They are trying to reverse human progress. Why? What for?
Man if this work ends up with a retraction, the fear of a McIntyre review will automatically result in a major improvement in the quality and honesty of the climate science papers. Any climate science paper author should be asking for McIntyre to be a referee, now that it is clear the “science” is not going to be able to tailor-make data and conclusions to support their favorite causes.
You have to feel terribly sorry for the poor innocent data.
“We perturb the data ten thousand times using clips from Herbie-goes-to-Monte-Carlo. While the data are recovering we teleport them upside down to a previous era, using a time machine
built from a Delorean and an electric toothbrush. Actually, the science is really simple”
Even God himself only threatens with eternal damnation.
Never, ever, ever, try to fool Steve McIntyre!!! You haven’t got chance.
Theo Goodwin says:
March 16, 2013 at 8:42 pm
Ben Wilson says:
March 16, 2013 at 7:51 pm
“5. And notice — Revkin gets a reply — not from Marcott, but from Marcott’s supervisor — Peter Clark, more or less saying “We’re trying to come up with some plausible explanation for this disaster. . . just give us a little bit of time!”
So — where is Marcott? Why is Clark calling the shots on Marcott’s paper? Can Marcott still function? Do you suppose Clark has yelled at Marcott for answering McIntyre’s e-mail?
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I think you nailed it. My understanding is that Clark was already shooting his mouth off about this paper being in AR5. Clark is a lead author of AR5. And Marcott’s thesis adviser. The logical leap that Clark may have pressured Marcott into a paper in Science that would serve his (Clark’s) purposes as lead author of an AR5 chapter isn’t a big one. He can be none too happy that Marcott has already admitted to McIntyre that the uptick is not robust. I’m betting that Clark has told Marcott to STFU and let him (Clark) handle things.
If Marcott wants to escape with ANY credibility at all, he’s do well to throw his adviser under the bus, distance himself from the Science article and simply defend his original thesis. Let Clark take the fall for the version that was published in Science. He seems pretty eager to do so, and Marcott should let him.
urm.. do0es Marcott suffer from Shakon baby syndrome?
NikFromNYC says:
March 17, 2013 at 9:53 am
“But the idea that recent Republicans are saints is just silly as well as a very bad PR move for skeptics to express”
Be assured that we are objectivists.
Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis
12:00 G W Bush, “Downpayment fund”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECi6WJpbzE
This from Science Editor-in-Chief Bruce Alberts at a March 5 Capitol Hill event on scientific integrity and transparency. http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2013/0311_alberts.shtml
Alberts then addressed concerns related to scientific integrity. Like others at the hearing, he cited 2011 correspondence in Nature by Florian Prinz and colleagues that questioned the reliability of published data on potential drug targets. “My conclusion,” Alberts said, “is that the standards are lower in some subfields of science than others, and we need to work on setting higher standards.” He also urged individual scientists to more critically assess their own work. “It’s easy to get a result that looks right when it’s really wrong. One can easily be fooled. Every scientist must be trained to be highly suspicious about his or her results.”
But wait, what if the result looks wrong and actually is wrong? How would you handle that situation Mr Alberts?
I am astounded the authors themselves did not withdraw the paper as soon as the first problems appeared (or at least temporarily suspend it).
Did not Gergis do that with hers quite early on?
trafamadore says:
March 16, 2013 at 7:54 pm
This will either leave the reviewers speechless or they will suggest something else that was used. For example, the Watts critique, that the data does not match the ice core data, that could be rescued by including the ice core data in the analysis, as one more location. Of course this isnt ocean data which I thought was the major data source for this paper, but even if it was included, it would have only been one more location data set and not changed the results much.
You need to raise your game.
Five ice cores are included in the analysis: Dome C, Dome F, Vostok, EDML and Aggassiz.
No wonder Otter ignores what you have to say.
***trafamadore says:
“Nearly a dozen model-based and proxy-based reconstructions have repeated Mann’s study. So It would appear that Mann was correct.”
Mann was wrong. Post those ‘model-based and proxy-based reconstructions’, and we will debunk every one of them, just like we did when they were first posted here by the anti-science crowd.***
McIntyre has already debunked those so-called dozen “reconstructions”. They all use one of four faulty proxies which had an overemphasized bias. All trafamadore needs is to have someone read her the past CA posts.
NikFromNYC says: March 17, 2013 at 9:53 am
… for under Bush Jr. both the crony banking housing bubble and the light bulb ban were allowed without any public protest, …
Granted the light bulb, but Bush submitted Community Reinvestment Act reform legislation three times to Demo-controlled Congress and was rebuffed. Shoulda’ tried harder.