Skiphil writes in comments:
“…there are some interesting developments in the “Marcott curve” which puts more of the circus in jeopardy. In addition to a new post on CA detailing changes in the core top record, there is this very significant comment on a prior thread which deserves some serious exploration:”
![marcott-A-1000[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/marcott-a-10001.jpg?quality=83)
Jean S on “Marcott’s main plot (Figure 1A)”
Hah! There is some additional fun in Marcott’s main plot (Figure 1A). Mann’s hockey stick there is the global EIV-CRU from Mann et al. (2008), which means that there is no actual reconstruction post 1850, since it’s the Reg-EM produced EIV reconstruction! So they have now essentially “grafted the thermometer record onto” Mann’s reconstruction. To his credit, Mann has always been careful to plot the post 1850 part in EIV reconstructions in a different color. He is actually explicitly warning in his data description spreadsheet that the values for 1850-2006 are instrumental data.
So in Marcott et al Fig 1A we have a comparision in the interval 1850-1950 between their reconstruction (uptick) and Crutem3 (LAND only) (annual?) instrumental record (no uptick). But that’s not all, folks! See the associated uncertainties … Mann et al (2008) uncertainties (which seem to match in the plot to those given in the spreadsheet, i.e., 2 sigma, whereas Marcott et al uncertainties are 1 sigma) are naturally calculated only up to 1849 (as there is no actual reconstruction afterwards), but in the Figure 1A they continue all the way to the end. Where did those 1850-2006 uncertainties come from?
Source comment here
I thought we already had the “Monday Mirthiness” thread.
A.D. Everard says:
March 19, 2013 at 8:54 pm
And Science swallowed it – hook, line and hockey stick.
They must feel so proud. /sarc.
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I am reminded of the song “Story of the Fish” performed by my friends The Elders.
“… the thing was stinkin’, so God love the people who ate it, you know…” LOL! Enjoy the story told by Ian Byrne at the beginning of the video, but seek out a vid with better audio (search: Story of a Fish – The Elders – 2009 Kansas City Scottish Highland Games) if you want to really enjoy the song to the full.
ZootCadillac says: March 19, 2013 at 6:52 pm
Well, yes, but it appears that they’ve conveniently decided to kick the response can down the road, into an as yet unwritten FAQ. From Revkin’s Mar. 16 update to his Mar 7 post:
Peter Clark, btw, is also a CLA for AR5’s WG1. But that aside, the above response (by Clark to a msg sent to Marcott) doesn’t show any indication that they have yet come to terms with (or even understand the implications of) the many flaws underlying this paper.
It may take some time for this FAQ to be produced. Perhaps they’ve even contracted it out to “experts” such as Mann and his fellow creative writers at SkS. Past experience suggests that one should be prepared for a barrage of non-responsive bafflegab in over-drive.
Please see above 🙂
Paul Matthews did this, quite succinctly, on Saturday:
Hilary Ostrov
Quit dodging the issue and answer the question, the paper is accepted and wide spread publicized in the MSM because of an artifact uptick.
Nobody would have given a rat’s arse if the paper did not showed that “unprecedented” (the favorite word of the alarmists) uptick in the 20th century.
This is what NSF grant manager, Marcott’s sponsor, said:
This research shows that we’ve experienced almost the same range of temperature change since the beginning of the industrial revolution as over the previous 11,000 years of Earth history – but this change happened a lot more quickly.”
Nobody in the MSM or even their own sponsors mention that the uptick is not robust.
Mike at 5:53, compete hockey stick worth its weight in gold is still worthless as it is a figment of Manns imagination.
trafamadore;
You mean Oregon State. One is the Ducks, is in Eugene and is a really cool place where hippies from the 60s still hang out. The other is the Beavers and in Corvallis. Really bad mistake, because both I and my wife are from the U of O.
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It must be so nice for you to finally be right about something. You should be very proud.
Very clever writing under trafamadore while your wife writes under tramafadore btw. The gender bias in the writing flip flopping back and forth really threw me until I realized it was two different people.
I’ve looked high and low and I’m forced to conclude
That Marcott et al have been quite simply rude.
By careful deletion and prudent selection
They’ve just tried to draw one gigantic erection!
(Sorry mod – is this too rude?)
[“Too rude?
Etude, dear Brut”
Mod]
trafamadore;
Actually, what really happens is that people write in and crit the paper, and ask to respond in the letters section of Science.
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Yes, because the only way a paper can possibly be debunked folks is if the journal it was first published in prints a letter critical of it. Known facts not printed in the journal don’t count. This is why the earth is flat and the sun circles the earth and you can diagnose mental problems by feeling the bumps on people’s heads and all manner of diseases can be cured by letting the blood out of the sick people. Known facts to the contrary don’t count because they haven’t been accepted for publication by the original journal.
I’m looking at that graph and noticing that the Mann line shoots up later than the blue Marcott line; which goes up at “0 BP”… But isn’t 0 BP defined as 1950 in the paper?
So am I reading that graph wrong? Or is it saying that we had a giant Global Warming spike in 1950 ? Then the Mann line says we had it now?
It’s hard to visually pick out the blue from grey in the next to last spike up at 0 BP on that graph, but that’s what it looks like. Clearly the grey continues well beyond “0 BP”…
trafamadore says:
March 19, 2013 at 9:51 pm
Wow. So, you are saying, you set up a Pareto for the incoming responses in the type of question, and since their are 4 responses equally distributed 2×2 or 4×1, none end up published? No, no, that is too complicated.
You would use your knowledge of the subject, and possibly your (political/funding/income) bias to determine which question is asked. And, since “what comes around goes around”, only the most banal and non-time-consuming will be allowed through, since, “y’all” have got each “others backs”.
Until you can possibly understand that there are NO proxy series that I am aware of that can continue the “UP-TICK” into the current warming period (consistently) you are just a confused. There are TONS of excuses, but no explanation. You can never have a paleo-record the the same type show the same end point in time. The error bars should be at least 3x of what the public sees (Nature, Science, and all the other sloppy mess).
If you can not fix that “BLADE” onto the shaft of the paleo-“stuff”, you are arguing without reason or responsibility.
Definition
Marcotting is a form of vegetative reproduction that consists in inducing rooting of part of a tree branch. After rooting is induced, the branch is cut and put in a nursery to develop buds and become an independent plant. Marcotting allows for the reproduction of exact copies of the mother tree and for early fructification.
Is someone ‘having a laugh’ as we cockneys say.
Owen in GA says:
March 19, 2013 at 7:18 pm
The bogusness of this just keeps getting thicker. First we have a hockey stick starting in the 1950s
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reading over at CA it appears that the end points of the proxies have been shifted to 1950, creating data where none existed, and voila a hockey stick appears in 1950 where none appeared in the original thesis.
How is this any different than using thermometer data to hide the decline in tree ring data? Is it any accident both times you get hockey sticks?
Surely the authors must have known that shifting the end points of the proxies to 1950 would affect the results in 1950. The difference between the original thesis and the subsequent paper is a huge warning sign that there might just be something wrong.
Don says:
March 19, 2013 at 10:03 pm
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I am reminded of the song “Story of the Fish” performed by my friends The Elders…
*
LOL. Thanks for that, Don, gave me a giggle. 🙂
I’ve noticed that committed Alarmists like to defend hockey stick shaped reconstructions by saying that it “doesn’t matter” if the proxies are inaccurate about the recent “blade” because we have increasing thermometer temps to substitute. Thus they tend not to be even slightly offended by any possible “grafting” of instrumental records onto plots of proxy records — they assume it is obvious that more reliable instrumental records should be preferred anyway. They also emphasize a flattened “stick” whether in the millenial Mannian types of recons or in the 110 century Marcott recon; although the Marcott “stick” has the long gradual decline, what is most important is that it tends to lose/flatten all high frequency variations. This is a crucial connection in the Mann-Marcott corpus, flattening the scope of “natural variation” and then emphasizing the “unprecedented” nature of 20th century warming.
But what that kind of stance ignores is that (1) any divergences between proxy records and modern instrumental records *may* call into question the reliability of the proxy records in the more distant past, and (2) we really don’t know nearly enough about natural variation in the past. If proxy records are unreliable in any major part of the 20th century, when we can compare them to instrumental records, how do we know if they are really so reliable (with narrow error bands) in the distant past?
For Marcott et al. (2013) we seem to have some rather freaky improvised results in the past one or two centuries, plus a long term curve that might be vaguely accurate but does not track high frequency changes. If 300-400 year periods (or at least century periods) may not have resolution before the 20th century, then it is actually not possible to assert (as the PR blitz for the Marcott paper does claim) that it is now the “rate” of warming that is unprecedented and is of such grave concern.
Both Michael Mann in his email to Revkin (Dot Earth/New York Times blog) and the NSF program manager for the grant under with Marcott et al. worked (she is quoted in the press release and some of the media articles) sing in chorus that it is the “rate” of warming now that is so scary.
E.M.Smith: So am I reading that graph wrong? Or is it saying that we had a giant Global Warming spike in 1950 ? Then the Mann line says we had it now?
No, you are reading it exactly right. Marcott et al. (Science, but not the thesis) reconstruction is saying that we had “a giant Global Warming” around 1900-1950. The Mann “line”, which is actually Crutem3 global land data, says, of course, that the “spike” occured after 1950.
You can see the (Mannian) smoothed version of the reconstruction used by Marcott el in the main figure of Mann et al (2008), e.g., here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2008/fig3.jpg
The reconstruction used is in green. Notice that it (along with its uncertainties) ends in1849. So in Marcott et al. they combined the green curve with the CRU curve (plotted in red in Mann’s figure above) to a single curve (gray in Marcott’s figure). The CRU curve (red) ends slightly higher in Mann’s figure than the corresponding curve in Marcott’s figure due to Mannian end-point filtering, but that’s another thing.
Now notice also that there are no uncertainties given in Mann’s figure for the CRU record, so where did those come to Marcott’s figure (where the uncertainties clearly seem to continue all the way to the end)? They didn’t come from Mann et al (2008) files, so this can not be just a mistake of directly plotting from Mann’s files without realising that the 1850-2006 part is the instrumental record.
What is this BP in Years (BP)? Before Pachauri?
I hope it is not Before Present, it is somehow a slippery reference point.
Anybody know where I can hire a climate scientist? I need a salary uptick for a mortgage application.
” … (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites)…” – Mann/RC
Where’s Lewandowsky when you need him?
Anthony
This explains why Mann claimed you were denying the instrumented record, because it turns out it is the instrumented record and not a proxy after all.
It looks like Marcott and Shakun tried to re-date proxies until the resulting curve resembles Mann’s reconstruction (and M&S forgot or didn’t care that since 1850 Mann’s is CRUTEM).
MAYBE M&S have even optimized their proxy re-dating algorithmically to minimize the difference to Mann. And so they have ended up with their bizarre proxy-re-dating (and proxy culling before 0 BP == 1950 AD).
Opinions on this? (And ignore trafamadore, he is trying to hijack the thread and fly it to North Korea)
E.M.Smith says:
March 19, 2013 at 11:17 pm
“I’m looking at that graph and noticing that the Mann line shoots up later than the blue Marcott line; which goes up at “0 BP”… But isn’t 0 BP defined as 1950 in the paper?
So am I reading that graph wrong? Or is it saying that we had a giant Global Warming spike in 1950 ? Then the Mann line says we had it now? ”
I think M&S could not come closer to Mann because of the invalidity of radiodating after 1950 – their study HAD TO stop at 1950 to appear serious. Given this constraint, they tried to emulate Mann as much as they could – is my hypothesis.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave. When first we practice to deceive.” – Sir Walter Scott
Skiphil says: “Both Michael Mann in his email to Revkin (Dot Earth/New York Times blog) and the NSF program manager for the grant under with Marcott et al. worked (she is quoted in the press release and some of the media articles) sing in chorus that it is the “rate” of warming now that is so scary.”
The current rate of warming – basically zero – must be very, very, scary for those in the Global Warming Industry. A few more years of this and the climate gravy train will come to a grinding halt and who is going to give a job to an unemployed ‘climate scientist’?.
I would not be surprised to Marcott et al do not respond to this latest problem in their work , nor the early ones. The ‘purpose ‘ of the paper has already been fore filled , column inches of climate doom and support for the stick. So when you get down to it , what is in it for them.
It would be nice to think that from professional and academic position they would deal with the issues , but this is climate ‘science’ where standards are so low a snake could not get under them , so actual ignoring these problems would be following the path laid done the ‘leaders ‘ in this field such has Mann.
I do not understand why people are feeding Trafamadore.
The point is simple, the paper deals with low resolution proxies which goes upto 1850. Whether these proxies are good proxies for temperature (ie., whether it is possible to screen out the temperature signal from the more general response to prevailing environmenal conditions in general) is an issue as it is with all proxies. The paper merely tells us what those proxies suggest, within the limitation of those proxies (including their low resolution), with respect to temperature trends from about 11,000 BP through to 1850. What the paper fails to do, like most papers, is to properly discuss error margins and the limitations of each and every proxy used, and the conflict between each proxy with each other and with the multi proxy average.
It tells us nothing about current temperatures. It equally tells us nothing about whether current temperatures are warmer than that seen throughout say 75% of the Holocene. This is all pure fantasy and hype. People are complaining at the unjustified spin which the article in Science has placed upon this particular piece of research.
The problem with all proxies is tuning and.one cannot splice one data set onto another data set, even for comparison purposes..It is always necessary to keep comparing apples with apples, and not apples with pears.
Leaving aside sampling, in broad terms there was nothing wrong with Mann’s tree ring data reconstruction. The problem with the reconstruction is that he spliced on post 1960 thermoter data. What he should have done was to set out the tree proxy data right up to date (about 1990). That data would have shown that according to the proxies used temperature were declining post 1960. This is important since this would then enable the reader to consider whether the proxies are a good proxy for temperature and/or whether there has been some error in tuning the proxies. Of course, tree ring proxy data is not a good metric for temperature since tree ring growth is a response to prevailing environmental conditions in general, temperature being only one small component of prevailing environmental conditions; and it not being possible to extract the response to the temperature component from the resonse to environmental conditions in general.
All proxy data is unreliable and needs to be viewed with a substantial degree of caution. At the end of the day, the real issue is whether the proxies used by Marcott are good proxies for temperature between about 11,000 BC through to 1850 and has he handled the proxies in an appropriate manner. It does appear that there were handling issues with the proxies but no doubt Marcott will respond on that in due course.
If we want to know whether these proxies suggest that current temperatures are warmer than that seen during say 75% of the Holocene we will need to wait at least a further 400 years, probably 600 years, and then carry on with the temperature plot post 1850. It woukld not surprise me that if this were done temperatures according to the proxies used are declining post 1850 since there is nothing within the paper that suggests that those proxies have turned towards an upwards tick.