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
beng
Yes, that thaught has struck me too. However, Marcott is a grownup, not a grad student anymore, and responsible too for his own actions. Apparently, what he did for his thesis, were he was dependent on his advisor in an entirely different way, was decent and without the now revealed ‘problems’ ..
But still, a young postdoc is dependent on ‘professor’ in a similar way for his future career, his possibility to new appointments, grants, tenure etc. And if it played out as you suggest, that he is the fall guy for all what’s wrong with this paper, while the ‘elders’ were scheming in the background with methods, timing, softball reviews etc (as i certainly looks like), in order to get the blade in print, just long enough for it to be included in the IPCC AR5, whereafter the repercussions could be blamed on the young guy and first author, then indeed this is very cynical.
However, Michaek Mann has been a coward for a long time already (like Gore) afraid to debate anybody not agreeuing with him on a level field ..
And if it is true that he was one of the reviewers (he might very well be one among those the authors suggested), then this will in the end get back to him too …
I still cannot understand how the journal Science could lend itself to such low scheming though …
Another glorious token of Climatology.
When this art is abandoned perhaps science will return to the study of our weather.
Climate will again be understood as either a geological event, or best defined on a regional basis.
I agree with those who call Marcott a sacrificial lamb on the altar of this cult.
But he is an adult and perhaps has a future in vacuum sales.
Based on personal experience, these bureaucrats will stonewall and evade.Hoping the attention will fade.
In 1665, aged 23 & just having been awarded a BA, Newton later claimed to have begun work on his calculus. I believe him, but the proponents of Leibniz’ priority don’t. He did definitely develop the theory of gravitation while home after August 1665, when Cambridge shut down due to plague, so, yes, he was a kid. Breakthroughs in math & science are often made by youngsters in their 20s, even if like Newton & Darwin, they don’t publish until much later in life.
Here’s what NASA & NOAA say about weather & climate:
“Weather is basically the way the atmosphere is behaving, mainly with respect to its effects upon life and human activities. The difference between weather and climate is that weather consists of the short-term (minutes to months) changes in the atmosphere. Most people think of weather in terms of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, brightness, visibility, wind, and atmospheric pressure, as in high and low pressure.
“In most places, weather can change from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and season-to-season. Climate, however, is the average of weather over time and space. An easy way to remember the difference is that climate is what you expect, like a very hot summer, and weather is what you get, like a hot day with pop-up thunderstorms…
“In short, climate is the description of the long-term pattern of weather in a particular area.
“Some scientists define climate as the average weather for a particular region and time period, usually taken over 30-years. It’s really an average pattern of weather for a particular region.”
I feel it is valid to talk about global climate, at least for longer time periods, as in “the equable Late Cretaceous climate” or “Snowball Earth”.
The 30 years 1981-2010 were probably globally warmer on average than 1951-80, but than 1921-50 is questionable. The period 1681-1710 was almost certainly colder, but AD 981-1010 might well have been warmer than the past 33 years. Not to mention many 30 year periods in the Roman & Minoan Warm Periods & the Holocene Climatic Optimum. Let alone the Eemian Interglacial, when Scandinavia was an island.
A little grafting here, a little grifting there; pretty soon you’re talking RealClimate Science [TM]!
Ian Blanchard says:
March 20, 2013 at 7:50 am
Agree, mostly. Bottom line he submitted his paper to Nature they declined because no blade on the stick, he emailed Mann for help, the blade was attached and Mann spoke to his friends at Science, viola.
Skiphil says: March 20, 2013 at 12:57 am
Indeed! The well-worn** diversionary fog of last resort: This paper may be right or wrong, but it doesn’t matter … “it’s the rate of warming”. And, of course, this rascally rate is always increasing “faster than we thought” so – empirical evidence of “causation” be damned – we must act now. By doing as we say, but not as we do!
** I don’t know how long this particular “argument” has been used. The first time I saw it was from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)’s so-called “science” maven, Bob McDonald (whose academic credentials were not earned in any of the sciences, but – perhaps very appropriately – in drama!) McDonald was baring his broken heart during a post-Copenhagen weep-fest on his blog, as I had noted in:
Yet another CBC “climate change” snowjob
Hilary Ostrov
Trafamadore once again tells us what the main point of the paper is. He thinks people here are naive and very stupid indeed. Let me explain Trafamadore:
THE MAIN POINT OF THE PAPER IS THE FABRICATED UPTICK. Duck and dive all you like you will fail to divert anyone here away from that focus. By all means keep trying and I guarantee you that you will keep failing. You can take that to the bank Traf.
If it was not for the sharp, fabricated uptick we would not be discussing it on WUWT.
“…the majority of the work is being done by scientists who are so egocentric that they can’t/won’t submit their work to people who are qualified to find the errors.”
This is how we got to where we are.
If the total debacle of the Marcott paper leads to some improvement in scientific method and more objectivity in peer review, then it won’t have been totally in vain.
I don’t know if anyone else has mentioned this, but Rud Istvan has an article about this on Climate Etc that I think is very important. He references Steve’s work and adds some of his own. I think that WUWT needs to help provide some exposure to Rud’s article. The public really needs to be exposed to the level of fraud that was pulled with this, since they were all exposed to the lie when it initially came out.
Grafting is nothing new. You can plot millennium scale PDO data that are all over the map for hundreds of years that suddenly converge to GISS values for the last 50 years.
Hockey Stick becomes Hockey P(h)uck…..
RockyRoad says:
March 19, 2013 at 8:42 pm
But your opinion doesn’t matter, “traf”… the more people dig into this paper, the more problems it has. And that’s what matters.
Exactly!
trafamadore says:
March 19, 2013 at 9:25 pm
A heat spike like this has never happened before, at least not in the last 11,300 years and Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time.”
Trafamadore, you have not followed-up and not tried to understand anything of the critique, as your arguments do not address the points raised.
With the right dating of the samples, the proxies give the same result as other work, showing correctly MWP and LIA and no unusual modern warming.
Without re-dating there is no hockey stick in the modern times, actually it shows cooling, but being too few proxies the results are not concludent.
http://suyts.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/hockey-stick-found-in-marcott-data/
And with all this garbage found in the paper you keep on posting your “sky is falling message”. I see an acute case of stikophrenia around.
Have you ever heard of the 8200 event? Do you know what is about “rapid climate chage”? Bond events? Have you read anything about the vikings in Greenland and that they grew grain in there? Had cows and farms?
http://www.icenews.is/2012/01/28/evidence-suggests-vikings-grew-grain-in-south-greenland/
http://www.co2science.org/data/timemap/mwpmap.html
You are denying any significant climate change in the Holocene. Do you realise who is the denier?
There are thousands of papers showing the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon:
http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod.html
warmer or at least as the Modern Warming.
I will not talk about the Younger Dryas which was one order of magnitude more significant that we see now, but many other events in the Holocene.
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#An
Google Mohendjo Daro and check why did that civilisation disappear? Because the climate changed about 4000 years ago getting cooler. Here some corresponding cooling from the Dead Sea:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379112002430
It is now not as warm as it was at the time of that civilisation as the Holocene cools slowly:
“We live in the coldest period of the last 10.000 years”
Trafamadore: there’s someone a bit closer to the subject who agrees has a different take on what THE MAIN POINT OF THE PAPER IS.
INTERVIEWER: “Mr Shakun … good to have you on. Thank you. What does your study tell us that we didn’t already know? What does it add to the science around this issue?”
JEREMY SHAKUN: “Yeah. So, what it tells us. You know, what we knew from the last one hundred years is that we’ve had thermometers out there and they’ve told us that in the 20th Century global temperatures rose about a degree celsius. And we already knew that that was pretty strange out of the last thousand years. We knew that was pretty anomalous. We haven’t seen that in a thousand years.
“But what _OUR_ [emphasis in original] study did was to say let’s go back a lot further. Let’s go back a full ten thousand years. Ah, and what it shows us is that one degree warming is looking pretty anomolous in the context of a full ten thousand years. So it really points to just how, how ah interesting and amazing times that we’re living in right now.”
http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/19/bent-their-core-tops-in/#comment-407249
So Trafamadore, are you going to say that the answer to the question “What does your paper add to the science” (and the explanation following “what it tells us”) is not the main point of the paper?