Just last month, these were the claims:
We’re screwed: 11,000 years’ worth of climate data prove it. It’s among the most compelling bits of proof out there that human beings are behind global warming, and as such has become a target on Mann’s back for climate denialists looking to draw a bead on scientists. — The Atlantic, March 9th
Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years The modern rise that has recreated the temperatures of 5,000 years ago is occurring at an exceedingly rapid clip on a geological time scale, appearing in graphs in the new paper as a sharp vertical spike. — Justin Gillis, New York Times, March 7th
Study: Recent heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years “Rapid” head spike unlike anything in 11,000 years. Research released Thursday in the journal Science uses fossils of tiny marine organisms to reconstruct global temperatures …. It shows how the globe for several thousands of years was cooling until an unprecedented reversal in the 20th century. — Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press, March 7th
True face of climate’s hockey stick graph revealed The rate of warming in the last 150 years is unlike anything that happened in at least 11,000 years, says Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who was not involved in Marcott’s study. — Michael Marshall, New Scientist magazine, March 7th
Now, Ross McKitrick, building on the work of Steve McIntyre and others in the blogosphere, shows how easily these media outlets were duped into believing this study was the end-all for proof of man-made climate change.
We’re not screwed?
11,000-year study’s 20th-century claim is groundless
On March 8, a paper appeared in the prestigious journal Science under the title A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years. Temperature reconstructions are nothing new, but papers claiming to be able to go back so far in time are rare, especially ones that promise global and regional coverage.
The new study, by Shaun Marcott, Jeremy Shakun, Peter Clark and Alan Mix, was based on an analysis of 73 long-term proxies, and offered a few interesting results: one familiar (and unremarkable), one odd but probably unimportant, and one new and stunning. The latter was an apparent discovery that 20th-century warming was a wild departure from anything seen in over 11,000 years. News of this finding flew around the world and the authors suddenly became the latest in a long line of celebrity climate scientists.
The trouble is, as they quietly admitted over the weekend, their new and stunning claim is groundless. The real story is only just emerging, and it isn’t pretty.
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Read his excellent essay in full at The Financial Post here:
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/04/01/were-not-screwed/
mogamboguru says:
April 2, 2013 at 7:18 am
It’s actually only 500 years being compared with the 11,500 years. The dates are 1500 to 2000 in the Figure 4 of the Huang (2004) study referenced (and the curve is up not down in any case). Presumably some got their reference notes mixed up, since the paper referenced does not remotely support the claim, but what is the correct reference?
How did this get past peer review and when will the retraction occur?
I suspect that Marcott got some mentoring for this paper by an established climate scientist. Something along the lines of:
“Son, this thesis of yours, it’s not what we look for in the published literature. If you expect to get published, you’ve got to sex it up. You’ve got to show that it’s worse than we thought. Find a way to spike it up at the end. Mike’s got all sorts if cleaver ways to do this kind of thing. Talk to him. Learn the trade. He’s the best in the business. If you’re going to have a career in climate science you need to learn one thing: serve only what the dogs are eating.”
You correct, Tom (toml says: April 2, 2013 at 8:14 am),
But now that they (and their supporters) have admitted that the uptick is bogus (or ‘not robust’) they are defending including it because it “confirms the instrument record”. Basically, they are trying to have it both ways now that they have been caught out including a statistical artefact.
Furthermore, the uptick is probably more related not to a few Monte Carlo runs, but – as Steve McIntyre has detailed – some seriously dodgy changing of the end points of a couple of their proxies. There has been no response to this in the FAQ the authors have posted and this is most damming point in regard to their actions in writing the paper, even though the post-publication emphasis on the uptick (which they had not placed emphasis on in the paper) is also highly suspect.
Steve is very careful not to attribute motive to the authors of this paper, but it is getting harder and harder to think this is simple scientific error, especially in the way they are obfuscating in their defence.
I searched the BBC news site for recent entries for “Marcott”:
“Sorry, there are no results for ‘marcott’ in the category ‘News’.”
So I tried CNN. Their latest report is the original headline of the now-retracted hockey stick:
“Global warming is epic, long-term study says Updated March 8, 2013
Global warming has propelled Earth’s climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest — in just one century.
How about Al Jazeera?
“Your search – marcott – did not match any documents. No pages were found containing “marcott”.”
The NBC, like CNN, still have as their latest word on Marcott the full lurid original misinformation:
“Warming fastest since dawn of civilization, study shows – Science
Updated 9:07 a.m. ET, Mon., April. 1, 2013
Overall, Marcott and colleagues note Thursday in the journal Science, the planet today is warmer than it has been for about 75 percent of the Holocene.
How about Fox news – at least they should be expected to report the discovery of data manipulation and the Marcott et al retraction?
“Did you mean: “marco” ?
Your Search for marcott did not return any results.”
Well its nice to see Fox being sensitive to the possiblity that I might be Mexican. But nothing at all – even from them – about the Marcott retraction.
This is what is so sinister and dangerous about the media. Marcott et al have won and they are laughing. The initial knee-jerk predjudice-driven sensational report of the study – “climate now warmer than 75% of the Holocene, climate-change skepticism demolished” was read by millions and this will never be undone. No amount of retraction will change that fact. AGW activism worldwide has received an irreversible boost. The exposed invalidity of the study and even the marcott retraction will remain unknown to most of the public. This is the modern mass media at its politically twisted worst.
Now, Ross McKitrick, building on the work of Steve McIntyre and others in the blogosphere, shows how easily these media outlets were duped into believing this study was the end-all for proof of man-made climate change.
They weren’t duped, they were complicit in the fraud and deceit. Any of them that were duped are dumb as a bag of hammers. Deborah Feyerick of CNN falls into that category. I’m surprised she has enough brains to remember to breathe. http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/02/11/cnn-anchor-blames-asteroid-on-global-warming/
McIntyre & McKitrick strike again, I love it. Three cheers for the good guys getting a win.Even if the MS media are certain to wash this under the rug.
toml says:
April 2, 2013 at 8:14 am
In some of the blogs there seems to be a misconception that Marcott et al. somehow “spliced” modern thermometer data onto their reconstruction and that the resulting sharp uptick, while misrepresenting the temporal resolution of their reconstruction, is a valid comparison.
Trouble is, that’s not what they did. Their reconstruction is a compilation of many Monte Carlo “realizations” of the actual proxy series. The Monte Carlo realizations created the uptick out of thin air, with no help from the modern instrumental record. The “blade” of the hockey stick is purely an artifact of the reconstruction statistics. People who try to claim that it’s just comparing the thermometer record to the paleo reconstruction are missing the point.
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I think you’re being too charitable. I think, but can’t prove, that they intentionally manipulated proxies to show the uptick. Given they had very few proxies to play with and that they had no misgivings about moving them up and down the timeline, it wouldn’t have been very hard to do.
Do you think they’ll put the FAQ with the supporting online material that they supplied to Science?
How difficult would it be for experts to perform an end-to-end parallel implementation of the Marcott et al reconstruction, doing so according to Marcott et al’s nominally stated methods, but instead using data which has not been arbitrarily modified and which is directly traceable back to the original data sources?
Phlogiston…ABSOLUTELY spot on.
What I was indicating earlier (and surely others before me had in mind).
I do think very many commenters here assume that simply proving a thing wrong will change perceptions. It wont. it would be good to see sceptics wake up to this reality: culture and policy is not determined bY realities but perceptions.
Wow, this is what should be called the marcottisation of a diagram.
The procedure is simple and should be added in the handbook of the small climastrologist: one takes a diagram that looks like it looks and through marcottisation one may change it to look like you want it to.
The marcottisation process works through redating the various proxies inside for the period of your interest. One can take any spaghetti graph and redating some component parts inside it, cutting off some inconvenient values obtain the graph of your desire from their average.
Beta Blocker says:
April 2, 2013 at 12:29 pm
How difficult would it be for experts to perform an end-to-end parallel implementation of the Marcott et al reconstruction, doing so according to Marcott et al’s nominally stated methods, but instead using data which has not been arbitrarily modified and which is directly traceable back to the original data sources?
Was already done by several in the search of how the hockey stick was achieved – you can see here some examples:
http://suyts.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/hockey-stick-found-in-marcott-data/
This is what the data without being changed shows.
Thanks, Steve McIntyre, for your scrupulous attention to details. Thanks Ross McKitrick, for your clear voice. Thanks, both, for bringing the truth to light.
There is probably no hope until we literally freeze over and people notice there ain’t no warming. The Steig et al paper was debunked by SM and others showing that they artificially spread the heat from one point of the Peninsula to the whole of Antarctica if I recall correctly. The paper has not been withdrawn or retracted. I would not be surprised that the owners of the journals like Nature and Science really don’t care anymore about the science as long as the journal sells. Basically like a newspaper does with sensational stories. The fact is their income is going to keep drying up if they keep this up because no one serious will be able to believe any of the work that is published on their journals.In other words the “Name” or “prestige” of these journals is being eroded by this tomfoolery
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I prefer “scicobabble”.
1) They don’t need to get away with the lies, they just need to get away with it for a little while. Headline page A1, correction page A23. It’s not science, it’s propaganda.
2) I *already* view scientists like used car salesmen. Suspect until proven. It kind of boggles me that scientists in general (of all people) defend the club first and correct the problem never. Scientists need to start policing their profession on a volunteer basis, it’s pretty clear no one else is going to do it. I know that scientists claim that’s what they do, but step back and look. It’s really, really not what you do.
What a well written review by Dr. McKitrick. I think it is time to start rolling past the circled wagons. I believe the media is starting to come around. With this nonsense, corrections from every publication who published that graph should be demanded.
I call on all WUWT readers to demand retractions/corrections from any publication that put that graph in their content.
I feel sorry for Marcott. Poor bloke unknowingly fell on his sword for the team and will never work again if we regain control of grants to study real science.
What’s the story here? ‘Before’ seems to be in the real world, in national media – often under Science/Technology sections. ‘After’ refers to an online Opinion piece in a Canadian financial outlet. Result? No change. Hardly surprising when you compare the reach of real-world science to that of provincial opinion, but it’s interesting how much the need to believe can lead to the creation of a bubble-world ‘reality’.
My God people. The scariest part of all this is that Climate Change is being taught as FACT at my children’s elementary school here in Arizona – AND, the school is REQUIRED to teach it! Try undoing that disaster each and every night around the dinner table to confused 10 and 11 year olds. Those of us who are truly informed about the issue can sit around and discuss the absurd lack of data credibility all we want on forums…meanwhile they are quietly drilling it into our children’s heads, and shooting out never-ending headlines of lies that never get retracted. Sick, sick stuff. And very frustrating.
Eliza:
It’s more about vanity than selling magazines. That and an amazing degree of insularity. There really is an illuminati vs. the great unwashed masses aspect to this business that is quite important is keeping the AGW train rolling down the tracks.
So you use a record that smooths and suppresses all short-term variation, and then announce, “Looky! the short-term variation (upward) is unprecedented in our record!” Uh, yeah.