Guest post by Nancy Green
Tamino claims he has added 3 spikes to the Marcott et al proxy data and the Marcott et al process detects them.
Source: http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/many_vs_unpert.jpg
This, he then proposes, is proof that there are no 20th century spikes in the Holocene. This claim appears to run counter to a prediction I made recently in a WUWT post; that as you increase the proxy resolution you are more likely to find spikes.
See:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/03/proxy-spikes-the-missed-message-in-marcott-et-al/
Having had my reply disappeared at Tamino’s site, I thought readers at WUWT might be interested. I don’t believe Tamino’s conclusion follows from his results. Rather, I believe he has demonstrated the truth of my original prediction. What needs to be understood is that adding a spike to the proxy data is not the same as adding a spike to the proxies. This is where people get confused.
The proxies are ocean cores or similar sitting in some repository. They are real, physical objects. To truly add a spike to the proxies you would need to travel back in time and change the temperature of the earth. This would then affect the proxies in some fashion, depending on the resolution of the proxies, how they respond regionally, including lags, gain or damping. The proxy response might also be affected by other unknown factors at the time that are not visible in the proxies. In other words, the spikes that you add to the proxies would have all the resolution problems that the proxies themselves have.
However, adding spikes to the proxy data is an entirely different animal. The proxy data is an abstract representation of the proxy. It is numbers drawn on a sheet of paper or electronic equivalent. Now you are adding (drawing) high resolution spikes onto low resolution proxy data, with no accounting for regional affects, lag, gain, damping or confounding factors. It should be no surprise at all that these high resolution spikes jump out. If they didn’t, it would point to a serious flaw in Marcott et al.
An analogy might help better understand the problem. Imagine for a moment that we are not dealing with temperature, but rather trying to detect planets around stars. We have before us a photograph of a star taken by a telescope on Earth. We look at this under the microscope. However, we find no planets because the telescope lacks the angular resolution to distinguish them from the star itself.
Now let’s go out to the star in question and add planets around the star and take more photos with our telescope. These planets are real objects. We know they exists. However, it will make no difference; we still can’t see the planets with our telescope. In this example we have added a spike to the actual proxy and it has made no difference.
Now let’s add a spike to the proxy data. Instead of placing planets around the star, take the photo from the telescope and draw a picture of a planet on it. This is an example of adding a spike to the proxy data. The photo is an abstract representation of the star and its planets, equivalent to the proxy data. Now examine the photo under a microscope and voila, the planet (spike) will now be visible.
What we are seeing in action is actually a form or misdirection used in stage magic. It fools us on the stage just as it does in science. It is our minds that create the confusion (illusion) between what the proxies actually are and what the proxy data actually is. The proxies are ocean cores – they are real objects. The proxy data is an abstract representation of the real object. However in our minds we are so used to dealing with real objects as abstract representations that we are fooled into thinking they are one and the same.
If anything, what Tamino has actually done is to prove the point of my original article. He has added high resolution spikes to the low resolution data and as predicted they are detectable. To conclude however that this somehow proves there are no 20th century type spikes in the Holocene makes no sense. As we have seen in this example, no matter how many planets you physically add around a star it makes no difference if you lack the resolution to detect them. This is no proof that they don’t exist. It is only after you examine them at sufficiently high resolution that they become visible.
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Nancy Green says:
April 8, 2013 at 11:16 pm
“If anything, what Marcott shows is that we are at risk of slipping into an ice age and this risk is accelerating.”
Thank goodness, more are getting to notice this. I had been largely ignored on this point that I’d tried to make on several occasions on two threads, until the last several commenters.
Gary Pearse says:
April 8, 2013 at 5:56 am
“ONE LOOK AT THE MARCOTT ET AL GRAPH and what does one see. A temperature proxy that shows (assuming proper science) A SCARY, INEXORABLE SLIDE TOWARD THE NEXT ICE AGE!! This is what the Hockey Team saw at once. This is what motivated the apparently successful attempt to divert sceptics…”
I even proposed that someone could get a PhD for a similar study with the conclusion that we appear to be coming to the end of the Holocene. It also was the basis for a question to Marcott et al at the NYT (not yet answered) as to why this most obvious of features WASN’T the principal conclusion of the study.
Gary Pearse says:
April 9, 2013 at 5:30 am
Thank goodness, more are getting to notice this.
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From the paleo records, one of the warning signs of an approaching ice age is temperature spikes. Also, our current interglacial has already run longer than the average.
So, based on the trend seen in the “robust” portion of Marcott’s work, coupled with the modern temperature spike following on the heels of the Little Ice Age, the most logical explanation is that we are seeing the calm before the storm. We are seeing a temperature spike upwards to regain some of the previous warmth of the Holocene, ahead of a another Little Ice Age, almost certainly worse than the last. This would be an extremely dangerous development for Northern countries in a time of increasing energy costs.
While Climate Science has enjoyed great financial rewards by painting CO2 as the cause of the current warming, it cannot explain the past cycles of warmings and thus tries to minimize them to hide its limitations. CO2 as a cause of warming is inconsistent with the release of CO2 by the oceans as they warm. This process alone should make the cycle of ice ages and interglacials impossible. By GHG theory, once in an ice age, the loss of CO2 from the atmosphere should lock us in permanently. Once in an interglacial the CO2 released by the oceans should prevent the next Ice Age. This contradiction with observation, coupled with the lag in CO2 versus temperature shows clearly that CO2 is not driving temperature, no matter how rewarding it is politically and financially to say it is.
History shows that science and authority have been routinely led astray many times in the past as to cause and effect. Human activity is the single most common cause blamed for weather and climate change throughout the records of human civilization. Human sacrifice is the universal cure. The search for witches as the cause of Natures woes continues to this day. Only today’s witches drive SUV’s, not broomsticks. They burn coal to heat their magic brew, not wood.
richardscourtney says:
April 9, 2013 at 4:46 am
Leo Geiger, Tamino and others are trying to obscure the fact of that statistical trick which can only be either gross incompetence or a deliberate attempt at deceit.
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Tamino …. deliberate deceit ?? As if ….
eric1skeptic says:
Thank you eric1skeptic. Your comments were to the point.
Yes, they did. And that is why statements in Marcott based on Figure 3, such as in the conclusion (warmer than 72%…) are reasonable. People can certainly argue about other details in the paper, or wider significance, or press coverage. But they shouldn’t think those particular concluding statements are wrong because the distribution only reflected the low frequency (since it didn’t) or because there was an exaggerated proxy uptick at the end (since that doesn’t change the shape of the Figure 3 distribution).
This is probably too technical a discussion to be having here. I should have used a planet analogy involving Death Stars or something…
Leo Geiger:
I write to thank you for your post at April 9, 2013 at 8:08 am addressed to eric1skeptic.
I always enjoy a good laugh, and that post gave me a very good laugh.
It pretends to agree with eric1skeptic who had cogently explained you were plain wrong. Then it pretends you were right. And finally you try to demean the forum in which you were shown to be wrong.
Having declared you ‘won’ I assume you will now ‘take your ball home’.
OK. You can do that, but don’t be fooled into thinking the misleading presentation of the Marcott et al. paper has not been exposed for what it is.
Richard
Certain criticisms of Marcott apply to some things but not others. I thought it might be worthwhile to highlight why this is so. I understand now there is little interest in this. So no Richard, no one has ‘won’ anything here.
Leo said: “And that is why statements in Marcott based on Figure 3, such as in the conclusion (warmer than 72%…) are reasonable.”
Reminds me of “And that is why you should never let a robot do your homework” http://wealldraw.tumblr.com/post/19004731367/and-that-is-why-you-should-never-let-a-robot-do
Or
“And that is why Wikipedia is not so great: because a huge amount of space is devoted to meaningless articles maintained by control freaks.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_is_not_so_great
Most claims in the Marcott paper are spurious or unreasonable. And that is why picking one more or less reasonable claim is not a valid defense of the paper.
The one I “picked” is one of the three items listed as the primary results of study. One of the primary results is “more or less reasonable”. Not a valid defence? Odd.
Leo Geiger says:
April 9, 2013 at 4:48 pm
One of the primary results is “more or less reasonable”
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You are confusing the specific with the general in an attempt to misdirect. As already explained a finding in science is not confirmed by the number of times it is found to be correct. A broken watch is correct hundreds of time each year. More than some people.
Nancy Green: Here’s fodder for another Marcott post for you. Dana1981 over at SkepticalScience has a new post about the paper, where he continues to splice the instrument temperature record onto the end:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/marcott-hockey-stick-real-skepticism.html
Bob Tisdale says:
April 10, 2013 at 2:34 am
Dana1981 over at SkepticalScience has a new post about the paper
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Here is the last line of the post:
and that despite the contrarians’ best efforts to argue otherwise, we’re not yet doomed to catastrophic climate change.
So, there we have it. Even SKS recognizes that Global Warming is saving us from catastrophic climate change. Otherwise as Marcott shows, we’d be steadily accelerating into the next ice age.