Gergis made to order IPCC zombie climate science

Steve McIntyre points out how climate science errors return from the dead as zombies:

PAGES2K, Gergis and Made-for-IPCC Journal Articles

March 15, 2013 was the IPCC deadline for use in AR5 and predictably a wave of articles have been accepted. The IPCC Paleo chapter wanted a graphic on regional reconstructions and the PAGES2K group has obligingly provided the raw materials for this graphic, which will be published by Nature on April 21. Thanks to an obliging mole, I have information on the proxies used in the PAGES2K reconstructions and will report today on the Gergis reconstruction, of interest to CA readers, which lives on a zombie, walking among us as the living dead.

The PAGES2K article has its own interesting backstory. The made-for-IPCC article was submitted to Science last July on deadline eve, thereby permitting its use in the Second Draft, where it sourced a major regional paleo reconstruction graphic. The PAGES2K submission used (in a check-kited version) the Gergis reconstruction, which it cited as being “under revision” though, at the time, it had been disappeared.

The PAGES2K submission to Science appears to have been rejected as it has never appeared in Science and a corresponding article is scheduled for publication by Nature. It sounds like there is an interesting backstory here: one presumes that IPCC would have been annoyed by Science’s failure to publish the article and that there must have been considerable pressure on Nature to accept the article. Nature appears to have accepted the PAGES2K article only on IPCC deadline eve.

The new PAGES2K article contains reconstructions for all continents and has an extremely long list of proxies, some of which have been discussed before, but some only now making their first digital appearance. Each regional reconstruction is a major undertaking and deserving of separate peer review. It seems impossible that these various regional reconstructions could themselves have been thoroughly reviewed as re-submitted to Nature. Indeed, given that the PAGES2K coauthor list was very large, one also wonders where they located reviewers that were unconflicted with any of the authors.

Of particular interest to CA readers is the zombie version of the Gergis reconstruction. Previous CA articles are tagged gergis.

CA readers will recall that Gergis et al 2012 had stated that they had used detrended correlations to screen proxies – a technique that seemingly avoided the pitfalls of correlation screening. Jean S pointed out that Gergis et al had not used the stated technique and that the majority of their proxies did not pass a detrended correlation test – see CA discussion here (building on an earlier thread) reporting that only 6 of 27 proxies passed the stated significance test.

Read it all here: PAGES2K, Gergis and Made-for-IPCC Journal Articles