Yet another 'unprecedented' hot times tree ring reconstruction

“This paper tells us what we already knew…” said study co-author Edward Cook.
Wasn’t it always going to tell them what they already knew?

researchers from the US along with some of the most corrupt nations on earth: China, India, Pakistan and Russia.
I have a feeling this will be a goldmine for auditors. If they can gain access to data, of course.
Which of course will be impossible.
We will have to take their word for it. As will the IPCC.
Sad state of affairs.

Sneak attack of the Hockey Sticks. Still in time for AR5? I guess we’ll see!
…just when you thought it was safe to forget about treenometers…

1850 to 1950 saw a general warming trend. The IPCC does not attribute most of the warming during this period to man-made greenhouse gases. The warming after 1950 must be man-made because we can’t think of anything else. Therefore the hiatus in temperature over the past 15+ years is caused by man-made greenhouse gases because I can’t think of anything else either.

“Fueled by industrial greenhouse gas emissions, Earth’s climate warmed more between 1971 and 2000 than during any other three-decade interval in the last 1,400 years,”
While that *may* be true, we also know from ice cores there are no less than 7 one hundred year periods in the last 26,000 years that changed temperature at a much, much higher rate than the 20th century. All completely naturally….

Who believes proxy studies?

I think the CO2 is moving around – “fugacious” like the deer in my backyard, eating the seeds the chickadees scatter with abandon from the feeder. I hope they stock up – we’re due another 8 to 15 inches of white global warming this evening, adding to the 6 feet of snow since March 1. I think the armadillo herds are fleeing from the UP of Michigan, because I detect a pan-American glacier building everywhere I look.

“This period of manmade global warming, which continues today, reversed a natural cooling trend that lasted several hundred years…”
————————————
Are they saying CO2 reversed a natural cooling trend and prevented the Little Ice Age from becoming the next full blown ice age?
Really?
cn

All of Western Canada is colder in the last 5 years than the previous 5 years by about about .7C.

Nusiyaki writes,
“researchers from the US along with some of the most corrupt nations on earth: China, India, Pakistan and Russia”
That’s an odd reading. A quick look at the authors:
Pakistan, Ethiopia, Italy, Norway, Chile, Nepal, China, Spain, Belgium, South Africa, Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, France, Argentina, UK, Australia, Chile, Italy, Russia, India, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, USA

Jimbo says: “I thought researchers got grants to study something new and not something we already know. In other words duplication is frowned upon. Is this not duplication?”
In Climate “Science”, attempts at duplication are frowned upon, and even interfered with, but only if a skeptic is the one attempting it. Duplicity, however, is not frowned upon in Climate “Science;” it’s rewarded.

“Earth’s climate warmed more between 1971 and 2000 than during any other three-decade interval in the last 1,400 years …”
===============================================
The temperature rise c.1910 – c. 1945 (including 30 year 1911 – 1940) was just as steep, if not steeper, and was not mainly due to human CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning as is generally acknowledged:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1901/to:2000/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1911/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1971/to:2000/trend

@mattN — if it is true that there were 7 such periods in the last 26k years, as you say, then perhaps the climate is more sensitive to external forcings than is currently appreciated. perhaps then it will also be more sensitive to CO2 forcing than is currently appreciated.

RCSaumarez says:
April 22, 2013 at 3:52 pm
Who believes proxy studies?

Actually I have no problem with individual proxy studies. The people who do this work are careful and serious people who go out in the field and measure stuff. They know exactly where their data comes from and understand its limits. They usually have a very good appreciation for uncertainty. The results of most individual proxy studies tell us something small but interesting about the past. They usually show nothing alarming going on.
The people I have no respect for are the ones who take the results of these individual proxy studies and feed them through various statistical data manglers to produce global climate reconstructions. These people take the good meat of individual proxy studies; mix it with unpatatable statistical ingredients; and mash it together to produce the hockey stick shaped sausages which are required to feed the political climate crusade.

You don’t have to read too far into the Climate Audit review to realise exactly how shameless this paper is. Why is it that it is left to bloggers to point out all of the nefarious machinations?
Where is the scientific community on this? Its ok to demonstrate utter contempt for scientific method?

Stuck on Stupid…
it can not be anything else.. Mother Nature has already shown them to be ignorant of how she works..

OK, let me try that again:
http://i36.tinypic.com/axzjt1.jpg

Stan W. says:
April 22, 2013 at 6:44 pm
“@Tom in florida — perhaps you would be so kind as to list a source for your tinypic? how was it derived?”
Stan, I had saved this image last year, from where I do not know. However a similar image can be found here:
http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Younger+Dryas

A very nice graphic image.
It does not in any way support the ‘hysteria’ of its authors.
A wonderful Pyrenees Mountains ‘line’ visible flanked by the Alps and ‘wedge like’ the
near surface temperature anomalies.
Had the ‘authors’ of the paper undertaken an analysis of the surface wind fields and wind stress, their paper, as such, would never have been published, as currently presented. 🙂

I questioned the 70,000 deaths number, so I looked it up. Sure enough, it’s straight out of Wikipedia.
I kept looking, and found a country listing of excess deaths in 2003. There were some missing, but they were headed for half that 70,000 number. The Telegraph had an article on the heat wave, and their number was 40,000, which sounds more sane.
Still a big number, but more a comment on European socialized medicine than the weather.

What makes tree rings larger or smaller, isn’t it a combination of things? Sunlight, favorable weather, rainfall, competition for ground nutrients, shifts in ground water level? Overall temperature might well simply get lost in there. Ice cores could tell more, but they only happen where it’s icy all the time.

A bit off topic but but I think I have detected a troll trail.
Every comment above before 6:08 has a down arrow, regardless of whether it is even stating an opinion of not.
At 6:08 the troll trail ends.
Can there really be people who see it as their duty to thumbs down every comment on the board in the name of protecting the planet? I guess so.
Noble work. I am sure Gaia thanks you, whoever you are.

MattN says:
April 22, 2013 at 3:21 pm
Looks like a few of us here would like to see a citation or two for your statement: “… we also know from ice cores there are no less than 7 one hundred year periods in the last 26,000 years that changed temperature at a much, much higher rate than the 20th century.” JP

Thomas Spaziani says:
April 22, 2013 at 8:16 pm
“The study also found that Europe’s 2003 heat wave and drought, which killed an estimated 70,000 people, happened during Europe’s hottest summer of the last 2,000 years. ”
Say WHAT?! 70,000 in one year?? Show me the data.
From a study done in Europe in 2007, analyzing the mortality due to the heat wave of 2003:
“In total, more than 80,000 additional deaths were recorded in 2003 in the twelve countries concerned by excess mortality compared to the 1998‐2002 period. Whereas 70,000 of these additional deaths occurred during the summer, still over 7,000 occurred afterwards. Nearly 45,000 additional deaths were recorded in August alone, as well as more than 11,000 in June, more than 10,000 in July and nearly 5,000 in September.”
http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_projects/2005/action1/docs/action1_2005_a2_15_en.pdf

“This paper tells us what we already knew…” said study co-author Edward Cook.

This is the same Ed Cook who admitted in the CG1 emails that we know “f*** all” about climate variability based on proxies greater than 100 years ago. Did he think we’d forget?? The tiny amount of respect for him I might have had is now gone.

Chris says:
“In total, more than 80,000 additional deaths were recorded in 2003 in the twelve countries concerned by excess mortality compared to the 1998‐2002 period. Whereas 70,000 of these additional deaths occurred during the summer, still over 7,000 occurred afterwards. Nearly 45,000 additional deaths were recorded in August alone, as well as more than 11,000 in June, more than 10,000 in July and nearly 5,000 in September.”
http://ec.europa.eu/health/ph_projects/2005/action1/docs/action1_2005_a2_15_en.pdf
So pretty much unlike the numbers posted in the WUWT article, this one is just doing some statistical gymnastics to justify the majority of ALL deaths that happen during the summer months to heat? Without a single medical opinion of the deaths considered in the count? Well geez in that case no one must die of anything but heat now.

“With the exception of Antarctica, cooling tapered off at the end of the 19th century, with the onset of industrialization”
Damn those factory overlords cursing us to a century of not freezing!
/sarc

Thomas Spaziani says:
April 22, 2013 at 11:34 pm
“So pretty much unlike the numbers posted in the WUWT article, this one is just doing some statistical gymnastics to justify the majority of ALL deaths that happen during the summer months to heat?”
No, that’s not what the report says. I quote “The excess mortality cumulated during summer 2003 has recently been assessed at the request of the European Union.” Excess means that which occurred above the norm.
Section 4 is titled: “4. Excess mortality in 2003 compared with the 1998‐2002 average”
Once again, excess meaning above the average of 5 prior years.
From Section 4: “The countries most affected by this excess summer mortality
were Luxembourg, Spain, France and Italy, where mortality increased by 14.3%, 13.7%, 11.8% and 11.6% respectively.”
Clearly the report is built by comparing the number of deaths during the summer of 2003 to the average during the same months during 1998-200, not by assigning all summer 2003 deaths to heat related causes.

It is interesting that the first century AD, which they say was warmer than the last decades of the 20C, was the Age of the Antonines, and Gibbon describes it as a period of unprecedented prosperity and well being.

Are these scientists the same that made up the consensus of 77 scientists. They must have been selected for a special ability to ignore the many peer reviewed papers from China, Japan, Tibet, Caribbean etc etc that have all show that the MWP was global, though maybe not entirely synchronous, and that it was as warm as or warmer than the end of the 2oth century. But we do not need ice cores, pollen, stalagmites, tree rings or any other proxies to know that, just to know what is in the history books relating to crop production – it was not possible to build the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Gothic cathedrals etc without food production that reflected a warm climate. And we also have the archeological records from Greenland for the MWP showing that grains were produced and cattle kept in areas which are currently under the ice or too cold to grow grains. Since, according to Arrhenius, a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would result in an increase in temperature mainly in the north of the NH, at night and in the winter – as GISS have conveniently produced by homogenizing land temperatures over the Arctic ocean, we do not need any statistical evaluation to tell that this Pages2K project has produced trash, even if some of the data may we good but used in the wrong way. As my Professor used to say ” you can see what you want in any data with the eye of faith” and AGW is a belief system not real science.

@Stan W – And that airport belonged to the local flying club until 1973 when it was sold to Waterloo Region and City and began expansion. UHI all the way I believe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region_of_Waterloo_International_Airport

If any of these calculations are based on tree rings, of course the trees grow faster now.
With the increase in CO2 the planet is getting greener, grows better and can feed another two billion people, not to mention the additional animals. What is so horrible about that?

Citation number 52 in their Supplementary Information is … wait for it …
the withdrawn Gergis et al paper!
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/ngeo1797-s1.pdf
Note to authors – if you don’t pay attention to detail, others will.

MattN,

While that *may* be true, we also know from ice cores there are no less than 7 one hundred year periods in the last 26,000 years that changed temperature at a much, much higher rate than the 20th century. All completely naturally….

Could you cite some reputable sources for this claim? My immediate questions are;
1) Are the ice core records homogenous?
2) How do they overcome the difference between regional and global? Regional rates of change/temperature amplitudes are always faster/greater than global.
Thanks in advance.

Chuck Nolan,

Are they saying CO2 reversed a natural cooling trend and prevented the Little Ice Age from becoming the next full blown ice age?
Really?

No, Chuck. The bolded bit is what you said. The non-bolded bit is what the article said.

dbstealey,
The ‘debate’ between some people is about global warming, but that is no reason to reject regional studies. Just because some people don’t get the distinction, doesn’t mean one component should be abandoned. Bob Tisadale, for example, has no problem examining regional climate variation/fluctuation.
wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/23/a-quick-comment-about-the-pages-continental-temperature-reconstructions/

Because global warming has stopped

By ‘global’, do you mean only surface temperatures? Because the oceans have been warming in the time surface temperatures appear to have been flatlining (since 1996, 1998, or 2000).
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
The full ‘global’ temperature budget goes much further than surface temps.

dbstealey,
I see from your chart that you think that temperatures have flattened since 1997.
That is the case using one metric from only one source. All the other surface/lower troposphere data sets show warming, albeit moderate.
But your chart is not global at all. It doesn’t include the oceans beneath the surface, it does not include heat energy gone into ice melt, and it does not include some of the North and South pole.
By my reckoning, the oceans have heated up since 1997, Greenland has lost ice, 85% of glaciers worldwide have retreated (which would absorb some of the surface heat energy), and Arctic sea ice decline has been much greater than Aantarctic growth.
Adding up, it sure doesn’t look like global warming has stopped since 1997. You can only claim that by isolating one data set representing one portion of the global energy budget. Not remotely convincing, sorry.

dbstealey says:
April 23, 2013 at 9:47 pm
/////////////////////////////////////////
When responding to barry, you could have pointed out the following::
There is no first order correlation between CO2 levels and temperature in the thermometer record, viz
1852 to 1862 cooling, no significant change in CO2 levels (certainlyCO2 was not falling)
1862 to 1878 warming, no significant change in CO2 levels
1978 to 1894 cooling, no significant change in CO2 levels (certainly CO2 was not falling)
1994 to 1902 warming, no significant change in CO2 levels
1902 to 1912 cooling, no significant change in CO2 levels (certainly CO2 not falling)
1912 to 1942 warming, only slight change in CO2 levels, which IPCC acknowledges is not sufficient to explain the warming.
1942 to 1956 cooling, significant rise in CO2 levels yet temperatures fell, ie., anti-correlation.
1956/7 El Nino spike
1957 to 1976/7 cooling, significant rise in CO2 levels yet temperatures fell, ie., anti-correlation.
1956/7
1977 to 1998 warming.significant rise in CO2 lebvels and the only period in the thermometer record where temperatures and CO2 rise in tandem. Howver rate of change is not significantly different to the 1912 to 1942 warming, which suggests that CO2 did not add to the natural variation that was responsible for the 1912 to 1942 warming..
1998 to date, no significant change in temperature although significant rise in CO2.
In summary, there is only one period of about 20 years when temperature anomaly and CO2 levels rise in tandem. However, warmist would have one believe that a 20 year period is too short to be of significance! And in any event, the rate of warming was not significantly different to the 30 year warming between 1912 and 1942 which warming was not caused by CO2 (as acknowledged by the IPCC).
Further, it is not clear whether there was any real warming between 1979 and 1997 since according tom satellite data the temperature was flat, The most obvious explanation for the difference between the thermometer record and that of the satellite measurements is that the thermometer record became polluted by UHI (or local heat island) and/or corrupted by inappropriate adjustments. I emphasise that it may well be the case that there was little if any real warming post 1977 and the observed warming in the thermometer record may (or may largely) be nothing more than poor data collection and/or management.
If one looks at the satellite data there is no first order correlation between CO2 and temperature for the entire 33 year period of the data set, ie., as from 1979 to date. The temperatures are flat between 1979 and about 1997/8, and falt between 1999 to date. There is merely a step change in and around the super El Nino of 1998 and unless that El Nino was caused by CO2, there is no first order correlation and CO2 levels in the satellite data set. As far as I am aware, no one suggests that the super El Nino was the product oof increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
Not only is there no first order correlation between CO2 and temperatures in the thermometer record, I would suggest that the same is so of the paleo record. In that record, there are periods not simply when CO2 levels are low but temperatures are high, and periods when temperatures are high when CO2 levels are low (which raises inconsistencies with the GHE conjecture), but more importanatly there are a number of periods when there is anti-correlation, ie., CO2 levels are falling but temperature is increasing, or CO2 levels are rising but temperatures are falling. Whilst correlation does not mean causation, anti-correlation is potentally fatal to a claim of causation. Of course, there are a number of periods where there are similarities between CO2 levels and temperatures, but it appears that temperature lead CO2 and that CO2 is levels (during such periods) is a response not a driver. Of course, one has to view paleo records with a degree of caution since all proxy reconstructions contain significant uncertainties and error bars.
i would suggest that it is one of the greatest PR coups of all time that the public have been led to believe that there is some correlation between CO2 levels and temperature. There is no firsst order correlation, and one needs fudge factors to build any case that there may be some relationship.
Presently, the evidence is strongly suggesting that the climate sensitivity at this period of the Holocene to CO2 is zero or so close to zero that we cannot measure any signal within the tolerance of the data sets that we possess. We cannot weed out the signal to CO2 (if any) from the noise of natural variation.
As regards the oceans, there is no reliable evidence of a change in heat content: we simply do not have the required coverage to make any reasonable assessment in that regard. We would need to increase ARGO coverage well over a million fold. We would need ARGO buoys no more than 50 miles apart and we would need that data set spanning a period of at least 60 years and preferrably 150 years before we could ascertain trends and seperate temperature fluctuations from natural ocean cycles. Any assertion that ocean heat content is increasing is not a scientific assertion, quite simply because we do not possess the data to make any scientific assessment in that regard.

richard verney,
Did someone say that CO2 was the only climate driver, or that short-term fluctuations would not occur under CO2 warming?
That is your tacit assumption. It is a straw man.

richard verney,
I plotted the two periods either side of 1998, using the amalgamated WFT data set and notice that both periods show moderate warming, not flat trends. I ommitted 1998 data, as you rightly point out that it is a super el Nino, and as it lies at the ends of the time periods, would skew the results based on one year’s major fluctuation.
Now, the super el Nino can’t be responsible for the higher temperatures 1999 to 2013, as el Nino effects fade within months. El Nino is an internal, fluctuating part of the climate system, not a forcing, so something else is responsible for the period 1999 – 2013 being warmer than 1979 – 1997 (Dec).