Crispin in Waterloo says:
September 9, 2013 at 12:27 pm
Oh yes I understand THAT fuss ! – but I don’t understand the fuss on here, and certainly not in the context of trying to call the paper as rubbish just because of it’s simplicity and lack of math!
Quite often the best explanations are extremely simple – the earlier detailed paper of 2009 is also really just a collection of observations, plausibly explained by simple ‘analysis’. However, it seems that some just cannot grasp it?
It may not be correct in the end, and I know many people do not like simple curve fitting exercises – but sometimes they do provide the best indicators?
As a geologist, who started just as Plate tectonics was being more widely bandied around, I was taught by academics of the (even) old(er) school, and there were those that liked its simplicity, and those who felt it was too complex! I often wondered why there was such a divide over such a simple explanation, but of course, it is all accepted stuff now!

Chris Schoneveld says:
September 9, 2013 at 9:17 am
What is that magic “recovery from the Little Ice Age”? Is that a given and needs no explanation?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
NASA: Heinrich and Dansgaard/Oeschger Events

Climate during the last glacial period was far from stable. Two different types of climate changes, called Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events, occurred repeatedly throughout most of this time. Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events were first reported in Greenland ice cores by scientists Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger. Each of the 25 observed D-O events consist of an abrupt warming to near-interglacial conditions that occurred in a matter of decades, and was followed by a gradual cooling….
Related to some of the coldest intervals between D-O events were six distinctive events, named after paleoclimatologist Hartmut Heinrich, that are recorded in North Atlantic marine sediments….
The cause of these glacial events is still under debate…..

During an interglacial like the Holocene they are called Bond Events. Dr. Gerald Bond found similar cycles during the Holocene interglacial. NASA used to have that information too but I can not find a link so I will use this instead.

The Physical Evidence of Earth’s Unstoppable 1,500-Year Climate Cycle
…Gerard Bond of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory analyzed sediments on the floor of the southern North Atlantic. Roughly every 1,500 years, there was a surge in the amount of rocky debris picked up by the glaciers as they ground their way across eastern Canada and Greenland. This ice-rafted debris was then floated much farther south before the icebergs melted and it dropped to the sea floor. Both the increase in the volume of the debris and its floating much farther south indicated severe cold periods.
Bond found nine of these cycles in the last 12,000 years, and they matched those in the cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Vostok Antarctic glacier — again strengthening our confidence that the cycles are real and significant.
Bond’s 1997 research report in Science 10 begins:

Evidence from North Atlantic deep-sea cores reveals that abrupt shifts punctuated what is conventionally thought to have been a relatively stable Holocene [interglacial] climate. During each of these episodes, cool, ice-bearing waters from north of Iceland were advected as far south as the latitude of Britain. At about the same times, the atmospheric circulation above Greenland changed abruptly. . . . Together, they make up a series of climatic shifts with a cyclicity close to 1,470 years (plus or minus 500 years). The Holocene events, therefore, appear to be the most recent manifestation of a pervasive millennial-scale climatic cycle operating independently of the glacial-interglacial climate state.

Bond concluded that every 1,500 years, harsh cold periods drop North Atlantic ocean temperatures by 2 to 3.5° C. However, deMenocal says ocean temperatures off Africa simultaneously dropped even more sharply, with changes of 3 to 4° C. Bond’s subsequent study demonstrated the linkage between the Earth’s warming-cooling cycle and the sun, using carbon-14 and beryllium-10 as proxies for solar warming and cooling.13
He wrote, “It is highly unlikely that Holocene climate forcing alone could have produced such large and abrupt production-rate changes at essentially the same time in both [the C-14 and Be-10]. Our correlations are evidence, therefore, that over the last 12,000 years virtually every centennial time scale increase in drift ice documented in our North Atlantic records was tied to a distinct interval of . . . reduced solar output.
“A solar influence on climate of the magnitude and consistency implied by our evidence could not have been confined to the North Atlantic….”
10. Gerard Bond et al., “A Pervasive Millennial-Scale Cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and Glacial Climates,” Science, vol. 278,
no. 5341, November 14, 1997, pages 1257–1266.
13. Gerard Bond et al., “Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate during the Holocene,” Science, vol. 294, no. 5549,
December 7, 2001, pages 2,130–2,136.

Hope that information clears up what is meant by warming from the ‘Little Ice Age” Bond event beginning around 1250 when Atlantic pack ice began to grow. If the climate follows the documented Bond, Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events then the warming trend should last “….close to 1,470 years (plus or minus 500 years)” Both the Vostok and the Greenland Ice Cores show that the climate is not stable but bounces between boundaries even during an interglacial. If anything the Holocene has been remarkably stable in temperature and climate.
The question of course is what actually causes these cycles. The newest SWAG by warmists is A new international study has pinned the trigger of the Little Ice Age to a series of major volcanic eruptions between 1275-1300 AD. Of course you then have to come up with why the pack ice was growing before that and how volcanoes have been periodically triggered and why there have been cyclical warmings of ~ 8-10C during glaciation.
Another guess is the 1,000 plus year north/south lunar tides link and The influence of the lunar nodal cycle on Arctic climate, ICES Journal of Marine Science and over at Jo Nova’s Ian Wilson and Nikolay Sidorenkov have published a provocative paper, Long-Term Lunar Atmospheric Tides in the Southern Hemisphere.

Does someone have the complete list of papers that sparked resignations?
There is this, then Spencer & Braswell in Remote Sensing, Soon &Baliunas, any more?

Yes, there seems to have been a long term near linear trend overlain by a 60 years wobble.
One must however be very careful about assuming..
a) that the long term linear trend is actually linear and not the upward run of a long term oscillation..
b) that the long term linear trend can be extrapolated into the future for any given length of time.

Steven Mosher says: September 9, 2013 at 9:04 am.
“That leaves one path for understanding the time series: build a physics model. Not pretty, and as the pause has shown, not entirely accurate.”
Mosh, their major problem is that their models are NOT physics models.
Yes there is some physics in them, but they also contain a large amount of ideology.
The two DO NOT MIX WELL !!

J. Scott Armstrong has done quite a bit of reseach on the ins and outs of publishing peer reviewed papers. Here is what he has found.

Peer Review for Journals: Evidence on Quality Control, Fairness, and Innovation
ABSTRACT
I reviewed the published empirical evidence concerning journal peer review, which consisted of 68 papers, all but three published since 1975. Peer review improves quality, but its use to screen papers has met with limited success. Current procedures to assure quality and fairness seem to discourage scientific advancement, especially important innovations, because findings that conflict with current beliefs are often judged to have defects. Editors can use procedures to encourage the publication of papers with innovative findings such as invited papers, early-acceptance procedures, author nominations of reviewers, results-blind reviews, structured rating sheets, open peer review, and, in particular, electronic publication. Some journals are currently using these procedures. The basic principle behind the proposals is to change the decision from whether to publish a paper to how to publish it.
Formal peer review is used to make decisions about who should receive grant money, who should be hired or promoted, and which papers should be published. A common thread here is the use of peer review to allocate scarce resources. This paper examines the use of formal peer review to decide how to allocate limited space in journals.

This is my favorite:

“Bafflegab Pays,” Psychology Today, May 1980
“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.” Simply put, this is the advice that J. Scott Armstrong, a marketing professor at the Wharton School, coolly gives his fellow academics these days. It is based on his studies confirming what he calls the Dr. Fox hypothesis: “An unintelligible communication from a legitimate source in the recipient’s area of expertise will increase the recipient’s rating of the author’s competence.”
Eight years ago, Dr. Myron L. Fox gave a celebrated one-hour talk, followed by a half-
hour discussion period, on “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education.” His audiences were professional groups, including psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and educators; afterward, on anonymous questionnaires, they said they found the lecture clear and stimulating. Fox, in short, was a smashing success. He was also a complete phony—a professional actor whom three researchers had told to make up a lecture of double-talk, patching raw material from a Scientific American article into nonsequiturs and contradictory statements interspersed with jokes and meaningless references to unrelated topics. (See “Newsline,” October 1973.)
To test whether such bafflegab also pays in print, Armstrong asked 20 management professors to rank the academic prestige of 10 management journals that had varying degrees of readability according to the well-known Flesch Reading Ease Test. Sure enough, the top-rated journal was the hardest to read; the lowest-rated one, the easiest…..

Hartley, Trueman, and Meadows took exception to the bafflegab theory. This is Armstrong’s revised theory.

Readability and Prestige in Scientific Journals
Introduction
Hartley, Trueman and Meadows [3] contribute useful evidence on whether scientists can gain prestige by writing in a manner that is difficult to read. This has been called the bafflegab theory by some. They concluded that the evidence was not strong. This comment examines some of the conclusions from Hartley, Trueman, and Meadows (HTM) and recommends directions for further research.
The Hypothesis
I suggest a revised hypothesis for future testing. The revised hypothesis assumes a threshold effect for bafflegab. That is, prestige is related to complexity up to a certain level, beyond which there is no gain. One possible reason is that simple writing is not representative of what readers perceive as scientific writing. Alternatively, it may be that the reader’s inability to understand the material will cause, him to attribute his failure to the high competency of the researchers, rather than to his own shortcomings. Furthermore, it may only be necessary to pass a given threshold to achieve this effect.
The threshold hypothesis is consistent with the results from the experimental study reported in Armstrong [2]. When the conclusions were rewritten, the original and the more complex versions did not lead to different results; only the simpler version led raters to judge the writer to be less competent. The threshold hypothesis will affect the experimental design. If one cannot obtain materials with “simple versions”, then little effect would be observed by comparing readability and prestige. The sample of management journals that I analyzed was useful because it contained some journals that were very easy to read. This was not true for my samples in sociology, economics and psychology [1], nor was it true for the psychology journals sampled by Hartley and Trueman as reported in HTM [3]……
Future Research
HTM conclude that it is necessary to develop superior measuring instruments before proceeding with further research. Certainly, better measures would be helpful, but I do not see
this as necessary. The use of meta-analysis can help to identify relationships even though the
measuring instruments are imprecise. Thus, more studies of the type already reported would be useful. Different approaches would also be useful. These analyses should examine the threshold effect. To do this, some very easily read materials must be included. If only normal materials are used, the threshold effect may not be observed because most of these materials are difficult to read. Given materials of roughly equal readability, other factors would be expected to be important. For example, more prestigious journals may have better copy editors. Also, they may have more important results to report’ and thus less need to confuse the reader.
Conclusion
As HTM suggest, better measures would help But this is unlikely to occur, given the vast effort already devoted to this issue of assessing readability. I believe it is more important to study situations that will allow for further tests of the bafflegab hypothesis. Results from these studies should then be included with the prior studies using meta-analysis in an attempt to determine the conditions under which the bafflegab hypothesis is true. Certainly there must be situations where scientists should write clearly. One possibility is that they should write clearly when they have something important to say.

AndyG55 says:
September 9, 2013 at 2:50 pm
correct – but the difficulty here is trying to compare lower resolution palaeo proxy data to modern observational data as we are dealing with significantly different timescales (I’ll ignore the accuracy issues!).
It is right to advise that any currently observed ‘linear’ trend may just be a small segment of a larger non linear change, but in practise, there is not much we can do about that. (on the other hand if Mann can do it…..)
For my money, the cyclical climate variation has been adequately demonstrated in the various proxies. Moreover, we know where we ‘are’ within the context of past cycles, i.e. coming towards the end of an interglacial. What we still do not know is how much of the observed changes are potentially anthropogenic – I personally think it is the square root of bugger all – and conversely, how much is natural? (I reckon 99%!) – and the warmista/scaremongers and governments will continue to use this lack of knowledge as long as possible!
What I feel Akasofu is doing, is reminding us of the LIKELY underlying natural trends. Anyone who cannot see those graphs as a pretty good first approximation of an explanation for the observed warming is, to my mind, blinkered in the extreme.

Over massage of data of questionable value be it paleolithic debris or tree rings, surface temperatures from poorly sited and/or poorly maintained equipment, questionable satellite data or what have you which is then averaged, smoothed, normalized and “anomilized”, then subjected to sophisticated statistical techniques seems to be quite common in the world of climate “science” be it by warmists or skeptics alike. Massacre the data enough and you can obtain whatever answer you desire.