Mann on the run – latest paper 'dead at birth', rejected by German warmist scientists, deletes inconvenient Facebook challenge

Actually I was using a play on words. “C’mon man” is a segment on ESPN showing stupid things that go on during American football games. For the non American readers, “c’mon man” is short for “come on, man, you can do better” or “come on , man, don’t be so stupid” etc. Here’s a segment from the show:

+1

Tell M4GW about it!
Make a suggestion to ELMER

As promised… Mann’s on the run
http://youtu.be/Y7Zm3k9CF5g

If Mann is plastic man then he must sing about:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NUJP0BwWB5Q

Climate change causes muddy waters.

And if he had addressed your criticism, would you have accepted it? No, it would become another angle for you to attack.

… and by what magic those with climate rabies can separate man-made variation from natural variation.

I am not a climate scientist, so I will defer to them for what I can not answer. I can freely admit that it is not my area of expertise.
As far as putting words in people’s mouths, I have received nothing but abuse since posting here. No acknowledgement or scientific discourse takes place in these forums, they are a cesspool that is continuously fed by the self reinforcing arguments and rhetoric you use to convince yourselves that you are smarter than people who have doctorates in climatology.
From my observations no one here is interested in actually having any sort of discussion about the possibility that ACC is real. Just patting each other on the back for putting down “the man”.
And I’m so glad to hear that you are infallible, and would never delete, edit, modify, or take to another forum a challenge to your ideology. Facebook is the best place for scientific discussion after all.

someone else – it seems you misunderstand the nature of these forums somewhat. You are right that the conversation can be rough and tumble, but it most decidedly is not limited to that. Intermingled with jokes and sarcasm, you can find some really valuable and original insight. This particular thread is not the best example, though.
If you are bothered by insults received, I would suggest the following strategies:
– avoid giving occasion by using careful language yourself
– if insults happen nevertheless, ignore, don’t engage (“don’t feed the trolls”). Instead, engage with those commenters that give reasonable replies.
Now there is one thing that never works on here, and that is appeal to authority. “Doctorates in climate science,” or in any other discipline, will impress exactly nobody here. Many of us here have scientific education and work experience well beyond a point at which we put much stock in formal credentials of any kind. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to argue your case yourself, using your own words and reasoning, and not demand of others that they defer to any authority that you choose to invoke.
HTH, Michael

Michael, thank you for one of the more level headed comments I have seen here. I appreciate it. I have seen the humor, sarcasm, wit, and glimmers of intelligence here. I may not agree with the Anti-GW meme, but I do understand most people posting here are not one dimensional.

“Someone else” sounds very much like the typical alarmist posters on the Friends of Science facebook page. The person who runs the page cannot keep up with the alarmists posts and they have swarmed the site ( having been run off everywhere that doesn’t censor skeptic comments ). There are some quality skeptic posts from long time WUWT bloggers ( thank you Mike Bromley !! ), but it is hard to monitor all the time. All ad homs, some cut’n pastes, and the obligatory “oil company shill” comments, but little if any science posted by the warmunists. They run away, or duck/dodge when you ask them to explain what they’ve posted, or to provide evidence for “hottest evah” claims.

You are correct, i would be surprised to find out that the people who frequent this blog have advanced scientific degrees.
And you are incorrect, there are many many many people on this blog who do not believe that CO2 and the greenhouse effect are real, much less affecting our climate.
I will have to disagree with you on your last point; possibilities are what make science possible.
The burden of proof as you call it is in the results. And they absolutely show that increased CO2 levels (and other GHGs) in the atmosphere are affecting the climate. The empirical evidence shows that CO2 levels have risen in the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution. We know what the greenhouse effect is, and that it is real. And yes, natural variability plays the biggest role in our climate, but not the only role. Deniers continuously tout that we can’t possibly understand all the factors in play, and while it is still an emerging science (aren’t most fields? isn’t that why research still takes place? to better understand the world we live in?) it can be empirically shown that human activity has a huge impact on our world.
Why are sustainable farming techniques encouraged so much? because the nutrient, PH balance, and water content of the earth that provides us with our food are so important. thats why we use fertilizers and do crop rotation, we know that if we don’t, the land will be unable to sustain agriculture. Deforestation is a huge issue as well, they are a huge carbon sink that we are constantly shrinking (and therefore increasing the free CO2 in the atmosphere). These things are all known, and we take steps to mitigate the potential issues proactively. Why would it be so bad to do the same for the atmosphere? Even *if* we are wrong, we still are reducing pollution, and making the world a better place for future generations.

and just to be perfectly clear: i am NOT saying that Mann et al is infallible. They should be subjected to the same scrutiny as everyone else. What i AM saying is that there is a reason they are at the top of their field.

I have never and will never advocate violence or retribution against someone for having a different ideology, that would be extremism; you are lumping everyone into the same CAGW, alarmist camp.
To your other point, there is a difference between spreading disinformation and FoS (if you even know what that means.). Freedom of speech is not the same as saying whatever the f*** you want. (point emphasized here, that word is absolutely blocked from being posted here. I have the freedom to say it don’t I? and you should have to listen to it?)
And i HAVE lived in other countries where people ARE punished for having different ideologies, it is deplorable.

And we’ll need a supercomputer cluster to decipher your drivel.

Sure did, but I’m still here aren’t i? It was an observation not a complaint, I was well aware of what I was walking into posting on this site. So I can take it, and I’ll dish it too.
[Dishing is not needed, nor wanted. Contributions and corrections and comments are welcome. .mod]

Someone else —
You confuse the issue. Instead of saying you believe in “climate change” you should say that you believe in “catastrophic man-made climate change” — after all, isn’t that exactly what you believe in? Don’t ever shorten it to “climate change”. Always say that you believe in “catastrophic man-made climate change”. That will make it clearer as to what your words are about.
Climate has always been changing and always will be changing. Everyone here believes in climate change.
“Climate change” and “catastrophic man-made climate change” are two entirely different things. They are different things that have different names. Please use the correct name for what your beliefs are.
Eugene WR Gallun

The one thing one has a very hard time getting from any of the graphics is the high resolution/high frequency problem vs the low resolution/low frequency problem. The other thing that this as much as all the rest of the graphs suffer from is the traditional (in climate science presentations) utter lack of error bars. All numbers are presented as if God handed them down on high, pristine and perfect, accurate to the resolution of the display. This is absolutely universal. Even in the rare cases where they do include an error bound on a graphic that isn’t just made up by somebody wielding a mouse, it is faint shading with no discussion of how it was obtained or what it might possibly mean.
But this graph has one feature we can use to get an idea of the problem. Look at the difference between Epica and Greenland at the end of the Wisconsin glaciation through the Younger Dryas. If you looked only at Greenland, you would conclude that the Earth rocketed up from glaciation, was warm, and then plunged into glaciation again almost overnight in the Younger Dryas. If you looked only at Epica, you’d conclude that the Earth warmed gradually out of the Wisconsin, and suffered only a smallish dip in the Younger Dryas. What is the reality? What is the error on any estimate of the reality? Clearly it is at least the difference between these two measurements, and note that Greenland is highly specialized terrain and would have been (and still is!) kilometers high in plateau and ice, not at all like equatorial Africa. Epica is on the other hand an acrony for European Project for Ice Core drilling in Antarctica, which is largely another plateau kilometer(s) high piled with more kilometers of thick ice sheet.
Why did Antarctica warm smoothly but Greenland shift abruptly? One theory is that Greenland was reflecting sudden, discrete shifts in thermohaline circulation (meaning that this is actually relevant to this thread). Basically the end of the Wisconsin was associated with a sudden shift of the Gulf Stream to carry warm water to Greenland and warm it, and the Arctic, and Europe, followed by a sudden shift back to a different self-organized thermohaline pattern that carried the warmth much further south so the entire NH went back into the icebox, followed by another switch back into a pattern that subsequently has held for the rest of the Holocene.
In the other thread on this topic/paper, I pointed out that M&R’s assertion, while not backed by the direct observational data that in fact contradicts it, is not unlike one of the hypotheses for the suddenness of the “switch” in thermohaline circulation — an enormous bolus of freshwater glacier melt when Lake Aggasiz broke through an ice dam and emptied into Hudson Bay and the Arctic, raising sea levels by 1-3 meters in a matter of years and discretely freshening the Arctic so much that a) it froze solid, semipermanently; and b) since freshwater is less dense, completely interrupted the subduction of the cooling warmer waters being transported into the Arctic by the subcurrents of the Gulf Stream. Water can’t enter the Arctic Gyre unless it can also leave it, and currently it comes in at the top, cools, and comes out on the bottom after dumping its heat to space. Block the latter and it becomes “stagnant”, and only can warm/cool at the surface, and even in midsummer, there just isn’t a lot of warming at the poles, less if they are completely covered with “permanent” ice as they are in Antarctica.
But we don’t even know the extent to which Epica results truly reflect e.g. warming and cooling in the entire tropical and subtropical band, or what happened to the temperate zone. One can guess that temperature variation in the tropics was much smaller, growing as one approached the poles, simply because if the tropical oceans shifted sea surface temperatures by 6 C over only a few centuries (or less!), there would have been absolutely unmistakable observational consequences. Neither of these should therefore be taken as continuous extensions of O18-derived mostly-tropical global temperature proxies such as the ones that make up the rest of the record.
So, let’s make the joke fully clear.
Almost the entire Phaenerozoic climate record:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Phanerozoic_Climate_Change.png
is known primarily from O18 data. The proxy is necessarily remarkably coarse grained, more so the further back one goes. At the beginning of this record, it is probably measuring/averaging over 100,000 year chunks simply because we are at that point using only very long half-life things like Uranium to date the rocks and we simply lack the temporal resolution to do much better. It is very likely not representative of a truly global average temperature anywhere, simply because we have to use the samples we can get where we can get them — sparse and regionally selective doesn’t begin to describe it. As we move towards the present, temporal resolution gets better as more radiometric dating isotopes kick in, the proxy itself works better, and the availability of fossil-bearing rock that hasn’t been multiply recycled in the e.g. breakup of Pangaea and plate subduction and so on goes up. Resolution increases to (maybe) less than 100,000 years, gradually moving towards 10,000 years. (This is why the log scale is actually helpful in many ways — even so note the disjunction at the 100,000 BP boundary!)
Within the last 600,000 years, the basis largely shifts from O18 in rock to the much higher resolution ice core data. The ice core data has its own issues (which I won’t address) in addition to the one I did address — it is a highly imperfect metric for global temperature changes which were IMO probably no more than 1/3 as large as the polar changes (and the polar changes themselves aren’t in “great” agreement). This is the basis for our assumed knowledge of the spikes in temperature in the last five or six interglacials, especially the Eemian. There is also other data that supports much of this, BTW — it isn’t just ice cores, there are studies of rocks deposited on the sea bottom when icebergs or ice shelves melted, there are studies of sea level, there are other proxies (shellfish fossils and distributions, plant and animal distributions). We certainly have the events right, even though our knowledge of the details of the climate shifts in e.g. the Eemian are probably much less certain than one would ever assume seeing the thin God-given line of “temperature” from the ice core data presented as if it is a real measure of global temperature accurate to the thickness of the drawn line over the entire Wisconsin and into the Holocene.
But it isn’t. In the Holocene, we have whole new sets of proxies, and the ice core data itself becomes less problematic the close one gets to the present. Over most of the Holocene, global temperature averages are probably time resolved on the scale of a few centuries — even when we have proxies with arguably better resolution and carbon dating (only possible at decent resolution in the last 50,000 years) we have the following problem:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
This is a great figure, because it is one of the most honest ones up on Wikipedia that addresses this subject. Note well that it shows the underlying source proxies as colored spaghetti on an asserted global anomaly relative to modern temperatures. Those proxies are — wait for it — nothing like coherent. At any given time one part of the world (from one of the very few parts of “the world” sampled by proxies here at all) might well be warming “dramatically”, while three others might be cooling, equally or less dramatically. One proxy will show large variation, where another proxy will show much more subdued variation. And note that none of the curves are particularly sharp — they are all smoothed because the noise in any given proxy is even less coherent or informative. The data is (as is clearly stated) 300 year data — one simply cannot compare it to the warming from 1980 to 2015 as this entire warming cycle might have occurred all the time as warming and cooling episodes in the past record and the proxies we use to infer past temperatures would be completely insensitive to it. Only warming or cooling sustained for centuries produces the wiggles in this graph, and those wiggles are substantial globally and even more substantial locally.
That takes us to the far right hand end of the log scale graph, the “present”. Here we are indeed running into the Mann/Jones/Briffa era, where “dendroclimatology” makes egregious claims for knowledge of past temperatures based on tree rings that are then spliced onto the heavily adjusted thermometric era smoothly from around 1850 to the present with no particularly clear acknowledgement of the change.
Now error estimates become absolutely crucial. HadCRUT4 (which I have in my personal climate workspace) has an error estimate built in, although nobody ever actually presents it. The error is even fractionated by what they think are distinct sources of error, and can be totted up into a total error, although it isn’t particularly clear if the result can be taken seriously as a confidence limit within the usual axiomatic statistical theory of such things. In 1850, HadCRUT4 acknowledges between 0.3 and 0.4C error. In 2015, it acknowledges between 0.15 and 0.2C error. Basically, it asserts a knowledge of global temperatures in the present that is only twice as precise as our knowledge in 1850. Both are, note well, based on real thermometers — a lot fewer thermometers, much more sparsely sited, in 1850 relative to the present, but we’re talking not proxies but direct measurements where the issues are the comparatively normal ones associated with reading measurement apparatus and imperfectly sampling some process at non-random locations, not making inferences about temperature from tree rings that are known to be multifactorial — as or more sensitive to things like rainfall, local environmental stress, CO_2 levels in the atmosphere (more CO_2 makes trees grow faster whether or not there is any warming, an effect that sadly they haven’t even thought of or tried to correct for but which affect the normalization of the proxy quite substantially over the last century of overlap with the thermometric record), fertilization by e.g. thunderstorm activity, land use change, fauna/ecology change — almost all of which is not known and SHOULD reduce the precision of the temperature inferences to the point of making them almost entirely useless, but hey, what do I know, I’m just a physicist who happens to be reasonably expert in statistics.
Still, in a sane Universe, the uncertainty in HadCRUT4 across the 150 years used to normalize and select the tree ring proxy is the starting point for the uncertainty in the proxy derived estimates. Personally, I cannot see any possible way that the proxy error could be less than twice that of the thermometric record in 1850, and I think that true probable error in the thermometric record in 1850 is almost certainly more than twice that of the present. I’d be absolutely amazed if the tree ring proxy were more accurate than 1 whole degree C, and am dubious in the extreme of any claim for a smaller number. But 1 C means that they are pointless! The total temperature variation from the LIA to the present is (asserted to be) order of 1 C or a bit less. We cannot be particularly certain that true global warming has occurred over this interval at all, let alone be able to assert that it is some very particular value!
OK, fine, that’s not quite true partly because, again, we have multiple proxies, and while all of them singly probably have errors on the order of 1 C or more back 400-600 years, collectively the error is at least somewhat smaller and the conclusion of warming more believable/plausible. Still, even during the LIA, we don’t really have any clue as to what temperatures were doing in the middle of the Pacific ocean, and most of the world’s continents at the time were terra incognita to European observers and what limited knowledge we do have comes almost entirely from a mere handful of proxies. Again, if hundreds to thousands of actual thermometers can manage at best 0.3 C, what could possibly be the precision of tens to hundreds of multifactorial proxy “thermometers”? The numbers alone imply a precision times larger (less precise) and that is before we start to worry about kriging, where the errors properly should dwarf the simple measurement precision, or consider covariance and confounding.
In the end, we are comparing apples in the present to oranges in the immediate past to bananas in the intermediate past to guavas in the distant past to pineapples in the truly remote past, without any due consideration of the suppression of all statistical detail and knowlede of shorter term fluctuations across the boundaries and presenting the upper bound of 1000 or 10,000, or 100,000 or 1,000,000 year old “global temperatures” in comparison to warming in an interval so brief that it would probably have been missed entirely even if it happened once every 300 years in almost all of the proxies used to develop the older estimates to assert that current conditions are “unprecedented”.
Let me state this clearly and categorically.
Bullshit.
You cannot make that statement with any possibility — without even the possibility — of quantitative support.
What one can do, but is basically never done, is use our present observations of climate variation to make assertions about the probable range of shorter term climate variation dressing the past data. That is, we could assume that the noise at different time resolutions is preserved as one moves back in the lower resolution data. So if early Holocene temperatures were, on average, as warm or a bit warmer than today on a 300 year coarse grained basis, and we have direct knowledge of fluctuations of order 1 C over 300 years, we could assume fairly safely that there were century long discursions of as much as 0.5-1 C warmer or cooler “dressing” the smoothed record of the Holocene Optimum. Indeed, it is almost certain that the highwater temperature across a several thousand year period was at least 1 full degree C warmer than the present. If we use the Eemian data for the same purpose, we might conclude that it could have been 2 C warmer than the present for at least some 50 to 100 year interval over the last 12,000 years.
Instead, the data is presented without any such analysis at all, leaving one with the impression that the Holocene was smooth, slowly varying, and entirely predictable with nothing much going on until humans came along and messed it up. Only when you look at the colored spaghetti in the graph I posted above does the falseness of that particular presentation or conclusion become clearly evident.
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