Book review by Andy May
Mark Steyn has written a wonderful new book on Dr. Michael Mann’s hockey stick and the controversy surrounding it. It is difficult to overstate the significance or impact of Mann’s Hockey Stick (Mann, Bradley, Hughes (23 April 1998), “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries” (PDF), Nature 392 (6678): 779–787, Figure 5, the paper is often abbreviated as “MBH”). The Hockey Stick appeared in Figure 1 of the Summary for Policymakers of the third IPCC Assessment Report (called “TAR” published in 2001) and it was prominently displayed in Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” As the book clearly shows, both the graph and the movie have been thoroughly discredited by hundreds of scientists who have attempted and failed to reproduce Michael Mann’s hockey stick using his data and other proxy data. Further, MBH attempts to overturn hundreds of papers that describe a world-wide Medieval Warm Period from around 900 AD to 1300 AD. The chapter devoted to Dr. Deming discusses this, for more information see here, here and here.
Professor Jonathon Jones of Oxford University:
“The hockey stick is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence…the evidence is extraordinarily weak…its defenders were desperate to hide this fact…I’d always had an interest in pathological science, and it looked like I might have stumbled across a really good modern example…The Hockey Stick is obviously wrong. Everybody knows it is obviously wrong.”
As 1973 Nobel Prize winner Professor Ivar Giaever said “Global Warming has become a new religion – because you can’t discuss it and that is not right.”
Steyn’s book documents the problems with the hockey stick, its use by the IPCC without proper peer review or validation, and the attempt to cover up its problems. It does this artfully using the words of the scientists, both “alarmists” and “deniers” and those in between. The list of quoted scientists is huge and includes Mann’s co-authors and others who supported him even after the paper and his hockey stick were shown to be wrong and perhaps, fraudulent.
The hockey stick told us that the recent warming period (1950 to 1998) was unusual in the last thousand years and that this sort of sudden warming had (supposedly) never happened before and that man’s CO2 emissions were (presumably) the cause. After all, what else was unusual about that time period? Yet, all of these suppositions were wrong and the hockey stick was wrong. Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas and it does cause warming of the atmosphere by trapping heat radiated from the ground and oceans, no one who has studied the issue disputes that. But, the graph appeared to show that this Carbon Dioxide based warming was much more dominant in our climate than traditional paleoclimate studies, physics or chemistry would suggest. As noted above it was an extraordinary claim, yet it was accepted instantly without checking it. This had the effect of destroying the credibility of the IPCC and the previously respected publication Nature.
At the time that Michael Mann’s hockey stick was chosen to be Figure 1 of the TAR summary for policy makers, Mann had just received his PhD. As many in the book note, the ink was not yet dry on his diploma. Yet, in addition, he was made one of the lead authors of the very section of TAR that presented his hockey stick (see figure 2.20). As a result it was up to him to validate his own work. In the words of Dr. Rob Van Dorland, an IPCC lead author:
“It is strange that the climate reconstruction of Mann passed both peer review rounds of the IPCC without anyone ever really having checked it.”
The hockey stick was never validated, yet it became so famous that it was taught to young children all over the world in elementary schools. Many years later, in 2005, it was thoroughly debunked by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (often abbreviated M&M). They showed that using the statistical technique invented by Michael Mann even random number series (persistent trendless red noise, see M&M Figure 1) will generate a hockey stick. Basically, Mann had mined many series of numbers looking for hockey stick shapes and gave each series that had the shape he wanted a much higher weight, up to a weighting factor of 392! This was truly a case of selecting a desired conclusion and then molding the data to fit it. Prominent statisticians Peter Bloomfield, Dr. Edward Wegman and Professor David Hand said Michael Mann’s method of using principle components analysis was inappropriate and misleading and exaggerated the effect of recent global warming.
Mann’s notorious statistical exercise was not sufficient to build the entire hockey stick. Unfortunately for him, if his model was carried to the present day, it peaked in the 1940’s and then declined in temperature. So, he simply spliced actual estimated global temperatures to his proxy reconstruction and didn’t mention it in the article, this is the notorious and poorly understood “Mike’s Nature Trick” scandal. More on the fraudulent parts of the hockey stick, including the Briffa “hide the decline” trick can be found here. These two links on “hide the decline” and “Mike’s nature trick” are the most balanced and informative I know of, one is by Professor Curry and the other by Steve McIntyre.
As you can see in the book many prominent scientists in the IPCC knew the hockey stick was “crap” to quote Professor Simon Tett, Chair of Earth System Dynamics, University of Edinburgh, formerly with Met Offices Hadley Climate Research Unit or CRU. And they knew it as early as 2001, but no one said anything. And, as we know from “climategate” emails, even though they knew it was “crap” they colluded to block Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick’s paper challenging the hockey stick. For years Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Phil Jones (Hadley CRU) kept the supporting data for the hockey stick secret as well as the computer algorithms they used to generate the hockey stick. This very act would normally have invalidated their work and the hockey stick, but it was accepted by Nature and the IPCC anyway. A very sad period of time for science.
Dr. Kevin Vranes in 2005 said ”Your [Dr. Mann’s] job is not to prevent your critics from checking your work; your job is to continue to publish…” “Why did the IPCC so quickly and uncritically accept the hockey stick?” asks Dr. Roy Spencer, “Because they wanted to believe it.” They needed it as a PR tool, they didn’t check it in any way they just ran with it.
One of the best critiques in the book is from Oxford Professor Jerome Ravetz:
“[The climate community] propounded as a proven fact, Anthropogenic Carbon-based Global Warming. There is little room for uncertainty in this thesis; it effectively needs hockey stick behavior in all indicators of global temperature, so that it is all due to industrialization. [This proposed “fact”] relied totally on a small set of deeply uncertain tree-ring data for the medieval period, to refute the historical evidence of a warming then; but it needed to discard that sort of data for recent decades, as they showed a sudden cooling from the 1960’s onwards!”
The problems encountered publishing the valid criticisms of Dr. Mann’s hockey stick are a serious indictment of the current peer review system, especially the systems at Nature and at the IPCC. Professor Hans Van Storch (University of Hamburg) went so far as to say “Scientists like Mike Mann, Phil Jones and others should no longer participate in the peer-review process.” Reform is needed and some suggestions by Professor Ross McKitrick are made here. The current peer review process can and has been used to suppress valid and important papers. This is why I applaud the internet and scientific blogs, they prevent self-serving and arrogant scientists from blocking the truth. One thing we have seen since the time of Copernicus and Galileo, no deception of this magnitude lasts forever.
Contrary to the myth that 97% of climate scientists believe we are headed toward a man-made climate doom, the truth is that a very small group of second rate climate scientists have captured the attention of some prominent political and media figures. They have also isolated themselves from the rest of the scientific community and suffer because of it. To quote Professor the Lord Oxburgh of Liverpool:
“We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians. Indeed there would be mutual benefit if there were closer collaboration and interaction between CRU and a much wider scientific group outside the relatively small international circle of temperature specialists.”
So, the following question is from Professor Mike Kelly (Cambridge) and it was directed to Dr. Keith Briffa, but could easily have been directed to Mike Mann or any of the alarmists:
“Given that the outputs of your work are being used to promote the largest revolution mankind has every contemplated, do you have any sense of the extent to which the quality control and rigour of approach must be of the highest standards in clear expectation of deep scrutiny?”
At this point, it is fair to ask what Dr. Mann and his colleagues have to say about all of this. The book does go there in some detail. Dr. Mann claims that his hockey stick has been replicated by others and this is true. But, they not only used the same data or similar data, but they used the same statistical techniques that have been shown to be critically flawed. One case in point is fairly typical of the others. Karoly and Gergis, in 2012, published their own hockey stick to rave reviews in the public media, especially in Australia. It claimed 95% certainty that the recent decades in Australasia were the warmest in 1000 years. They used similar proxies as Dr. Mann and used the same statistical techniques. Steven McIntyre went to work and blew it up in less than three weeks. He sent his statistical analysis to the authors. Dr. Karoly and Dr. Gergis, to their credit, recognized their error and withdrew their paper, even after the mainstream media praise. As Joanne Nova wrote, “In May it was all over the papers, in June it was shown to be badly flawed. By October, it quietly gets withdrawn.”
Just as Karoly and Gergis’s paleoclimate reconstruction disappeared, Mann’s seems to be disappearing as well. Professor Philippe De Larminat noted in 2014:
“The hockey stick curve, which ignores large climatic events, seems to have come straight from another world… This Chapter 5 [in the Fifth and latest IPCC report] in question does not make the slightest mention of the famous publication from Mann et al … neither in the text nor among the some 1,000 specific bibliographical references in this chapter. Given the extensive use that the IPCC made of it in the past (cited six times in the Third Assessment Report), and the controversy it still causes, this absence is peculiar.”
Let’s hope that hockey stick fiction goes away like the 97% consensus fiction has.
Professor Ian Plimer notes:
“In the next IPCC report, the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age mysteriously reappeared. This suggests that the IPCC knew that the “hockey stick” was invalid. This is a withering condemnation of the IPCC. The “hockey stick” was used as the backdrop for announcements about human-induced climate change, it is still used by Al Gore, and it is still used in talks, on websites and in publications by those claiming that the world is getting warmer due to human activities. Were any of those people who view this graphic told that the data before 1421 AD was based on just one lonely alpine pine tree?”
So, the book shows that the hockey stick is dead to all scientists on all sides of the climate debate. What is the impact of this appalling chapter in the history of science? I think that Professor Judith Curry says it best:
“With regards to climate science, IMO the key issue regarding academic freedom is this: no scientist should have to fall on their sword to follow the science where they see it leading or to challenge the consensus. I’ve fallen on my dagger (not the full sword), in that my challenge to the consensus has precluded any further professional recognition and a career as a university administrator. That said, I have tenure, and am senior enough to be able retire if things genuinely were to get awful for me. I am very very worried about younger scientists, and I hear from a number of them that have these concerns.”
This is an outstanding and important book and I highly recommend it.
This post was originally published on andymaypetrophysicist, republished here with the author’s permission via our “submit a story” link on the menu bar.
You can order it on Amazon here, .
…’Davey appell. Paging Davey appell! Jonathon Jones is seeking input….. wait, never mind. ‘pears you already blew that gig.’
No comments allowed on the previous article … “On NASA’s recent sea level claim: “Science Isn’t Broken” (Except when it is)” … ???
[Noted. .mod]
Yes, and I dearly wanted to post a few tidbits that I have found over the last few years.
Book ordered, should be a good read.
I have my signed copy. Thanks Mark. If there is any left, I want to buy another one.
Great review! This will go down as a very dark period in the history of science. Unfortunately it is going to take many years to overcome the Mann/hockey stick insanity because the useful idiots in the media, politics, and academia bought it hook, line, and sinker. They never thought to question it because it sounded good and fit their naive world view. The scientific community, as a whole, should be ashamed of the way it let this nonsense prevail for so long. Apparently all the grant money it helped generate clouded their better judgement. Yes, a very dark period in the history of science.
Agreed with a slight tangent; the reason CAGW will continue in spite of virtually every prediction being falsified is:
“In May it was all over the papers, in June it was shown to be badly flawed. By October, it quietly gets withdrawn.” Facts (are boring and) will not defeat this (anytime soon)
Twain? Government misdiagnosis the problem and miss-applies the wrong solution.? I’m about half convinced that wind and solar (focus) projects get funded because they are spectacularly big. Kind of a self congratulatory monuments. Small and useful need not apply.
taz1999 says:
the reason CAGW will continue in spite of virtually every prediction being falsified is:
Money. And lots of it.
More than a $billion annually in federal grants support the climate scare. That much money buys CAGW.
If the money hose was turned off, the CAGW scare would evaporate overnight.
dbstealey:
If the money hose was turned off, the CAGW scare would evaporate overnight.
Violent agreement there. People having to use their own money tend to be more rational about cost/benefit. Unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a way to clamp the money hose.
I sugest the next green directive could be a money burning power plant. Turn green to steam baby…
Very well said. Thanks Dave
I’m almost done with the book and I don’t think there could be a more devastating testimonial to the farcical history that was the hockey stick. In addition to that, it will be next to impossible to win a libel case for the term ‘fraud’ when this book demonstrates that scientists all over the world have been using the exact same term for years. The damage to science, peer review and public trust is still being gauged, but will linger for decades. Michael Mann shot to stardom with his ‘stick’ and seems determined to ride it all the way down to oblivion.
If the case ever goes to trial, it should prove highly amusing.
The irony is that Mann can’t now destroy his UVA emails because that would be destruction of evidence.
Blown up by the fool’s own petard!
Mann’s forced to go to trial. If he withdraws, then he has to face Steyn’s countersuit for $20M or so.
Dropping his suit against Steyn could be taken as evidence that even Mann knows how weak his case was. It would serve to strengthn Steyn’s case.
Machts nichts if Mann backtracks now and drops his suit against Steyn. Mark the Great has countersued.
A gutsy guy and great champion of freedom of the press.
Mann can now argue that the book and its attending publicity has irretrievably biased any potential jury pool, so a fair trial is impossible. The liberal judge will agree and dismiss both the suit and counter-suit.
Mann should phone Hillary for advice on this.
I’m pretty sure that a jury could be impaneled which had not read the book nor heard any coverage of it.
This was a fabulous review of the book and of the false work of “Dr.” Mann. Thanks to the reviewer Andy May and to the author of the book Mark Steyn.
(ever notice that many good people are named Mark? Is is just coincidence? I think not)
I’ve always thought so.
Next we’ll have two cats showing up and agreeing as well.
My two Cats agree!
Hat-tip to PiperPaul 🙂
Thank you for an excellent summary!
I said something similar in the review of this book on Climate etc but state it again. As someone who earned a PhD from the same department at Yale as Mann did, I find his science, his hockey stick, and his advocacy an embarrassment to that department, that institution its ‘geo-alumni’ and suspect I am not alone. It’s a sad day this book even had to be written. The economic damage of Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ is incalculable.
George Devries Klein, PhD, PG, FGSA
Not only the economic damage. The human cost is also huge. The higher energy prices, higher taxes and loss of jobs have adversely affected many millions of people. It would be nice if the perpetrators of this hoax would have to pay for their crimes.
Dr. Klein, you are in a league so far removed from the likes of Mann as to be untouched. As any practicing sedimentologist will agree, it was hard not to see your deeply significant contribution to the discipline. Thanks for weighing in here. The sedimentary record is mostly a record of the climate changes of the time….which essentially says that there is no such thing as a base line in climate. Every Cross-bed, every scour mark, every fore-reef talus records a change. But what do I know…You’re the boss!
Message for Mike Bromley:
Thank you very much for your kind words. I did an Internet search and discovered you are one of Andrew Miall’s students. Interesting coincidence. Way back in the Precambrian of my life, I was Andrew’s external PhD examiner. Also, I noticed you earned a BS from Acadia University, right in the heart of the Acadian Triassic where I completed a PhD thesis (early Precambrian of my career).
Hmm, maybe you can be an interested Party in Stein’s case. You have been harmed, too, and need the closure of a large judgment against Mann. And of your department stripping Mann of his unearned “doctorate.”
Since it doesn’t appear to be possible to post a comment on the previous post by David Middleton titled “On NASA’s recent sea level claim”, I will put this here.
The extended quote taken from the FiveThirtyEight blog that Middleton opens with is cut short to finish with this sentence:
However, it continues in the FiveThirtyEight blog:
Cutting the final sentences out completely changes the meaning. This is quoting out of context. If what another writer says doesn’t support your position, you can’t simply cut part out to make it better fit your position.
[Request you copy this, re-submit it under “Tips and Notes” directly. It will be reviewed (and acted upon) faster when submitted there. ..mod]
Not sure how that happened, but comments were turned off. Please put them on the appropriate thread as it accepts comments now.
Thank you !
Anthony – those comments still aren’t working right. It says there are 63 comments but shows only a handful and cycles back to the start of commments, no chance to enter one. Is there a virus or something in there? Arno
[To be sure Anthony sees a comment like this, put it in Tips & Notes. ~mod.]
Good review. My pre-ordered Kindle copy comes soon. Will be an enjoyable quick read, as have practically memorized Monfort’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, and engaged Marcott’s cloned abomination up close and personal (David Appell, did you read that essay, since you recently cited Marcott again as supporting Mann? That joke is on you.)
This, being religion not science, even Steyn’s excellent work won’t change the minds of many alarmists. Here’s an Amazon review:
Pure unadulterated ad hominem. Truly disgusting. The reason that only older scientists are willing to stand up is that young ones WILL have their careers truncated. This really is the Emperor’s New Clothes on steroids. As Judith Curry put it:
Fifty years from now folks will publish many learned papers describing the collective insanity that is CAGW ‘science’. They will ask, “The evidence was so obvious, how could they have been so stupid?” Some wit may even cite H. C. Anderson.
and my review or the review…
He likely meant to say “one dollar climate science textbook …”.
I get stuff wrong all day long. Maybe I am wrong again (here) and he was actually intending to say something that doesn’t make logical sense.
On the other hand, he could have just been trying to be ironic … showing that most stuff on that side of the big lie is not reviewed (peer or otherwise).
The hubris is so strong in Russel S. that I understand he felt qualified to review a book sight unseen. I seem to recall another anointed one reviewing a book without reading it. That reviewer went on to behave in an even more dastardly manner towards the Heartland Institute. Noble cause corruption with the accent on corruption.
[blockquote]Steyn’s highly elliptical, ( and often self-contradictory ) quote mining [/blockquote]
Looks as if the reviewer (computer program?) has used “elliptical” to mean defective that makes it, ironically, difficult to understand. The stupidity is then compounded by suggesting that people who understand the scientific method are to be ignored in favour of someone who argued that incredibly active hurricane years such as 2005 would become the norm rather than flukes.
Oops. Bad case of hmtl dyslexia today.
Russell’s review has been identified to Amazon as abuse. Even though it is unlikely that Amazon will bother to delete vvussell .
What is obvious from lazy and dishonest vvussell’s review is that he cut and pasted it from elsewhere. One hundred dollar textbooks are his recommendation? Not forgetting that he got the cost wrong.
Well said. Climate Science is also politics, and in politics this is “Par For the Course”.
“The Hockey Stick is obviously wrong. Everybody knows it is obviously wrong”
The fact that most climate “scientists” keep this quiet says the entire field of climate “science” is corrupt. The fact that we don’t see it on the front page at the NYT an the lead story at all TV networks show that they are also corrupt..
Same with the media’s willful repetition of the lie about “97% of scientists” without doing their job to point out that the bogus assertion is based upon worse than worthless surveys by an Australian cartoonist who likes to dress up like a N@zi.
I am hoping Mark Steyn will write “A Disgrace to the Profession: Volume 0: The Backstory on Climate’s Most Famous Bully”. Was he always like that? Is that how he came to fame? Does he beat his wife? Does he have a dog? Was he the child of an alien? No, joking aside, what do we know about his past?
Let’s keep the psycho-babble out of this debate, please. We have enough problems dealing with the reality of hucksters and charlatan climate scientists or climate studies groups.
What “debate”? Haven’t you heard the science is “settled”? 🙂
Mickey has tried to suppress his past by keeping his UVA emails private, despite their residing on a public server and his having been a public employee when he perpetrated them.
He does apparently have a wife and daughter, although like Politburo figures of old, he keeps them under wraps.
I’m desperately hoping he writes something about cook and lewandowsky so offensive that they sue him, so that he can give those two frauds the same treatment he is giving mann.
(popcorn) +1
Fraudulent perhaps?? Fraudulent definite. the guy should be in jail for the damage he has caused. Tony Heller’s work will be remembered for all time mark these words lukewarmers! LOL
Mickey Mann should share a cell with his former colleague Jerry Sandusky, who is to sport as Mann is to science.
+ 1
Don’t know why, butt the idea of Mann and Sandusky in the same cell makes me lol.
Sandusky and Mann could have a soap-dropping competition.
I’m still asking myself why it’s taking so long for Penn State to tell Mann he’s being fired!! Penn State had undergo a very serious scandal with their football program and if they aren’t embarrassed at how Mann has suied every climate scientist for defammation of his character.
They are up front about why he is still there. It’s because he brings in so many grants from US government agencies.
Penn State has lacked any real leadership for some time. Spanier was a lapdog for Joe Pa and his band of merry men. Then they tried to bring in David Smith, who was found to have improprieties in his expenses while at SUNY. They had a couple placeholder admins, and now Barron is not what I’d call A-List material. He had a pretty lackluster record at Florida State. As an institution they don’t appear to have much upside.
A lot of lackness for decades now coming home to roost for the Nittany pussy cats.
FYI- Eric Barron, now president of Penn State, is a climate scientists before he became an administrator. He has great personal and people skills, much needed for that job (Proof: he got the football sanctions lifted by the NCAA). However, because both he and Mann are in the climate field, I suspect there just might be some sort of conflict of interest here so, Mr. deSouza, don;t expect much movement.
George, I think that there were several members of the NCAA Executive Committee that were leaning heavily toward reducing/lifting sanctions simply because it was placing a huge burden on student athletes who were not at fault. There was a receptive audience. If you look back, Barron made a mess of Coach Bowden’s retirement, (sic), and during his tenure FSU’s total research expenditures, as a percent of total university research expenditures, trended down fairly reliably.
Wouldn’t it be great if Mann were to be transfered from Penn State to state penn.
“Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas and it does cause warming of the atmosphere by trapping heat radiated from the ground and oceans, no one who has studied the issue disputes that. ” This is false. Plenty of scientists and people with common sense dispute this. Please don’t make falsehoods of your own. Your derision of Michael Mann doesn’t excuse your own blindness or stupidity.
There are lots of people, both scientists and not, who comment on this blog who happen to agree that GHE is nonsense. However, I don’t think those who don’t are going to be persuaded by insults. Present the evidence and the open minded will eventually see it.
CO2 should be referred to as a radiative gas.
Whilst the laboratory properties of the gas are clear, how it works and inter acts in the dynamics of Earth’s atmosphere and resulting effect are presently moot.
I have yet to see any observational evidence that withstands the ordinary rigours of scientific scrutiny that establishes that in the 19th to 21st century atmospheric conditions encountered here on planet Earth, that it has led to any warming in that period.
I agree. Only alarmists and lukewarmers who do not understand physics would make such a claim. “Trapping heat” indeed!
The only so-called “heat-trapping” CO2 does is to delay the ultimate passage of IR photons from the surface to space by a few milliseconds, and which is easily reversed and erased each night. CO2 preferentially transfers heat to N2/O2 via collisions rather than emitting a photon, which accelerates convective cooling -by far the dominant heat transfer mechanism in the troposphere.
Does CO2 absorb IR? Yes it does. I’ve personally observed this in a friend’s lab. (He uses CO2 lasers.) Does CO2 emit the energy thus gained? Yes it does, otherwise you couldn’t use it to lase IR. This being the case, then what happens In the atmosphere? The CO2 must be emitting IR in all directions randomly, roughly half toward space and half toward the earth. So the IR isn’t merely delayed by a few milliseconds, close to half of it is sent back toward the surface,
If you take a digital IR camera and point it up at the sky at night you’ll find that the sky has a temperature. What is it that is registering in the camera, that enables it to make this measurement, if not back radiation? What effect is this this back radiation going to have on the earth’s surface?
Of course you can measure back-radiation from the average -18C or 255K “blackbody” sky.
Yes or No: Do you think a blackbody at 255K can warm a blackbody at 288K or 15C?
Science is about making measurements. Such statements as ‘CO2 causes warming’ are largely meaningless unless some kind of handle can be put on HOW MUCH warming it causes. The classical theory actually says ‘Not very much’ so the alarmists have to compound this small amount with alleged feedbacks.
This is where the pseudoscience comes in, because the existence of these feedbacks cannot be proven. Furthermore it is relatively easy to show that if they did exist, the climate would be completely unstable anyway. Thus, the fact that the climate is relatively stable suggests that the postulated feedbacks do not exist.
Read Schmidthusen’s PhD thesis, University of Bremen. He describes the GHE in detail and shows areas that are net negative in Antarctica. But, over the whole world in terms of temperature the GHE is net positive. But, by a much smaller number than claimed by the IPCC.
It seems to me that if there were positive feedbacks that the temperature would do a hard over to the extreme long ago. If the temp increase caused more water vapor then further raised temps then more water vapor would cause more water vapor more temp increase on and on. In electronics if you have positive feedback it will drive the output to saturation.
How anyone with any sense allowed this nonsense to be put to print, baffles me.
And therein lies the problem. As I understand it the hypothesis goes that CO2 causes a rise in atmospheric temperature which in turn increases the water vapour content of the atmosphere. This increased water vapour content then raises the temperature of the atmosphere which causes more evaporation which raises the atmospheric temperature and on and on. However the alleged process should occur without any CO2 at all, viz. the action of the sun is to heat the atmosphere (containing water vapour) which causes an increase in water vapour content. This then raises the temperature of the atmosphere which causes a further increase in atmospheric temperature etc. etc. etc.
I repeat: the alleged feedback should occur without any CO2 in the atmosphere at all!
co2 is a trace gas. it cant cause plant growth either
sarc off
The name of the judge who decided the hockeystick fraud was valid should be included in articles referring to it.
Heartland Institute had no legal recourse to Peter Gleick’s scam and his and Kevin Trenberth’s defamation of Roy Spencer, other than Norman Rodgers’ great American Thinker article, received little coverage other than on climate website.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2013/05/is_roy_spencer_the_worlds_most_important_scientist.html
Historical records may be irrelevant in a month, but it seems to me that references to outrageous corruption should include the identity of all major actors.
Skepticalscience still has an insanely fictitious post on the Heartland theft/impersonation/libel, that includes no mention of misconduct, BTW
BTW. Lubos Motl should sue, too, I think – only as a disincentive to John Cook’s future attacks.
I just received my copy from Amazon this very afternoon. So far my favorite quote is from Dr. Judith Curry “The climate science field, and the broader community of academics, have received a tremendous black eye as a result of defenidng the hockey stick and its behavior”
LIkewise the field of conservation science has been denigrated by similar Mannian climate fear mongering prompted by Mann’s schtick.
[“Defending” or “Denifying” the Hockey Stick? Surely not “Defunding” though. 8<) .mod]
To anyone who has worked for any length of time based on winning competitive grants or contracts from Federal agencies, it is no mystery why so much climate research comes to alarmist conclusions no matter what the data actually says. The key to winning a grant or contract is to propose work that 1) you have demonstrated capability to do and 2) addresses what the sponsor wants. Gauging what the sponsor wants and targeting those wants is perhaps the most important determinant of your proposal. Thankfully I have long been involved in this in another discipline, but just for fun I thought I would look at the NOAA Broad Area Announcement (BAA). BAA’s are a typical request vehicle for research or development proposals from Federal Agencies.
The NOAA BAA (and others) can be found at the grants.gov site via a search
http://www.grants.gov/web/grants/search-grants.html?keywords=noaa
and then clicking on the link to NOAA-NFA-NFAPO-2014-2003949
The BAA spells out what NOAA wants by stating the given assumptions up front:
“Projected future climate-related changes include increased global temperatures, melting sea ice and glaciers, rising sea levels, increased frequency of extreme precipitation events, acidification of the oceans, modifications of growing seasons, changes in storm frequency and intensity, air quality, alterations in species’ ranges and migration patterns, earlier snowmelt, increased drought, and altered river flow volumes. Impacts from these changes are regionally diverse, and affect numerous sectors related to water, energy, transportation, forestry, tourism, fisheries, agriculture, and human health. A changing climate will alter the distribution of water resources and exacerbate human impacts on fisheries and marine ecosystems, which will result in such problems as overfishing, habitat destruction, pollution, changes in species distributions, and excess nutrients in coastal waters. Increased sea levels are expected to amplify the effects of other coastal hazards as ecosystem changes increase invasions of non-native species and decrease biodiversity. The direct impact of climate change on commerce, transportation, and the economy is evidenced by retreating sea ice in the Arctic, which allows the northward expansion of commercial fisheries and provides increased access for oil and gas development, commerce, and tourism.”
If one plans to put in a proposal, it better toe this line. No wonder so much research aims to identify alarming consequences of AGW, and does it no matter what.
Thanks FAH. that explains a lot!
FAH is correct. Though there are other concurrent manipulations going on.
Any CFO or Manager of Budget worth their salt keeps an eye out for the fashionable watch words. Just including the fashionable words or duplicating another group’s justification are a budget request’s quickest path to the trash bin.
Still, that only eliminates the sheer dross of the wish lists.
Departments often multiply requests into many requests with similar but not identical goals. After the dross is tossed, remaining requests still sum into tidy amounts that departments can then assign as desired. If they receive the funding.
Method:
Project budget cycles are universal and typically yearly even though projects can run for years.
When the proper time arrives, a budget call is issued and department staff begin to prepare their budget requests; requests that must be backed by a justification, schedule and expense details.
Somewhere in the background, the organization as a whole is working on the total expected available funding available for allocation.
This bucket of cash is not based on the total size of requests, at least immediately. When areas become hot or ‘in fashion’ and allocation sources want to increase funding, then the list of passed over projects and their requested funding becomes useful.
From the get go, funding allocations are dog, cat and bear fights. Biggest and most influential sponsors get more of the funds and they often drive the fashionable projects.
Budget allocations trickle down governmental levels until they reach a level where specific departmental functions receive specific dollar amounts.
A funding assignment can request that certain projects receive the bulk of the funding, but often the original amount requested is immense in comparison to the amount actually allocated.
Reducing requested amounts to available funding is easy. All it takes is a percentage slash. Unfortunately, most genuine projects have no chance of success on partial funds. Add in that virtually all project plans also require a capital budget plan and funds allocation. Capital (equipment, buildings) budget planning is usually prepared on a five year basis with yearly adjustments.
When capital funds are allocated, they are specific to financial line number.
The funding amounts received by the department is then allocated by the executive and his staff, with the detail grunt work performed by the budget department.
That executive may decide to allocate the funding in support of the hottest areas under their control.
Then there are the governmental departments that literally are given so much funding that they have cash to throw away. When an organization receives funding far in excess of requests and they lack sufficient staff to oversee subsequent allocations; think NSF, though multiple agencies have undergone recent massive rapid growth that they lack intelligent controls.
Almost every government agency that is either new, a merger, or undergone rapid growth in the last couple of decades is so flush with borrowed cash that they happily throw money at problems. Easily the worst way to run a country.
Who are the people who make or determine who get the grants. That’s the most important position to be in. If I could control the grants, I could turn this thing around.
I have also written proposals and gotten government grants. Yet I have seen many people on blogs deny that grant seeking creates any bias. Just try to get a grant to say climate change will be good for crops and trees!
From Eisenhower’s Farewell address (the military industrial complex speech) comes this tidbit of wisdom, more relevant today than 55 years ago:
“Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”
And the Mann was also an upside down data specialist as well. What an heroic figure for the delusional lefties and carpetbaggers.
Has anyone ever seen a hockey stick with an 18 year flat notch in it?
You have to turn it upside down to shoot a puck now. At least Tiljander series would finally be right-side up.
That 18 year pause would have been a drop of 0.6°C without the anthropogenic effect. So how come a 0.6deg:C drop in temperatures is unprecedented?
Dear Dr. T. Karl, do you mind if we dispense with formalities and I just call you Trofim ?
Did your powerplay get you to be second in line after this one ?
That is a thorough and well done review by Andy May of Mark Steyn’s book titled “A Disgrace To The Profession” (subtitled: ‘The World’s Scientists ~in their own words~ On Micheal E Mann, His Hockey Stick, And Their Damage To Science’). Thank you.
I received the book two weeks ago; it is a copy signed by Mark Steyn. : )
I have read it three times. The first time I read it with wide open attention. It struck me as providing very reasonable and sufficient evidence of a strong skeptic underpinning in the Climate Science PhD community; a strong PhD community that finds fundamentally false science dominating the works of Michael E Mann (of PSU). And it is just volume one!
Then I immediately reread the book with primary focus on identifying evidence and reasoning (presented by Steyn and the 100+ quoted PhDs) that Mann’s climate related work product is a necessary result of his political / social / economic biases. I found a significant intellectual thread in the book supporting the conclusion that political / social / economic bias predetermines the outcome Mann’s climate work product.
In my third read of the book I primarily focused on identifying evidence and reasoning that it is a non-rational element in Mann’s philosophy of science that causes his climate related work product to be necessarily false. I found a significant intellectual thread in the book supporting that there is an intellectually fatal element in Mann’s philosophy of science which causes his false climate related work products.
John
Oops! Here is an edited repost of my above comment with the blockquote command properly closed.
– – – – – – –
That is a thorough and well done review by Andy May of Mark Steyn’s book titled “A Disgrace To The Profession” (subtitled: ‘The World’s Scientists ~in their own words~ On Micheal E Mann, His Hockey Stick, And Their Damage To Science’). Thank you.
I received the book two weeks ago; it is a copy signed by Mark Steyn. : )
I have read it three times. The first time I read it with wide open attention. It struck me as providing very reasonable and sufficient evidence of a strong skeptic underpinning in the Climate Science PhD community; a strong PhD community that finds fundamentally false science dominating the works of Michael E Mann (of PSU). And it is just volume one!
Then I immediately reread the book with primary focus on identifying evidence and reasoning (presented by Steyn and the 100+ quoted PhDs) that Mann’s climate related work product is a necessary result of his political / social / economic biases. I found a significant intellectual thread in the book supporting the conclusion that political / social / economic bias predetermines the outcome Mann’s climate work product.
In my third read of the book I primarily focused on identifying evidence and reasoning that it is a non-rational element in Mann’s philosophy of science that causes his climate related work product to be necessarily false. I found a significant intellectual thread in the book supporting that there is an intellectually fatal element in Mann’s philosophy of science which causes his false climate related work products.
John
I have finished reading my signed copy. This book will do more to break up this ugly blot on all science. I was relieved to see how large a group of scientists were outraged by this terrible science. I was asking myself why are most scientists silent about this disgraceful product and a host of other disgraceful output from activist scientists. The book gave me some relief. Having ‘outed’ so many scientists who apparently were keeping their criticism largely quiet, I believe this expose will encourage even greater numbers to come forward, not just on Mann’s rather obvious farcical work, but on the whole edifice of a science either contributing or silent on the egregious political activism of so many that is leading to a destruction of civilization. This book is exactly what is needed to set free the young scientists that Judith Curry is worrying about.
To all scientists caught in this bind by the tyranny of 97% of ALL academic and All government agencies and ALL scientific institutes and almost all ‘learned journals and media, this book provides and opportunity to stand up to this. A large enough number provides safety. Mark Steyn is one of those lone very brave knights who really does go around saving the planet from the groupthink destroyers of civilization and world prosperity. He will never receive adequate thanks for this. He is in the position of trying to save the Nile crocodile while it is trying to bite his head off. He is an inspiration to all.
I hope he writes a series of “Disgrace to the profession..” books on psychologists/psychiatrists (Lewandowsky and all those silent about it in the profession), sociologists that have long succumbed, politicians – probably not much can be done about, media – well they will switch horses when a critical mass is reached. Get his recent book but also buy his others if you want to see a knight at work.
Got one of Mark’s signed books and read in 2 days. Excellent work.
Weeks ago I’ve found the Web campaign forcing Smithsonian to fire Willie Soon.
The organization behind it has Mann as advisor.
So no surprise to learn in the that Soon has been criticising Mann’s scientific work early on.
What a coincidence.
Here’s my pre-order for Volume 2.
Jaypan, that is news, can you point us to where you found that pearl, is it still around ? Personally I find that astounding and if Mark knows this but I am sure we all would like to find out ( Lazy I guess but I would appreciate further info and thanks beforehand!).
Excellent review. My only quibble is with this statement: “Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas and it does cause warming of the atmosphere by trapping heat radiated from the ground and oceans, no one who has studied the issue disputes that.”
Plenty of scientists dispute it for the very simple reason there is absolutely zero evidence that it does.
Would any of you guys who think GHE is valid please explain why there is no evidence of it in over 500 million years of geologic history of earth. Please explain why the Antarctic and Greenland ice cores of the most recent 3/4 million years of the Pleistocene show atmospheric CO2 lagging temperature changes by 800 years. Please explain why steadily increasing CO2 during the lasts 18+ years has corresponded with flat-lined, then decreasing temperatures. Arrhenius was a smart guy and I think had he been aware of the above observations, we would not be having this discussion; Michael Mann might have spent his life doing something useful; and Mark Steyn would not have had to waste his time fighting a SLAP lawsuit. Thanks.
Michael Wassil:
Several others have made the same assertion as you in this thread; viz.
The radiative properties of CO2 are well known, are clear, and are undeniable evidence that “Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas and it does cause warming of the atmosphere by trapping heat radiated from the ground and oceans”. However, the absolutely certain fact that CO2 DOES does cause warming of the atmosphere is not evidence that this warming is sufficient to overwhelm other warming and cooling effects operating in the atmosphere.
Simply, whether an effect exists is NOT the same issue as whether an effect is significant and/or is sufficiently large for it to be discernible.
I again explain this in hope that your “quibble” will not again be repeated in this thread.
The Null Hypothesis is a fundamental scientific principle and forms the basis of all scientific understanding, investigation and interpretation. Indeed, it is the basic principle of experimental procedure where an input to a system is altered to discern a change: if the system is not observed to respond to the alteration then it has to be assumed the system did not respond to the alteration.
The Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed a system has not experienced a change unless there is evidence of a change.
In the case of climate science there is a hypothesis that increased greenhouse gases (GHGs, notably CO2) in the air will increase global temperature. There are good reasons to suppose this hypothesis may be true, but the Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed the GHG changes have no effect unless and until increased GHGs are observed to increase global temperature. That is what the scientific method decrees. It does not matter how certain some people may be that the hypothesis is right because observation of reality (i.e. empiricism) trumps all opinions.
Please note that the Null Hypothesis is a hypothesis which exists to be refuted by empirical observation. It is a rejection of the scientific method to assert that one can “choose” any subjective Null Hypothesis one likes. There is only one Null Hypothesis: i.e. it has to be assumed a system has not changed unless it is observed that the system has changed.
However, deciding a method which would discern a change may require a detailed statistical specification.
In the case of global climate in the Holocene, no recent climate behaviours are observed to be unprecedented so the Null Hypothesis decrees that the climate system has not changed.
Importantly, an effect may be real but not overcome the Null Hypothesis because it is too trivial for the effect to be observable. Human activities have some effect on global temperature for several reasons. An example of an anthropogenic effect on global temperature is the urban heat island (UHI) that probably distorts global temperature ‘measurements’. Cities are warmer than the land around them, so cities cause some warming. But the temperature rise from cities is too small to be detected when averaged over the entire surface of the planet, although this global warming from cities can be estimated by measuring the warming of all cities and their areas.
Clearly, the Null Hypothesis decrees that UHI is not affecting global temperature although there are good reasons to think UHI has some effect (e.g. it probably distorts global temperature estimates). Similarly, it is very probable that AGW from GHG emissions are too trivial to have observable effects.
The feedbacks in the climate system are negative and, therefore, any effect of increased CO2 will be probably too small to discern because natural climate variability is much, much larger. This concurs with the empirically determined values of low climate sensitivity.
Empirical – n.b. not model-derived – determinations indicate climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 equivalent. This is indicated by the studies of
Idso from surface measurements
http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/Idso_CR_1998.pdf
and Lindzen & Choi from ERBE satellite data
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf
and Gregory from balloon radiosonde data
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/OLR&NGF_June2011.pdf
Indeed, because climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of CO2 equivalent, it is physically impossible for the man-made global warming to be large enough to be detected (just as the global warming from UHI is too small to be detected). If something exists but is too small to be detected then it only has an abstract existence; it does not have a discernible existence that has effects (observation of the effects would be its detection).
It is an absolutely certain fact that CO2 DOES does cause some warming of the atmosphere. But to date there are no discernible effects of AGW. Hence, the Null Hypothesis decrees that AGW does not affect global climate to a discernible degree, and that is the ONLY scientific conclusion possible at present.
Richard
Thank you for that excellent summary Richard. I have heard on this blog about the use of the null hypothesis but never understood what they really are. Your explanation is really very clear and concise, I have copied it for my future reference. It should be a posting!
Most excellent post.
Goes to the heart of the primary difference between the warmist position and the skeptics position.
I’ve mentioned this before, the main discussion regarding “global warming” shouldn’t center around any of these:
-Arctic Ice disappearing
-Glaciers retreating
-Coral reef bleaching
-Mt Kilimanjaro losing snow
-Polar bears doing anything anywhere
-Some creature or plant facing extinction
-A change in cyclones/hurricanes/typhoons
-Droughts
-Floods
-Dry rivers
-Computer models or simulations
-A “consensus”
-Al Gore’s movie
-Etc. causing etc. by etc. reported by etc., etc.
primarily because, something is happening somewhere that is climate related and one can always say “lookit that, see, it is worse than we thought” when really, climate is what climate does.
There is plenty of proof that the climate is changing somewhere and no real evidence that the climate does not change anywhere, but as RSC points out, there is no evidence that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are involved in the change.
richardscourtney August 28, 2015 at 10:57 pm
Thanks. All I’ve claimed is there is zero evidence anywhere in geologic history, both long term and short term, to support the GHE radiative warming hypothesis. You, and other GHE adherents, say that because CO2 is a radiative gas that it ‘must’ have some warming effect. Yet, you ignore the total lack of evidence that it has any effect whatever. So it seems to me that you have the problem understanding the null hypothesis. Show me some evidence that temperature changes follow CO2 changes. Until then, I will continue to consider GHE unsupported supposition having no relevance to the real world.
Outstanding! And really good references, thank you. I would also suggest Holger Schmithusen’s PhD thesis University of Bremen. 2014 I think. “Antarctic Specific Features of the Greenhouse Effect”. Net GHE can be negative in Antarctica, but generally it is a small positive number in terms of temperature. Probably less than one degree per doubling of CO2. Insignificant to be sure, but real.
Thank you! I’ll bookmark this post. Never heard it explained this well.
Andy,
In Antarctica, there can be no water vapor feedback from whatever GHE an extra carbon molecule per 10,000 dry (very, there) air molecules might cause, ie going from three 100 years ago to four now.
Richard, I’m an accountant, not a scientist, but I must disagree with you when you state it is an absolute fact that CO2 DOES cause some warming of the atmosphere. Without the sun, CO2 does nothing. I have traveled to many different places on this earth with differing climates; desert, jungle, rain forest, open plains. One thing they all had in common was, when the sun went down, temperature dropped. In the desert and open plains, it dropped relatively dramatically. And while I had no way of measuring atmospheric CO2 at my location at the time, I’m fairly certain that the CO2 level did not change when the sun went down. Just yesterday (August 29) the thermometer outside my kitchen door showed 85 degrees at 3:00 pm, and after sundown, around 8:00 pm, it showed 65 degrees. That was a drop of twenty degrees. The winds were calm, no front was moving in, and there were no clouds. The point I’m trying to make is, if CO2 trapped heat, or warmed the atmosphere, there should not be such large swings in temperature if the only change was the position of the sun.
faulty null
and a type II error.
jayhd:
You say to me
Sorry, but that is an error.
The CO2 modulates the effect of the heating provided by the Sun.
Without atmospheric CO2 the Earth’s temperature would be lower.
Richard
“hockeyschtick: Yes, each collision of an IR photon and a CO2 molecule delays that molecule by a few milliseconds, however there are two points that you are ignoring. 1) That photon will undergo many collisions before it escapes the atmosphere, not just the one you write about.”
No, the TOTAL delay from the average photon being absorbed and re-emitted many times by GHGs on it’s way from the surface to space is a few milliseconds, not each single event which only takes microseconds.
“2) When re-emitted after a collision, the photon is radiated in a random direction, as likely to be back towards the surface as towards space.”
Of course, but 15 micron IR from CO2, equivalent to a “partial blackbody” radiating temperature of 193K cannot warm/increase the temperature/frequency/energy of any blackbody warmer than itself, including the 288K surface.
Google ‘frequency cutoff for thermalization’
“MarkW August 30, 2015 at 6:37 am
hockeyschtick: Accelerated convection removes SOME of the extra heat that was trapped by CO2. Even if it did manage to remove all of the heat, it would still be a neutral affect, not a net cooling.”
No, it does accelerate cooling, explained in this paper p 824-825.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/07/new-paper-finds-increased-co2-or.html
Richard, stop with the “falsehoods” falsehoods.
The entire source of the 33C GHE is the gravito-thermal GHE of Maxwell, Clausius, Carnot, Feynman, Boltzmann, the US Std Atmosphere, Chilingar, the HS greenhouse equation, etc etc. The Arrhenius GHE confuses the cause (gravito-thermal) with the effect (GHG IR absorption and emission). None of the papers you have cited have considered this fact and thus do not prove the Arrhenius theory.
Michael Wassil:
I addressed my post to you in hope of being helpful to you and the several lothers in this thread who fail to understand it is true that
Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas and it does cause warming of the atmosphere by trapping heat radiated from the ground and oceans, no one who has studied the issue disputes that”
and who also fail to understand what that means.
Sadly, your reply demonstrates the truism that ‘There’s none so blind as those who don’t want to see”.
Please read my post again and state anything you don’t agree and/or understand so I can try to clarify the matter.
Richard
The only so-called “heat-trapping” CO2 does is to delay the ultimate passage of IR photons from the surface to space by a few milliseconds, and which is easily reversed and erased each night. CO2 preferentially transfers heat to N2/O2 via collisions rather than emitting a photon, which accelerates convective cooling -by far the dominant heat transfer mechanism in the troposphere. Chilingar et al have calculated 93% of tropospheric heat transfer is non-radiative via convection and WV condensation, which easily dominates radiative-convective equilibrium in the troposphere.
hockeyschtick:
Yes, as you say
That “transfer” of energy warms the N2/O2 which together are most of the atmosphere.
And you say that warming of the atmosphere
There would not be the accelerated convective cooling which you postulate if the GHGs did not warm the atmosphere.
As I said,
It is an absolutely certain fact that CO2 DOES cause some warming of the atmosphere. But to date there are no discernible effects of AGW. Hence, the Null Hypothesis decrees that AGW does not affect global climate to a discernible degree, and that is the ONLY scientific conclusion possible at present.
Richard
Sure, but note that the warming of N2/O2 is via collisions, not radiative transfer or radiative forcing or ‘heat trapping” from GHGs. On the contrary, this accelerates the rate of convection and heat loss from the surface to tropopause. Thus, more CO2 cools the surface by
1. accelerating convection
2. slightly increasing heat capacity Cp, which by the lapse rate is inversely related to temperature change
3. Increasing the radiative surface area to space, cooling the stratosphere – thermosphere.
richardscourtney August 29, 2015 at 11:50 am
You apparently still don’t seem to understand what I’m talking about.
I am not arguing about whether or not CO2 is a ‘radiative gas’. I have said there is NO EVIDENCE in geologic history (long term, medium term or short term) that this radiative gas has any effect on temperatures. The only evidence of any correlation is that CO2 follows temperature in the short and medium terms. If you’ve got evidence otherwise, let’s see it. With what do you agree/disagree? What do you not understand?
richardscourtney August 28, 2015 at 10:57 pm: “It is an absolutely certain fact that CO2 DOES does cause some warming of the atmosphere.”
Show me some real data where changes in CO2 caused changes in temperature.
Michael Wassil:
It seems we are talking at cross-purposes. I again ask you to read what I wrote.
You ask me
Try reading this.
The Earth could not be as warm as it is if there were not a radiative GHE.
Richard
hockeyschtick:
Sorry, but you are very, very mistaken when you assert
The “warming of N2/O2” “via collisions” occurs because CO2 is a GHG so CO2 molecules in the atmosphere absorb photons in the 15 micron and 4 micron wave bands and thus are raised to higher energy states.
The absorbed energy of the photons is ‘trapped’ by raising the CO2 molecules to higher bending, stretching and rotational states.
It is this radiatively absorbed energy which heats the N2/O2 molecules when it is ‘released’ via collisions.
Convection occurs because ‘hot air rises’. The accelerated convection which you postulate is because the N2/O2 molecules are warmed by the heating they obtain via collisions with radiatively excited CO2 molecules (and O2 molecules, etc.).
Everything else you assert is a RESULT of the heating of N2/O2 molecules provided by collisions with radiatively excited CO2 molecules (and O2 molecules, etc.). If they did not get warmer then they would not rise faster (i.e. there would not be the “accelerated convection” you assert).
I repeat,
Simply, whether an effect exists is NOT the same issue as whether an effect is significant and/or is sufficiently large for it to be discernible.
The warming from CO2 exists but at present atmospheric CO2 concentrations any additional warming from additional CO2 is very, very small and is observed to be less than 1.0°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 equivalent.
Richard
hockeyschtick:
I intended to write ‘H2O molecules’ wherever I wrote ‘O2 molecules’ in my reply to you.
H2O is a GHG and O2 is not.
Sorry, for my silly mistyping which I hope has not caused confusion.
Richard
richardscourtney August 29, 2015 at 2:54 pm
Richard I don’t know how I can be more clear about this. Show me the data. Show me some actual, measured data that has changes in atmospheric CO2 leading corresponding changes in temperatures.
I’m not interested in explanations of the GHE hypothesis. Or why the earth would be this or that without GHE. I know all about it, even if you mistakenly think I don’t.
If the GHE radiative gas hypothesis is valid, then show me the measurements of CO2 leading temperature. If you can’t do that, just say so. Please stop dancing around telling me why the hypothesis ‘must’ be true.
Michael Wassil:
I am NOT “dancing around”. I have provided you with links to clear evidence.
I gave you links and references to three papers which use different methods to measure the magnitude of the warming effect of increase to atmospheric CO2 concentration. When you ignored that I gave you a link to Archibald’s article on WUWT. But you claim I am “dancing around” to avoid providing you with the links to referenced papers although I have done that but you have ignored them.
Now you demand that I show CO2 changes leading temperature changes when I have repeatedly reported on WUWT and elsewhere that at all time scales temperature changes lead CO2 changes. That shows the effect of temperature on CO2 overwhelms the effect of CO2 on temperature: it does NOT prove CO2 has no effect on temperature.
I repeat, please read my original post again and state anything you don’t agree and/or understand so I can try to clarify the matter.
Richard
No Richard, you completely misunderstood my reply. Of course CO2 is an IR active gas, and of course it absorbs 15 micron photons, and of course that quantum energy increase results in a higher vibrational microstate of the CO2 molecular bonds (bending), and of course that same quantum energy is preferentially transferred via collisions with N2/O2, and of course if energy is transferred to N2/O2 it will warm, and that will thereby accelerate convective cooling of the surface.
BTW the 4 micron band of CO2 you mentioned is not relevant to this discussion since Earth’s LWIR is between 7.5 microns and ~20 microns. And 15 micron radiation affects the CO2 bending microstates only, not in the wavelength ranges that affect stretching or rotational microstates.
As I said, more CO2 thereby cools the surface by
1. accelerating convection
2. slightly increasing heat capacity Cp, which by the lapse rate is inversely related to temperature change
3. Increasing the radiative surface area to space, cooling the stratosphere – thermosphere.
For further discussion on this, please read the peer-reviewed papers by Chilingar et al, available in full here:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/07/new-paper-finds-increased-co2-or.html
hockeyschtick:
Repeating an error does not make the error right.
You repeat
That ignores my refutation which said
Things that “get warmer” are not getting cooler. And warmer air above the surface reduces heat loss from the surface and so the surface warms too.
Richard
Richard hasn’t provided any data proving that CO2 warms the atmosphere. The only so-called “data” supporting such assertion are climate models which fail on basic physics for several reasons including the 8 reasons described in this post:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/07/collapse-of-agw-theory-of-ipcc-most.html
On the contrary, there is a huge amount of data proving that GHGs do not cause warming of the surface at all on 8 planets including Earth and Venus with GHG concentrations ranging from 0-96%+. Six planets are in this paper:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/new-paper-confirms-gravito-thermal.html
and an additional 2 (Europa & Mercury) here:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/05/maxwell-established-that-gravity.html
No Richard, please read these posts to understand how the kinetic energy of N2/O2 is converted into gravitational potential energy as air parcels rise, expand, and cool, and then fall, compress, and warm, i.e. the 33C gravito-thermal GHE. CO2 photon absorption is converted to N2/O2 kinetic energy which is then converted back and forth to gravitational potential energy. The gravito-thermal GHE has nothing to do with radiation from GHGs, which is the EFFECT, not the CAUSE of the gravito-thermal GHE.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/07/erasing-agw-how-convection-responds-to.html
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/07/physicist-richard-feynman-proved.html
richardscourtney August 29, 2015 at 3:55 pm
Let me make this as simple as I can. The true/false make/break prediction of the GHE radiative gas hypothesis is that temperatures will rise due to increasing atmospheric CO2.
There is no data/evidence in the long term geologic record showing any correlation between CO2 and temperatures. In the medium term geologic record we have ice cores that show temperature changes leading CO2 changes by 800 years. In the short term we have temperatures leading CO2. For the past two decades there has been steadily increasing atmospheric CO2 and flat-lined, then declining temperatures.
Nothing you have linked to changes any of this; no data showing CO2 leading temperatures. All of the observations from the real world say the GHE radiative gas hypothesis is false. Thermodynamics and quantum theory explain how it’s false. End of story.
hockeyschtick:
You write blatant falsehoods when you write
In my first post I wrote
I would accept your apology for your falsehoods.
It seems you are merely an anonymous troll attempting to disrupt the thread from its subject.
Richard
Richard S Courtney – COOL IT. I’ll determine who’s a troll and who isn’t. This is not your blog.
Michael Wassil:
Let me make this as simple as I can. YOU ARE WRONG.
Nobody should consider your repeated assertions that the radiative greenhouse effect does not exist unless and until you can refute all the evidence of the radiative greenhouse effect from the real world (some of which I have cited, linked and referenced for you).
Richard
Richard, none of those papers prove the Arrhenius radiative GHE. They set an upper limit to a possible small warming effect of CO2, but none of them prove the Arrhenius theory or that CO2 was the one and only possible source of the warming, and in fact list many reasons why it may not be.
Fact is the 1976 US Standard Atmosphere is the one and only verified mathematical model of the atmosphere from the surface to space and completely excludes CO2 and any GHG radiative forcing calculations whatsoever. That document proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the entire source of the 33C “GHE” is gravito-thermal, and that the Arrhenius theory confuses the cause (gravito-thermal) with the effect (IR absorption/emission from GHGs).
Anth0ny W@tts:
I apologise that my objection to blatant falsehoods which misrepresent my posts has been interpreted as being an attempt to usurp your blog.
Please be assured that no such attempt was or is intended or desired. And I lack sufficient stupidity to think any such attempt could be successful.
Richard
hockeyschtick:
You again write falsehood saying
NO!
Read Idso’s paper which uses eight different methods that each measures the magnitude of the enhanced radiative GHE from surface measurements and the papers I cited by Lindzen & Choi from ERBE satellite data and Gregory from balloon radiosonde data.
That is a list of 10 different methods which each determines the magnitude of the radiative GHE to be ~0.8°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 equivalent. They do NOT “set an upper limit to a possible small warming effect of CO2”: they provide measurements of the magnitude of the change to the radiative GHE effect for change to atmospheric CO2 from its present level.
And nobody has claimed “that CO2 was the one and only possible source of the warming”. I certainly have not. Indeed, in my first post I wrote
and
Also, of course, any scientific theory may require amendment or replacement in light of refuting information, but you have provided no refutation of the radiative GHE. Assertions are not evidence.
Richard
hockeyschtick: Yes, each collision of an IR photon and a CO2 molecule delays that molecule by a few milliseconds, however there are two points that you are ignoring.
1) That photon will undergo many collisions before it escapes the atmosphere, not just the one you write about.
2) When re-emitted after a collision, the photon is radiated in a random direction, as likely to be back towards the surface as towards space.
hockeyschtick: Accelerated convection removes SOME of the extra heat that was trapped by CO2. Even if it did manage to remove all of the heat, it would still be a neutral affect, not a net cooling.
Michael: That an affect is swamped by other factors is not evidence that the affect does not exist.
If you want to make the claim that the warming is too small to be discerned in the wild, being masked by all of the more massive natural cycles, then you will be in complete agreement with richard. richard has been arguing against the false claim that it is impossible for CO2 to cause any warming.
MarkW August 30, 2015 at 6:40 am
Thank you for being polite.
richardscourtney
August 29, 2015 at 10:18 pm
I dispute the Arrhenius GHE radiative gas hypothesis, not whether or not CO2 is a radiative gas. There is zero evidence that CO2 caused any warming during the last 500 million years to today and strong evidence that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is either not correlated or dependent upon temperature. That’s all I have said. Your ‘evidence’ does NOT address that.
If you want to claim (per MarkW) that the supposed GHE effect is so small that it is totally overwhelmed by everything else in earth’s climate system, the hypothesis still fails. The hypothesis predicts that CO2 causes measurable warming. It has not. Therefore: it fails. You are free to think me wrong.
The gravito-thermal theory provides a satisfactory explanation for the surface temperature and atmospheric thermal gradient of earth – and every other planetary body in the Solar System with a dense enough atmosphere to be affected by gravity and enough gravity to work it. The gravito-thermal theory does not require a magic gas to defy thermodynamic laws and quantum theory.
Michael Wassil:
Thankyou for deciding what I “am free to think”.
Allow me to reciprocate and to say that you are free to continue ignoring all the evidence I have given you so you can continue in your belief that the GHE does not exist.
However, reality is what it is. And it is simply true that,
“Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas and it does cause warming of the atmosphere by trapping heat radiated from the ground and oceans”.
The effect of that is too small to be discerned, but that is NOT the same as it not existing.
Richard
richardscourtney August 30, 2015 at 1:01 pm
“The effect of that is too small to be discerned, but that is NOT the same as it not existing.”
So, finally, you agree that the Arrhenius GHE radiative gas hypothesis fails. Radiative gases do not cause a measurable effect on temperatures. Unless you say otherwise, I also conclude that you agree there is no evidence that CO2 has EVER caused any measurable warming and thus no reason to expect that it ever will cause any.
Michael Wassil:
It seems you have decided to join hockeyschtick in making misrepresentations. You write
SAY WHAT!?
“Finally”? I have been completely consistent from the start: in my first post I wrote
And that conclusion is NOT my agreement that “that the Arrhenius GHE radiative gas hypothesis fails. Radiative gases do not cause a measurable effect on temperatures.” On the contrary, in that same first post I cited and linked to three papers which DO measure the effect of radiative gases on temperature. And I explained why such a small measured effect means that AGW is not discernible from natural variation of the global climate data.
Also, I have completely refuted your untrue assertion that “there is no evidence that CO2 has EVER caused any measurable warming and thus no reason to expect that it ever will cause any”. I have provided you with some of the evidence but you have chosen to ignore it.
Richard
Richard,
Please answer these simple questions:
Yes or No: Do you believe that a blackbody at 217K can warm a warmer blackbody at 255K by 33K up to 288K?
True or False: Heat transfer from cold to hot requires an impossible continuous decrease of entropy.
richardscourtney,
I responded to your above referenced comment in a new thread @ ‘John Whitman on August 30, 2015 at 4:19 pm’.
This current thread was getting a little too cluttered for me to follow easily.
John
Hockeyschtick:
For reasons known only to you, you ask me irrelevant questions and make irrelevant assertions when you demand
A blackbody at 217K cannot warm a warmer blackbody at 255K by 33K up to 288K and heat transfer (n.b. HEAT transfer and not energy transfer) from cold to hot would require an impossible continuous decrease of entropy.
But none of that is relevant to the effect of the radiative greenhouse effect (GHE).
The Sun has a surface temperature of 5,778 and it heats the Earth’s surface.
The Sun can and does heat the Earth to a surface temperature of 288 K.
Without the GHGs in the Earth’s atmosphere the Sun would only heat the Earth to a surface temperature of 255 K.
The effect of the GHGs is to inhibit heat loss from the Earth.
This effect of GHGs is similar to the effect of providing insulation to the walls of a building that is internally heated (e.g. by a fireplace): the GHGs in the atmosphere raise the Earth’s temperature enclosed by the atmosphere, and the insulation in the walls raises the building’s temperature enclosed by the walls.
No violation of thermodynamic principles is involved in the increase of the Earth’s surface temperature which results from the presence of GHGs in the atmosphere; i.e. the radiative greenhouse effect (GHG).
Richard
Richard,
Unfortunately this thread has now been split in two, but my reply to your comment is below:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/28/a-detailed-review-of-the-book-a-disgrace-to-the-profession-by-mark-steyn/#comment-2018119
I would think just the small sample above of the devastating observations against Mann and his pathological ilk would be enough to stop climate science abuse dead in it’s tracks. Unfortunately there are too many institutions, individuals, politicians, and government agencies invested in this travesty for change to come easily.
Since the climate change industry is now a $1.5 trillion per year business, the Truth has a difficult time slowing the momentum of that much vested interest.
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/07/spot-the-vested-interest-the-1-5-trillion-climate-change-industry/
Mark Steyn is a writer of great wit. His various recent posts about the Mann book are wonderful.
http://www.steynonline.com/7132/the-fall-of-mann
How about Nature’s duty of care? Have they distanced themselves from their mistake in publishing such rubbish? As you say “Mann had just received his PhD. As many in the book note, the ink was not yet dry on his diploma.”
Who were real fraudsters in all this? The people who plucked this junk from obscurity or the novice and third rate buffon that they promoted to international stardom?
It seems Mann is the Stephen Glass of climate science.
Can it be possible that U.S voters will make holocaust Hilary a President.
Donald Trump will join Barak Obama on the global warming gravy train if he wins.
The megarich are in a race with each other.
They detest the masses socially.
They detest the democracy that made them rich.
Corporate psychopaths.
I wonder if there is any truth to the rumour that Big Al is going to make a run?
I’m still reading through my copy of Mark’s book which does include an autograph from poor Mark’s hand. I tend to read it in our throne room which does cause me to read it piecemeal slower and rather carefully; but it does cause my visits to the throne room to lengthen as I suffer the one more chapter syndrome.
The book is a wonderful concise handy volume that should be kept near at hand. When the trolls arrive to drop obscure claims upon us, Mark’s book will often supply the rejoinder.
I’ve been ruminating about ‘Volume 1’.
Originally, I thought the volume method was just separating Mark’s research in a somewhat serial or topic form. Volume one is not just a serial list of research. There is planning and thought in this approach.
Consider that Mark Steyn is researching manniacal’s role in climate science in preparation for a lawsuit defense. Mark’s first book is an illuminating interrogatory of scientists and their view of maniacal and manniacal’s alleged science.
A) Identify and clarify the science foundation for manniacal’s broken fork twig. (Sticks are large things that can break bones).
What is mostly missing from Mark’s lovely discourse is research and interrogations regarding defaming the bald one with the chubby hairy chin.
B) Identify and clarify manniacal’s alleged passive submissive role in climate science.
We know there are emails, tweets, facebook and newspaper articles authored and broadcast by maniacal. None of the really egregious examples of these maniacal burblings are included in the book.
My guess is that volume 3 will be where manniacal’s bellowing will be laid bare for all to read.
And this is before discovery into manniacal’s hidden data and code. Woohoo!
This “detailed review” is sadly lacking in the detail section. For instance, fairly early on it says:
But somehow it misses the fact multiple people Mark Steyn quotes in this book actually do dispute that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, or at least that man’s emission of it is causing the planet to warm. I’ve been trying to work my way through the book myself, but I’ve only been able to get ~60 pages in so far due in part to the people Steyn relies upon being ones who say things like:
That was from the author of Section 18, Dr Denis Rancourt, PhD. It’s from the very article Steyn quotes. It doesn’t just question that man is causing the planet to warm with CO2 emissions, it questions whether or not man is causing CO2 levels to rise at all! Steyn is literally quoting people who scoff at the idea man is causing atmospheric CO2 levels to rise, but this “detailed review” says “no one who has studied the issue disputes” that carbon dioxide causes warming…?
Or what about the constant misquotations? I’m only ~20 sections into the book, but I’ve seen something like 20 misquotations. Some are relatively trivial ones, where Steyn just takes text from the middle of a sentence and portrays it as the start of a new sentence by changing a word to be capitalized. Others are more serious though. In one case he put quotation marks around words to indicate they were actual quotes when they weren’t, claiming they were written when they were spoken. In another case he attributed words to Tom Wigley’s son instead of Tom Wigley himself simply because Wigley happened to mention his son in an e-mail.
Yeah, that’s right. Wigley talked about his son in an e-mail to some friends, so Steyn claimed some words Wigley said were from Wigley’s son. How the hell does that even happen, and how the hell does nobody notice? Does nobody ever stop and think, “Wait, why is Steyn quoting someone’s kid”?
This “detailed review” also says:
But somehow fails to point out Steyn’s description of “hide the decline” is way off-base, completely mis-describing it in a way that falsely claims it was used to cover up problems with Mann’s original hockey stick from 1940 on.
I just, ugh. There’s probably no point in me talking about this. People like Mark Steyn, and I doubt there’s anything he could do that would make anyone criticize him. Still, it’s obscene. If you want to see just how bad it gets, you can follow my live review here. It’s the same thing I did with Michael Mann’s book, only this one is being way harder to get through as it has more problems. Which makes me sick to say.
Brandon.
Steyn’s description of “hide the decline” is way off-base, completely mis-describing it in a way that falsely claims it was used to cover up problems with Mann’s original hockey stick.
__________________________________
So what is your view of this ‘hide the decline’? Please do tell.
My perception is much as Steyn claims. The tree ring series failed to show a scary warming in the late 20th century, despite the heavy reliance on a single tree – YAD066. So the conventional thermometer series was spliced in at the end of the graph to ‘hide the decline’ in temperatures that the original tree ring series showed.
And this was wholly dishonest of course. You cannot say to the world that this wonderful tree ring series is the gospel truth on historic temperatures, if the recent record demonstrated no correlation with the established thermometer record. In fact, any real scientist would have ruefully but honestly noted that the thermometers were clearly demonstrating that there is no relationship between temperature and tree-ring width. And a wise scientist may have gone on to compare tree-rings with rainfall, and got a much closer match.
But Mann was neither wise nor honest, because splicing a completely different thermometer temperature series onto the end of a tree-ring temperature series, without saying so, is the height of scientific dishonesty. It would be the same as an astronomer claiming a star had just had a giant x-ray flare, by splicing in the infra-red spectrum into the data. Total and utter dishonesty.
Ralph
I believe that the “hide the decline” phrase has been used to describe more than one “hiding” situation, Ralph.
Your description is, in my opinion, the most obvious one.
ralfellis:
I explained exactly what “hide the decline” referred to, in detail, in the short eBook I wrote to give people an introductory guide to the hockey stick debate so they could, without any prior knowledge or experience, understand why Michael Mann’s work was fraudulent after only 30-60 minutes of reading:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RE7K3W2/
If you’d like me to send you a free copy so you can see what “hide the decline” actually means, I’d be happy to e-mail you a .pdf copy of it. It’ll show you why you are way off-base when you say things like:
Though I’ll admit it doesn’t actually talk about YAD06 (not YAD066). I don’t think anyone can fault me for that though. Michael Mann didn’t use YAD06! YAD06 was part of the Schweingruber network, used by Keith Briffa, which was famously impacted by the “divergence problem” and consequently truncated in 1960, and as such, would fit much of what Steyn says. But none of that has anything to do with Mann’s hockey stick as you’re talking about entirely different papers.
Mann was somewhat involved in the trick where after Briffa’s series had been truncated, real temperatures were spliced on like you describe for an WMO graph, in that he was a participant in the preparation of the graph, so it would be fair to criticize him as a person for his involvement with it. I did so in that eBook. However, I made it clear the splicing of instrumental temperatures was done for the WMO graph, not Mann’s papers like you and Steyn are portraying.
I am about as harsh a critic of Michael Mann as you’ll find, but I think it is just obscene for you guys to go around writing paragraphs like:
When what you say is so completely wrong. Not only is it wrong on principle to make false accusations, making false accusations makes it easy for people to dismiss criticisms of Mann as being stupid and wrong because, quite frankly, your guy’s accusations sound stupid and wrong when examined.
In other words, not only is it wrong to be wrong, but by being wrong, you make it harder for people who are right to get heard.
Brandon,
It’s not “YAD06” (or YAD066). It’s Briffa’s YAD061:
It was his only treemometer that showed rising temps. So that’s the one he used.
Brandon.
I think it is just obscene for you guys to go around writing paragraphs like:
Quote:
“You cannot say to the world that this wonderful tree ring series is the gospel truth on historic temperatures, if the recent record demonstrated no correlation with the established thermometer record.”
______________________________________________
‘Obscene??’
Quite clearly, the late 20th century tree-ring ‘temperature record’ bore no relation whatsoever to the ever warming temperatures of HadCrut, Giss etc: So something was obviously very wrong here. Either the thermometer record is wrong, or the tree-ring record is wrong, or both. Your choice – which is it? They cannot all be right.
So please explain why it is ‘obscene’ to point out an obvious error in the ‘scientific’ argument being made. I think what you mean is that it is ‘obscene’ to question the High Priest of Warmism and question his Holy Text. A heresy that you would like to bring to the attention of the Warmista Inquisition, and urge them to start warming their pokers. But that is a different question entirely, and it brings your true intentions into sharp focus.
R
More whining, complaining, misdirecting and waste of space nonsense Brandon?
Don’t bother reading folks. Same old Brandon that only leads to his trolling for visitors to Brandon’s, oh my, very sad very partial review elsewhere…
You are not in, or close to, Mark Steyn’s league, Brandon. What Steyn clearly illuminates within well structured very short sentences, Brandon muddies beyond despair over multiple dense paragraphs.
ATheoK, it’s fascinating you say this given just a couple years ago, I was being praised on this site for my takedown of Michael Mann’s book. I wonder just when people should and should not read what I write.
Brandon –
Would you be so kind as to provide a link to that “takedown of Michael Mann’s book”?
Just a couple of years prior to now, your detailed and intensive research provided insights and understanding into a number of muddy or better described as ‘covered up’ topics.
I miss that Brandon Shollenberger. But, I do understand that your intensive investigation leading to those posts must’ve seriously curtailed other personal and probably far more enjoyable activities.
I’ve gone from considering your posts a ‘must read’ to ‘mostly skip’. I confess to reading at least your first paragraph and then glance at following paragraphs to see if detail anything interesting. Your following argumentive rebuts and posts usually fail to add anything.
Lately, here and elsewhere you’ve tended to take issue with people’s wording or description of their understanding.
Are these other people factual, precise and absolutely accurate?
Well, no.
Definitely not in all aspects of the topic, but then people’s understandings are phrased in their own words. Words that rarely will ever accurately reflect every precise accurate aspect. These other folks have the correct basics and in many cases can even define the relative data changes.
To challenge commenters and place your, unfortunately wordy, perceptions of the historical actions against theirs; well, it rarely truly adds to the discussion.
e.g. you take issue with Steyn’s mentioning Wigley’s son; “…Steyn claimed some words Wigley said were from Wigley’s son. How the hell does that even happen, and how the hell does nobody notice? Does nobody ever stop and think, “Wait, why is Steyn quoting someone’s kid”?…”
Bluntly, you are wrong. Steyn never quotes Erik Wigley. Steyn quotes Tom Wigley’s email.
Basically, you make the same mistake maniacal made where he claims that Mark Steyn alluded pedophilia because he accurately quoted another person’s Penn State comment. You ascribe a tertiary’s distant finding to a first person quote and then blame the first person for an inaccurate quote.
Brandon: Where has your vaunted research and accurate detail gone to? Why are you fussing about wordplay?
Maybe you should turn your book back to the foreword and start again.
By the way, I am sorry that you’ve suffered credit issues which I, perhaps incorrectly, assume are identity theft related or at least creditor related.
Never mind, got it:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/11/shollenbergers-technical-review-of-manns-recent-book/
ATheoK, try not to let your bias show so obviously. You say:
But the reality is I’m the exact same Brandon Shollenberger. The two introductory eBooks I wrote in the last year addressing Michael Mann’s book and work are better than anything I wrote on the subject before. I’ve done more original work examining BEST in the last two years than I ever did on the hockey stick. I’ve done more original work on other topics in the same time period as well.
Nobody ever talks about that, but it’s true. The only thing that’s changed is people don’t like what I have to say because I happen to talk about things they don’t like to hear. That’s not a change in person. It’s just a change in what subjects I happen to cover. I heard the exact same criticisms of my writing style I hear now two years ago, just from people on the other “side” of the arguments. People have always accused me of nitpicking and arguing semantics when they didn’t like what I had to say, but they never say the same when they like what I have to say. Crazy, huh?
As for criticisms like:
They show you aren’t even putting any effort into reading what you criticize. Of course Steyn didn’t quote Wigley’s son. I said so myself:
Nothing in that quote suggests Wigley’s son is speaking. There are no quotation marks or anything else. It’s just Wigley talking about something his son discovered. Steyn has simply attributed this quote to the wrong person, for no reason.
Steyn attributed a quote to Wigley’s son even though the quote was clearly from Wigley himself. I pointed that out, and you responded by… condemning me for supposedly claiming Steyn quoted Wigley’s son?
Come on man.
Semantics yes, your error though. Page 47 in the book “A Disgrace to the Profession”. As I suggested, start at the foreword and read through again.
Mark Steyn does not assign any quote or even words to Eirik Wigley. Mark does quote and reference Tom Wigley. Mark’s additional commentary places some context upon the quotes, commentary that represent Mark’s thoughts on the matter.
You are telling me that I should not accurately describe my thoughts and feelings? That is plain wrong.
You don’t appreciate or like them? Tough. Don’t read them.
Your historical write-up e-books may be accurate. I do think of them nicely as I assume you’ve collected your previous researches into coherent posts. I do not know, nor will I try to read them. Your circular reasoning on nitpicks, semantics and expert absolute accuracy is not my cup of tea. Stick to plain accurate facts and most likely I’ll read the posts, descend into fretting over whose phrases are most perfect, sorry, gotta go… I have better things to worry about.
At the last class reunion I attended we were requested to provide beforehand some writing, phrases or comments that we felt were important.
Initially I assumed that this was optional. Later after a few nagging notes, I submitted a portion of a poem that I personally like.
I submitted that specific bit of prose for multiple reasons. Top of my list was the notion that I knew the wording would drive English majors nuts.
To ensure accuracy, I carried several copies of the poem with me.
Sure enough as the reunion wound down as people drank deep and started actually reading the reunion book, I started getting harassed by people who;
A) insisted that the English was wrong.
B) insisted that the punctuation was wrong
C) that the words made no sense.
The only things that passed muster were the spelling and capitalization. Every one that I handed a full copy of the very long fully referenced poem to just shut up.
Some continued to mutter since they were taken and they knew it, but all bowed to the poet’s name and gravitas. Some even remembered the poem, just not an obscure section that I liked.
I’ve pulled similar pranks on others with writings from Edgar Allen Poe, Samuel Clemens and James Thurber. All three authors are far better wordsmiths than anyone alive that I personally know. Plus, only the most dense fail to realize they’re taking issue with the masters.
Basically, you are wrong about Steyn quoting Eirik, whether by your implication or by your direct statement. Your insistence on arguing about your claim for Steyn’s malfeasance based on gerrymandered wordings is tiring and frankly utterly useless.
ATheoK, seriously, this is pathetic. Please, stop:
Anyone who looks at Page 47 will see you are full of it. Right at the top of the page, in big letters, is a quote. Right below the quote are the words:
So please, write hundreds of words to tell me you’re not just being completely biased in your reactions to me. Tell me stories about your life which are supposed to shed some light on whatever. Keep wasting my time on nonsense like that. Just stop saying stupid **** like this:
Because anyone who even looks at the book will see I am not only correct, I am so obviously correct, it is mind-boggling you’d claim for even one second that I’m not. But somehow, you’ve not only claimed I’m wrong, you’ve pointed people to the exact page where they can see the words “Professor Tim Wigley’s son Eirik” right at the top, under the quote Steyn attributes to “Professor Tim Wigley’s son Eirik.”
Which you keep insisting he didn’t do, claiming that proves some character flaw on my part. I suppose that probably says something about you. I wouldn’t care to guess what.
I am working my way through some of Steyn’s other books (After America and America Alone) and like most hard core Republicans he does himself a disservice by typically ignoring any and most all wrongs by his side and concentrating heavily on the evils of the Democratic view. This writing slant results in a requirement to cross check much of his work for the kind of mis-description that you present. The only one worse (in my opinion) at this is Coulter, probably because that way of writing is very popular with that half of America. However, to the more precise, this drastically lowers their believability. Even though there is much useful in Steyn’s material, I dislike having to cross check referenced “facts” because of his hard right wing writing style. It’s much easier with Coulter because if one bothers to keep up with actual historical news at all, usually it can be done from memory.
I don’t think you got the serious points of the two books of Steyn you claim to have read. They are very disquieting, especially for what has actually happened since they were written. His books predicted something of the horror show of terror in Paris, Copenhagen and elsewhere and the ‘gee whiz we are actually the bad guys’ political correctness responses of lefty politicians – PC is indeed a lefty, anti-libertarian, construct that first says gee we shouldn’t use free speech unless its sensitive and kind and gee, maybe democracy has to be sacrificed.
It’s easy for those who are unaware that their education has been completely corrupted by political shepherds so that only a few percent of the lot, wired to question and understand actually what is happening, have any viewpoint at all. The rest believe the ministry of truth’s propositions are some kind of preordained given .
You are vague in your criticism and details, which is itself a tell of the new, official form of intellectual thought open to you, but let me guess. You can cite some policy stupidity on the part of the right in connection with the problems being analyzed in the books. No s*** Sherlock? If you read some of Mark’s columns, you would see a lot of criticisms of the “right wing” – he doesn’t pull punches when he sees them waffling and half-assedly kowtowing to the new paradigm of a self-punishing, guilt-ridden western world. The right succumbing is the most scary of all. There are alarmingly too few trying to save the Nile crocodile, while the witless croc is trying to bite their asses off.
That you are reading Steyn’s books is kudos to you I must say. But go all the way and read his columns. You won’t like them but, they are at minimum entertaining and perhaps you will see a new way to look at things. Coulter, yeah, she’s a soft target, but Steyn, who gets regular death threats and who has walked the walk and talked the talk and been hauled before the ministry of truth on several occasions because of his dangerousness to them, deserves your highest respect. He has even forced the Canadian government to repeal major sections of the hate speech laws because they were being used to shackle guys like Mark who went before two lefty “Human rights tribunals” a thing you will eventually see in America the way it is going with a pliable electorate, and he beat their asses off. He is going to beat the ass off M. E. Mann, too and you will see some laws repealed there, too, if it’s not too late. He’s working for you!!! Don’t you get it?
BFL:
I read a free preview of one those two books. It was only a chapter or two, but it was enough to convince me never to buy the book. A few pages was enough, actually. I forget which of the books it was, but it was quickly apparent the book would only appeal to you if you had a particular viewpoint you wanted confirmation for. If not, the book would just be bad. There was so much rhetoric that was pure fluff there to appeal to people’s sense of superiority with their views, and every one of Steyn’s “arguments” was so one-sided it wasn’t even worth reading. You could just list the standard talking points on the issues, and you’d have Steyn’s arguments.
Or at least, that’s how it seemed. Steyn’s not “right wing,” but once you know his position on issues, his arguments are entirely predictable. The only thing that’s a surprise is his particular choice of rhetoric for that day.
@Gary Young
Sure I get how the “left” screws up but I also see how the “right” screws up also. You know, Iraq, torture, imprisonment up to forever without trial (with torture) if considered by what ever their definition of a terrorist happens to be, dis-assembly of Glass-Steagall (you know that law that USED to prevent banks from using pension, savings and other private “safe” funds from being gambled on derivatives & the market), blocking of oversight or even observation of derivatives and CDS’s, subsidies for the rich but not for the incapable poor etc.. Would be nice to have someone point out the wrongs of BOTH sides evenly which the press should do (ha ha) but has become a tool of whatever political master they serve. And THAT is my point, I actually enjoy reading Steyn’s columns, but I also realize that his is by far not the whole lopsided story of most and that can harm credibility. I also see this as one reason Trump is so popular, as he claims to not be in any one’s pocket and the one time he suggested taking lobbyist money but not doing any favors and then ask the audience for their opinion, he was booed.
BFL
but I also see how the “right” screws up also. You know, imprisonment up to forever without trial (with torture).
______________________________
I presume you refer to Hussain Obama’s continued use of Guantanamo Bay. But perhaps I should point out that Hussain is supposed to be in the socialist spectrum.
R
BFL, the traditional method for handling prisoners of war is to hold them until the war is over.
If that amounts to “forever”, then so be it.
You can keep making the claim that weakening Glass-Steagal was a mistake, but such a claim remains only your opinion. There are many who disagree with you.
Your claims that everything in your list was a mistake or screw up is still nothing more than a political list of the things you disagree with.
Having read your list of the so called “wrongs” by the Republicans, it seems that your major problem with Steyn is that he has a different political philosophy than you do.
Here’s the problem, Brandon. Steyn’s witty, urbane, smart and can put together a lucid argument about something he knows little about. You can’t. Steyn argues big picture. You argue minutiae and nonsense (loved your argument about lawyers arguing the alternative… demonstrating you’re too stupid to avoid arguing about a things you know nothing about). We all understand that you got pissed off because Steyn can’t appreciate your nuanced and flawed view of his case. He’s in it to win. God only knows what you’re doing… other than making a total ass of yourself.
It’s the “minutiae” that primarily makes for credibility and shows up political “slant”. True that he doesn’t write like a researcher which makes these types, sadly, more like political hacks instead of reputable providers of information. I assume that you are a big fan of Coulter’s also.
ttfn:
It’s good to know you think it is “minutiae and nonsense” that Steyn misquoted people, misattributed quotes, misrepresented quotes, quoted people who argue humans aren’t responsible for the rise in CO2 level as experts and accused Michael Mann of doing things which were actually done in entirely different papers. Because it may be true:
But “skeptics” are showing one thing is beyond clear: they don’t care how bad you act if you’re someone they like. I may be “a total ass,” but at least I’m not a raging hypocrite who is celebrating horribly flawed work simply because I like what it says.
I know it must feel nice to be part of a “consensus” guys, but really, you should try being skeptical of the things you read. It’s very rewarding.
@BFL, Where did I bring up coulter? Who the heck is coulter? I was talking about Brandon’s laughable “analysis” of Steyn and his case. Ever since Steyn got pissed at Brandon’s ever so nuanced “analysis” of Steyn’s case (which was as stupid as most of his nonsense), Brandon’s been behaving like a five-year-old running in place screaming at the top of his lungs. It’s all about Brandon and his boring opinion. Can’t wait till he takes the stand for the plaintiff.
See, this is what I mean about people’s bias showing so clearly. ttfn just said:
I literally wrote a book (albeit, only a short eBook) to show how one Mark Steyn can easily win this lawsuit by providing the case for proving Michael Mann’s work is fraudulent, yet here we have a user painting me as a person in Mann’s camp.
An average person needs half an hour, maybe an hour, with my eBook to see what Steyn said about Mann’s work is accurate. As far as I know, nobody else has ever written a guide to the subject as simple or clear. I could have titled this:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RE7K3W2/
“A Simple Explanation of Why What Steyn Said is True,” but somehow, I’m a Mann supporter?
Brandon
“But somehow it misses the fact multiple people Mark Steyn quotes in this book actually do dispute that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, or at least that man’s emission of it is causing the planet to warm.”
good catch. +10
“But somehow fails to point out Steyn’s description of “hide the decline” is way off-base, completely mis-describing it in a way that falsely claims it was used to cover up problems with Mann’s original hockey stick from 1940 on.”
better catch +20
On your quotation checking, you’d come across better by just focusing the worst
1. Capitalizing– not even worth the ink you spilled.
2. Wigley screw up.. much better.
Assemble all your evidence.. then comes the hard part of choosing and limiting what you talk about.
Steven Mosher:
I disagree that pointing out a consistent pattern of misquotations, even when they’re done in a relatively minor fashion, is a waste of ink. It’s not something I’d spend a lot of time on if I were writing a “case” or “rebuttal,” but I’d likely point it out as doing it allows people to distort the meaning and impression of quotes.
But there’s no doubt that much of what I’m writing in that topic won’t be all that important. I’m just taking notes on the book as I read it. I’m sharing the notes so people who might be interested in an immediate reaction as I read the book can read them, but I’m not presenting them as any sort of collected or structured response.
Once I finish going through the book, I can use the notes I’ve taken to go back and see what topics I want to spend more time on. That’s when I’ll worry about how I want to present things. Until then, if people want to argue my notes don’t make for a neat case, well… they might want to think about what notes are 😛
Steven Mosher
“Brandon
But somehow it misses the fact multiple people Mark Steyn quotes in this book actually do dispute that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, or at least that man’s emission of it is causing the planet to warm.
good catch. +10”
Oh no, Steyn quotes whacked out GHG deniers – he can’t possibly be taken seriously for that reason alone. Alas, the ‘settled science’ that says CO2 is a GHG, therefore anthropogenic emissions of CO2 over the last 150 years have been largely responsible for the rise in temperature over that period is, as ever, when you get down to the nitty gritty science, far from settled.
In assessing the long term radiative forcing via (instantaneous) ‘line by line’ spectral analysis of the various ‘well mixed greenhouse gases’ emitted by industry, the IPCC relied upon basic physics, yes, but scaling that basic physics up into the real world is problematic. Chiefly, aerosol/cloud interactions are very poorly modeled and calculations of radiative GHG forcing from ‘well mixed GHGs’ involve assuming clear sky conditions. Even the much lauded recent study which purported to demonstrate CO2 GHG forcing ‘in the wild’ for the first time, as opposed to just in the laboratory, was done over a limited time period only and for clear sky conditions. So even the basic GHG radiative forcing supposedly due to accumulations of anthropogenic emissions since 1850 is not as well defined and unchallengeable as some would like to make out. And that’s not including the ‘dangerous’ bit – the assumed positive water vapour feedbacks which are theorised to take the world into +2C territory in the coming decades.
Even assuming that the scientists are right and that the GHG effect from well mixed GHGs has been steadily increasing in line with man’s emissions over the post industrial period, this critically relies upon the generally accepted notion that atmospheric CO2 ppmv has likewise increased smoothly from approx. 280ppm in 1850 to 400ppm now – all of it due to fossil fuels. Alas, atmospheric CO2 levels are far more variable – in time and space – than the instrumental post 1958 Mauna Loa record and the ice core pre 1950s record indicate, which rather brings into question the entire concept of ‘well mixed’ GHG radiative forcing:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1315583/posts
http://www.biomind.de/realCO2/literature/evidence-var-corrRSCb.pdf
Steven Mosher
“Brandon
But somehow it misses the fact multiple people Mark Steyn quotes in this book actually do dispute that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, or at least that man’s emission of it is causing the planet to warm.
good catch. +10”
Oh no, Steyn quotes whacked out GHG dismissers – he can’t possibly be taken seriously for that reason alone. Alas, the ‘settled science’ that says CO2 is a GHG, therefore anthropogenic emissions of CO2 over the last 150 years have been largely responsible for the rise in temperature over that period is, as ever, when you get down to the nitty gritty science, far from settled.
In assessing the long term radiative forcing via (instantaneous) ‘line by line’ spectral analysis of the various ‘well mixed greenhouse gases’ emitted by industry, the IPCC relied upon basic physics, yes, but scaling that basic physics up into the real world is problematic. Chiefly, aerosol/cloud interactions are very poorly modeled and calculations of radiative GHG forcing from ‘well mixed GHGs’ involve assuming clear sky conditions. Even the much lauded recent study which purported to demonstrate CO2 GHG forcing ‘in the wild’ for the first time, as opposed to just in the laboratory, was done over a limited time period only and for clear sky conditions. So even the basic GHG radiative forcing supposedly due to accumulations of anthropogenic emissions since 1850 is not as well defined and unchallengeable as some would like to make out. And that’s not including the ‘dangerous’ bit – the assumed positive water vapour feedbacks which are theorised to take the world into +2C territory in the coming decades.
Even assuming that the scientists are right and that the GHG effect from well mixed GHGs has been steadily increasing in line with man’s emissions over the post industrial period, this critically relies upon the generally accepted notion that atmospheric CO2 ppmv has likewise increased smoothly from approx. 280ppm in 1850 to 400ppm now – all of it due to fossil fuels. Alas, atmospheric CO2 levels are far more variable – in time and space – than the instrumental post 1958 Mauna Loa record and the ice core pre 1950s record indicate, which rather brings into question the entire concept of ‘well mixed’ GHG radiative forcing:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1315583/posts
http://www.biomind.de/realCO2/literature/evidence-var-corrRSCb.pdf
That other pillar of AGW science, the CO2 ‘hockey stick’, will probably follow Mann’s HS into ignominy very soon as it becomes clearer that atmospheric carbon dioxide can, and has, changed significantly in concentration over decadal/centennial timescales in the recent geological past.
>>this is the notorious and poorly understood “Mike’s Nature Trick”
>>scandal. (hiding the decline).
Ahh, yes, the fact that Mann’s proxy temperature erection went limp in the last few decades of the series, so it required an urban heat island prosthetic to maintain its Mannliness. However, since this graph has been proven to be fraaudulent, and is known to have misled numerous governments, planning agencies and policy makers, why is Mann still at liberty? Just one for instance:
London Heathrow declined to invest in new snow-clearing equipment, because the Prof Mann prediction was a zillion degrees of warming, and Prof David Viner said there would be no more snow. But in 2010 Heathrow had to close because of too much snow and antiquated snow clearing equipment. (A £0.5 million budget for a major airport !! – That equates to 2 snow-clearing machines.) Another well know low-standards airline only bought 3 days worth of de-ice fluid, based upon warming predictions, and ground to a halt as a consequence.
Those little debacles (and the 2013 replay) cost the airlines and nation £ several hundred million, in lost trade and business. Have Mann and Viner offered to repay this money? Why not? Their scaremongering has cost the nation £ billions, if you include all the snow and flood disruption that we did not prepare for, and it was all due to incorrect Warmist predictions. So why are these snake-oil salesmen still at liberty?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1340146/UK-SNOW-CHAOS-Heathrow-Airport-boss-admits-prepared-says-truly-sorry-disruption.html
R
Correction of personal information. I am not and never have been a Professor at Oxford University. I have a Ph.D. in mathematics from Cambridge, I was a visiting Professor at Utrecht in the 1960’s, I was a Reader in History & Philosophy of Science at Leeds until 1983, and now I have the honorary position of Associate Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford University.
Thank you, Dr. Ravetz.
Perhaps Mark Steyn should upload the information for personal and quote sources to the web at Steyn Online? That way errors such as these can be corrected live and even extended.
I greatly enjoyed and appreciated your perceptions of the matters that Mark Steyn included in volume 1.!
Dr. Ravetz:
I went to include your corrections in my copy of the book and you are not described as ever being a Professor at Oxford.
Perhaps you were misinformed by someone?
Mark Steyn lists your background as:
— Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College, London
— Associate fellow of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford.
— Co-creator of the NUSAP notational system for uncertain information.
— Developer of the theory of post-normal science.
— Former member of the Genetic Manipulation Advisory.
— Former Visiting Scientist at the European Commission Joint Research Centre
— Director of the Council for Science and Society
— Senior Fellow of the Green Center for Science and Society at the University of Texas, Dallas
— Visiting Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai.
I changed the formatting to highlight the apparently erroneously described position quote:
Positions that should be included are:
— Ph.D. in mathematics from Cambridge
— visiting Professor at Utrecht in the 1960’s
— Reader in History & Philosophy of Science at Leeds until 1983
— Associate fellow of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford, Honorary
Is this a clearer description Dr. Ravetz?
Sorry for the error. I did not do a good job of checking your bio. Thanks for the correction.
Sold. I’m so looking forward to reading this while I relax in my co2 enriched greenhouse. I’ll post my own hockey stick graph in October to illustrate crop yield improvements since I introduced this fantastic gas.
THank you! I just heard about this book recently and really enjoyed your review.
Two questions:
1. Who appointed Michael Mann to the IPCC?
2. What relationship, if any, does Michael Mann have with Ben Santer (the IPCC ground-zero of detectible anthropogenic climate change)?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/06/manns-tree-ring-proxy-train-wreck/#comment-1808672
[excerpts]
We knew that Piltdown was wrong at the time his papers were published (MBH98, etc.).
I published the following article in E&E in early 2005, in defence of several legitimate climate scientists.
“Mann eliminated from the climate record both the Medieval Warm Period, a period from about 900 to 1500 AD when global temperatures were generally warmer than today, and also the Little Ice Age from about 1500 to 1800 AD, when temperatures were colder. Mann’s conclusion contradicted hundreds of previous studies on this subject, but was adopted without question by Kyoto advocates.”
Regards to all, Allan
Full article at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/28/the-team-trying-to-get-direct-action-on-soon-and-baliunas-at-harvard/#comment-811913
Drive-by shootings in Kyotoville
The global warming debate heats up
Energy & Environment 2005
Allan M.R. MacRae
[Excerpt]
But such bullying is not unique, as other researchers who challenged the scientific basis of Kyoto have learned.
Of particular sensitivity to the pro-Kyoto gang is the “hockey stick” temperature curve of 1000 to 2000 AD, as proposed by Michael Mann of University of Virginia and co-authors in Nature.
Mann’s hockey stick indicates that temperatures fell only slightly from 1000 to 1900 AD, after which temperatures increased sharply as a result of humanmade increases in atmospheric CO2. Mann concluded: “Our results suggest that the latter 20th century is anomalous in the context of at least the past millennium. The 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, at moderately high levels of confidence.”
Mann’s conclusion is the cornerstone of the scientific case supporting Kyoto. However, Mann is incorrect.
Mann eliminated from the climate record both the Medieval Warm Period, a period from about 900 to 1500 AD when global temperatures were generally warmer than today, and also the Little Ice Age from about 1500 to 1800 AD, when temperatures were colder. Mann’s conclusion contradicted hundreds of previous studies on this subject, but was adopted without question by Kyoto advocates.
In the April 2003 issue of Energy and Environment, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and co-authors wrote a review of over 250 research papers that concluded that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were true climatic anomalies with world-wide imprints – contradicting Mann’s hockey stick and undermining the basis of Kyoto. Soon et al were then attacked in EOS, the journal of the American Geophysical Union.
In the July 2003 issue of GSA Today, University of Ottawa geology professor Jan Veizer and Israeli astrophysicist Nir Shaviv concluded that temperatures over the past 500 million years correlate with changes in cosmic ray intensity as Earth moves in and out of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. The geologic record showed no correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperatures, even though prehistoric CO2 levels were often many times today’s levels. Veizer and Shaviv also received “special attention” from EOS.
In both cases, the attacks were unprofessional – first, these critiques should have been launched in the journals that published the original papers, not in EOS. Also, the victims of these attacks were not given advanced notice, nor were they were given the opportunity to respond in the same issue. In both cases the victims had to wait months for their rebuttals to be published, while the specious attacks were circulated by the pro-Kyoto camp.
*************
Unfortunately for him, if his model was carried to the present day, it peaked in the 1940’s and then declined in temperature. So, he simply spliced actual estimated global temperatures to his proxy reconstruction and didn’t mention it in the article, this is the notorious and poorly understood “Mike’s Nature Trick” scandal.
This is not true the measured data from 1902-1995 is referred to on the figure (Fig 5) and in the legend to the figure:
“Figure 5 Time reconstructions (solid lines) along with raw data (dashed lines).”
Phil.
as usual, you are out of your depth in d’Nile.
People wanting the facts of “Mike’s Nature Trick” can read this.
Richard
Phil, for the details of the deception I refer you to either Steve McIntyre description or to Judith Curry’s. Both are linked in my post. Mike’s nature trick and Briffa’s hide the decline trick are not simple. But both McIntyre and Curry explain them well.
No matter how McIntyre and Curry describe it they can’t make your false statement correct!
he simply spliced actual estimated global temperatures to his proxy reconstruction and didn’t mention it in the article,
This can be refuted just by reading the legend of Fig 5 in the paper (which you linked to).
richardscourtney August 29, 2015 at 12:53 pm
People wanting the facts of “Mike’s Nature Trick” can read this.
The post you linked to doesn’t refer to “Mike’s Nature Trick”.
Actually read McIntyre’s post on this. He addresses your complaint specifically about the legend of Figure 5 part way down the first page. My statement is not false, McIntyres’s write up is under the hyperlink “Mike’s Nature Trick” in the text. If that is not working for you, here it is again. http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/29/keiths-science-trick-mikes-nature-trick-and-phils-combo/
Phil.
I wrote
You have replied saying
SAY WHAT!?
That entire post is about “Mike’s Nature Trick” to “Hide the decline”.
That post is an essay on WUWT by our host so is appropriate for citation in a WUWT thread (which this is), is the most clear exposition of the matter of which I am aware, and provides links to McIntyre’s original explanations of the matter.
However, your silly reply has enabled further commendation of the essay to those who want the facts of “Mike’s Nature Trick” about which McIntyre says
Richard
Andy May, please don’t tell people to:
I get you’ve chosen not to respond to any of my comments, such as this one, for whatever reason. Fine. Whatever. But even if you’re going to ignore me, you still shouldn’t tell people to read a post which clearly shows what you say is highly misleading. You were criticized for saying Mann:
The post you link to shows, quite clearly, that is not what Mann did. It’s even worse if we read the fuller context of what you said:
This gives the clear impression Michael Mann showed both instrumantal temperature and proxy data together as a single line. That’s completely untrue. As the post you link to clearly explains, Mann “spliced” instrumental data onto the proxy data for the purpose of padding when smoothing the data, nothing more. That’s bad, but it’s very different than what you claim.
I went ahead and dug up my post about this. I still recommend people read my eBook instead as it is a much better writeup, but for people who just want to know what the truth on this one issue is, you can read a simple explanation with graphs here.
Incidentally, the graphs Steve McIntyre made without the “trick” end on a downturn due to an arbitrary choice he made. He could have made a different choice and had the series end with an upturn, like you’ll see in my post. I don’t think the difference should actually matter for anything, but I hope people who want to claim Mann’s reconstruction should end with falling results realize they really don’t have a basis for it. It’s equally valid to say the results went up, went down then started going back up again.
But that’s not too different than what we saw with the modern temperature record with the cooling/lack of warming in the middle of the century, now is it?
“he simply spliced actual estimated global temperatures to his proxy reconstruction and didn’t mention it in the article,”
The statement is simply false. Here is Fig 5b:
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/pics/MBHFig5b.png
I have rearranged it slightly so that the caption is brought entirely under 5b instead of spread across the page. You can see that:
1. The global temperature is clearly shown with a dashed line, explained on the actual plot
2. The caption also clearly states that raw data is shown up to 1995
richardscourtney August 30, 2015 at 1:52 pm
People wanting the facts of “Mike’s Nature Trick” can read this.
You have replied saying
The post you linked to doesn’t refer to “Mike’s Nature Trick”.
SAY WHAT!?
That entire post is about “Mike’s Nature Trick” to “Hide the decline”.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with this article’s discussion about Mann’s 1998 Nature paper, it’s all about Briffa’s treatment of his data. Proving once again richard that you really don’t know what we’re talking about.
Andy May August 30, 2015 at 1:16 pm
Actually read McIntyre’s post on this. He addresses your complaint specifically about the legend of Figure 5 part way down the first page. My statement is not false,
He doesn’t address your false statement, you assert that Mann spliced the raw data to the reconstruction and did not mention it in the paper. Reading of the caption to the figure clearly shows that your assertion is not true.
Why do all these fools want to be so famous?
We’ve inadvertently geo-engineered a slightly warmer and much greener world, with amazing, and miraculous, net benefit.
Praise, not blame should apply. And what to we get? Massive social disruption engendered by fear and guilt.
It cannot stand, and won’t. The fall is inevitable, pre-ordained, and humongous. The alarmists are already toast, but, like zombies, stumble on, a distinct hazard to the human race.
=================
It appears Amazon has done a hatchet job on the prior reviews of the book that were apparent when Anthony first did his own review here. Currently there are only three and none appear to be an “Amazon verified purchase” although two of the reviewers do indicate they received advance copies. Many of the original responses to the “RS”‘ review were deleted, including Anthony’s and my own. I also complained to Amazon at the time because it was obvious RS hadn’t even read the book, yet his drivel still appears.
Thanks for posting this new review! Perhaps the author will also post it at Amazon?
As far as “$100 college textbooks” go, they are in an abysmal state. As a relatively recent college student, I can attest to the fact that the content is often biased and suffers from extremely poor review/editing despite the fact there are usually dozens of “reviewers” listed.
I found so many blatant errors in a sociology textbook that the instructor gave me credit and had me preview each chapter before he assigned course work. This led to me reading each later assigned textbook, in all manner of subjects, cover to cover before actually attending the course. I found egregious errors in Statistics , US History, another Sociology, Anthropology, and Environmental Science textbooks just to name a few. Apparently, current day University instructors rarely read or scrutinize the books they assign.
My favorite, in an upper division “science” textbook (that cost OVER $100), was a graphic regarding climate that showed the Sun as a cantaloupe-sized object in relation to Earth as an orange-sized object, in order to support the text’s contention that the sun has minimal impact on our climate. It IS indoctrination, pure and simple.
I intend to purchase Mr. Steyn’s book directly from him, as he will then be able to keep more of the proceeds. Later, I will likely buy a second copy from Amazon to give away so there will be no doubt I am indeed a “verified” purchaser in order to leave a review.
Never mind Al Gore, and discard the idea that solar “renewable” energy is inextricably linked with the predictions of disastrous climate change.
Consider instead James Hansen’s work, or even just the facts of archaeology,some of which can be seen in a sufficiently thin slice of coal.
On second thoughts, take the Industrial Revolution, which liberals like Jacob Bronowski reckoned did more for the agricultural working class than most, or perhaps even all, political revolutions. There was a highly evolved and perfected wind industry in those days, called sailing ships. Coal burning steamships swept them from the seas, and for a while oil burning, until it became too expensive, could drive transatlantic liners at the speed of half a gale. It is just about inconceivable that any derivative of wind turbine energy could compete with the “Cutty Sark”, the “Balclutha”, Nelson’s “Victory”, or even HMS “Beagle”.
Nevertheless, the cost of burning fossil fuel (anything buried that once was living) is that the composition of the atmosphere has changed more rapidly in the last two centuries than it did in 600 millennia of the Carboniferous, which took 60 million years to sequester all that carbon, AND to release oxygen into the atmosphere. I’m assuming that at least 1% of the fossil carbon has been burned. I may be overestimating the speed at which carbon was being sequestered, since plants and animals had begun to colonise the land more nearly 500 million years ago, but certainly before 1000 million years ago, the atmosphere contained more CH4 than CO2, and no oxygen.
Methane (HC4) is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and airborne reflective or absorptive particulates, whether solid or liquid drops, can have a relatively large effect. But the dominant greenhouse gas at present is CO2, and it is reported to have gone from 350 ppm to 400 ppm in a very short time.
When people think about a couple of degrees of warming of the air, it seems trivial. But if you think of warming the oceans by that much, AND melting the polar ice, that is a very great deal of heating.
But never mind even that. It is time to stop burning coal and gas, because nuclear is safer and cleaner even without counting the CO2, and the people who tell you otherwise, including the wind and solar lobbies, are serving the interest of the fossil carbon owners — whether they know it or not.
Whoops! Typo! Methane is carbon tetrahydride, CH4, not hydrogen tetracarbide HC4.
But, in brief, the fact that so many of those of who are convinced of AGW and DCC (Disastrous Climate Change) also favour an utterly useless and expensive cure for it, has nothing to do with whether AGW is real.
James Hansen, James Lovelock, and the brilliant young MIT graduates Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie who are developing a “Waste-Annihilating Molten-Salt Reactor” that can consume either the long lived part of the”Waste” (strictly speaking, wasted,) fuel from the the present PWR fleets, or new uranium at half the enrichment level of the same PWR plants. see http://transatomicpower.com .
If they can succeed and hold out against the lumpen inertia of the NRC, this design can go where no wind turbine can go (it’s quite small) and generate 520 MWe, which is a lot better than 200 wind turbines at 2.5 MW.
It would continuously produce nuclear waste at a rate of about half a ton per year. What’s that in lbs per day?
Dear all,
the “problem” with Mann’s hockey-stick was uncovered mostly by S. McIntyre. He was very meticulous and reported literally hundreds of errors in Mann’s and follow up works of the last decade.
Unfortunately, this also mean, that it takes a long time to follow up on this “debate”.
I am under the honest impression, that any “fact” published to refute McI was discussed and rebutted at climate audit (which now hosts a group of exceptional scientists!).
In facts, but not in the media there is no doubt, who had the last word on this issue!
I would like to direct all of your attention to one article (there are many more good ones on that blog):
http://climateaudit.org/2006/08/30/wahl-and-ammann-again-1/
“WA reported that reconstructions without bristlecones (their Scenario 6) lack “skill” in reconstruction and “climatological meaning”, a finding with which we concur. The NAS Panel says that bristlecones should be avoided in temperature reconstructions. Thus, MBH-type reconstructions (with PC networks) with or without bristlecones are both eliminated. So much for the “refutation” of our criticisms.”
(the article has much more information)
and go from there to the question of at least scientific fraud..
Since everybody seems to agree that the bristlecone proxies are the main contributor in Mann’s 1998 paper and his “censored” directory knows that he knew about that + his co-author knew from the Ababneh thesis, that bristlecones are dubious whne it coems to their use as temperature proxies,
why did Mann et al. choose to leave that discussion out of their paper? That is misleading and fraudulent!
(And shines a bad light of these three climate scientists for every day this paper is not retracted!)
I almost never get any response to my questions here, it’s a strange phenomena. I comment rarely and am an occasional reader, not a scientist but have spent over 10 years trying to understand the claims of the catastrophic AGW crowd and what folks here and elsewhere in the skeptical community have to say. I’m often convinced by the technical arguments on offer here – but mostly they go above my head after a while. I occasionally ask basic questions or comment on the politics (something I’m expert in). That said as preface, here goes.
1. Steyn is not a scientist. He doesn’t even have an undergrad degree. He’s also a fierce right wing partisan (close to where my sympathies lie). Given these things, he has no broad credibility in the broader public discourse in our society. He speaks to an echo chamber who already agree with him. How on earth do any of you think this book will change a thing?
2. The triumphal tone of this piece is just bizarre to me. The claims about the science moving away from Mann and that they are a second tier minority of scientists seem to be way out of touch with what I see in the broader public discourse. In fact, what I see on the larger world is a certainty about climate change in both public dialog, public policy and all media. It’s presented as a fact now. How do I square these two conflicting views? Is the science really falling apart? Is there a real change in what’s being done in the actual fields at issue here? Put more directly, if I didn’t come here (or to other skeptic blogs) I would never know what this article seems to be claiming.
Example: I tried watching a documentary on Netflix, Antarctic Edge: 70 degree South – It posits as a central truth that global warming has reduced the ice pack in sections of the Antarctic severely and that in fact the pack is present a fully 90 days less than it was before AGW. Yet in the skeptical community, I hear that the antarctic ice extent is growing even enough to offset diminishing Arctic ice. How can this be? Are these folks flat out lying? I also know that an expedition to the Antarctic became locked in ice and had to be rescued – but here’s the thing. I’m just some guy. I’m not stupid (I actually possess a genius IQ, I only mention this to highlight the dilemma non-scientists find themselves in) and I actually read up on this a lot. How can you folks think any progress is being made when 99% of the dialog asserts global warming as a certainty and disastrous and already affecting us? I think we are moving rapidly away from any disagreement in our broader public dialog about this.
Please, don’t debunk the claims I’m citing, at this point I’ve read thousands of such back and forth comments and debates. My question is this: Are you guys in an echo chamber here? Is there really any movement in the larger wordl? The EPA is pressing forward full steam. Various states and other governments are taking action around the world. I think it’s wrongheaded but is there actually any chance this will be pushed back in the real world? Has this movement made any actual real progress or had any affect in the real world?
at scribblerg, your last paragraph “Please, don’t debunk” has no standing in science and is the standard junk narrative of a closed mind, your genius closed mind is standard fair in the cAGW true believer crowd.
Lol, wow, you guys are funny. Perhaps all of you who focused on that statement missed that I actually agree with you foiks? I didn’t want to get derailed into a debunking conversation because I”m already in agreement with you.
My question was wrt the triumphalist tone and the claims about how the science is falling apart, yet you guys just jumped on that statement. Bizarre and perhaps telling…
You are right to question Steyns integrity. How someone with his lack of understanding of science can grab the attention of those who claim to be science-literate is a source of amazement. Your term of ‘Echo chamber’ explains it all.
I like Mark Steyn, and think he’s correct. My point was a larger one about the triumphalist tone of the article, claiming that the science is falling apart – while I see and hear every day policies and pronouncements in the media, from govt and from public intellectuals and many scientists that AGW is a fact and dangerous. I don’t believe them, I just think folks here are kidding themselves.
But perhaps it’s the same delusion that has them believe Steyn’s book will be read by a single person who doesn’t already agree with us skeptics…
That does not sound like an honest question. Who would ever ask an actual echo chamber such a question?
That said, the answer is no and all of the technical arguments here that often convince you should make that point obvious. There are zero pro CAGW forums that allow contrary discourse, most delete all effective questions or technical answers contrary to that forum’s premise.
WUWT does not.
Climate Audit does not.
Bishop Hill does not.
Jo Nova does not.
In fact, most of the contra-CAGW forums are open to even obstinate and very obnoxious contrarians.
Very much so.
The EPA has already been stopped. Two consortiums of states have sued the EPA. One consortium has won an injunction against the EPA to invoking their new ‘standards”, preventing them from proceeding until the case is heard.
The second consortium is likely to win an injunction upon appeal. Eventually only the kool aid swallowing eco-controlled states will welcome EPA new standards and most of those already meet the new EPA rules.
Like Australia where they are actively removing the eco-poison pills?
Like Spain where the green technologies are either bankrupt or the Country is broke?
Like most of Europe where the greens are force marching unwilling countries to obey?
Like Germany where workers and employers fear a loss of jobs?
Like Canada where they’ve already pulled many of the green plugs out?
Like America where the only alleged Country wide progress is forced by illegal POTUS diktat?
In America, most states are not running down the alleged rosy green path back to serfdom and real hardships.
Solar is mostly wishful thinking and full of bankruptcies.
Massive wind turbines are proven endangered and un-endangered bird and bat killer.
Traditionally, all of the warmer climate periods of man’s recorded history are described as ‘Optima’, because those are periods when mankind flourishes.
Many of histories recorded cold periods, often termed mini ice ages, are dark very deadly chapters in man’s history.
You do not make clear what is wrong headed, I suspect your idea of wrong headed is a failure to implement renewables and to dump fossil fuels.
There is only one eventual outcome for CAGW and that is abject failure. Mother nature is not fooled nor is she conducive to fakery. CO2 has not demonstrated any ability to trump natural processes.
Safe wind power from very long term lasting equipment is not yet developed, let alone implemented. Most alleged wind power stats are the optimum statistics pushed by the wind industry itself, not independent engineers.
Reliable common solar and/or battery power is even further behind than wind.
Neither alleged renewable source of power is at all possible independent of fossil fuels.
Solar and wind are utterly reliant upon fossil fueled mining industry, transportation industry, metal refining industry, plastics industry, polymers industry, construction industry, maintenance industry,… none of which rely on alleged renewables.
Think about it. Whenever newer more efficient technologies are developed, the first groups to massively implement them are industries; because that is where the savings are.
Outside of some fuel-cell buses, and government required taxis, the vast majority of industry has not only not implemented renewables, they are unable to implement of effectively utilize renewables beyond tiny trickle charges.
We think so. We also think that the CAGW groups are getting more strident, more desperate, more absurd as they see their chances for a power grab slip away.
Without the CAGW devotion to ‘argumentum ad verecundiam, appeals to authority, meaning that they almost always resort to claiming some ‘other’ person(s) of authority has decided the issue for them.
Eventually science always moves forward, even past authoritative tyrants who are unable to pony up actual science.
The IPCC may never technically go away since they are now an entrenched bureaucratic department in an unelected government. Still, the IPCC has moved somewhat away from the alleged terrors of hellfire CAGW and morphed into moderate CAGW.
Their weakness is that they decide and publish the political summary without the scientists involved, well before the alleged scientific chapters are released.
The IPCC tipped their hand this past time when all of their dire predictions were slapped with a 95% faith consensus yet the science supposedly behind the predictions makes no such statements of faith.
If you have a question; search for the topic! Almost every contra-CAGW forum has a search box available. Many of them also supply easy to find summaries for certain aspects of the science.
Asking us a simple question or worse pouting because no-one answers the simple question, doesn’t make sense.
We are all passer bys here. Arriving mostly of our own volition to keep tabs on the latest in climate science. We are not faithful lap dogs delirious that others ask us questions so we can waste our time responding.
Knowledge may be freely available, but it does require work. If you’re having trouble with the enormity, focus on one small section; and that section can be almost anything, e.g. the bearings required by wind turbines.
Lastly, ‘nullius in verba’. Take no-one’s word!! The moment any argument depends on one of the argumentums, leave that site and don’t go back!
argumentum ad verecundiam
argumentum ad populum – argument where “everyone says”
argumentum ad hominem – argument by personal assault
argumentum ad ignorantiam – The don’t know another reason “It must be CO2”
argumentum ad misericordiam – the misery argument, “Think of the grandchildren…”
argumentum ad baculum – argument of the stick or force. “skeptics should be jailed”
You arrogant ponce, of course it was an honest question – I didn’t want to derail into a specific issue as I agree with the skeptical POV. On the larger question, your response is cherrypicking. You cite exceptions to policy when there are hundreds of policies that go the other direction. You cite the EPA being pushed back but in fact those court orders are temporary and the issues will be decided at some point – and it’s still the official policy of the U.S. EPA.
I’m a skeptic, I’m with you folks here, but I think you are just kidding yourselves that there is some turning point being reached in the science or the larger society. Of course their are setbacks and pushback, but in the larger mainstream public narrative, climate change/AGW is now presented as a fact. Just look at Obama’s visit to Alaska and the coverage it’s getting.
And I know the the glaciers were receding even before CO2 increased. I saw an article from 1907 lamenting the retreat of glaciers in Alaska.
But hey, keep claiming victory, I know it makes you guys feel great.
Some issues are difficult for ‘amateurs’ to research – others are not.
Credible Antarctic and Arctic sea ice history and current extent are readily available for the whole satellite era.
Go see for yourself!
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/
Andy May should have added added a disclaimer / caveat / proviso / quid pro quo to his statement “Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas and it does cause warming of the atmosphere by trapping heat radiated from the ground and oceans, no one who has studied the issue disputes that.” Andy May should have added something like all else in the total Earth Atmosphere System remaining equal, which it never does.
John
Oops. Sorry I put the extra word ‘added’ in my first sentence of my above comment.
John
I agree. Your addendum to my statement is a good one. Thanks.
Andy May,
My suggested addition to your statement is approximately what Richard Lindzen has often added to his assessments of CO2 and possible warming effect.
John
Scribblerg makes a good point. Until information like that presented in this review is presented routinely in the mass media there will not be a change in the public perception of the bogus issue of man-made global warming. Scientists of the proper stature and position are going to have to organize an effort to confront media executives and editors throughout the country with the need to correct this calamity before it becomes larger than it is. I recently traded emails with the opinion page editor of my local newspaper (in a large city) and his reply to me was “William, don’t you realize That 97 percent of scientists and many government officials disagree with you?” I replied that he should contact a number of professors in the climate field at the various universities in the state and ask if they believed that man caused global warming. I did not receive a reply.
As I’ve said 1,000 times any 1st year econometrics student could have identified the “tricks” Mann was using. This Multi-collinearity weighting scheme is just one is just one of the violations. He deliberately avoided using thermometer data until 1903, and kept proxies in the data until 1983. Each time there are alterations to the data construction the data set “dog legs.” That should have been a red flag to anyone seeking the truth.BTW, what caused the dog leg in the 1980 and 1903 for that matter? What suddenly changed? Certainly not CO2.
Unfortunately, this description from the post isn’t really true. It’s not really false either. It’s one of those things which is so off-base, it’s not even wrong. The next part of the review:
Is even worse, as what it says is just wrong, showing the author doesn’t actually know the subject he’s writing on; he only has a vague grasp of some ideas sort of related to it. Sadly, what he says can be found in Mark Steyn’s book, so it’s no surprise he and others will be misinformed in this way. When leading lights in a movement make bold factual claims on relatively simple matters, it’s natural for people who look up to them to expect those claims to be true.
And since no skeptics seem to be willing to step up and point out what Steyn writes on these matters is false, I’m sure the author of this post won’t be the only person who will be similarly misinformed.
Care to share the true information? McIntyre nailed Mann’s garbage to the wall for all to see.
skeohane, I agree Steve McIntyre did so. The problem is what McIntyre says is not what Mark Steyn says. If you read McIntyre’s descriptions of Michael Mann’s work, you won’t find him saying the same things Steyn says because what Steyn says is wrong. The fact I point out Steyn is wrong doesn’t somehow mean I’m defending Mann. It just means I’m pointing out Steyn is wrong.
As I pointed out above, I’ve written a short eBook to give people an easy way to get familiar with the problems of Mann’s original hockey stick. It should only take half an hour, maybe an hour, to get through. If you do, you’ll understand exactly why it is reasonable to call Mann’s work fraudulent. You can find it here:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RE7K3W2/
And I have a standing offer to send anyone a free PDF copy of it if they don’t want to buy it. There’s a follow-up to it as well, which deals more with Mann’s later work. They both evolved out of the two detailed reviews I wrote of Mann’s book, which you might remember were reposted and praised on this site a while back. I think they’re much better written and far easier to follow, and they do a good job of showing just what the central problems with Mann’s work and behavior were.
– – – – – – –
Brandon Shollenberger,
I am commenting with regards your ‘August 30, 2015 at 6:37 am’.
Of course, in addition to McKitrick’s brief summary of problems of the hockey stick, there is another flawed aspect of the hockey stick diagrams used in the IPCC TAR, AR4 and WMO 1999. That additional flawed aspect is the pseudo-scientific graphical impression/ inference that the diagrams created. A pseudo-scientific impression/ inference was created by using on those diagrams both (a) the proxy ‘hockey stick shaft’ and (b) the recent thermometer (instrumental) ‘hockey stick blade’.
I think the authors of those diagrams created pseudo-science because their intention was to create a false impression that reality fit their hypothesis. In that regard, here Professor Ivar Giaever (PhD) talking about the nature of pseudo-science,
John
John Whitman, unfortunately, Ross McKitrick’s description in that book is somewhat inaccurate. The inaccuracies aren’t anything too severe though, and I suspect they happened due to how little space he devoted to the subject. Even with them, however, McKitrick’s description is leaps and bounds above Steyn’s. You’ll note, McKitrick doesn’t say anything like:
Which is simply untrue. McKitrick also doesn’t say anything like:
Which is, if we’re being rather generous, incredibly misleading. Other inaccuracies present in this post and Steyn’s book are also absent from McKitrick’s description because, once again, his description is far, far better.
Brandon Shollenberger,
McKitrick went on in his chapter in that book to give more detail as a retrospect on the Hockey Stick.
It very arguable that Steyn’s fundamental thrusts in his new book on Mann (& his Hockey Stick escapades) are without reasonable basis. You seem to hold that there are no reasonable bases for his fundamental thrusts on Mann’s work. Some of the statements by some of the PhDs quoted in his book tend to support Steyn’s fundamental thrusts. So we civilly disagree.
John
John Whitman:
I know. I’ve commented on it before to say I think his chapter was a good one. Even so, there were some nuances that he got a little wrong. For instance, he writes Graybill and Idso said the bristlecone proxies should not be used for temperature reconstructions. In actuality, they said the modern portions of the proxies should not be used. They discussed the possibility of using the earlier portions if one could find a way to calibrate the proxies without using the modern portions (something Mann’s methodology couldn’t do).
Similarly, he claims the CENSORED directory showed Mann knew the hockey stick vanished without bristlecones, but what it actually showed is he knew you’d still get a hockey stick without bristlecones due to the Gaspe proxy. That proxy just shouldn’t have been used because it had been duplicated and artifically extended. In both cases, the nuances don’t affect the point he’s making, but they do show the issue is not quite as simple as he makes it out to be. But again, I think these are minor things, unlike Steyn’s.
We can be stuck in disagreement, but the reality is Mark Steyn makes many factual claims in his book. Whether or not he can find other people to quote making similar claims won’t change whether those claims are true or false. It certainly won’t make what he says more true if he can take people’s quotes out of context to misrepresent them to make it appear they support what he says, something he does on a number of occasions.
You don’t have to agree with me that he does things like that, but he does do them. And he also just flat out says things which are false. So does this blog post. That’s just how it is. A book a lot of people are going to read says things which are very untrue about Michael Mann’s work, and rather than correct it, this site is helping promote those false claims. The result is people are going to become even more misinformed than they already are.
Brandon Shollenberger,
Quite a few of the PhDs he quoted in his book discuss in similar ways as Steyn does the various aspects of the hockey stick problems.
I am getting the ebook version soon, so I will be able to list in detail by electronic search my evidence that Steyn is not inconsistent with a broad range of PhDs on the matter of the hockey stick problems. It is likely he was informed by what they all said and what even McKintrick has said.
John
John Whitman:
I don’t know that there are really many people who have said what Steyn says, but let’s suppose they have. Some have said it is reasonable to doubt humans have played a role in causing atmospheric CO2 levels to rise. That doesn’t make those beliefs reasonable. It doesn’t make it reasonable for Steyn to repeatedly make factual claims which anyone who had one even the most basic of research on Michael Mann’s hockey stick would know is false.
I don’t know where Steyn got the ideas he put in his book, but the simple reality is he says tons of things which are horribly wrong. If skeptics want to be taken seriously, or if they just want to have some integrity, they should speak up and point this out.
Again, I do not think Steyn’s words in his book are uninformed by the 100+ PhDs positions on the hockey stick problem. They all either subtly or starkly differ in their views on the matter of the problems of the hockey stick. This is an open discourse where reasonable men have differences . . . it is what make science vibrant.
Anyway, once I get my ebook version then I’ll do some comparative studies on the many many views of the 100+ PhDs compared to Steyn’s views.
John
John Whitman:
Again, it doesn’t really matter where Steyn got his ideas from. He could have gotten the horribly wrong ideas I’ve been criticizing from 100 PhDs (which he certainly did not) and they’d still be wrong. If anything, him finding many PhDs which give terrible opinions would just discredit the point of his book, showing the opinion of “experts” has no particular connection to reality, making them practically worthless.
I’ve been reviewing the book at my site. so far, I’ve discussed ~1/3rd of the quotes Steyn has offered. Quite a few do nothing to support the claims I’ve criticized Steyn for making, not in the least because Steyn misrepresents what some people said. And misattributes at least one quote, and may well have even fabricated at least one quote.
But yeah, there are some “experts” in the book who do say things which are as completely wrong as the things Steyn says. For instance, there’s the guy who apparently believed Michael Mann and his group collected all the proxy data they used themselves, making the hockey stick a very expensive project, when in reality all they really did was download the data from the internet (or get it via e-mail). Personally, I think that just makes the book look bad.
On these specific issues, I’ll refer to two comments from my site which I wrote yesterday. Particularly important highlights:
That most likely will be proven wrong on a biblical scale. The climate “scientists” are not “isolated” from the rest of the scientific community. The silence of the scientific community enables and empowers them, and when the fraud is finally exposed all funding will be cut for Federal Research, not just to the climate science departments. Silence in the face of evil is evil itself. University Presidents like those at The Ohio State University turn a blind eye to what is happening at the Byrd Polar Research Center and the Glenn School of Public Policy. The lie brings them money, so they stick with the lie. Send an email to the president and expose that the Thompson don’t archive or release their data, send an email to the President that the climategate emails debunk the Byrd’s position that global warming is causing the Mt Kilimanjaro glacier to melt. Send an email to the President that sublimation is the cause and it has nothing to do with CO2. You will get no response at all.
BTW, note how bone dry the land it. There is no sign of melt. No streams, no pools, no puddles, just dust. No evidence of melt at all.
There is no thermometer evidence supporting the claim that the peak of Mt Kilimanjaro is melting. The glacier is 2000 ft above the freeze line.
http://www.unep.org/dewa/Portals/67/pdf/kili_icecap_poster_av.jpg
Mt Kilimanjaro is 17, 340 ft high, 2000 ft above the freeze line:
Freezing level (ft) 15600 15300 14800 15100 15300 15100 15600 15600 15100 15600 15600 15100 15600 15600 14900 15600 15400 14800
http://www.mountain-forecast.com/peaks/Mount-Kilimanjaro/forecasts/5963
This is the truth:
The only thing that Evil needs to prevail it for good men to do nothing.
https://youtu.be/mDKcF–1hEc
This video does a great job demonstrating the concept of simplifying arguments down to easily understood messages and communicating it in a manner that a 2nd grader can understand. We “skeptics” need to condense our arguments down and communicate them in videos like this one. Someone should make a video detailing the fraudulent statistics of the Hockeystick. Choose the simple concepts like not including thermometer data until 1903. Stick to the concepts that anyone would understand.
https://youtu.be/EH_Izul6J5M
co2islife:
Okay, even if this were true, and by no means am I agreeing it is, how would “not including thermometer data until 1903” be bad, much less anything worth focusing time and attention on? Of all the things you could possibly choose to talk about when it comes to Michael Mann’s work, why in the world would you pick that?
1) Instrument data is infinitely more accurate than “proxy” data. I know of no known credible field of science that would use a “proxy” when more accurate instrumental data was available. Why would anyone ever choose less accurate data when more accurate data is available?
2) It is clear that when the instrumental data is added and the “proxy” data is removed the behavior of the data set dramatically changes, it dog legs. That is clear evidence that the “proxy’ was not a good estimator of the actual.
3) #2 is evidenced by the fact that the proxy data was removed because the instrumental data wend higher and the proxy data went lower, so they chose to “hide the decline.”
4) Instrumental data has far less error than a proxy does by definition. Why inject error when you don’t have to?
5) We have thermometer data going back to the mid-1600s. Why is that data ignored? The IPCC published thermometer data from 1860, why was that data ignored? Simple. It didn’t give the predetermined and desired result.
6) The proxy data used erases the known evens of the Roman and Medieval warming periods and the little ice age. To reject those events should have taken extreme evidence, and the best data available. That wasn’t required.
7) What possible explanation could exist to not use widely available thermometer data? And why, when sets of thermometer data was available that covered the globe, were they ignored? Why would anyone seeking the truth do that? The answer would simply be found by adding the thermometer data to the set and dropping the proxy data. If you do that the hockeystick no longer exists and you no longer have a linear relationship between CO2 and temperature.
Read the descriptions on the chart. Instrumental data is not added until 1902, and proxies are not propped until 1980. Why are those dates selected? They give the desired results. There is no logical reason to chose those dates other than by doing so you get the chart you want. He cherry picked and data sets to get the desired results. That would be considered fraud in the Financial world.
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/2/4/1265282134205/TempChart.gif
http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/the-hockey-stick/image
co2islife:
These sort of comments make me want to bang my head against a wall. Michael Mann didn’t use instrumental data instead of proxy data. He calibrated proxy data against instrumental data. That means he had to use both, together, over the same period of time. That period of time happened to be 1902-1980. Claiming that was fraudulent because he didn’t start the period before 1902 is just absurd given you want to do calibration on reliable data.
So even if we disregard the fact your idea Mann somehow used proxy data instead of instrumental data is just completely insane, with no basis in reality, your idea that his choice of using instrumental data only from 1902 on is bad, much less fraudulent, is just absurd.
I have no idea how this could be “clear” given it never happened, but I hope you enjoy your fantasies. I’ve always heard hallucinogenics are fun, but I’ve never actually tried any myself.
For an entirely different set of results, in entirely different paper, published by entirely different people. But sure, let’s blame Mann, because… we don’t like him, I guess?
That’s actually not true, but it’s funny you say it because it reminds me you actually believe:
Even though one of the common criticisms of Mann’s work, both in his original hockey stick and his follow-up 2008 hockey stick, is his use of instrumental data. Over 20% of the proxies in the original hockey stick were instrumental records, and a ridiculous number of proxies in his 2008 hockey stick had instrumental data used to fill in missing periods, and people criticized Mann for that, with good reason. But here you are, telling us all about how Mann didn’t use instrumental data, because it would have given the wrong results.
That is the level of education Mark Steyn and this site is giving out. The “skeptic” movement isn’t just unaware of basic details of the hockey stick. It is so completely misinformed at this point that it actively attacks Michael Mann for things which are the exact opposite of the truth. You can take any number of real criticisms of the hockey stick, and you’ll find “skeptics” going around arguing against them in their attempts to prove the hockey stick is wrong.
It’s crazy.
It is about taxing and spending, about grants and funding, about votes, about power, about the U N .
It is not about truth, not about facts, not about even Mann, not about ice, not about the temperature records, not about sea rise.
No amount of facts piled on top of facts will move this lie made political operation that feeds itself off this lie/fraud/corruption.
The lie base will fail, the lie made foundation will crumble, there is no corner stone, there is no real thing that can be made real out of this dust blowing in the wind.
I will fall from the heavy load of lies needed to keep it winning votes for more taxes and spending on the fraud.
Taxes are real.
Wasting of the taxes can not be hid will enough over time from those on the paying end of the tax fraud.
Now where did I put that link to my Yeti video?
– – – – – – –
richardscourtney,
I do not agree with your judgment(s) of the validity of your presumed CO2 hypothesis.
It appears to me to be is a bizarre intellectual paradox, to say the least, if a person claims a physical atmospheric effect must be absolutely real in the atmosphere yet it is not unambiguously detectable (your ‘undiscernible’) in the real atmosphere. From a philosophical perspective, that bizarre intellectual paradox does seem to have the consistency of the kind of paradox that is fundamental to flawed Kantian / Hegelian epistemology and metaphysics.
John
John,
What if any warming effect from having four rather than three CO2 molecules per 10,000 dry air molecules is promptly negated by negative feedbacks, such as from water vapor?
Gloria Swansong,
Interesting hypothesis of the behavior of a physical effect of CO2 in the atmosphere, but are you saying it has been unambiguously detected in the real atmosphere?
John
John,
Unambiguously no, although the recent study at sites in Alaska and Oklahoma claimed to have observed the CO2 GHE. There is room for doubt IMO because the study wasn’t purely observational but involved modeling.
WUWT covered it in March, IIRC.
So that you may arrive at your own conclusion at to degree of ambiguity:
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/02/25/co2-greenhouse-effect-increase/
John Whitman:
You have quoted the conclusion of my above post that is here. My post (which you have quoted out of context, do not link, and have cited with an incorrect date and time stamp) completely explains its conclusion.
If you have any dispute with that post then please state it instead of making irrelevant, unjustified and untrue assertions about a “paradox” which does not exist; i.e. this nonsense
Richard
Oops. In my above comment’s first sentence the first ‘is’ should be deleted. So my comment should read,
John
+1
The simple fact is the Arrhenius radiative greenhouse theory confuses the cause (gravito-thermal) with the effect (IR absorption and emission from IR-active greenhouse gas passive radiators). That is why the Arrhenius-believers are so confused about even a scientific definition of what their radiative greenhouse theory is, much less able to provide any solid evidence.
You are too humble h-schtick. Give Richard Courtney the link:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.ca/2014/12/why-man-made-global-warming-theory.html
richardscourtney August 30, 2015 at 2:19 pm
Richard, it’s been fun and we’re really not far apart. You say “indiscernible degree” and I say “indistinguishable from zero”. CO2 is certainly a beautiful molecule with a lot of interesting properties and I think we agree about that if nothing else. Spoiler Alert; here’s a quote from the above article:
“Bad things can happen when climate modelers conveniently ignore over 200 years of well-established physics, including confusing a cause with an effect, but that is unfortunately what has happened. We will now show additional reasons why man-made or natural CO2 cannot be the Earth’s climate control knob, demonstrating how the IR emission spectra from greenhouse gases are simply an effect of and not the cause of the mass densities/gravity/pressure/viscosities of all gases present in each layer of the atmosphere all the way from the surface to the edge of space, which in-turn are entirely responsible for the resulting temperatures (via the Ideal Gas Law and other physical laws) at every altitude, not IR backradiation from passive IR absorbers/emitting gases (so-called “greenhouse gases” for the first time a decade later). “
Michael Wassil and hockeyschtick:
NO! It has NOT “been fun” dealing with the irrelevancies, illogical assertions, refusal to consider evidence and blatant falsehoods from the two of you.
The best I can do in response to your comments in this sub-thread is to copy my most recent above reply to hockeyschtick. It is here and says:
“Hockeyschtick:
For reasons known only to you, you ask me irrelevant questions and make irrelevant assertions when you demand
A blackbody at 217K cannot warm a warmer blackbody at 255K by 33K up to 288K and heat transfer (n.b. HEAT transfer and not energy transfer) from cold to hot would require an impossible continuous decrease of entropy.
But none of that is relevant to the effect of the radiative greenhouse effect (GHE).
The Sun heats the Earth and has a Surface temperature of 5,778 K.
The Sun can and does heat the Earth to a surface temperature of 288 K.
Without the GHGs in the Earth’s atmosphere the Sun would only heat the Earth to a surface temperature of 288 K.
The effect of the GHGs is to inhibit heat loss from the Earth.
This effect of GHGs is similar to the effect of providing insulation to the walls of a building that is internally heated (e.g. by a fireplace): the GHGs in the atmosphere raise the Earth’s temperature enclosed by the atmosphere, and the insulation in its walls raises the building’s temperature enclosed by its walls.
No violation of thermodynamic principles is involved in the increase of the Earth’s surface temperature which results from the presence of GHGs in the atmosphere; i.e. the radiative greenhouse effect (GHG).”
Richard
Ooops!
I intended to write
“Without the GHGs in the Earth’s atmosphere the Sun would only heat the Earth to a surface temperature of 288 K.”
Sorry for the misprint.
Richard
Ouch; Still wrong!
It should be 255 K and NOT 288 K.
This what happens when suffering frustration at time wasters.
Richard, although, thankfully, you answered the simple questions correctly, you then falsely claim these have nothing to do with the GHE and thereby contradict your answers.
As seen in the OLR spectra, the CO2 + H2O “partial blackbody” has an emitting temperature of ~217K corresponding to the 13.33-15 micron band of IR.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vvN1VZjxhu4/Vc0gRW-aXeI/AAAAAAAAHUI/dlx0Wlsaeco/s1600/OLR%2BNimbus_energy_out%2B2.jpg
You just admitted radiation from a 217K blackbody cannot warm a 255K BB to 288K, therefore whether or not the 13.33-15 micron radiation comes from a BB or GHG’s makes NO difference as that low energy/frequency radiation cannot warm the much warmer surface, and if it could would require an IMPOSSIBLE reduction of entropy.
GHGs are NOT “insulation”, blankets, greenhouses, glass panes, etc. which are SOLID objects that work by limiting CONVECTION, which has absolutely nothing to do with “radiative forcing.” On the contrary, GHGs are free to convect and actually enhance convective COOLING.
Arrhenius-believers falsified once again.
hockeyschtick:
Clearly, your post is either malign or demonstrates you lack ability to understand even simple scientific concepts such as ‘inhibiting heat loss raises temperature’.
None of your waffle changes the facts that:
A blackbody at 217K cannot warm a warmer blackbody at 255K by 33K up to 288K and heat transfer (n.b. HEAT transfer and not energy transfer) from cold to hot would require an impossible continuous decrease of entropy.
But none of that is relevant to the effect of the radiative greenhouse effect (GHE).
The Sun heats the Earth and has a Surface temperature of 5,778 K.
The Sun can and does heat the Earth to a surface temperature of 288 K.
Without the GHGs in the Earth’s atmosphere the Sun would only heat the Earth to a surface temperature of 255 K.
The effect of the GHGs is to inhibit heat loss from the Earth.
This effect of GHGs is similar to the effect of providing insulation to the walls of a building that is internally heated (e.g. by a fireplace): the GHGs in the atmosphere raise the Earth’s temperature enclosed by the atmosphere, and the insulation in its walls raises the building’s temperature enclosed by its walls.
No violation of thermodynamic principles is involved in the increase of the Earth’s surface temperature which results from the presence of GHGs in the atmosphere; i.e. the radiative greenhouse effect (GHG).
Richard
John Whitman:
You have repeated your untrue assertion about a “paradox” that does not exist so I will repeat my response.
You have quoted the conclusion of my above post that is here. My post (which you have quoted out of context, do not link, and have cited with an incorrect date and time stamp) completely explains its conclusion.
If you have any dispute with that post then please state it instead of making irrelevant, unjustified and untrue assertions about a “paradox” which does not exist; i.e. this nonsense
Richard
richardscourtney,
The paradox in your conclusion is stated very explicitly / concisely and I find your conclusion (which I quoted) represents consistently and completely all that you said earlier in your previous comment(s).
The paradox you presented is clear, so based on it I argue that Feynman would agree with me that your paradox resides outside of what can reasonably be scientifically said. My understanding is that Feynman would have one claim only what is unambiguously detected/ observed in reality can be claimed as a rational basis for {your words follow}“It [CO2 hypothesis] is an absolutely certain fact’”.
Your paradoxical statement is good for discussion. Which I think will now be expanded upon in this thread. It offers us a valuable learning experience in how to avoid framing statements which are problematical scientifically.
John
John Whitman:
You do not state any paradox in my comment because it contains no paradox.
And the absence of any paradox is why you are wrong when you assert this nonsense.
My comment is here and anybody can read it to see for themselves that it does not provide any paradox.
The only pertinent issue worthy of discussion is why you are posting your untrue nonsense.
Richard
richardscourtney,
Here is the conclusion of yours which I found to be a “bizarre intellectual paradox”,
It looks like the conclusion of yours (which I quoted) is a paradox based on the following good sampling of various definitions of the concept ‘paradox’.
. . . and . . .
. . . and . . .
So, Richard, paradoxical? Congratulations.
I will leave you with these two paradoxical quotes from Lewis Carol (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson):
“Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
John
John Whitman:
There is no paradox and you do not state one.
You say my clear, logical and explained conclusion “seems illogical” to you but that tells about you and nothing else.
As my explanation began by saying
YOUR INSUFFICIENT INTELLIGENCE TO UNDERSTAND THIS DOES NOT MAKE IT “PARADOXICAL”.
Richard
If that is even close to accurate then every Hockeystick chart published is wrong. Once again, here is the chart from the IPCC. Read the description.
a) Instrumental data 1902 to 1999
b) Reconstruction 1000 to 1980
c) Instrumental value 1998
http://www.klimaskeptiker.info/img/hockeystick.gif
If what you are saying, that he had the instrumental data, why isn’t that identified on the chart? If he had the data to “calibrate” why didn’t he just use the actual values? More importantly, just what kind of thermometer did he us to calibrate the year 1000AD data? Facts are you are wrong.
co2islife, you clearly have no idea how temperature reconstructions are made. You’re criticizing the hockey stick without having the slightest idea how it was made, despite claiming it was made in a fraudulent manner. And then you’re saying things like:
Anyone who knows the slightest detail about how a reconstruction like this gets made knows proxies get calibrated against the modern instrumental record as part of the process of combining them into the reconstruction. The proxies can’t just be combined with one another as you don’t know how they’d be related to one another. You need some commonality, such as the instrumental record, to try to establish a relationship between them.
To accomplish that, Mann used the instrumental record from 1902 to 1980 to put all of his proxies in what he considered to be a common scale, namely, temperature. This calibration was intended to put them on a common scale for their entire records, as far back as 1000 AD. This is all very basic stuff, so when you say things like:
You just sound stupid. Asking why someone didn’t use the calibration data instead of the data they’re calibrating? That’s just… And your last question? You clearly don’t know what calibration is.
I swear, I don’t think there’s been a person on this page who has accurately criticized Michael Mann or his work. What is going on? Mann did a lot of horrible things. It’s not hard to point real problems out.
But you also have put down Mark Steyn who has written a brilliant book – its top of the hit parade of books published on climate. He didn’t publish the dragon-slayer sciency put down that apparently you claim to have done. However he collected an unexpectedly large number of heavy duty put downs of Mann and his hockey stick that are not well known on the ‘outside’ that I think is going to generate a paradigm shift in the “debate”. These fellows, some of whom one could say have been ‘outed’ with their opinions, are just what is needed to get a critical mass of criticism of the whole mess. Others will feel safer coming forward, young scientists will be emboldened. Please, Brandon, you are destroying your own reputation, probably a bit put out by this upstart invading what you see as your territory. Please rejoice at the new node in history that this man has created.
Also, accept that this is certainly as much Mark’s fight given that he is being clubbed over the head by a multi-million buck law suit stick from this odious personage. You have done your stuff, ok (but on this thread you are undoing it all). Now step back and enjoy your introduction to one of the world’s brightest lights, a one man wrecking crew in action. This guy is a freedom fighter for free speech that isn’t an egghead. He’s been sued before and the result was the quashing of a statute in Canada. He receives death threats like you receive junk mail in your post box. Let’s judge the guy by results, soon to be forthcoming.
Gary Pearse:
It isn’t a brilliant book. It’s a terrible book. If “skeptics” were actually being skeptical or applying their stated standards of honesty and accuracy to the book, they’d be condemning it, not praising it.
Except his book contains so many mistakes and misrepresentations it won’t work. It’ll be easy for people on the other “side” to argue against the book as all they have to do is paint Steyn as a person who has no idea what he’s talking about who just cherry-picks quotes that sound good without understanding what they actually mean, much less what any of the real issues are.
I’m not going to “rejoice” at a bad book with tons of errors being published and widely embraced so it can spread a great deal of misinformation. If Steyn had written a good book, I’d be praising and celebrating it. The sad fact of the matter is, he didn’t. He wrote a bad book, and as such, I’m not going to praise it.
If this book is any indication, Steyn isn’t a champion of free speech. He’s just a bully who likes to be able to say whatever he wants without any fear of consequence. Any true advocate for free speech knows it has reasonable limits, and they’d at least consider those limits when arguing for it. One of those limits is you don’t flagrantly make things up to trash people’s reputations – which Styen has done in this book.
You can love the guy. You can hate me. I don’t care. This book is a piece of trash, and if you actually cared about skepticism rather than tribalism, you’d see that.
why isn’t that identified on the chart?
It is, it’s the red line as is clearly stated on the graph!
“We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.” (Lord Oxburgh)
This is from the report into the matter sought by UEA to investigate possible wrongdoings by Phil Jones, c.s.
Mann claims that that report exonerates him (and Jones). But to me the quote means something much more profound and damaging than what Mann does not read in it, or does not want to read in it: Lord Oxburgh says in the nicest possible words: you (Mann, Jones, the whole caboodle) were out of your depth. (full stop).
Now that is something Mark Steyn ought to use when he gives his evidence in his court case.
Richard and Brandon,
There still seems to be some confusion over Mike’s Nature Trick and the splice, so here are the relevant parts of Steve McIntyre’s post on the details:
Begin quote:
The trick is clearer in MBH99. The graphic in MBH98 (Nature) is much muddier and doesn’t show the trick as clearly. First, here is the (rather muddy) graphic from MBH98 showing the smooth:
Next, on the left is a blowup of the latter part of the above graph. The overprinted yellow line is an exact emulation of the MBH smooth obtained by splicing instrumental data after 1980 with proxy data up to 1980, followed by truncation after smoothing. (Here to about 1953.) If Mann had not spliced instrumental data after 1980, the smoothed series (following his methodology) would have looked like the version on the right – the orange line showing the result without the instrumental splice.
Although Mann and others have regularly described his “Nature” trick as nothing more than plotting both instrumental and reconstruction data in the same graphic, the “trick” was more than that: it was, as shown above, the splicing of instrumental data with proxy data prior to smoothing. On one occasion however, Mann implictly conceded the Climate Audit exegesis of his Nature trick, stating in an inline comment at realclimate as follows:
“In some earlier work though (Mann et al, 1999), the boundary condition for the smoothed curve (at 1980) was determined by padding with the mean of the subsequent data (taken from the instrumental record).”
End quote
To see the figures go to: http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/29/keiths-science-trick-mikes-nature-trick-and-phils-combo/
So Mann seems to admit the splice before smoothing. But, either way the splice was done, he didn’t just plot them together as some of you seem to think. I hope this clarifies the issue. I think most of the debate of splice or no splice, documentation or no documentation in the caption to figure 5 is simply semantic. But, the root of the deception by Mann (and perhaps Briffa) is that they spliced the instrument record on to the end of a proxy, smoothed the resulting dataset and presented it as a proxy. They did present and identify the raw instrument data in addition, but that was window dressing. The criminal splice happened earlier, be fore the smoothing. McIntyre shows the results with the instrument data spliced and without, they are very different. They committed this fraud in several papers and in the IPCC TAR.
Andy May, you somehow fail to note what you just described is not what you described in your post or what Mark Steyn described in his book, yet it is what I described. Or at least, it is if we append to your description the important qualifier that Mann truncated the smoothed series at the original ending point, something you failed to note. So I guess the real problem is you’re still not describing what was done accurately.
This is not simply splicing temperatures onto the proxy record like you and Steyn claim. It’s called padding the proxy record for smoothing purposes. The authors shouldn’t have used the instrumental record for the padding, but that doesn’t justify you and Steyn grossly exaggerating what was done. As for your comment:
And perhaps Briffa? If you’re going to write a post telling people what was done, you should be able to know who did what. It’s not very difficult. Briffa’s series were truncated to cover up the “divergence problem.” Mann padded his proxy reconstruction with the instrumental record for smoothing purposes as a trick to “hide the decline.” Jones combined these two procedures together when making the WMO graph. That sums it up.
But you’ll note, Mann did not splice two series then present them as one. He merely used one series as padding for another when smoothing it. And as for:
No McIntyre did not. What McIntyre did was show results you get if you use the instrumental record as padding and the results you get if you use something else as padding. Just what that “something else” would be is an arbitrary choice, so there is no single answer one can provide. You can come up with any number of alternatives. They’ll all look different than what Mann came up with, but some will also look different than what McIntyre came up with.
I guess there is no convincing you, we just have to disagree.
I read Steyn’s book a couple of weeks ago on a vacation in Iceland (went there to hide from the warming!). I was skeptical at first but the format, being short two and three page vignettes, made it easy to pick up and put down.
Naturally, the big reason to write the book was for Steyn to slam Michael Mann because of the lawsuit…and he did it with gusto. But it answered a few questions I have had for a while.
One of them is the CRU E Mails. As a non science person (engineer…Howard, not Sheldon) I never understood the big deal about these E Mails. Now I get it.
Another useful thing it did was to characterize Mann as the neophyte that he really was back when all of this hit the fan.
But mostly, it tells the story of the discrediting of the hockey stick. Unfortunately, once it served its purpose of giving climate science a relatable image that was used to sell this miserable science to so many world leaders, the fact that it became disproven was irrelevant. The “science” had stuck by then and leaders are charging forward, ignoring the fact that this science becomes more and more questionable with each passing year.
Good book, though. Worth the read.
IMO the statistics of the HS and other “climate science” icons are intentionally incompetent. “Climate scientists” could have sought professional statistical help if they wanted good data handling. Surely they knew they weren’t up to it, but plainly didn’t care. Or if they were, they purposely fudged.
They’re frauds, charlatans and hoaxsters of the lowest order.
Steyn covers this nicely.
Also statistical incompetents, but they could have fixed that if they wanted to, by hiring competent help.
Brandon Shollenberger wrote:
1) Mann chose to discontinue to use the proxy data when the instrumental data diverged from the proxy data. That is fraud. “Hiding the decline” and “Nature trick” are statistically fraudulent methods. The very fact that he acknolodged that the proxy was faulty, and yet let it remain in parts of the data reconstruction is undeniable evidence of cherry picking. Cherry picking is an example of fraudulent statistics.
https://youtu.be/JlCNrdna9CI
2) When instrumental data is available it should be used instead of the proxy, not in combination with it. There are plenty of temperature data sets for the N Hemisphere. The IPCC, NOAA, NASA have temperature records going back to 1860 that cover the N Hemisphere. Why do these organizations not use the Hockeystick Chart data post 1850?
http://myweb.uiowa.edu/rhorwitz/images/globaltemps.jpg
3) This temperature data goes back to the mid 1600s. It is obvious why Mann didn’t include it.
http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/CentralEngland_UK_Large.gif
4) For him to completely drop all the proxy data from the set in 1980, you would have to make the case that all the regions covered by the proxy data now have thermometer data available, and you would need to show that as temperature data became available the select proxy sets were dropped. Can you provide evidence that Mann gradually replaced the proxy data with thermometer data?
5) Before Mann the scientific evidence pointed to a Medieval Warming and Little Ice age. Mann’s chart erased all of that. In no other field of science in the history of man has the tyranny of the status quo been so easily defeated. It is a joke to think one research paper can erase all the prevailing evidence without any scrutiny or reproducibility.
co2islife August 31, 2015 at 3:06 pm
1) Mann chose to discontinue to use the proxy data when the instrumental data diverged from the proxy data.
I suggest you read the Mann paper, it is linked above, the proxy data was not discontinued in 1980, the ‘training period’ with the instrumental data was ended in 1980 because many of the proxy series end in 1980 or shortly thereafter.
3) This temperature data goes back to the mid 1600s. It is obvious why Mann didn’t include it.
Yet if you read the paper you’ll see that temperature data was used for “verification back to 1820 in all cases and back through the mid and early eighteenth century in many cases”
Brandon Shollenberger wrote:
It never happened? Just how do you think the chart got the name “Hockeystick?” The sharp bend ie dog leg occurs to the year that thermometer data is added. Temperature data existed before 1903, but it wasn’t included. Only when thermometer data is added does it take a sharp turn upward. What happens if you keep using the proxies? You get a decline that needs to be hidden by using a nature trick.
Are you a dog leg denier?
http://www.klimaskeptiker.info/img/hockeystick.gif
1) The IPCC no longer uses this chart for good reason.
2) He was collaborating with Briffa in their research, clearly they both were impacting each others work. Why did Briffa then change his results?
3) What is magical about 1903, what is magical about 1980? Nothing. Those dates were simply chosen to create a graph that gave the desired results. Why use proxy and thermometer data together? Because it gave the desired results. Why drop proxy data in 1980? Because it gives the desired results.
4) There have been countless temperature reconstructions and only 1 before 2000 showed a Hockeystick. Were all researchers before Mann simply incompetent? Was the IPCC incompetent when they published this chart in 1990 before the Hockeystick?
5) Why was the Hockeystick never discovered before 1999? Why do the ice core data not support such claims? Why does the archaeological evidence not support the Hockeystick? Why does the written record and art work not support the Hockeystick?
Frozen Venice
http://www.standeyo.com/NEWS/10_Earth_Changes/10_Earth_Changes_pics/100110.little.ice.age.jpg
Here is another one:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c01a3fd2b88ba970b-pi
Brandon Shollenberger wrote:
Are you kidding? You might want to tell Michael Mann that. The error bands on his Hockeystick represented by the gray lines are clearly wider for the pure proxy data, and become almost non-existent when he goes to pure instrument data. Proxies by definition are less accurate than the direct measurement. Proxies are estimates of estimates. Proxies by definition are second choices, they are alternative measurements, they are better than nothing.
http://www.klimaskeptiker.info/img/hockeystick.gif
Brandon Shollenberger writes:
1) You are wrong
2) Steve McIntyre pretty much proves the Hockeystick is pure garbage
3) No temperature reconstruction before the Hockeystick excluded the little ice age and Medieval warming period
4) Cherry picking is fraud
5) Using bully tactics in the Peer Review process is fraud
6) Read the Climategate email, that field of science is as corrupt as they come
No kidding. Are you telling me that Proxies are actually related to what they are trying to represent? Wow, that is really earth shattering news. No kidding, temperature proxies are calibrated to temperatures. Problem is, as Mann found out, there are many many more factors than temperature that impact proxies like tree rings, coral and ice cores. When calibrating tree rings you can’t just use temperature you also must use humidity and other factors. Mann seemed to forget that, and that is why the whole “hide the decline and nature trick” came into play. Temperatures went up, proxies went down, he dropped the proxy FOR THAT SELECTED PERIOD. That is fraud. How did he know that didn’t happen in the rest of the data set when temperature records didn’t exist to alert him of the divergence?
Really, that is nice. You seem to ignore the fraud. He deleted the proxy data when it didn’t didn’t jive with the temperature data. That is fraud. Just what do you think “hide the decline and nature trick” imply? Honest statistics? You can’t pick and choose when to use proxy data and when not to. There isn’t 1,000 years of temperature data to alert you when you have a divergence. He could only identify the divergence over the past 100 years. He only edited the past 100 year for the divergences. What about the other 900? Briffa had the same proxies and got totally different results. The proves the proxies he is using are unreliable and inconsistent at best. You don’t reject every temperature reconstruction ever created based upon faulty proxies. That isn’t how science works. This is from the 1990 IPCC. You don’t get to reject this based upon un-reproducable data. Only people that take the same flawed data sets and apply the same flawed statistics end up with a Hockeystick. McIntyre demonstrated that a random data set will give you a hockeystick using the Mann data and statistics. Key is, no one before Mann ever created a Hockeystick. On honest scientist ever will in the future.
?w=700
Once again, he deleted and adjusted data based upon divergences between the proxy and the temperature record. How did he make those adjustments when temperature records didn’t exist. Simple answer? HE DIDN’T That is fraud. He only made adjustments for the past 100 years. We have no way of knowing how many time the data diverged in the past, the Briffa proves the proxies they were using gave inconsistent results. Mann, by consulting Briffa on how to Hide the Decline and use a Nature Trick clearly was must have adjusted his own data, and was instructing Briffa on how to corrupt his data as well. That is also called collusion in any other field. In business these Men would be behind bars.
https://youtu.be/JlCNrdna9CI
Brandon Shollenberger writes while hooked to an IV Drip of AGW Kool-Aid:
20% of the proxies were instrumental data? Just what kind of instrumental data is a tree ring, ice core or coral? Why does the chart specify that instrumental data isn’t used until 1903? Are all the charts mislabeled? I still don’t understand why thermometer data wasn’t used before 1903? Care to explain that? Did Mann not know that the IPCC had thermometer records going back to the 1850s? Did Michal Mann not know about the EA CRU, NASA and NOAA? Has Michael Mann been living under a rock and simply not aware that these data sets existed? Does Michal Mann not know how to use the internet? Please explain to me and everyone else why thermometer data was excluded prior to 1903? Please explain why no one until Mann discovered the Hockeystick pattern of temperatures? Please explain why all temperature reconstructions prior to 1999 were invalidated because of Mann. Is that really how science works to you? Some hack rewrites history on an epic scale and we are to just believe him? Is this blind faith science?
1) No independently created, unbiased and objective temperature reconstruction in the past or the future will ever reproduce the Hockeystick. It simply took way too many customized statistical techniques totally foreign to real science. The only way the Hockeystick is reproducible is if you use the same garbage data and the same garbage statistical methods.
2) The Hockeystick totally rejects 100% of all temperature reconstructions up to 1999 and after. That alone makes this a highly likely fraud on the level of the Piltdown Man and/or Cold Fusion.
3) Even the instrumental data in this “Science” have disagreements. Satellite data show a “pause.”
4) CO2 has its greatest impact when increasing from a very low level. The CO2 increase from 180 to 250 over the past 900 years did absolutely noting according to the Hockeystick, and yet when CO2 went from 250 to 350 it caused run away warming. Simply go to MODTRAN and calculate this out. The Hockeystick is 100% contrary to the absorptive behavior of CO2. CO2 traps less heat at higher concentrations. The marginal impact of CO2 is much less at 350 ppm than 180 ppm. Mann’s Hockeystick defies physics.
http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/
co2islife September 1, 2015 at 3:33 pm
20% of the proxies were instrumental data? Just what kind of instrumental data is a tree ring, ice core or coral? Why does the chart specify that instrumental data isn’t used until 1903? Are all the charts mislabeled? I still don’t understand why thermometer data wasn’t used before 1903? Care to explain that? Did Mann not know that the IPCC had thermometer records going back to the 1850s? Did Michal Mann not know about the EA CRU, NASA and NOAA? Has Michael Mann been living under a rock and simply not aware that these data sets existed? Does Michal Mann not know how to use the internet? Please explain to me and everyone else why thermometer data was excluded prior to 1903?
As pointed out before if you’d taken the trouble to read the paper you’d no that everything you say here is wrong!
Instrumental data prior to 1903 was used, data series going back as far as 1550 were used. The 1903-1980 period was used for ‘training’ the proxy data. The other data was used for verification outside that range.
Boo Hoo, Michael Mann claims that he has been attacked and treated unfairly. Clearly he hasn’t read the Climategate e-mails about his bully tactics, manipulation, collusion and exclusion.
https://youtu.be/06DdPb_DFo0
How does one “fudge” or “mis-represent” comments like the Mt Kilimanjaro glacier is disappearing due to sublimation? His description is so far from reality. He is an awful “scientist” and an even worst propagandist.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/22/al-gores-global-warming-claims-on-kilimanjaro-glacier-finally-dead-and-buried-in-the-climategate-2-0-emails-even-phil-jones-and-lonnie-thompson-dont-believe-it/
BTW, this chart implies that the Little Ice Age persisted until 1900, in fact the entire last 1000 years was a Little Ice Age that bottomed in 1900. This chart implies that the 1800s were colder than the little ice age era. is there any evidence of that? Did crop yield collapse in the 1800s? Is there any evidence what so ever that the 1800s were colder than the Little Ice Age era? is there any evidence that the late 1800s early 1900s were colder than the late 1700s and early 1800s? I doubt it. This chart is pure crap.
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/pics/MBHFig5b.png
I guess this never happened.
https://youtu.be/LObn2Sk7tVg
Watch the documentary in the previous post about the little ice age. The Hockey-stick
23:20 into the documentary. The Pope back then made similar mistakes regarding the weather and climate like the one is doing today. Here, I tagged the clip:
https://youtu.be/LObn2Sk7tVg?t=23m10s
The Hockey-stick shows a falling temperature from 1000 to 1900, with the later end of that period being the coldest. What evidence other than faulty proxies do we have as evidence? The only evidence is the fraudulent statistics of Michael Mann.
http://www.klimaskeptiker.info/img/hockeystick.gif
The Legacy of Michael Mann lives on:
http://www.onenewsnow.com/culture/2015/09/01/climatologist-obama-peddling-a-non-issue
BTW, the Hockey-Stick got past the Peer-Review process. Is that how “science” is now done? A few UN-elected corrupt scientists get to rewrite history, reject all findings before, bypass the tyranny of the status quo? The fact that the Hockey-Stick counts as “sound science” proves we need reform in the funding and review process of science. Michael Mann is giving the Government all it needs for further oversight of Science. That is the real harm this fraud had done. He has politicized science.
WUWT, you may want to commission an article about past climate decisions by the Pope and the Catholic Church. In this documentary they discuss how the Pope blamed Witches for the Little Ice Age. I tagged the clip here. It is in about 23 min 20 seconds. It would be a great reminder as to just how wrong the Pope has been in the past, and just how wrong he is today.
https://youtu.be/LObn2Sk7tVg?t=23m20s
Dr Sallie Baliunas also did something on Witchcraft and climate change. Unfortunately, my understanding is that the climate bullies have driven her from the field.
https://youtu.be/s3CjSBCahBc
https://youtu.be/VYDXFmEzZg0
https://youtu.be/Ib2ZlHakSkc?list=PLB23906671779C66E