Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Over at Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre is doing his usual superb job deconstructing bad science. In this case he is discussing the recent publication of the long-delayed “Pages2K” two-thousand-year multi-proxy study of ocean temperatures. The paper is called, “Robust global ocean cooling trend for the pre-industrial Common Era,” Helen McGregor, Michael Evans, et al., and it was published August 17, 2015 in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Steve has provided the R code for reconstructing their bizarre method of binning the data in 200-year bins, and then converting the values from degrees C to standard deviations. After going through all of that strange process to get their results, the second author opined in their press release:
Today, the Earth is warming about 20 times faster than it cooled during the past 1,800 years,” said Michael Evans, second author of the study and an associate professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology and Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC). “This study truly highlights the profound effects we are having on our climate today.”
And here is their money graph, the one that is supposed to show those results.
Figure 1. From the Pages2K study, showing their binned ocean temperature results in units of standard deviations.
It shows the data in 200-year bins, centered in the middle of each bin, so the first bin is from 0-200 AD and the last bin is from 1800-2000 AD. I saw that graph and I said “Huh?” The change from 1700 to 1900 is not anywhere near 20 times as steep as the drop from the start of the study to the present, as Michael Evans claims. That is simply not true.
However, his statement is clear evidence that they are desperately looking to find a “hockeystick” shape, and are trying any method to find a way to present their results so that they appear to support their alarmist claims.
In any case, I thought I’d take a bit of a different tack from that of the authors, and show their results by ocean, in the original units of degrees C. We won’t be needing any math at all, as I prefer to start my investigations by just using the Mark I Eyeball. Before we can begin to discuss how we might average or combine these records, we need to first see just exactly what each individual record looks like. Let me start by showing the Indian Ocean:
Figure 2. Indian Ocean results from the Pages2K study.
Warming 20 times faster than it cooled? According to the proxies, the Indian Ocean didn’t cool much if at all, and it didn’t warm much if at all. Those findings certainly do not agree with the author’s claims.
Next, here’s the Southern Ocean, the waters that encircle Antarctica.
Figure 3. Southern Ocean results from the Pages2K study.
This graph to me perfectly exemplifies the problem with their method of averaging proxies to discern past temperatures. You can see that two proxies start out within a half-degree of each other at 14.5°C-15°C … and one cools steadily for the entire record, while the other doesn’t cool at all. Obviously, both are unlikely to be correct … but which one (if either) is correct?
Then we have the bizarre trace down near Antarctica where the water is cold … it says that the temperatures warmed by about 7°C from the year zero to the year 900 … and then cooled down by 7°C from there to 1900 or so. Unlikely.
Does anyone really believe that if we just average these proxy records in some form that we will actually have an accurate measure of the temperature variation in the Southern Ocean? Because for me, that’s all “garbage in”, and no matter how you might standardize it or anomalize it or average it, you’ll still get “garbage out” for your purported Southern Ocean temperature.
In any case, moving on, we have the Mediterranean …
Figure 4. Mediterranean Ocean results from the Pages2K study.
This is getting ridiculous. In their unending quest to claim recent anthropogenic warming, they’ve included a short segment that shows strong warming from 1700 to almost 2000 … but the rest of the Med disagrees. One proxy goes level, one has a slight rise since about 1700, and one falls pretty steadily from 400 to 2000. Again, garbage in …
We have two proxies from the Arctic Ocean, viz:
Figure 5. Arctic Ocean results from the Pages2K study.
Hilarious. One shows recent warming, and one shows recent cooling, both starting about 1700. People take this seriously? Go figure.
The Pacific is next.
Figure 6. Pacific Ocean results from the Pages2K study. I’ve assigned random colors to the different proxies so that they can be distinguished.
I cannot object in strong enough terms to professionals passing this nonsense off as science. They’ve included several short segments that show the Pacific warming very rapidly, along with another short segment showing it warming and then cooling, and a final short segment that shows it not changing at all since the year 1300… how can anyone mistake this foolishness for actual scientific findings?
I do love the purple line at the bottom, though, showing the Pacific Ocean warming by about two degrees from the year 0 to the year 1380 … righty-o ….
And to round out the madness, here’re the Atlantic proxies …
Figure 7. Atlantic Ocean results from the Pages2K study.
These include a proxy that claims, in all seriousness, that an area of the Atlantic which had a temperature of 15°C in both the year 0 and the year 1800 had fallen by a whacking 5°C, and was down to 10°C, by 1920 … I’m sorry, but that’s simply not credible. Had it happened, we would have seen it in the observational record.
And strangely, almost all of the cooler Atlantic proxies (less than 22°C) show steady cooling from beginning to end … who knows why.
I’m sorry, but their study is just scientific onanism. There is no way that we can combine these 57 proxies, regardless of what technique we might use, and come out with a meaningful value for global ocean temperature changes.
But that’s just what they claim that they’ve done. They’re claiming that it’s simple, all they have to do take those crazy results from those six oceans, standardize them, take a weighted average based on the area of the ocean in question, and presto, they come up with the global ocean temperature history for the last 2,000 years …
I say that’s dumb as a bag of ball bearings.
Finally, I defy anyone to show me an anthropogenic effect anywhere in these results. Most of the proxies that cover the period 1900-2000 show cooling temperatures, not warming temperatures as the authors claim.
Steve McIntyre continues to parse the study, and I’m sure will have further interesting results. I can’t recommend his site highly enough.
My best wishes to everyone, we now return you to my regularly scheduled holiday … at this moment the railroad train is coming by our tent, and the whistle is loud enough to make your eyes water.
Williams, Arizona.
w.
PS—Is there valuable information in these 57 proxies? I would say yes, very likely so … but they will never find it using those methods. Instead, each proxy needs to be considered on its own merits, and whatever value it might have needs to be considered and determined without reference to the others.
AS USUAL: If you disagree with someone, please have the courtesy to quote the exact words you object to. That way, we can all understand both who and what you are replying to.
DATA AND CODE: Available at Steve McIntyre’s site, linked to above.
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Good post, Willis, but is anyone who wants to believe the hockeystick interpretation going to listen? The supposed “20 times” slope is miniscule compared to its error bars, as is every other movement in the graph. ie, as you have pointed out, the whole thing is complerely meaningless.
Willows? Where are you, actually?
Ne’er mind, just caught up with the travelogue. Willow Beach, now I know where you are.
My bad, Reality. I was at Willows Beach, now I’m at Williams. I’ve fixed the text.
w.
If you mean the train going to the Grand Canyon, its a great ride if you have grandchildren along. It will never equal the Durango to Silverton ride in Colorado. They do stage a train robbery. I bet you are enjoying the change in temperature, however. Hope you are camping at the Grand Canyon. It is a much better experience and keeps you within 5 to 10 minutes of The Canyon rim.
Michael Evans needs to explain EACTLY what he was referring to in his comment or retract it.
No he doesn’t.
It’s climate science.
In order for the law of large numbers to apply to the error bars, you have to, well, have large numbers.
Let me know when they have thousands of proxies.
Peter
A while back this graphic now widely distributed showed proxies being all over he map.
The graphic shows me in the dastardly act of digitizing the proxies. One could conclude, as many have, that proxies are completely worthless. Thing is, they were from very different places. Some proxies (seemingly now including 14C) are clearly bad, but others just report REGIONAL variations.
One of the interesting results of the digitization is the following.
Greenland and Vostok are kinda antiphase, but not really. Was looking for correlations with Eurasian civilizations over all the proxies. None really found. It’s complicated. Don’t put all your money on any one proxy.
You don’t see a lot of papers where even the very first word of the title is totally false.
I noticed that, too. Marketing in the title.
“The change from 1700 to 1900 is not anywhere near 20 times as steep as the drop from the start of the study to the present, as Michael Evans claims.”
Michael Evans does not claim that. 200 year binned proxies obviously cannot be relied on to measure late 20th century warming. He said that the Earth is warming fast now, but did not cite claim proxies as the the evidence. The instrumental data showing the modern warming is well-known. The paper is about the cooling period, as the title says.
Here is the Ocean2K press release which doesn’t claim any kind of hockey stick.
Nick
It may be that Willis has mis-stated the paper, but my reading of what Willis has stated is that the last bin does not cover the period 1700 to 1900 (as you state) but rather the period 1800 to 2000,
Willis states: “It shows the data in 200-year bins, centered in the middle of each bin, so the first bin is from 0-200 AD and the last bin is from 1800-2000 AD”
Of course, the final bin cannot tell one much as to what is happening say post 1950s to date (if for no other reason that the data for 2000 to 2015 is not included, and the data for the last quarter could be choked by the data for the first three quarters of the period). But the land based temperature record suggests that the planet was in a cooling cycle between say 1940 and sometime in 1970, and the data from that period is within the last bin (1800 to 2000).
Of course, for the period 2000 to 2015, temperatures (according to most temperature data sets, at least before the very recent adjustment with buoy data, showed that temperatures were fairly flat with no or miniscule warming.
The main problem is that this is simply proxy data, and all proxy data needs to be taken with a large dollop of salt.
What are the real errors, +/- 2degC, or perhaps +/- 4degC, or possibly even more than that?
When two proxies which are supposed to be measuring the same data show opposite trends, one knows that one is in real problems with the reliability and worth of the proxy data.
In other words, Nick, he’s grafting the instrumental record on to the end of the proxy record … and you seem to think that’s OK???
In the same quote he says:
But if, as you say, “200 year binned proxies obviously cannot be relied on to measure late 20th century warming”, then his statement is clearly wrong. His study cannot tell us anything about today, so why is he comparing it to today?
Nick, you always want to get all lawyerish. But he hasn’t even given us the information to determine if it is true. His results are in STANDARD DEVIATIONS. Please explain to us how he has determined from a graph in STANDARD DEVIATIONS how fast the earth was warming compared to the present.
You’re just flailing trying to defend this, Nick. There’s lots of better targets for your intelligence.
w.
Willis,
You wrote “However, his statement is clear evidence that they are desperately looking to find a “hockeystick” shape, and are trying any method to find a way to present their results so that they appear to support their alarmist claims.”
You should not tar all the authors, or the work itself, with the irresponsible comment made by one author. The “press release” you link to does not even seem to be the official press release. The one Nick links does seem to be the official release and does not include the offending quote by Evans. It talks only about the long term trend – no hockey stick in sight.
Any criticism of the paper should be based on what is in the paper. The method sounds fishy to me, but combining proxies is a far from trivial task and I do not claim to know the correct way to do it. I am pretty sure that applying the eyeball test to the individual proxies, plotted on inappropriate vertical scales, is not the way to do it. At most it casts doubt on the claim that the result is “robust”. But I think that a critical look at the Ocean2k “money graph” does that. I will be interested in seeing what McIntyre concludes since he has the requisite skill set.
“Nick, you always want to get all lawyerish. But he hasn’t even given us the information to determine if it is true”
Willis, the lawyerishness is in the approach of McIntyre. Yes, he hasn’t given us the information to determine that it is true. It is a remark in a press release, not a scientific paper.
But he, and his audience, know well the large amount of instrumental data that show temperatures have risen recently. And he is contrasting that rate of rise with the slow decline seen in the earlier proxy record. He could have been clearer. But trying to examine the proxy data for evidence of a hockey stick that it can’t possibly show (resolution), rather than just using a bit of common sense to figure out what he is really saying, is just a time waster.
Nick Stokes says “[..] instrumental data that show temperatures have risen recently. And he is contrasting that rate of rise with the slow decline seen in the earlier proxy record.”
You just “can’t” do that. The resolution is totally different. In the past there could have been any number of temperature changes just like that in the instrumental data and they simply would not show up in the proxy data. So you simply cannot compare the two.
“In the past there could have been any number of temperature changes just like that in the instrumental data and they simply would not show up in the proxy data.”
That is a reasonable response to someone using that to say that something like modern warming could not have happened in those millennia. But he didn’t say that. He said:
“Today, the Earth is warming about 20 times faster than it cooled during the past 1,800 years”
He’s simply comparing two observed rates.
Nick Stokes quotes:
Today, the Earth is warming about 20 times faster than it cooled during the past 1,800 years
Nick, that is so self-serving. Why limit it to 1,800 years ago? Let’s go back to just before the Holocene began:
http://oi43.tinypic.com/1zoanbc.jpg
R.B. Alley shows very rapid cooling. Also rapid warming of 15ºC — within a decade or two! That occurred naturally, and it happened before humans were emitting anything but trace amounts of the trace gas CO2.
You will never stop arguing that dangerous man-made global warming is happening. But we can see that nothing unprecedented is happening. Everything we observe now has happened in the past, repeatedly, and to a greater degree than now.
Question: what would it take for you to admit that your belief in dangerous AGW is wrong? Could anything convince you? Or are your conclusions firmly in place, and now you’re just looking for any corroborating factoids?
Wow, seriously? How does someone at this site compare something like the Younger Dryas interval to modern warning as though that disproves the idea modern global warming could be dangerous? There’s so much wrong with that idea I wouldn’t know where to begin. It’s jaw dropping in its absurdity. Can we please have some standards here?
Or who am I kidding? This entire topic was made to criticize a paper it’s clear nobody here had even bothered to look at. What standards could there possibly be?
Brandon S,
I was merely responding to one specific comment, which I quoted – not the entire paper. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say a single word about that. Look up ‘strawman fallacy’.
I was replying to Nick Stokes quoting what I regard as a cherry-picked time frame. (I also asked him a question, but I doubt he’ll answer it.)
You really need to get a grip, Brandon. You’re arguing with everyone here. You even implied that Willis has never read the paper. I know Willis well enough to know he invariably has his ducks in a row. So why do you feel the need to expand your circle of enemies like that? Big downside, with no profit. And you did it with Anthony a few days ago. You did not used to be like this. What happened?
If I was an evil guy, Brandon, it would be easy to spin you up. All I did was to point out that picking a start time of 1,800 years ago is really convenient for the argument being made. But looking at a longer time frame makes that argument nonsense.
Finally, I am not trying to ‘prove’ that man-made global warming (MMGW) is dangerous. What I have done consistently is to challenge anyone to produce measurements of MMGW, and/or to show any global damage, or harm, from the CO2 being emitted.
So far, no takers. Thus, reasonable folks will say that ‘dangerous MMGW’ is an unproven conjecture, and that more CO2 is apparently harmless.
If I’m wrong about those things, post evidence: produce empirical, testable measurements quantifying MMGW out of all global warming, and/or produce observations that more CO2 is causing global harm. Can you do either one?
“Nick, that is so self-serving. Why limit it to 1,800 years ago?”
Well, as you said, I’m just quoting the paper, which is the topic of this article. And the paper was concerned with a period for which they could estimate whole ocean SST, not just a location in Greenland. Unlike blog commentators, scientists have to focus. I try to focus, too.
dbstealey, try removing the beam from your own eye:
I didn’t claim you said a word about the paper this topic is about. I said:
That is about global warming, dangerous or otherwise, in general. I then made a comment about this topic, separate from that paragraph, not in reference to you. So don’t tell me:
When you can’t even be bothered to read what I say. I clearly didn’t say anything like what you claim I said, yet you still accused me of using a strawman fallacy and told me to “get a grip.” As for Willis Eschenbach, he clearly didn’t read the paper or else he wouldn’t have said the untrue things about it he has said. That is, unless you’re going to claim he knowingly said untrue things about the paper…? I’ll note you haven’t actually addressed any of the points I raised about this post, so it can’t be that you’re claiming I’m wrong regarding them.
As for your question:
I wasn’t aware criticizing people when they were wrong would “expand [my] circle of enemies.” I didn’t realize I had to worry about downsides of my actions or the hope for profits from them. But guess what, you’re wrong when you say:
I have always been like this. I just didn’t read this site before so I don’t know if you guys behaved like this before or not. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you’ve changed. Maybe you haven’t, and I just didn’t see you guys do what you do now. Either way, if I had seen what I see nowadays, I’d have said the same things I say now.
But dear god, the idea I’m expanding a circle of enemies and losing profits? Do you realize how disgusting that sounds? I don’t think you could make this sound more tribalistic if you tried.
Brandon S,
I then made a comment about this topic, separate from that paragraph, not in reference to you.
Actually, I replied to Nick Stokes, and you stepped in and started to argue. I don’t mind that, but your comment was a direct reference to mine.
I was merely responding to one specific comment, which I quoted when I replied to Nick quoting what I regarded as a cherry-picked time frame. I disputed that and posted a reference.
Anyway, in re-reading my comments here, I have to say they still reflect what I think. You’ve become much more argumentative, even while arguing that you’re not.
You’re starting to remind me of another Brandon, whose M.O. is to take each sentence from a comment and argue about it. I’m not taking that bait. My comment that you started arguing about was intended to show how silly the ’20X faster cooling’ claim was. That’s all.
But if I’m not mistaken, it looks like you think there may be evidence that the modern warming might be “dangerous”. Is that what you think? Because if so, that’s something I’d like to discuss, rather than having you argue on behalf of Nick.
dbstealey, you made a comment about the Younger Dryas interval and how it impacts how we should interpret whether or not global warming may be dangerous. I commented on that, then separately commented on this post. You responded:
I never claimed you said a word about “the entire paper.” As far as I know, you never said a word about the paper. Your claim that I used a strawman fallacy to say you have was baseless. To now say:
Is to just further misrepresent things. The fact I addressed your comment while talking about things does not mean your comment was the only thing talked about.
That’s fine. You can address what I said or you can not. The simple reality is you’ve misrepresented what I said in a trivially obvious way anyone with an open mind would recognize. If you’re not going to address it, there’s no reason for me to talk to you about some other topic as you’re obviously not going to behave reasonably in a discussion if you can’t be bothered to acknowledge what people do and do not say.
When someone tells you you’ve misrepresented what they’ve said, the correct response is to try to resolve things, not to try to change the subject. That’s just how civil discussions work.
Brandon,
You’re misreading what I wrote regarding the “entire paper”, whether deliberately or not I don’t know. But I’m not going to get into an endless nitpicking back-and-forth with you, and I misrepresented nothing. If you didn’t understand, my apologies for not being clearer.
As I said, I’m happy to discuss it if your belief is that there is “dangerous” man-made global warming happening — or even if you think there might be a danger of that. But it’s undeniable that you have been getting into constant arguments with Willis, and Anthony, and me, and others. I don’t know why, but it’s there.
What got me started was your comment that I was comparing…
…the Younger Dryas interval to modern warming as though that disproves the idea modern global warming could be dangerous
See, the problem I have with that statement is the idea that skeptics have something we need to “disprove”. I’m not proving or disproving anything. My post was simply intended to show that just prior to the current Holocene, global T naturally fluctuated by TENS of degrees, within only a decade or two.
I supposed that anyone reading that would understand that the tiny ≈0.7ºC wiggle over the past century and a half is nothing. It would be hard to find a century time span in the geological temperature record that was as flat as the past century, up to right now. What do you expect? A 0.000º change?? To use your own words:
There’s so much wrong with that idea I wouldn’t know where to begin. It’s jaw dropping in its absurdity.
If you meant something different, please say so. All I have to go on are your words.
dbstealey:
I didn’t misread anything. What you said was quite clear, and it was wrong. You can choose not to address the fact it was wrong, pretending this was all just a matter of poor wording or whatever else. You are free to choose not to address what I say in a direct manner. You are free to not try to resolve things. You are free to pretend to actually resolving disagreements would require “endless nitpicking back-and-forth with” me.
That’s your call. My call will be to not pretend people who misrepresent things in trivially obvious ways are having legitimate discussions. So when you actually try to address the things I say, we can have a discussion. Until then, you can go back to talking about how I’m expanding my circle of enemies and making unprofitable decisions by pointing out when people make posts about papers they haven’t even read. Because guess what? While you say:
Willis Eschenbach has now flat-out admitted he didn’t read the paper.
That’s right. After I made multiple comments about how Eschenbach’s writing made it clear he hadn’t read the paper he was criticizing, and after you made it sound horrible for me to imply he hadn’t read the paper he was criticizing, Eschenbach has now actually admitted he hadn’t read the paper he was criticizing.
So apparently I’m expanding my “circle of enemies” by saying things that are completely true. Ooooh. It sends shivers down my spine how people are going to hate me for… speaking the truth?
Brandon,
Brandon S. says:
I didn’t misread anything.
Sure you did. I documented it. You’re just tap-dancing now.
Really, Brandon, you have a problem with everyone. Some introspection is overdue.
To make it so clear even you can understand it; when you jumped in and asserted:
I didn’t claim you said a word about the paper this topic is about.
And I never said you did. I was replying to Nick Stokes, when you jumped in and made an issue out of what you presumed I meant. And you were flat wrong. My reply to you was this:
I was merely responding to one specific comment, which I quoted – not the entire paper. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say a single word about that. Look up ‘strawman fallacy’… I was replying to Nick Stokes quoting what I regard as a cherry-picked time frame.
I was explaining that my comment was to Nick Stokes’ posted quote, and that I was not referring to anything else. You keep trying to fabricate something that didn’t happen. No wonder you’re arguing with everyone. You have trouble understanding simple sentences.
Now that you’ve had it explained to you again, why don’t you finally answer my question: do you believe that ‘dangerous’ man-made global warming is happening, or that it is likely?
Hi Nick, I know you would agree with the importance of not propagandizing by misleading even if your words are parsed to be true. Michael Evans should have been clear that the “20 times as steep” climb has nothing to do with his research and thus should not be his headlined quote. A more candid headline would be Pages2K confirms overall trend of temperature decline for the most recent fifth of the current Quaternary interglacial epoch, aka the Holocene. Because the Pages2K tells neither the scientist not the curious public a thing about actual global temperature swings in 50-100-year frequencies, even taking the long assumption that the data is robust. (A very long assumption, looking at graphs.)
Ron,
The headline said “1,800 years of global ocean cooling halted by global warming”. That may well be referring to the slight upslope at the end. But they were clear about the basis for the 20x claim. As Brandon notes, they issued a FAQ, which said:
“4. The recent warming is larger ([|~1° C / ~-0.5° C| = 2) and more rapid by a factor of roughly 20: (| [~ +1° C/100 years]/[~ -0.5/1000 years] | = 20) than the volcanically induced cooling trend over the last 1-2 preceding millennia.”
And
” A more candid headline would be Pages2K confirms overall trend of temperature decline “
That was in fact the title of the paper:
“Robust global ocean cooling trend for the pre-industrial Common Era,”
Nick, I think you missed Brandon’s and my point: to compare a trend over an epochal period versus a trend over a half century tells nothing. It misleads the public when a scientist summarizes his group’s results as if it is meaningful. We have no idea how many or how steep the 50-year up-swings or downswings in the last 2000 years. It would be like proclaiming that 1998’s warming rate was 20X steeper than any on record as a news item in 1998, (which I wouldn’t doubt was done). It would mean nothing because we have so little record.
Actually Tony B’s work in the UK seems to show that steep up-swings and downswings are the norm there for the last millennium.
Ron,
The comparison isn’t particularly relevant to this particular study, and the Oceans2K press release didn’t feel the need to make it. But it isn’t pointless. We know there has been a recent global temperature rise, and the paleo studies are trying to see how this compares with the past, and in particular the recent millennia, which seem to have otherwise similar climate conditions. All proxies have issues – ice cores are only where there is ice, and tree rings also are fairly limited to temperature stressed environments. The Onean2K type proxies have less resolution but more coverage. No one study can rule out the possibility of a comparable global rise in the past, but it is reasonable to remark that this is yet another study showing fairly gradual change in comparison to modern warming.
As I’ve said below, I don’t think this comparison is valid. In fact, I’d go beyond that and say it is dishonest to compare these trendss as the author did. Not oly did the author use trends calculated over data with wildly different temporal resolution, the spatial resolution is strikingly different as well. You can only get the modern warming he uses if you include warming over land, meaning he’s comparing modern land+ocean to past ocean warming, a completely disingenuous comparison.
But again, issues like these can’t be examined so long as people like Willis Eschenbach make false and absurd claims. As long as people make easily refuted claims, the real problems will go unaddressed because the easily refuted claims are all anyone will discuss.
Nick, I think we both agree that proxies are troubled but its the only tool available to illuminate the relevance of the last 150 years in the larger picture. Where we disagree is in the public communication of the relevance of the study. Setting aside the numerous statistical problems with the study revealed at Climate Audit, the study gives absolutely zero information about 50-year swings and zero information about AGW. It was not designed to. So, for the second lead author to be using a statistical comparison of a vague 2000-year trend to the last 50 is misleading. To unskeptical minds he is saying there is significance simply because he is a climate scientist and he is uttering the words. I would be fine with Dr. Evan’s statement if he also gave the disclaimer that his statement means nothing. I hope you agree that he failed the Feynman ethics test there. But, for Evans to be saying the study underscores Man’s impact on the climate is purely indefensible (except with the disclaimer that he is very biased on the topic).
Brandon, if you mostly agree with Willis why not just point out the points where you think he’s gone too far?
If you agree that Pages2K gives absolutely no information as to whether we just had the warmest month in 2000 years, or the warmest half-year, or year, and if you agree that is the main newsworthy topic of the day, how many would be shocked hear such a thing from one of the Pages2K authors after hearing Evan’s statement?
Ron Graf:
I don’t “mostly agree with Willis.” I think by his fourth paragraph, Willis Eschenbach has misreprepresented what people have said, and I think it gets worse from there on. The fact I think this is a bad paper doesn’t require me explain all the problems with the paper every time somebody writes a series of misrepresentative criticisms of the paper which show he hasn’t even read the paper.
If Eschenbach had taken the time to try to understand the paper rather than just make wildly untrue claims about it, such as claiming the authors only worked in SD units rather than temperatures, when anyone who had read the paper would know the authors worked with both, then I would have taken more time to discuss the details of what he had gotten right and what he had gotten wrong. But if he’s not even going to read the paper before writing posts criticizing it, what possible point would there be in writing a detailed response? It’s not like I can expect him or anyone here to actually read it.
I don’t agree “that is the main newsworthy topic of the day” as nobody claimed it provided any information of the sort.
If I were a reporter and have been hearing news blasts all year from NASA and NOAA that we are having the hottest year, hottest six months then the hottest month ever, wouldn’t you be curious why a scientist who just published data analysis that could confirm this for the last 2000 years did not take the opportunity to state that? If I were a skeptical journalist I would have asked:
1) How probable is it that we are having the warmest year in 2000 years?
2) Has our increase in temp for the last 50 years really made up for 2000 years of natural decline?
3) If the natural trend is decline should we have expected a warming after the Little Ice Age?
4) When was our interglacial naturally due to end?
5) Do you believe there have been warming periods in the last 8,000 years after the Holocene optimum?
6) Is there not proxy evidence for a Minoan Warming Period, a Roman Warming Period and a Medieval one?
7) Didn’t your study start during Roman times?
8) Did your proxies show any warming periods?
9) Is it possible that mixing poor proxies with good ones and switching from units C to SI and back to C in a statistically flawed manner has degraded your data into a near hockey stick handle?
10) Even if all your proxy were valid and analysis flawless don’t the error bars indicate how high or low actual temperatures may have swung had thermometers been there to measure them?
Yet I fear reporters likely will enhance the author’s verbal claim by a neat idea of pasting a fire-red upward curve at the end of the long gradual line.
Ah, the old splice modern cooked records onto the proxy “trick” then… Thanks for clarifying that, Nick.
Amazing stuff, Willis. I have read Steve M’s initial report over at Climate Audit and I was pretty impressed by his work, as usual (There are some great and informative comments as well). But your no-nonsense presentation is as eye-popping as the railroad noise. Sometimes an incisive mind like yours is necessary to make us think intelligently. I would never have thought to present it in the way you have done.
Your proposition, put simply, is that ‘this method is nonsense’ and it sure looks like it from here. I have to keep an open mind, so I’ll be waiting for a pertinent response from the authors. If it doesn’t come, I might start getting suspicious!
By the way, I think Evans’ comment about the 20 x faster warming can only refer to a bit of advanced math comparing the 2000 year cooling trend they claim to find against the 1970-2000 30 year uptick in the thermometer record. Just more nonsense of course but it’s the sound bite that will count. He’d likely have preferred to splice the actual late 20th century temperatures on to the end of his graph but must have been told that that might get noticed…..
“Earth is warming about 20 times faster than it cooled during the past 1,800 years”
Claims cost no money.
Lies, lies and statistics…
To get future funding they have to deliver results that are conform or support the cultural Marxistic idea that we have CAGW.
Climate “scientists” use statistics like a drunk uses light posts… for support, not illumination!
HAHAHA. Good one. 🙂
That is not all they do to light posts.
And even if it was true, correlation doesn’t mean causation.
Excellent article. So easy to understand even a climate scientist could follow it.
The interpretation of what Michael Evans means when he says, “Today, the Earth is warming about 20 times faster than it cooled during the past 1,800 years,”, that was truly robust.
It is proof that he is biased in his interpretation and proxy selection – good catch.
And once again this is another failure for the peer review process. Mixing those proxies is clearly meaningless.
When will journals that blunder like Nature Geoscience have take responsibility and perform a root cause investigation?
Nature Geoscience wouldn’t get ISO accreditation. So it’s findings shouldn’t be used for Government planning.
As a sting operation, someone should submit a totally made-up study based on shaky (read ‘robust’) statistics and see if it gets accepted for publication.
Nick apparently can’t.
Or more likely he can and wants to limit the damage.
Vacation???
The belief that ‘averaging’ everything reveals the meaning of life is one of the most common bits of nonsense in academic studies, and needs to be summarily disposed of.
+1. The average of garbage is smellier garbage
I like the idea of the average New York telephone number.
When you mix all the colours on a painters palette and stir, you find that “average” colour is shit-brown. Data is much the same.
When you mix all the colours on a painters palette and stir, you find that “average” colour is shitty brown. Data is much the same.
The second most common bit of nonsense is that fitting a trend line to the data gives the meaning of life.
The third most common bit of nonsense is that you can extrapolate the trend line way beyond the limits of the data to predict what will happen in the future.
To my mind, you have to look at the competency of the reviewers, it is well past time that anyone can rely on published work and so called peer review.
Reviewers must be willing to expect public scrutiny and put their names and professional reputation in the public domain, as there is so much shoddy work being rushed out for amplification in the media, purely to push political and financial agenda like the Paris belief fest.
With the enormous cost and economic change involved, it is only a matter of time to the day, that authors, peer reviewers and the journals themselves get jointly sued to stop the rot that is eating into the reputation of science.
When you look at the far reaching ramifications for business and economies that are literally being forced to undergo change at huge financial cost! There are billions to be had by lawyers pursuing the who cabal involved..
Once the court cases start, anonymous and CYA deceptions will not be enough to prevent destruction of reputations and the award of Multi Billion settlements. The backlash on science and professional societies can only be prevented by clamping down on poor research and biased publication now.
As I think I’ve mentioned here before, ISTM that peer review is the process by which a scientist gets other scientists who agree with him to confirm, anonymously, that he’s right.
Sure, it’s not supposed to be that way. But, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.” (Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut, Ph.D.)
KenB, I think you are on to something:
“…authors, peer reviewers and the journals themselves get jointly sued to stop the rot…”
States prevailed in the myriad tobacco lawsuits because of the private profits being made off of health care costs that had to be socialized.
There is no qualitative difference in this case. If anything it is far worse.
Climate alarmism and all of its hangers-on and rent seekers are profiting individually, whereas the financial consequences will be borne by all of us collectively.
It is a fraudulent action, and a conspiracy involving many people, for obvious financial gain. RICO would seem to be the appropriate statute to employ, among others.
Willis: according to Klimate-101, the vertical scale of your graphs should be in tenths of units instead of whole units. This means you should have used at least 0.5 degree divisions instead of 5 degree ones.
That makes all the changes much scarier …
Bad Scientist, go stand in the corner 😉
That one must the what Evans was referring to. He gets his 20x faster from one odd-ball proxy.
Look, those proxies are clearly not correlated properly. If the original work indicating which direction corresponds to warm is ignored and they are correctly scaled to correlate with the recent temperature record, they will fall into line and Pages2K will produce a proper hockey stick.
M.E. Mann published a method for doing in 1998, why can’t these guys get it right???
My guess as to why they used 200 year bins was to get allegedly statistical significance.
The problem with this is that the data is correlated in both space AND time. Which means they aren’t getting the significance they think they are getting. In my Monte Carlo experiments playing around with auto-correlated time series and surfaces, the confidence intervals need to be moved out by a factor of about 2.5x… which means those error bars, already horrible, are even more horrible than that…
Peter
Peter
Interesting speculation. If true it would indicate statistical malpractice of quite a large order. Surely a project with this level of funding ($millions – tens of $millions?) could afford a sophomore level statistical review? Are you going to pursue this? Maybe Steve McIntyre’s audit will shed light on this.
Not worth the effort, I can draw a straight line through the boxes already. Don’t have to try harder than that….
I see that it is no longer politically correct to refer to the Christian Era. Not sure what “common era” calendar is supposed to be common with. Certainly not the jewish or arabic calendars. I suppose that 200 B.C. now means 200 years before “common”.
B.C. is now B.C.E. which some of us like to translate to Before Christian Era and C. E. to Christian Era.. that nose tweek has now resulted in more True nonBelivers resorting to the whole name instead of the abbreviation. .. So next up is to start calling it The Common Christian Era 🙂
Mike, that’s just silly. It’s more ‘political correctness’ gone wild (I’m not accusing you, you understand).
Christ was every bit as much of a historical figure as Archimedes or Plato. But no one would bother about it if we referred to three thousand years ago as 2,000 BA or 2,000 BP. It’s the ‘BC’ that ruffles their feathers.
So just based on pushback against these endless Orwellian language changes, I refuse to use “BCE” or anything similar. It’s “BC” or “AD”. And if some PC professor doesn’t like it, tough.
Thank you Willis: another SUPERB article !
(Steve McIntyre’s work on “Deflategate” is a real eye-opener).
“Money graph” – an excellent description.
“professionals passing this nonsense off as science” – SPOT ON !
“… their study is just scientific onanism” – BRILLIANT !
Regards,
WL
Yeah, they should have pulled out of the study before they completed it.
They used bins because that is where you put the garbage.
Quote:
Today, the Earth is warming about 20 times faster than it cooled during the past 1,800 years,” said Michael Evans, second author of the study and an associate professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology and Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC). “This study truly highlights the profound effects we are having on our climate today.”
Note that Michael Evans doesn’t actually say that The Study says the Earth is warming 20 times faster. Only that it highlights the effects we are having on our climate.
Obviously he wants us to think that the study says the Earth is warming 20 times faster!
And Nick Stokes seems to think that makes a difference.
Try taking the partial derivative and multiply by the input error range… I bet you get -x to 20x…
I wonder why the ice core studies show such a different result than some of the other proxies.
The Antarctic ice core studies of PAGES 2K showed a warmer period from 141 AD to 1250AD than temps today. There was also a 30 year warmer spike from 1671 to 1700 as well.
“Robust” is a give-away that the work is dodgy.
I asked the UK Met Office what they meant when they said things are “robust”. Their reply included (I kid you not):
…It is robust in that is stands up to scruting and it’s also trying to convey integrity.
“Robust” is in the eye of the grant-holder…
‘Scruting’ sounds like what the deer do on my mountain in the fall when the bucks get their horns locked while fighting over a doe.
And all this time I thought “robust” meant the torso of a female-form robot.
Willis, I must protest at your besmirching the name of a “Bag of Ball Bearings.”
Ball bearings are very useful, which is more than you can say about their so called scientific study.
I agree. The comparison is an insult to ball bearings everywhere!
I too was wondering what is particularly dumb about ball bearings; strange comment indeed. Dumb as a Climate Scientist would have made more sense.
As with the proxies he discussed, taken singularly they could be useful. Dumped into a bag, they’re just a stupid bag of ball bearings. Great article, BTW.
I thought the analogy to ball bearings was appropriate. CAGW arguments are often circular and reading them makes one dizzy. Further they run in a race and don’t get anywhere. The separation between then is artificial and cagey, literally. They appear well polished but the sheen quickly disappears when even the slightest attack is made on them. They last longest when operating in their own sealed environment and when well-greased. When one fails it takes all the others with them because they are co-dependent. This last point explains why the whole lot has to be chucked together and replaced with something new.
Thhhhhhhbbbbbbbtttt
Ball bearings are supposed to be installed in something, usually to hold weight while allowing movement against friction of the surfaces they are installed against. Having a bag of them is more or less useless.
Box of rocks? Bag of hammers? Caste of Climatologists?
A bag of ball bearings were useful tools used by criminals and policemen for hitting their foes or victims over the back of the head with. Called a “Sap” Stunning in their effectiveness. This was mostly used in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Usually encased in a leather bag, they weren’t meant to kill, just knock someone out.
Ball bearings in a bag were only dumb if not used properly.
The HAD 4 data shows about 0.8 C warming since 1850. Can you tell me why this is unusual/unprecedented when we also know that the LIA finished about 1850?
So how much of that slight warming can be attributed to the recovery from the LIA plus some UHI effect plus data tampering plus ENSO/PDO plus cloud variation etc? Anyone have any ideas?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850/offset/trend
“The change from 1700 to 1900 is not anywhere near 20 times as steep as the drop from the start of the study to the present, as Michael Evans claims. That is simply not true.”
No, it’s true.
“4. The recent warming is larger ([|~1° C / ~-0.5° C| = 2) and more rapid by a factor of roughly 20: (| [~ +1° C/100 years]/[~ -0.5/1000 years] | = 20) than the volcanically induced cooling trend over the last 1-2 preceding millennia.”
I have to say, even if true (with those error bars, that’s questionable) any temperature proxy I’ve ever seen going back more than 20k years shows that the planet warms faster than it cools.
Except of course according to their own graph it dropped at a faster rate betwen 1100 & 1700 than it rose between 1700 & 1900
A C Osborn.
They did not make the “20 times as steep” observation from the proxy graph. Willis Eschenbach appears to have made an assumption that they did.
http://www.pages-igbp.org/ini/wg/ocean2k/nature-geoscience-2015-faqs
It begs the question: what was the point of the comment about rates of proxy cooling versus instrumental warming?
The problem is with comparing these 200-year bins with the end-of-20th century warming which is a tenth of that length of time. I can state that the warming since sunrise on this, a very hot day, is 20 times the cooling we experience over the last several weeks. Makes just as much sense. – NOT!