While ramping up his own invective to fit as much ad hominem as possible into a single sentence:
Mr. Sauer parroted baseless talking points that have their origin in fossil-fuel industry-funded climate change denial propaganda, not honest scientific discourse.
Michael Mann says:
“overall warmth of the globe and northern hemisphere today is substantially greater than during Medieval time”
Except, there’s that pesky ice core proxy temperature data (proxy temperature data is something Mann embraces for his own Hockey Stick) that says otherwise:
And he finishes up with this gem:
Readers interested in the truth behind the science, rather than the falsehoods and smears perpetuated by uninformed individuals like Mr. Sauer, should consult scientist-run websites like skepticalscience.com, or books on the topic like my own “Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change”. Let’s get past the fake debate about whether the problem exists, and on to the worthy debate about what to do about it.
Last I heard, skepticalscience.com was run by a cartoonist.
Having the courage to “do nothing” is also worthy of debate.
[Added] Given his quote, Dr. Mann might find the recent change in the AP style book interesting.
Update: Some people had questions about the graph and it’s representivity. For that, we cite the paper by Dr. Richard B. Alley, of Penn State, a colleague of Mann and a vociferous climate change proponent, much like Dr. Mann himself. The bolding in the abstract is mine.
The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland
Quaternary Science Reviews
Volume 19, Issues 1-5, 1 January 2000, Pages 213-226.
Richard B. Alley
Department of Geosciences and Environment Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, Deike Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA
ABSTRACT:
Greenland ice-core records provide an exceptionally clear picture of many aspects of abrupt climate changes, and particularly of those associated with the Younger Dryas event, as reviewed here. Well-preserved annual layers can be counted confidently, with only ~1% errors for the age of the end of the Younger Dryas ~11,500 years before present. Ice-flow corrections allow reconstruction of snow accumulation rates over tens of thousands of years with little additional uncertainty. Glaciochemical and particulate data record atmospheric-loading changes with little uncertainty introduced by changes in snow accumulation. Confident paleothermometry is provided by site-specific calibrations using ice-isotopic ratios, borehole temperatures, and gas-isotopic ratios. Near-simultaneous changes in ice-core paleoclimatic indicators of local, regional, and more-widespread climate conditions demonstrate that much of the Earth experienced abrupt climate changes synchronous with Greenland within thirty years or less. Post-Younger Dryas changes have not duplicated the size, extent and rapidity of these paleoclimatic changes.
Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379199000621
Source data for the graph: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
UPDATE2: In pointing out an error I made (in comments) about the end date in the GISP2 graph above (ending 95 years before present) Nick Stokes reminded me of a detailed analysis I did in 2009 showing the scale of Mann’s Hockey stick relative to the GISP2 data.
You can review that post here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/12/historical-video-perspective-our-current-unprecedented-global-warming-in-the-context-of-scale/
The graph from that post, shown above, illustrates the last 3000 5000 years, with the 20th century instrumental record splice added (like Mann did in his original hockey stick paper) to show the warming of the last century. Clearly, the medieval warm period around the year 1000 is still warmer than the present
And there is a video, which illustrates the scale of the “hockey stick” compared to the warmer periods of the past:
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[Snipped. Off topic. ~mod.]
Another example of taking the talk off topic and turning haranguing into an art form. Another troll attempt to degrade the usefulness of the site as a source of information. The record that Mann bases his information on isn’t useful to show that Mann was wrong. Wow. And then the arguing just strays further and further away from the topic at hand.
Sounds more like he was promoting his book.
To clear up the apparent confusion about when the GISP2 ice core record ends, here is the original description (which is followed by several thousand isotope ratios from accelerator data). The top of the core is 1950. The 1855 date is based on temp reconstructions (not isotope ratios) by Cuffy and Clow and Alley.
GISP2 Oxygen Isotope Data (from Stuiver’s original description with the measurements)
General Description
Between 1989 and 1993, the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) collected several ice cores from near the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet (72°36’N, 38°30’W). Two of these were the 200m B core drilled in 1989, and the 3053m D core (drilled from 1989 to 1993) – the longest ice core drilled to date in the northern hemisphere. The D core penetrated the depth of the ice sheet, and allowed the further recovery of some 60-cm of bedrock. The Principal Investigators for the University of Washington’s contribution to this multi-university effort were M. Stuiver (Box 351360, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195, USA) and P. M. Grootes (now at Leibniz-Labor, Max Eyth Strasze 11-13 24118 Kiel, Germany) .
All d18O values were determined at the Quaternary Isotope Laboratory (M. Stuiver, Box 351360, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195, USA).
The data columns represent:
Depth Top depth of each interval, in meters. Samples are continuous unless specifically noted.
Age Layer count age at the given depth (in yr BP), where 0 BP represents AD 1950 summer to AD 1949 summer. Age corresponds to the top of the interval, unless noted otherwise.
Del 18O Mean d18O value (in per mil) over the interval starting at the indicated top depth. Standard deviation in a single d18O measurement is 0.14 per mil. Multiple measurements (such as in the data sets below) reduce the standard deviation to the 0.05 to 0.1 per mil range.
The top of the core is not 1950, that is the reference year, ‘present’ (based on C14 dating standards). The first level from which data is collected is 95 years earlier, i.e. 1855.
Mann really likes that “parroted” word. And loves “scurrilous”. Maybe he’s a bird-brain or a rodent…
RE: Brandon Shollenberger
September 23, 2015 at 7:53 pm said:
“But the fact I think Mann’s work is wrong and even fraudulent does not mean I am going to ignore false criticisms of his work. If anything, it means the opposite. Because I want the case against Mann to be taken seriously, I want people to stop making bad arguments about his work. That is the only way the real arguments will get heard.
One of the primary reasons Mann has gotten away with as much as he has is because people keep making bad arguments he can easily shoot down. Bad arguments give your opponents ammunition. It’s that simple.”
Thank you, I appreciate the clarification of your perspective (and the motivation for your argumentation),
Hogwash.
Brandon Shollenberger is acting as a rear guard, so to speak, in an attempt to force skeptics to argue to near wits end for every little scrap of recantation, even as the warmista horde is being routed from the positions they clung to so tenaciously for all those years.
His pretending to be a skeptic merely wanting better arguments from his brethren is not to be taken seriously.
Michael Mann. Talk about an outliar!
There was some talk about what was and can now be grown on Greenland. It’s a very long thread and I am not sure if this has been posted yet.
This is what the archeological record has found.
“Little Ice Age stopped corn cultivation
The Greenland climate was a bit warmer than it is today, and the southernmost tip of the great island was luscious and green and no doubt tempted Eric the Red and his followers. This encouraged them to cultivate some of the seed corn they brought with them from Iceland.
The Vikings also tried to grow other agricultural crops. Their attempts to grow these crops and barley did not last long, however, as the climate cooled over the next couple of centuries until the Little Ice Age started in the 13th century.”
http://sciencenordic.com/vikings-grew-barley-greenland
I recently read Richard Alley’s 2000 book: “The two-mile time machine,” about the GISP2 project of which he was a part. Great read. If he since went to the “dark side” in his research papers, too bad. I still recommend the book.
Sorry this is a late reply, but I’m old and it takes me a while to think these things over.
But the questions put forward here are suppose do just that right? Get people to think .
This was on the source linked website.
Norm Sauer, who lives in Nevada City, is a member of The Union Editorial Board. His opinion is his own and does not reflect the viewpoint of The Union or its editorial board.
Is this the Mr. Sauer that Dr. Mann felt compelled to chastise?
The reference to ice cores from Greenland got things going. Some of the exchange got p r e t t y sporty.
Weather, climate, history, archeology, thermal dynamics and more. And VIKINGS!
I personally learned a lot and it created yet more questions in my mind.
Besides who doesn’t like VIKINGS?
Still, come on, an op-ed piece in a rural county paper and Mr. Sauer is in the clutches of ‘big oil’!
Dr. Mann throws the scientific consensus, a decade and a half of validation, and the Washington Post (they have their own march you know composed by JPS in 1889) against the opinion of one man.
Had it been Ben Cartwright (of Bonanza), I could understand. Ben had gravitas. I identify more with Norm.
Norm doesn’t have his own march or long running TV show (please fact check me on this).
So, is Dr. Mann doing his own spin and damage control? What damage? His followers are legion. His graph has become the icon of activists around the globe. Doctor, ‘move on’, as we used to say.
But remember ‘yesterdays news wraps todays fish’.
It is not about the science. It is the about headline stupid!
Note to self, crawl back to the shadows.
The hockey stick proxy data are approximations to global surface temperature ‘anomalies’. The GISP ice core data are not global (nor are they anomalies) – they represent regional (at most) fluctuations in the Greenland air temperatures. You can’t just shove the ‘stick’ on the end of the GISP data and then use it to make false claims about the magnitude of the present day warming. You might as well splice any two time series together for that matter – your data are not apples to apples!
“Medieval” is a very broad term used variably, thus is not scientific.
Some people use it as starting circa 400AD whereas others start the Dark Ages then and Medieval later. The broader use of the term covers two cool periods and the warm MWP.