Trond Arne Pettersen writes via Tips and Notes:
Something (funny) for you? On realclimate there is a guest post by Mark Boslough. He writes about the cynicism of the deniers and presents two graphs.
The first is of paleotemperature reconstruction of Sargasso Sea surface temperature. And the second one he claims is a doctored version that is a misrepresentation of Sargasso Sea temperatures by global warming doubters.
But actually the two graphs are exactly the same. The second is just a mirrored version, the time axis is turned the other way around. He says that the second one falsley claims that the global temperatures were higher 3000 years ago (something other sources say the were). So who has missed the point here, I or Mr Boslough?
Link to realclimate:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/01/non-condensable-cynicism-in-santa-fe/
Archived here:
non-condensable-cynicism-in-santa-fe-realclimate (PDF)
Link to my cut and paste of the graphics:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3i1mu4clopnq59j/Doctored%20version.pptx?dl=0
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Typical hockey team pal review.
… or maybe I’m the DA for missing the more subtle points of his critique.
I’ll look at it again, and try not to laugh this time.
The critique is not subtle. It is set out explicitly and has nothing to do with the axis direction.
Year 0? I’m not sure what is wrong with this. Doesn’t nearly every western nation use this calendar? Any place that calls this year ‘2017’ has that same year 0.
Now, I know not everyone uses the same dating system. Most Islamic countries use a different calender. China has its own calender. The Hebrew calender. Probably many more. And every one of them has a different year 0. But just the fact this one ends at 2000 tells you it’s probably the western one that will be used by most English speakers, the caption being in English anyway.
Sure, having a ‘years from present’ format makes it more accessible to a wider international audience, but using a common calender dating system instead hardly seem like a real issue. I don’t see the problem.
Unless you’re just naturally ‘Triggered’ by even a passing reference to Christianity. I’ve known people like that. ~¿~
The real thing that is wrong with the numbering is that 0 BP is not 2000AD. It is 1950. But in fact the resolution is so coarse that this hardly matters.
Yes, “the resolution is so coarse”…yet the RC folks want to compare it to Station S and it’s much different resolution, as if its apples-to-oranges.
Even if one accepts that the timeline was read in the proper direction, this is an embarrassment and absolute failure.
“…this hardly matters…”
That always seems to be the excuse in the case of warmista errors. Christy, McIntyre, etc, make a minor error, and they’re portrayed as incompetent boobs.
You are always here rushing to point-out typos and argue semantics that “hardly matter.”
Even so, visually I see little difference in one’s ability to arrive at basically the same conclusion.
The switched axis direction and the different meaning for “0” on the graphs somehow distract from that explicitness.
Perhaps a contest can be started?
Who will become the last person banned from RealClimate before the plug is pulled, or perhaps when RealClimate is turned into a legitimate Federal website with RealClimate forbidden from banning polite commenters; just for simple, contrary, complex or opposing positions.
A second winning position could be based on previously and unjustifiably banned commenters requesting and receiving public apologies from specific RealClimate offenders.
It would give me quite a tickle,
to hear RealClimate in a pickle,
when persons offended by RC Team fickleness,
receive kindness, and honest climate cycle reports,
Surely I thought, Hades froze over at Gavin’s NOAA/GISS.
Well, I read the actual article at Real Climate, and from what I can gather it’s just Mark whining about how he tried to submit some abstracts for a climate
partyconference, One being this thing on how contrarians ‘misuse’ the Sargasso Sea proxy by NOT applying Mike’s Nature Trick to it, and how they refer to this proxy as if it represents global temperature. (I mean really, who would do such a thing? ^¿^ ).His other abstract was apparently Lew paper psycho smears or attempts to do a Consensus counting survey at the conference. Anyway, the abstracts were rejected because they were nothing new (no, really <¿<).
Needless to say, Mark was incensed. Nobody EVER rejects abstracts from him.
Oh, he also mentioned that he went because he wanted to talk to Skeptics.
Of course, when the Unbelievers didn’t convert in mass after hearing his wisdom, he decided that the only possible explanation is that they were all just too cynical.
~¿~ He really does live in his own little world, doesn’t he.
Okay, I really tried to give Mark Boslough the benefit of the doubt. I went over to RealClimate, I read his comments, I found a copy of the Keigwin paper, I read it as best I could, I reconsidered his comments, and I came up with the same basic reaction, namely head shaking smirky face.
He writes:
I say:
But it DOES show a cooling trend from past eras to the present era !
He further writes:
I say:
inconvenient? — “inconsequential” might be the better word. Am I correct in thinking that he is trying to elevate the trend of a tiny segment of time above the trend of a huge segment of time that contains that tiny upward trend as STILL COOLER than in the past ?
And continuing, he says:
I say:
Can you BE any more ambivalent in your flaccid attempt to counter skepticism? Obviously, … this was not an explicit conclusion of the paper.
In fact, if a person actually reads the paper, which is here:
Keigwin, L. (1996). The Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period in the Sargasso Sea. SCIENCE, 274(5292), 1504-1508.
https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/keigwin_sargasso.pdf
Go to page 1507, and notice what the conclusion of that paper REALLY seems to be, namely
Regardless of the exact cause for the LIA [Little Ice Age], the MWP [Medieval Warm Period], and earlier oscillations, the warming during the 20th century (O.5°C) is not unprecedented. However, it is important to distinguish natural climate change from anthropogenic effects because human influence may be occurring at a time when the climate system is on the warming limb of a natural cycle.
See the phrase … “not unprecedented”? — this means warming has happened before, Mark.
See the phrase, “may be occurring”? — this indicates either uncertainty or an unsubstantiated assumption or both, Mark.
See the phrase, “warming limb of a natural cycle”? — if it is warmING, then this means it is still cooLER than at some other time in the past, Mark.
Hopefully, I have not made a bigger fool of myself than Mark did. If so, then, oh well, learning can be painful.
Some instances of self-righteous arrogance just stick with you, and this is one of those instances that caused me to focus a bit more on Boslough’s comments at RealClimate:
How impressive, to collaborate with a known pioneer in the field.
Well, it AGREES with other known assessments showing a global cooling trend over this long span of time. People probably use the Robinson et al. article to beef up this fact. Finding supporting evidence, however, is NOT “misrepresenting”. At most, it might be leaving out an underlying assumption that an author assumes (perhaps incorrectly) that a reader already knows.
I found the Robinson et al. article here:
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm
. . . and the version of the graph in question that Robinson et al. used, which was THIS one:
Figure 1: Surface temperatures in the Sargasso Sea, a 2 million square mile region of the Atlantic Ocean, with time resolution of 50 to 100 years and ending in 1975, as determined by isotope ratios of marine organism remains in sediment at the bottom of the sea (3). The horizontal line is the average temperature for this 3,000-year period. The Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Optimum were naturally occurring, extended intervals of climate departures from the mean. A value of 0.25 °C, which is the change in Sargasso Sea temperature between 1975 and 2006, has been added to the 1975 data in order to provide a 2006 temperature value.
Now, while I still think the placement of that “0” point is sort of confusing (Jesus? or the past point where temperature was at the average of the whole time span and temperature of today?), the graph still seems to capture the significant long-term trend of Keigwin’s original graph. And as Willis pointed out, any “conflating” that was done was done by Boslough, in trying to splice a short-term instrumental series onto a long-term paleo-climate series. As I said earlier, “inconsequential”, as opposed to “inconvenient”, or better still, INCORRECT.
Even if you allowed this INCORRECT splicing procedure, still I ask, “Does the choice of 400years, as opposed to 500 years strike anyone as arbitrary?, to the point of being meaningless?” Why not 500 years? Why not 1000 years or 2500 years?, when temps were as high or markedly higher? Of course, you have to choose a convenient low point in a progression of cyclic lows and highs to create a case of alarmism:
I think that I have pretty much proven to myself now that this guy is a scam artist, whether he realizes it or not.
Christiana Figueres, the U.N. climate change chief since 2010 has stated publicly that the climate agenda is about destroying capitalism. Nothing to do with climate.
So why are we nit-picking about details of past temperatures, as if that was the correct metric anyway?????
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-03/un-official-admits-global-warming-agenda-really-about-destroying-capitalism
Haha. You couldn’t make it up. Someone check if this Mark Boslough actually exists?
So, after the “upside down Tiljander” we have the left-to-right Saragasso. What next? Inside-out AGW?
OMG!!! “Climate Science from Climate Scientist.” This Mann guy needs to get over himself. Even his intro smacks of egotistical arrogance. BTW, didn’t he get his education at Berkeley? That center of higher learning that riots each time someone says something offensive to the snowflake liberals? Where are the “safe spaces” for Conservatives out there? Anyway, here is the kind of “science” this global warming nonsense has created. Ironically it features a chemistry professor at Berkeley.
Climate “Science” on Trial; Confirmed Mythbusters Busted Practicing Science Sophistry
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/02/04/climate-science-on-trial-confirmed-mythbusters-busted-practicing-science-sophistry/
Isn’t this what they call real climate science. 😁😁😁😁
When the subject of the data being the same in the two graphs is brought up in the comments section of that Real Climate article one response (from gavin?) is that the point is not that the axis were reversed, its that the newer measurements that were plotted along with the reconstructed data was deleted in the re-printing, and that the plot of sea surface temperature is presented as global average temperature, with the conclusion that global average temperatures are cooler now than they were 3000 years ago. He does have a point that the title of the re-printed graph makes a statement about global temperatures, but the axis label on the plot clearly says sea surface temperature, same as the original printing.
As for the newer data being deleted, the newer data looked too compressed to tell any trends (looks like a band), but you can see it is consistently warmer than the reconstructed data over the 50 years that there is data from both sources. The author is concluding the new warmer data implies the warming trend is even greater than the reconstructed data shows, but I asked (in the comments) if there is any reason to think the newer data would show any different trend if the newer measurements were available for a longer period. It seems like the newer data would show warmer temperatures overall, but I don’t see why he thought that meant the warming trend would be greater. My comments were up this morning but have since been deleted, without any answer. I thought it was a valid question.
I also commented that it seemed appropriate to me for someone to re-use the older, reconstructed data without the newer data included because the newer data covers too brief of a time period (last 50 years) to contribute any meaningful information if your purpose is to look at temperature trends over 3000 years. That comment was deleted too. I was polite, really, but I guess when you think the debate should be over and you run the blog, then the debate is over, at least on your site.
He wasn’t misinterpreting the axes at all. He was correctly claiming that some data had been removed. What an idiotic beat up