Andrew Revkin was fawning over the paper on Twitter when McIntyre showed up.
Here is the complete response by Steve McIntyre.
I was curious as to why their new Antarctic reconstruction was so dramatically different from PAGES2K only seven years ago – a question that both they and reviewers ought to have thought about. Difference arises mainly from one catastrophic error and 2 implausible new series.
the largest difference from PAGES2K -and main contributor to "new" blade – came from Kaufman's version of Dahl-Jensen borehole inversion series. Kaufman has HS (worse with binning). Opposite to original.
3/ so how did they get such a different appearance? Total cock-up. They dropped the earliest Dahl value, then reversed the years. So the Dahl value from 5502 BC was used in 1995 AD, from 4438 BC in 1987 and so on. A goof of Mannian proportions.
4/ it was easy to notice. I tweeted on this within a day or so after publication. There are two other very questionable "new" series. Instead of using the new WAIS isotope series – the highest resolution Antarctic series over the Holocene – they use a WAIS borehole inversion
5/ in which isotopes are a sort of fringe. The inversion matrices used in borehole inversion are hugely multicollinear, so the inversion math is very unstable. This whole discipline should be thrown out on those grounds. But there is a special problem with ice core inversions.
6/ there is very very strong seasonal swing in temperatures of top 15 meters or so of Antarctic ice core boreholes. In the published article on WAIS inversion, they excluded the top portion – which are the layers laid down after 1960 or so. So supposed recent uptick in WAIS
7/ temperature reconstruction arises from ice layers laid down prior to 1960. It is a really stupid series. And yet, the WAIS isotope series is fantastically high resolution over long series. d18O series are backbone of paleoclimate – so why didn't they just use d18O?
8/ you know the answer. The WAIS d18O series didn't yield a HS, so they used the stupid borehole inversion series which did.
9/ the only other series contributing to "new" HS is a melt layer frequency series from Siple Dome – where there is an isotope series available. Siple Dome is near Ross Sea, where icesheet has been gradually eroding during Holocene as it is maritime grounded. As a result,
10/ even though isotope data shows slight decline in temperature over Holocene, there has been a slight increase in melt frequency in Siple Dome. They calculated this series as a running total of melt layers in prior 1000 years, which Kaufman incorrectly used as annual resolution
11/ Kaufman then binned this series. If one were to use this crappy data at all, you'd be required to bin the original data, not the running 1000 year total. If you did that, it has max 500 years ago, not in 20th century.
12/ also, unlike isotope series which have been taken at many sites and properties and vagaries thus known, use of a singleton series where there are no comparanda in region lends itself to abusive cherrypicking, such as here.
13/ I haven't looked at other regions, but Kaufman's Antarctic reconstruction is a mess and needs to be retracted. You may recall that Kaufman's Arctic PAGES2K series was similarly screwed by upside-down series in Iceland and series in Greenland which had similar contamination
14/ to the contaminated Finnish lake sediment series (also used upside down) relied upon in Mann's supposed no-dendro reconstruction in 2008.
Originally tweeted by Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) on August 7, 2020.
HT/Tim P
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These are just the errors that are caught. I imagine many papers have errors and there are simply not enough people of Steve McIntyre caliber doing reviews to catch them all.
It is very scary that some are willing to bet the whole economy on science that is so shaky.
Doing reviews and disproving others papers do not get you prestige or tenure. It truly is a thankless job.
Now we need the word from unrealclimate and Gore.
There is a book review in the July 23, 2020 issue of the Journal Nature. It’s all about the rampant scientific fraud etc. It’s title is appropriately SCIENCE FICTION. The reviewer does not disagree with the author
LOL – Go Steve!
I keep telling people the ice core data is NOT a reliable proxy source. I guess I should start adding that neither are the scientists analyzing the data.
I don’t think Steve is saying ice core data is not a reliable proxy. He is saying that you have to be careful to use and appropriate ice core data set and not to invert the data or delete the first data point.
ice core using d180 isotopes is supposedly one of highest resolution proxy. Law dome in particular is very high resolution with a pronounced mwp. It is heavily underweighted or omitted from pages2k nd most of the other reconstructions. mann used it in mhb 2003 (as i recall,), but was so underweighted that it was treated as meaningless
ice core using d180 isotopes is supposedly one of highest resolution proxy. Law dome in particular is very high resolution with a pronounced mwp. It is heavily underweighted or omitted from pages2k nd most of the other reconstructions. mann used it in mhb 2003 (as i recall,), but was so underweighted that it was treated as meaningless
The WAIS divide core has even better resolution, but the Holocene part is almost never used anywhere since there is not a trace of a hockeystick. It is hard to even find an image, but here is one:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-WAIS-Divide-deep-ice-core-WD2014-chronology-%E2%80%93-Buizert-Cuffey/14edde71861f65bb72e4b04fab9aa955e301c982/figure/0
Please tell me I didn’t read that right. They read the data in backwards?
So what? Both Mann and PAGES 2K has repeatedly turned their data upside down to get the “correct” result, so why not reverse time as well?
Revkin is (and has always been) an archetype of the slick, urban, fast-talking blowhards. His entire career has been one of freeloading; he is a classic social parasite.
All he’s ever done is make noise. He’s largely clueless.
A “running dog” accompanying a bandwagon. (In Marx’s day barking dalmatians accompanied fire trucks.)
What isn’t address is how significant the error found is. Steven McIntyre found a transcription error in one record. However the paper by Kaufman et al. used
“1319 paleo-temperature records from 470 terrestrial and 209 marine sites where ecological, geochemical and biophysical proxy indicators have been used to infer past temperature changes.” Now an error in one record might naively be expected to change the final result by less than 0.1% which is significantly smaller than the errors in the results to begin with. As I understand it one of the strengths of using multiple proxies is that errors in a single proxy will not change the results significantly. So Steven McIntyre can be 100% correct about the error but it will not change the final result in the slightest.
Of course the error should be admitted and corrected and I hope that someone is going throw all the records to check that nothing else is transcribed incorrectly but that just requires a minor correction to the manuscript rather than its retraction.
I am unclear how you determined that the error only changed the outcome by 0.1%. Can you explain? Hopefully you are not assuming that all proxies end up being weighted equally or being used in all regions. That would seem to be unwarranted.
Isn’t the issue that the changes in a handful of proxies led to a completely different pattern for one geographic region – Antarctica from an earlier analysis using what appears to be many of the same proxies.
As for a single proxy error, the use of strip barked very old Bristle Cone Pine series has been shown to be problematic when allowed to dominate a factor in a factor analysis type of analysis.
Bernie,
The phrase I used was “naively be expected to”. The proxies are weighted I guess by proximity to other ones so the antartctic ones would be more heavily weighted. But there are still enough proxies involved so that any single one could be completely wrong without changing the end result significantly.
Frankly, I’m shocked that you can blithely dismiss and obfuscate reading in data backwards and upside down as simply “a transcription error”. Then say “I hope someone is…” and “…proxies are weighted I guess…”. So – you really don’t know.
Their fraudulent antarctic hockey stick starts ramping straight up just after 1750. I guess all the car, tank, airplane and fossil fuel power plant emissions during the revolutionary war must have caused that.
Yes. Apparently, all it took was for Wilbur’s Amalgamated Horseshoe & Plough to burn its first lump of coal in the brazier, and the Little Ice Age immediately came to a screeching halt. A few days later, after Ye Olde Tallow Factory opened up across the street, the game was effectively over. Mother Nature herself decided to go on permanent holiday, leaving global and local temperature fluctuations entirely up to the far more powerful CO2 molecule, against whose magic she had no recourse. At least, that is the most plausible explanation that modern scientists can hypothesize, and therefore is fact.
i’m sure Nick Stokes will set Steve McIntyre straight /sarc
He hasn’t been able to yet.