By Andy May
The left-wing Scientific American published a so-called review of Steven Koonin’s new book, Unsettled, by a number of prominent left-wing scientists. The article is headed by the mandatory sunset photo of steam coming out of powerplant chimneys. The article is not really a review, their substantive claims are very weak, it is really a hit piece to trash Koonin and his reputation in the best Naomi Oreskes’ and Union of Concerned Scientists’ odious style. But throwing rocks from glass houses invites them to be thrown back, and what goes around comes around. What little scientific content is present in the article is dealt with at the end of this post, their scientific arguments are as vacuous as their attacks on Koonin.
Naomi Oreskes is the senior author of the hit piece, which is no surprise, that is what she does. Oreskes was famously humiliated in court by content expert Kimberly Neuendorf (ExxonMobil, 2018a) (May, 2020c, p. 169). Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran (a co-author of the Scientific American slander piece) wrote a peer-reviewed article for Environmental Research Letters (Supran & Oreskes, 2017), that supposedly used “content analysis” to show that ExxonMobil was saying one thing about climate change publicly and another in private. However, their content analysis was sloppy, poorly done, and biased. In the words of Kimberly A. Neuendorf, the prominent expert in such analyses (she abbreviates Supran and Oreskes as “S&O”):
“S&O’s content analysis does not support the study’s conclusions because of a variety of fundamental errors in their analysis. S&O’s content analysis lacks reliability, validity, objectivity, generalizability, and replicability. These basic standards of scientific inquiry are vital for a proper content analysis, but they are not satisfied by the S&O study.” (ExxonMobil, 2018a, Attachment A)
Neuendorf’s book, The Content Analysis Guidebook, is the standard reference in this area. Most of the errors identified by Neuendorf spring from poor sampling of ExxonMobil content. S&O improperly grouped together communications that vary across time and by author and audience. They also group statements by Exxon and Mobil, before they merged, as if they were one entity. Further, S&O coded the communications themselves rather than using objective and uninvolved coders, this renders their work non-replicable and unscientific (May, 2020c, p. 169). It is hard to take either of these authors seriously.
The second author is Michael Mann, the main author of the notorious hockey stick. This very flawed “reconstruction” of Northern Hemisphere temperatures has so many problems we cannot list them all here. The best description of the problems is Andrew Montford’s authoritative The Hockey Stick Illusion (Montford, 2010). From a scientific and statistical point of view (the study contained many statistical errors), the best critiques are by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick (McIntyre & McKitrick, 2003) and (McIntyre & McKitrick, 2005). For a fairly complete list of criticisms of the hockey stick, the best source is Mark Steyn’s book, A Disgrace to the Profession (Steyn, 2015). Finally the leaders of the scientific community have looked at the hockey stick and it’s generation and detailed the data and statistical problems in two reports, one from the National Research Council (National Research Council, 2006) and the other from the Congressional Wegman ad hoc committee (Wegman, Scott, & Said, 2010). However, the most damning criticism is from the U.N. IPCC AR4 report. The hockey stick was widely promoted in the third IPCC report (TAR) but dropped from AR4 due to the problems uncovered and documented. This is what Keith Briffa and other IPCC authors had to say about it in AR4:
“Some of the studies conducted since the Third Assessment Report (TAR) indicate greater multi-centennial Northern Hemisphere temperature variability over the last 1 kyr than was shown in the TAR, demonstrating a sensitivity to the particular proxies used, and the specific statistical methods of processing and/or scaling them to represent past temperatures. The additional variability shown in some new studies implies mainly cooler temperatures (predominantly in the 12th to 14th, 17th and 19th centuries), and only one new reconstruction suggests slightly warmer conditions in the 11th century, but well within the uncertainty range indicated in the TAR.” (IPCC, 2007b, p. 436)
Briffa toned this bit down a bit, but it is damning anyway. The statistical methods used to create the hocky stick were certainly flawed, as the National Research Council Report explains in plain English. Further the proxies were incompatible with one another and could not be combined with statistical techniques as explained in all the critiques of the hockey stick. The first critique of the hockey stick was by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas and they explain clearly why it is a bad idea to combine proxies (Soon & Baliunas, 2003).
Among the authors of the Scientific American hit piece, we find Peter Frumhoff, a leader of the far-left Union of Concerned Scientists. As explained in my latest book, Politics and Climate Change: A History, Frumhoff was one of the organizers of the ExxonKnew campaign. He, with help from various Rockefeller foundations, the Tides Foundation, Greenpeace and other wealthy liberal foundations, got many state attorneys general (AGs) and ex-tobacco lawyers to attend a secret meeting at Harvard University in 2016. Frumhoff arranged to pay travel expenses for, at least some of the AGs. It was secret because the AGs did not want to get caught conspiring with tobacco lawyers in a plot to “get” ExxonMobil. The Vermont AG, Scot Kline, fought releasing the meeting agenda for over a year, but eventually had to turn it over in court (May, 2020c, p. 167).
Presenters at this secret meeting included Naomi Oreskes and Peter Frumhoff. All their efforts to “get” ExxonMobil failed miserably, there was nothing to sue ExxonMobil for. They talked Michael Bloomberg into funding and placing private lawyers, charged with going after fossil fuel companies, into the AG offices of several states. Bloomberg laundered the money for this through NYU law school, who the private lawyers reported to. These lawyers were called “Special Assistant Attorneys General” and were given some prosecutorial powers, but were not there to prosecute criminals, they were there to harass specific companies. It doesn’t get more corrupt than that, these are not nice people.
The Scientific American hit piece claims that temperatures have risen rapidly since 1979 and are the warmest in 1,500 years. If one digs into the hockey stick, and into temperature reconstructions in general, it is easy to see that no one can possibly say that, if they are honest. Since 1979 surface temperatures have been measured in the lower two meters of the atmosphere and in the upper meter of the oceans in thousands of places around the world with accurate thermometers. Then these measurements have been extensively processed to form records of global average temperature. The various records do not agree with one another, and all are criticized. Below, Figure 1 is a plot of the widely used HadCRUT5 temperature records for the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
The record claims that the Northern hemisphere surface is warming at a rate of 0.28°C/decade and the Southern Hemisphere is warming at a much lower rate of 0.11°C/decade. Given that CO2 is a well-mixed gas, this is hard to explain, if we assume CO2 is causing the warming. But Earth’s surface is unstable, we live on the surface and all our weather occurs there, the measurements may be a little wonky. Also, most of the land is in the Northern Hemisphere, which doesn’t help, elevation changes things, especially temperature. What about the satellite data? Below we see the Northern and Southern Hemisphere warming rates for the entire lower troposphere, not just the chaotic lower two meters:
Hmmm, quite different. The Northern Hemisphere is still warming more rapidly than the Southern, but the difference is much less than in the HadCRUT5 record. Notice the Southern Hemisphere UAH satellite rate is nearly the same as the HadCRUT5 Southern Hemisphere rate. The anomaly is the extraordinary HadCRUT5 Northern Hemisphere rate. Is this real? Unlikely.
So, it appears we do not know the warming rate since 1979. Makes it pretty difficult to say the rate or the current temperature is unusual. What do we know about temperatures prior to 1979? We have no reliable satellite data prior to 1979, and all ocean surface temperatures are from ships. Prior to World War II, the ship temperatures are from buckets of water brought up to the deck with a rope. Those measurements must be very accurate! Not! (Kennedy, Rayner, Smith, Parker, & Saunby, 2011) and (Kennedy, Rayner, Smith, Parker, & Saunby, 2011b).
Prior to 1900, what do we have? Mostly proxies, tree rings, sediment, and ice cores. The tree rings are well dated, and we have one ring per year. Unfortunately, if you look into the hockey stick articles I list of above, you will see that tree rings are affected by the atmospheric CO2 concentration, which means modern tree rings are not comparable to ancient ones, oops! The other proxies are poorly dated (±50 years or so). How long has it been since 1979, 41 years? Further, most proxies are not annual, many represent several decades of temperatures. The temperature accuracy of the proxies is also suspect. In short, there is no way anyone can honestly compare today’s temperatures to the past 1,500 years. The data doesn’t exist. The following plot of temperature reconstructions is presented in AR5 (page 409):
Some are reconstructions of global temperatures (dark blue), some are land only (red and orange), some are land and sea extratropical (light blue), etc. The point is, climate is regional, the global average surface temperature we are trying to estimate in modern times, may or may not be a meaningful measure of climate change. We just don’t know. Given these three plots, how can anyone say modern warming is unusual with a straight face?
They also claim that Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City in 2012, is due to human-caused climate change, which is pure speculation. Even Scientific American makes this point in an article trying to blame weather events on climate change, they write:
“Today, scientists still generally agree that it’s impossible to attribute any individual weather phenomenon solely to climate change. Storms, fires, droughts and other events are influenced by a variety of complex factors.” Scientific American
They remind me of Karl Popper’s anecdote that when a Marxist opened a newspaper every article was “proof” that Marx was correct (May, 2020c, p. 247). One of the ways to spot a pseudo-scientific hypothesis is that everything that happens is “proof” the hypothesis is correct (Popper, 1962). More on extreme weather and climate change can be found here.
They also blame fossil fuels for all our air pollution and the deaths that result from it, totally ignoring the huge health benefits that fossil fuels and modern technology have brought to the world as explained here.
They claim that climate change is already costing the United States and the world a lot of money, when leading economists have determined that the additional CO2 in the atmosphere and the recent warming have benefited the world by making it greener and by improving agricultural productivity (May, 2020c, pp. 119-121). We hear a lot about limiting warming to either 1.5° or 2.0°C, depending upon who is talking. But Nobel Prize winning Yale economist William Nordhaus states, in his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, that the optimal economic pathway is to allow for four degrees of warming in 2135 should the IPCC worst case scenario occur (see slides 6 and 7 in Nordhaus’s pdf of his slides).
They also make the claim that the rate of sea-level rise has quadrupled since the industrial revolution. This is obvious nonsense, the measures of sea level change that exist today are not accurate enough to say that. Sea level is probably rising, but the rate moves up and down and varies from less than one millimeter per year to over three millimeters per year. Tide gauges are only accurate to several centimeters (±30 millimeters or so), so how could we possibly know if the rate had quadrupled? More on sea level “acceleration” from Anthony Watts here. Kip Hansen discusses the difficulties in measuring the rate of sea level rise here.
In any case, if sea level is rising at 3 mm/year, it amounts only to a foot in 100 years, which is hardly a disaster. One needs to remember that satellite sea-level measurements and ground-based measurements do not agree, and the difference is larger than the sea-level rise we are trying to measure!
That is the extent of the scientific arguments in the hit piece. Not much. But the article was not written to debate Koonin’s points, it was just an attempt to trash him personally and to give climate alarmists in social media something to link to.
The bibliography can be downloaded here.
This whole business is a prime example of why I gave up subscribing to that magazine quite a few years ago!
Peter, me too!
They appear to have become the mouthpiece for propogating the UN agenda
Therefore they should append their names with the moniker of their overlords…UN…
UN-Scientific UN-American
Me three.
My simple test for the accuracy of a “Science” magazine is whether they use the correct name for the location of the Palomar Observatory, i.e. Palomar Mountain. The use of Mt Palomar indicates that the staff doesn’t care about getting all the details correct. Back in the 1960’s, Sci Am did get it right, but started drifting away in the 1980’s.
A co-worker brought in some old magazines that her pack-rat aunt had kept around, whih made for some interesting reading. One mid 1930’s issue of Reader’s Digest had a reprint of a Sci-Am article praising Germany’s work on Eugenics. This is more of a slam on Sci Am than Reader’s Digest as slightly earlier issue of RD had a story on the concentration camps being set up in Germany for political prisoners.
You might also want to add this to your criteria: “whether they are in the business of endorsing political candidates”:
Scientific American Gives First Presidential Endorsement in 175 Years — to Joe Biden
https://people.com/politics/scientific-american-endorses-joe-biden/
That tells you everything you need to know. IMHO
*There should be a disclaimer in every article they write that they endorsed Biden.
People who endorse political candidates are expressing their political beliefs in hopes that you too will accept and act on their beliefs. There is no other reason.
It is a travesty of purpose for anyone who claims that they represent “science” to do such a thing. There is no political component to be found anywhere in the scientific method.
I’ve gotten it for several decades. Always loved it. But I’ve noticed that now the editor is a woman and most of the coeditors are women and it seems that most of the articles are written by or about women. Now, I have nothing against women but this looks like reverse discrimination- and with it now dominated by women, it’s certainly more likely to be politically correct.
I dropped it when they gave Jeffrey Sachs a monthly column to promote communism.
That’s where they lost me too.
And Mr Middleton joins the “Me Too” crowd 😉
Same here.
They lost me when they ran an article deploring research with animal subjects – must have been in the late 80’s.
Decades ago for me.
A long time ago for me. Decades
Given that CO2 is a well-mixed gas, this is hard to explain, if we assume CO2 is causing the warming.
≠=======
Not hard to explain at all. Water takes considerably more energy to warm than does air.
As such, when you average air and water temperatures you must account for the energy and mass, which must be conserved.
(T1+T2)/2 = Average
Does not conserve mass and energy when samples 1 and 2 are not the same substance.
Thus the northern hemisphere with more air samples does not match the southern hemisphere with more water samples.
In other words when you average air and water temperatures the result is garbage.
“Given that CO2 is a well-mixed gas, this is hard to explain, if we assume CO2 is causing the warming.
≠=======
Not hard to explain at all. Water takes considerably more energy to warm than does air.”
The atmosphere is 10 tons per square meter which equals around 2.5 meter of water.
You can’t heat up surface air without heating the 10 tons of air above it. You can heat 1 mm of water without the 2.5 meter getting warmer.
If you counting 2.5 water depth as ocean surface than there or equal, if counting top 5 meter of water the water takes twice as much to heat.
But if think entire ocean’s average temperature is actually to the global surface average temperature, then that water takes 1000 times heat to warm 1 C as heat atmosphere by 1 C.
Or our global climate is an icehouse global climate, and this due to the average temperature of entire ocean being cold, or about 3.5 C.
Did you mean cubic kilometer rather than square meter?
10 tons per square meter seems rather dense…
The air above 1 square meter of the earth’s surface {assuming sea level elevation}.
A cubic meter of sea level air is about 1.2 kg per cubic meter though density varies depending air temperature, so say when about 15 to 20 C. But 1 atm pressure is 10 tons of air above your head. If underwater and have 10 ton of water above you {10 meter depth} it’s addition of 1 atm per 10 meter depth of water you are under.
If on Moon with 1/6th of Earth gravity, under 60 meter of water, is 1 atm of pressure. You have less problems with bends swimming under water on the Moon.
I’d think you’d have tremendous problems in general trying to swim underwater on the moon. Finding the water would be the first problem…
gbaikie posted: “But 1 atm pressure is 10 tons of air above your head.”
I cannot see how that is reasonable. If we conservatively assume your head was as large as 1 feet by 1 foot in horizontal dimensions (i.e., 144 square inches), a sea level pressure of 14.7 psia (i.e., one atm pressure)—which indeed must result from the integrated weight of a 1 square inch column of air above your head—would result in 144 * 14.7 = 2,117 pounds force. That value is close to 1 English ton of force (2,000 lbf) or 1 metric ton of force (2,200 lbf). However, it is NOT 10 tons of force.
I do believe you are off by about 1 order of magnitude too high.
I suspect you missed these bits in gbaikie’s posts: “The atmosphere is 10 tons per square meter ” and “The air above 1 square meter of the earth’s surface {assuming sea level elevation}..”
If it’s approx 1 tonne per square foot, then it is indeed approximately 10 tonnes per square metre “above your head”.
No, didn’t miss it. The sentence “But 1 atm pressure is 10 tons of air above your head.” could just a easily been (incorrectly) stated as “But 1 atm pressure is 14.7 pounds of air above your head.”
Above your head- per square meter
Per square meter, 10 metric ton or 10,000 kg
Per square inch above your head is 14.7 lb.
If it’s per 1/4 meter above your head, it’s 2.5 metric ton
1/100th of square meter, 100 kg or .1 ton
Square meter has 10,000 square cm
10,000 / 100 = 100 square cm or 10 x 10 cm
{which about 4″ square} is 100 kg
{16 times 14.7 lbs = 235.2 lbs} And 100 kg is about
220 lbs, It’s wrong, ok, 1 atm equals 14.6959 psi and 10 cm = 3.93701″ and square it: 15.5000477401 times 14.6959 =
227.78715 lbs, still “wrong”- but close enough.
It’s about 10 tons per square meter
My head is not as big as 1 square foot- but you could wear a big hat – or have some really big hair thing going on- or be some very fat person with a gut could as wide as a square meter.
I will further simplify my original response in this thread by pointing out that “But 1 atm pressure is 10 tons of air above your head.” is expressing a quantity of pressure in terms of force, which is not correct.
Thanks!
So much criticism of “climate change”, and none of its foundation, the greenhouse effect. I mean despite there is so much subject matter, making all the rest irrelevant.
Indeed. The luke warm consensus appears to dominate without much discussion of the problems in the underlying fundamentals.
For example looking at the past 1 million years. CO2 peaks at the point where temperatures start to fall. How is this possible if CO2 causes warming.
And as well temperatures start to rise when CO2 is at a mibimum. This tells us that low CO2 causes warming and high CO2 causes cooling.
True, but it is not quite what I mean. Actually there is plenty of irony there. Nobody wants to look stupid by questioning the GHE itself. That is given the background that there is a lot of stupid and totally wrong “theory building” of GHE deniers. The notion is, those stupid arguments somehow validate the GHE theory.
Reality is more it has never been seriously contested, and critical sides like this here have not even tried. It does not mean there is no way forward. There is.
That’s because there is a plethora of WE cheerleaders and groupies on this website vigorously supporting the mangled physics of the GHE cargo cult hypothesis.
leitmotif, you’re pretty fast and furious with the ad hominem attacks . . . now, would care to contribute some objective scientific facts or scientific reasoning to the discussion?
“The record claims that the Northern hemisphere surface is warming at a rate of 0.28°C/decade and the Southern Hemisphere is warming at a much lower rate of 0.11°C/decade. Given that CO2 is a well-mixed gas, this is hard to explain, if we assume CO2 is causing the warming.”
So why is it easier to explain if CO2 is not causing the warming? In fact, of course, the answer in either case is that the SH has much more ocean, which warms more slowly.
“Notice the Southern Hemisphere UAH satellite rate is nearly the same as the HadCRUT5 Southern Hemisphere rate. The anomaly is the extraordinary HadCRUT5 Northern Hemisphere rate. Is this real? Unlikely.”
In fact, the UAH table gives the numbers, 0.16 and 0.11 C/dec. Is this real? Let’s check UAH 5.6. There the numbers are 0.21 and 0.10. Pretty different, and a lot more like HADCRUT.
But not the same, why? UAH measures the lower troposphere everywhere, HADCRUT combines air temperatures over land, SST for oceans.
Nick, I see your point, and Ferdberple’s. As for UAH 5.6, 0.21 and 0.1 are considerably below 0.28 and 0.11. I’m not saying any of the values are correct or incorrect. I’m just saying they are different enough that some or all of them must be wrong. We have no idea what the global average surface temperature is, or how fast the surface is warming. I don’t even think the surface is the temperature we should be measuring to measure global climate change, if there is any such animal.
Climate of North America or Australia? I can see that. Global climate? What is that? It only makes sense if there is a global “forcing” like CO2. Does that exist? If so, is it significant? That is what I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else knows either.
The real problem lies in pretending that this planet has a complex and chaotic system called a climate in which its component parts and variables can be assessed, evaluated and averaged. The entire notion is utterly absurd. I keep wondering how so many brilliant minds can have spent so many countless hours pondering and arguing over the characteristics of a thing that does not exit.
Chaos theory needs to be integrated into undergraduate STEM programs as a check on those who tend to exponentially extrapolate every disaster to “infinity.”
… thereby misunderstanding the fundamental nature of chaos. Being schooled in the importance of statistical ‘trends’ in economics and politics, once some “climate” sequences emerge from empirical observation they immediately constrain it into an algorithm, punch it into their computer model and pretend they’re looking at a simulacrum of reality … completely abandoning what made it chaotic in the 1st place.
“…wondering how so many brilliant minds can have spent so many countless hours…”
IF I grant you the ‘brilliant minds’ bit, you still have a problem. You ascribe those minds to people researching atmospheric phenomena, but the real actors are social engineers and psychologists, not fluid mechanics and physicists. Sciencers, not scientists.
In other words, sir, this whole thing has nothing to do with climate, it is all about a Bolshevik coup on mankind. I love this site, not for the debunking of climastrology, but for the pure science and philosophy. To make sense of the “climate catastrophe”, my textbook remains The Protocols:
Protocol 2v2: “The administrators, whom we shall choose…with strict regard to their capacities for servile obedience,… will therefore easily become pawns in our game in the hands of … their advisers… drawing …information they need from our political plans from the lessons of history, from observations made of the events of every moment as it passes. The ‘people’ are not guided by practical use of unprejudiced historical observation, but by theoretical routine without any critical regard for consequent results. We need not, therefore, take any account of them … let that play the principal part which we have persuaded them to accept as the dictates of science (theory). It is with this object in view that we are constantly, by means of our press, arousing a blind confidence in these theories. The intellectuals… will puff themselves up with their knowledge and without any logical verification of them will put into effect all the information available from science, which our AGENTUR specialists have cunningly pieced together for the purpose of educating their minds in the direction we want.”
Now, THAT’s climastrology/covidiocy/4th revolution to the point, dontcha theenk?
” It only makes sense if there is a global “forcing” like CO2. Does that exist? If so, is it significant? That is what I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else knows either.”
Look at how a mild La Nina can drop GAT like a stone over a couple of months. This is the very reason Mann is trying to cancel the AMO etc etc. He is a one trick pony and people are starting to notice that his chickens are coming home. Even he probably sees it.
Andy, average sea temperature is a whole lot closer to reality than land temperatures. The reason is that air and land vary widely in the amount of energy required to heat a givwn mass, depending upon humidity and land use.
Sea temperatures on the other hand are only dependent upon salinity. The saltier rhe water the easier it is to heat.
So averaging arctic waters with tropical waters is problematic due to salinity differences.
But averaging dry soil with wet soil, dry air with wet air is much more problematic.
Until someone shows that averaging and homogenization conserve energy and mass, the entire concept of averaging is bogus.
How can any calculation of temperature that fails to conserve anergy or mass be correct? It is nonsense.
You’ve just proved that you can’t measure global temperature because it is dependent on the amount of ocean vs land.
It’s worse than that because any heating won’t be the same in the two regimes and it is highly likely to have localization. Given that background the idea of an average warming is a fools errand and next to useless for any impact evaluation.
Unscientific Unamerican is ‘it’
my post on koonin
https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/03/22/steve-koonin-lecture/
Thanks for this!!!
I guess that if Scientific American wanted the best two people they could find to go on a witch hunt and demonize Steve Koonin and his book, Naomi Oreskes and Michael Mann are certainly at or near the top of their list of choices. Oreskes isn’t even a true scientist, is she? A science historian isn’t the same thing, is it?
If Mann and Oreskes are driven by hatred, arrogance and egotism as much as anything else, one can see it if one reads between the lines of their demonizing screed that SA tries to pass off as a book review. I have always suggested that arrogance, egotism and hubris can easily be mistaken in one’s own mind for self-righteousness and virtuosity.
If Oreskes and Mann are as full of themselves as they often appear, it is highly unlikely that anyone (including me) will ever be able to get them to understand that fossil fuels will only fade away into the sunset when replacement technologies emerge that can succeed them. The climate scare narrative is not going to force fossil fuels out of the picture, and an anti-nuclear stance pretty much leaves the the alarmists at a dead end.
If and when Scientific American decides to actually be a purely scientific publication again, it should be a fairly dramatic transformation. I believe that science is just as susceptible to corruption from politics, money and activism as most everything else is, and SA is one of the many glaring examples of it today.
Mann achieved his infamy by acting on Phil Jones’ (or was it Trenberth’s) request, a la King Henry II, “who will rid me of that meddlesome period (MWP)?” His great work was falsified almost within the year and the IPCC had to retract.
Oreskes rocketed to instant fame by using her lofty position of scholarship by confirming several of the various “97% consensus” frauds. They’ve been lauded by the climate change hoi poloi ever since. Oreskes’ preposterous tract was a subject of derision immediately because I believe she claimed something like 100% consensus.
The first time I saw the hooky stick, I knew it was BS. The Midlevel Warm Period is a FACT of history and the shaft was straight, with nary a wiggle. Impossible!
That was all I needed to logically surmise that Mickey Mann was a fraud.
Since that time I discovered Climate Audit, where Steve McIntire proved statistically that Mann was a fraud, and then on to this site which continues, daily, to prove the fraud.
I must especially thank Anthony for the review of weather station siting anomalies in the US for showing that they failed to run updated equipment and locations with the old equipment and locations to compare the temperatures between the two. I would think 2 years of readings from old and new equipment would be required to provide for adjustment of the output of the new to match the old.
I remember that just the change from white washing to latex paint of the enclosures had an UPWARD effect on the recorded temperature. Minor no doubt, but still a change, especially when climatistas average the global anomaly to the thousandth of a degree. And EVERYONE always says the US has the BEST temperature history. The BEST with the known deficiencies is not so great.
If the rest are worse, that surface temperature data is crap in general, and even worse when “corrected” by climatistas in government like GISS in the US and BOM in Aus.
Exactly … “Unreliable data, you say? Great, all the better to justify endless “adjustments” as needed”.
At this point I have to believe that the only people who believe AGW are frighteningly ignorant, brain dead or politically motivated.
Yes… and unfortunately…Oreskes has a baccalaureate degree in Mining Geology and did reputable work both in industry and academia…. then she became an academic specializing in the history and philosophy of “Science” and promptly forgot everything she ever learned in the real world.
Agreed. Oreskes and Mann seem to reside in the same parallel universe as does Nancy Pelosi. And it isn’t the most adjacent one!
Should be called “Pseudoscientific German.”
“In the fall of 2008, Scientific American was put under the control of Nature Publishing Group, a division of Holtzbrinck” a German company.
In short : The Scientific American is no longer The Scientific American.
“Political Science American” is what it became long ago. Like the NY Times, playing to its subscribers, to optimize revenue. Truth appears only incidentally, as it may fit the rhythm or beat. Magazines and news media have become exactly like pop artists, playing the tunes their audiences reliably want to hear, to fill seats in the “concert halls” that is their revenue base since advertisers went to where the eyeballs are. Politics and the fear/alarmism that is the squeaky wheel of politics has become another branch of the entertainment industry.
What is more hopeful to observe is that climate alarmism may increasingly becoming the bird in this Dead Parrot Sketch that passes for societal dialogue, debate and governance. As Professor Harry Frankfurt once said in interviews about his excellent essay (On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005), one of the most effective ways to push back against bullshit is to make fun of it. It lends itself to that. Any persons attempting to attack an adult-in-the-room like Steven Koonin with less-than-diligent efforts will increasingly be parodying themselves. Of course, they’ll always be the last to know…
” one of the most effective ways to push back against bullshit is to make fun of it.”
Most definitely: the thermageddonists hate it when you laugh at them in comment threads on blogs or on twitter. They start screeching and wailing. I regard laughing at the warmunists as a sport.
Andy,
Good summary and argument. The blather in the middle of the report contained smears of Koonin, AEI, Marc Thiessen, and the Koch brothers as well, only to make a simple-minded association. Just cut-and-paste stuff. The entire deal was to give some sort of appearance of substance to the direct libel at the end:
…which is a value judgement not borne out by any of the content in the body of the article. Now Mann-boy sued over something IMO a little bit less than this. In fact, Koonin’s gone out of his way to stay in his lane and NOT take obvious arguments that automatically generate the “denier” label, perhaps not to Lomborg levels, but careful, none the less. I wonder just how much legal pressure it would take for Scienceautistic Amerikan to retract it?
Scientific American: once the pride of scientists communicating facts to the general public . . . now the pride of so-called “scientists” communicating falsehoods to the gullible public.
Sic transit gloria.
“From a scientific and statistical point of view ([MBH98] contained many statistical errors)”
Incorrect. An error assumes a mistake made. Mann knew exactly what he was doing, which is why he tried so hard to cover it up. Even his subsequent studies, supposedly vindicating his own work, contained similar “errors”.
Michel Mann . . . the pride and joy of the National Academy of Sciences, who elected him to be a member in April 2020 despite his scientific malfeasance being proven and well-known by then.
I am puzzled by Figure 2. If the figures shown are relative to 1979-1990, surely the average anomaly during that period should be zero? Eyeballing the graph shows an average anomaly during that period of -0.3.
Following one of our favourite politicians down under, “Please explain!”
Dudley,
Believe it or not, the Figure 1 graph is from the anomalies as delivered by HadCRUT. The anomalies have not been shifted. Here is the full range of data, straight from HadCRUT.
Dudley, as for Figure 2. The title is poorly worded. What I meant was that the Southern Hemisphere anomalies were moved to the Northern Hemisphere average from 1979 to 1990. This was to emphasize the difference in the slopes since then. I fixed the title and caption in the post to make it more clear. Thanks for pointing this out, the title was clearly wrong.
And while consistently criticizing “skeptical science” for presuming the MWP was a global effect, insisting it was local … his [MBH98] proxies consisted of fewer than half a dozen bristlecone pines in America, combined with possibly a dozen of Keith Briffa’s Yamal larches to represent 1000 years of the entire Northern Hemisphere … plus his “nature trick” splicing 20th century instrumental measurements to his proxies. Whadda guy!
Local cooling creates global cooling when you average, unless there was offsetting local warming somewhere else.
So far noone has shown the LIA had offsetting warming, so it must have cooled the global average.
And here we see the problem with focusing on global averages! It obscures important regional differences. Look at the LIA, in the Northern Hemisphere (30N to 60N) relative to other latitude slices. This pattern of warming looks very natural, looks like orbital influence, not CO2, a well-mixed, globally distributed greenhouse gas.
Orbital forcing is by latitude, CO2 should be global.
Yamal came after the Hockey Stick study, and similarly the ‘Nature Trick’ had nothing to do with the HS.
Whadda Guy!
Mann’s “nature trick” …
https://climateaudit.org/2009/11/20/mike%E2%80%99s-nature-trick/
I remember buying Scientific American all the time, before it went full politic, now that it is the Unscientific American I don’t even bother looking at the cover. So sad what they have done!
It’s puzzling.
It’s odd how the NH was in sync with SH surface temperature and global SST trend until ~2000, the global SST trend being in sync with UAH lower troposphere since 1979.
The same zany divergence applies to GISTEMP, it will be interesting to see how things proceed from here.
Even if true, it belies the idea that CO2 is the “control knob.” Hemispheric differences scream natural variability.
Hemispheric differences scream nothing of the sort. Climate models were predicting faster northern hemisphere warming due to elevated CO2 concentrations back in 1980: “Figure 14 also reveals that the high latitude warming of the northern hemisphere is significantly larger than that of the southern hemisphere” from Manabe and Stouffer 1980, JGR, Sensitivity of a Global Climate Model to an Increase of CO2 Concentration in the Atmosphere.
Sorry, but no one uses those 1980 models anymore. They were not fit for purpose and were abandoned for newer, more complete models. So your comment is meaningless as it is 40 years old. Try to keep up with current events.
The point is that the observed faster warming of the northern hemisphere has been a predicted outcome of climate models (and generally, of climate scientists) for 40 years, before that differential warming was even observed.
I’m sure if I’d used a more recent paper (such as this 2013 one on interhemispheric temperature asymmetry: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/26/15/jcli-d-12-00525.1.xml) you would have piped up with “but the model was tuned to show that!”
Try to actually engage with the science.
You can file that under “Even a broken (analogue) clock is right twice a day.”
SciAm did a similar hit-job on Bjorn Lomborg when his “The Skeptical Environmentalist” came out.
Just my thought!
That’s when I canceled my subscription to SA. I don’t agree with Lomborg on many things, but I really objected to SA’s hit piece.
Reminds me of the review of Lomborgs The Skeptical Environmentalist.
So a bad review in Scientific American makes Unsettled a must-read!
So it should become a badge of honor to have such a “review” of skeptical authors as only the authors the climatistas fear will get such reviews.
”The Scientific American hit piece claims that temperatures have risen rapidly since 1979 and are the warmest in 1,500 years”
I’m getting sick to the back teeth hearing this over and over and over by so many alarmists….
How can anyone honestly say they know the speed at which temperatures a thousand years ago went up or down by <> 1 degree C? Proxies cannot possibly have this kind of resolution. It’s guesswork at best.
Compare apples with apples or f**k off!
It’s just completely made up garbage pure and simple. LIES!!
Trying to calculate and predict the climate is like trying to calculate and predict a market. Neither can be done. Climate is chaotic. Markets are chaotic. But to left wingers who think an all knowing bureaucracy can gather all the data and calculate and predict the future, both can be controlled.
Scientific American is NOT ‘left wing’.
this idea that every piece of climate science is motivated by some ‘leftist’ dogma is utter nonsense and makes this site and its viewpoint look ridiculous
LOL.
…and the moon is made of cheese.
Great Poe, griff.
allsides.com disagrees with you:
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/scientific-american
So skepticism is left wing also? How about keeping fossil fuels? Funny how so many left leaning politicians are hell bent on eliminating fossil fuel use for generating energy. You reckon you can name some left leaning people that are willing to speak up about doing using natural gas well into the future?
Okey Dokey:
Scientific American Gives First Presidential Endorsement in 175 Years — to Joe Biden
https://people.com/politics/scientific-american-endorses-joe-biden/
Now, if Scientific American published something like this about Climate Science, I might agree with you:
Pandemic researchers — recruit your own best critics
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01392-8
And without the above approach, the only pushback is from the “denier community”
The Rise of “Kinder, Gentler” Climate-Change Deniers
Bret Stephens might seem reasonable compared to conspiracy theorists, but his stealth denial is far more damaging.
https://newrepublic.com/article/142421/rise-kinder-gentler-climate-change-deniers
Notice how the disparagement of Nic Lewis (far more damaging) morphs to:
Climate contrarian uncovers scientific error, upends major ocean warming study
So, without the arrival of Lewis, Bill Gates and Elon Musk would be lobbying the Biden Administration for money to cool the world’s oceans. And think of the fear inducing “click-bait” headlines and the billons of dollars of ensuing research based off of Resplany’s claims.
Nature used to be at the pinnacle of scientific journals, where mistakes like Resplandy’s would have ended one’s scientific career.
Scientific American, if it were truly scientific should be welcoming Steve Koonin to the fold and highlighting his concerns… allowing its readers to make up their own minds.
However, as they endorsed Joe Biden, that ain’t gonna happen…
“Scientific American is NOT ‘left wing’.”
Scientific American is definitely Climate Alarmist.
That’s why I cancelled my subscription to Scientific American back in the 1980’s. They started making unsubstantiated assertions about Human-caused Climate Change that were never backed up by facts or evidence and I got tired of it after a while. And they are still doing it today.
I recently reacquired a subscription to Scientific American, although it wasn’t intentional. I got it as part of signing up for Apple+, which includes something like 300 magazines.
I read the cover of the latest Scientific American and just shake my head at how far down the rathole it has fallen. They ought to call it Scientific American Politics.
So, why are you here?
An equally short answer would be appreciated.
Small note. The steam is coming out of cooling towers, NOT chimneys.
No. See the cover image to Blowing Smoke. It is exhaust gas steam resulting from the SO2 scrubber at the base of the stack.
The NRC actually concluded
“The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century
warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000
years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that
includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced
changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and
the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented
during at least the last 2,000 years“
Nope. Seriously, have you actually read AR4? The Hockey Stick (MBH98) is reproduced in Fig 6.10. Sure it is less prominent, but then it was by then 10 years old and just one of many. As for ‘problems uncovered’, the IPCC found that criticisms that might have changed the conclusions had no merit and those that had some merit had a negligible effect on conclusions.
“McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) reported that they were
unable to replicate the results of Mann et al. (1998). Wahl
and Ammann (2007) showed that this was a consequence of
differences in the way McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) had
implemented the method of Mann et al. (1998) and that the
original reconstruction could be closely duplicated using the
original proxy data. McIntyre and McKitrick (2005a,b) raised
further concerns about the details of the Mann et al. (1998)
method, principally relating to the independent verifi cation
of the reconstruction against 19th-century instrumental
temperature data and to the extraction of the dominant modes
of variability present in a network of western North American
tree ring chronologies, using Principal Components Analysis.
The latter may have some theoretical foundation, but Wahl and
Amman (2006) also show that the impact on the amplitude
of the final reconstruction is very small (~0.05°C; for further
discussion of these issues see also Huybers, 2005; McIntyre
and McKitrick, 2005c,d; von Storch and Zorita, 2005).”
(Section 6.6.1)
Dropped? Hardly.
“…Wahl and Ammann (2007) showed that…the original reconstruction could be closely duplicated using the original proxy data…”
Have Mann et al. (1998) ever released the original proxy data?
Of course, they mainly used publically available proxies, and released the data shortly after publication. Here’s an extract from Mann’s book ‘The Hockey Stick and Climate Wars’
Mann, Michael E.. The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (p. 263). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.
https://climateaudit.org/multiproxy-pdfs/
John Phillips, Mann is being disingenuous. This is what really happened, from the authoritative Hockey Stick Illusion, by Andrew Montford.
The email requesting the data from Mann did not mention a spreadsheet, the data was delivered as a text file in any case, not a spreadsheet. p. 95
Neither Mann nor Rutherford mentioned the ftp site in numerous emails. Mann claimed that he and Rutherford had to generate the data for McIntyre, yet the data “pcproxy.txt” was years old when McIntyre finally found it. page 95
Montford’s description of the raw data problems from pages 92-106 is very illuminating. Very little of what Mann writes in his book is true.
I have yet to read a single sentence from Andrew Montford that is not skewed in some way, according to the Auditor himself:
I concede I have not read Montford’s book, and after this review, never will.
Consider the source of that “review.”
Between the inappropriate use of bristlecone pine tree rings, the botched Principal Components analysis and the clumsy attempt to camouflage appending proxy temperatures on to instrumental temperature records, Michael “Piltdown” Mann revealed himself to be either wildly incompetent or a flat-out liar/charlatan.
The source of the review is a professional statistician who specialises in time series and has published on climate. I notice you don’t address the actual content.
So many myths:
Bristlecones turn out to be perfectly OK in the context in which they are used by Mann et al.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2009/11/13/0903029106.full.pdf
The PCA controversy is moot, using a non ‘botched’ method only impacts the reconstruction by 0.05C at worst.
Instrumental records and proxies are plotted separately and clearly labelled as such in both MBH98 and MBH99, there was no ‘splicing’.
John Phillips:
From the Wegman report, Wegman was a Professor of statistics at George Mason until he retired in 2018.
Regarding principal components:
In summary, the faulty methods used by Mann forced the hockey stick graph. You can feed random red noise to the algorithm, and it will produce a hockey stick. This is demonstrated on page 30.
You clearly need to broaden your reading and include those that disagree with you.
The report can be downloaded here:
https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/07142006_wegman_report.pdf
And the long debunked myths keep on coming.
“Again, we have another example of Montford implying that some single element is both faulty and crucial. Without nonstandard PCA the hockey stick falls apart! Without the Stahle and NOAMER PC1 data series the hockey stick falls apart! Without the Gaspe series the hockey stick falls apart! Without bristlecone pine tree rings the hockey stick falls apart! It’s all very persuasive, especially to the conspiracy-minded, but the truth is that the hockey stick depends on none of these elements. You get a hockey stick with standard PCA, in fact you get a hockey stick using no PCA at all. Remove the NOAMER PC1 and Stahle series, you’re left with a hockey stick. Remove the Gaspe series, it’s still a hockey stick.”
As for the HS from red noise myth, it was not truly random input, M&M used data with an unrealistically high degree of autocorrelation and failed to detrend…
“We generated the red noise network for Monte Carlo simulations as follows. We downloaded and collated the NOAMER tree ring site chronologies used by MBH98 from M. Mann’s FTP site and selected the 70 sites used in the AD1400 step.”
Even then the resulting hockey sticks were tiny compared to the real thing, and half trended down, not up. So our brave researchers devised a ‘hockey stick index’ that mined the output and only printed the top 1% that suited their case… and the ‘diligent’ Wegman repeated this uncritically.
https://deepclimate.org/2010/10/25/the-wegman-report-sees-red-noise/
https://deepclimate.org/2010/11/16/replication-and-due-diligence-wegman-style/
LOL. Which source? The Grauniad ? The idiot Tamino ?
You threw a lot of spaghetti on the wall. I’ve got better things to do than to sort through garbage.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/
The search for truth always begins with ignoring what you don’t want to see.
Andy May, thank you for clarifying this and setting the record straight.
I read Andrew Montford’s superb book more than a decade ago.
I do not recall reading anywhere since that Michael “Piltdown” Mann and the Hokey Stick gang had ever released their original proxy data.
God knows, as Montford recounts, up until the appearance of his book, they had done everything in their power to avoid releasing the original data.
I’m unclear on that point. I’m not sure he ever released all the data in a usable form. Neither the National Research Council nor the Wegman committee were able to get it. As a result, everyone has reverse engineered it and used that for their analysis. It is clear Mann edited the public domain proxy records in various ways as explained by McIntyre and Montford.
I’m unclear on that point. I’m not sure he ever released all the data in a usable form. Neither the National Research Council nor the Wegman committee were able to get it.
You keep on spreading untruths. Why?
Letter from Dr Mann to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce
https://www.realclimate.org/docs/Mann_response_to_Barton.pdf
“Very little of what Mann writes in his book is true.”
Well considering he was willing to include falsehoods (like claiming to be a noble prize winner) in court documents, it’s no surprise that his book would be filled with falsehoods as well.
He (or likely his legal team) used the wrong form of words regarding the awarding of the Nobel Peace prize to the IPCC, he originally said he was a Nobel Prize winner, when the correct form of words is ‘he contributed to the reports of the IPCC which was awarded the prize’. The error was promptly corrected.
This, of course, had no bearing whatsoever on his professional work. ISTR when the book first came out, McIntyre promising to write up all the errors in it, but for some reason never got round to it…. LOL.
Click.
John Phillips,
Yes, the hockey stick was dropped. A glance at Figure 6.10 proves that, the hockey stick is buried in a plate of spaghetti.
As for the NRC, report. It was done by a committee, and they were divided. Gerald North is a well-known alarmist, and he headed the committee, in that position he softened the conclusions. Here are some significant quotes from the report, NOT from the conclusions:
“The variability of proxy reconstructed temperatures will be less than the variability of the actual temperatures and may not reproduce the actual temperature pattern at particular timescales.” page 83
“Most critically, the relatively short instrumental temperature record provides very few degrees of freedom for verifying the low-frequency content of a reconstruction.” page 83
The key criticism:
“Zorita and von Storch (2005) then reconstructed the Northern Hemisphere average temperature using both regression methods and the related Mann et al. method and found that in both cases the variance of the reconstruction was attenuated relative to the “true” temperature time series with the attenuation increasing as the noise variance was increased.
This phenomenon, identified by Zorita and von Storch (2005) and others, is not unexpected. Within the calibration period, the fraction of variance of temperature that is explained by the proxies naturally decreases as the noise level of the proxies increases.” Page 86
I have read the AR4 report and the NRC report. But both are so large and have so many authors you can cherry-pick anything you want from them. I think I characterized both accurately on the substance. You are free to disagree.
So in AR4, MBH98 was both included in a graph, discussed in the text and according to you, ‘dropped’. Got that.
I note you cite Soon and Baliunas 2003 as a critique of MBH and also von Storch (2005). Oddly, you fail to inform your readers that S&B was such drivel that half the board of Climate Research, including Hans Von Storch resigned in protest, von Storch writing in his resignation letter that the paper should never have been published and ‘The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked … the methodological basis for such a conclusion (that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climate period of the last millennium) was simply not given’
Regarding von Storch (2005) – according to you, the ‘key criticism’ – I asserted that the criticisms of MBH that have merit, have negligible impact, rather than rely on Montford’s interpretation (never recommended), you could try instead reading the actual paper…
“Our results, derived in the artificial world of an extended historical climate simulation, indicate therefore that the AHS (artificial hockey stick – derived from non-centred PCA ) does not have a significant impact but leads only to very minor deviations.”
And that is your ‘key criticism’.
From <https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2005GL022753>
I notice you do not try and challenge Soon and Baliunas on the merits, in my opinion, it is a brilliant paper and well ahead of its time. You are entitled to your opinion, so is von Storch.
In any case, the hockey stick is now completely discredited and Soon and Baliunas has stood the test of time. A political fight in an obscure journal, that happened in 2003-2004, doesn’t matter now.
“I notice you do not try and challenge Soon and Baliunas on the merits, in my opinion, it is a brilliant paper and well ahead of its time. You are entitled to your opinion, so is von Storch. In any case, the hockey stick is now completely discredited and Soon and Baliunas has stood the test of time. “
And black is white. Surely von Storch’s opinion carries some weight, as an editor of the journal? Ultimately he, half the editorial board and the publisher agreed the paper should never have seen the light of day. Not sure this counts as standing the test of time.
As for the problems with S&B, here are a few … a central issue is that the paper made up it’s own definitions of the MWP and LIA and only recorded ‘anomalies’ so it would for example laughably count warm or wet conditions in one region from 800 to 850 and dry conditions in a separate region from 1200 to 1250 as both demonstrating the Medieval Warm Period. Ho ho.
Secondly, many of the scientists whose work was cited took violent disagreement to the way S&B misrepresented their studies…
“Malcolm K. Hughes of the University of Arizona, whose work on dendrochronology was discussed in the paper, said the paper was “so fundamentally misconceived and contains so many egregious errors that it would take weeks to list and explain them all.” Peter Stott, a climatologist at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said “Their analysis doesn’t consider whether the warm/cold periods occurred at the same time”.
S&B also failed to validate their proxies against temperature (oh, the irony), they made no attempt to show that regional temperature changes were a proxy for global change and they used the whole of the 20th century as a base period while comparing it to low-resolution proxies, which meant they were unable to support their conclusion that late 20th century warming was anomalous.
Many of the authors whose work S&B had misused published a rebuttal in EOS. No editors felt constrained to resign.
Sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy
https://www.sgr.org.uk/resources/stormy-times-climate-research
I have looked into all this for my recent book, this is what I wrote:
“An investigation, by the journal, concluded that the review process had been properly conducted and many of the staff supported the paper.”
“In particular one article, by Soon and Baliunas (CR 23: 89-110), has caused considerable controversy. The article drew severe critique, which was made public by a thorough analysis of the results in the Transaction of the AGU, EOS (vol 84, No. 27, 256). I find this critique well-taken. The major result of the Soon and Baliunas paper “Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” cannot be concluded from the evidence presented in that paper, even if the statement itself may be true. It is not a problem of different “opinions” but whether the methodology is adequate of not. Thus, the review process of CR failed to confront the authors with necessary and legitimate methodological questions which should have been addressed in the finally printed paper. On the other hand, the publisher Inter-Research has determined that the review process was done according to the CR rules. Four different reviewers were involved. Thus, the editorial board of CR had to admit that the formal review rules are not sufficient to guarantee the required quality control of the review process”
“After a conflict with the publisher Otto Kinne of Inter-Research I stepped down on 28. July 2003 as Editor-in-Chief of Climate Research; the reason was that I as newly appointed Editor-in-Chief wanted to make public that the publication of the Soon & Baliunas article was an error, and that the review process at Climate Research would be changed in order to avoid similar failures. The review process had utterly failed”
Hans von Storch, editor Climate Research (resigned)
“The paper that caused the storms (Soon & Baliunas, Clim Res 2003, 23:89–110) evoked heavy criticism, not least in EOS 2003 (84, No 27, 256). Major conclusions of Soon & Baliunas are: ‘Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millenium.’ (p. 89) and ‘Overall, the 20th century does not contain the warmest anomaly of the past millenium in most of the proxy records which have been sampled world-wide’ (p. 104). While these statements may be true, the critics point out that they cannot be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper. CR should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication.”
Otto Kline – publisher Climate Research.
The publisher of the journal, Dr. Otto Kinne, and an editor who recently became editor in chief, Dr. Hans von Storch, both said that in retrospect the paper should not have been published as written. Dr. Kinne defended the journal and its process of peer review, but distanced himself from the paper.
”I have not stood behind the paper by Soon and Baliunas,” he wrote in an e-mail message. ”Indeed: the reviewers failed to detect methodological flaws.”
The review process may have been conducted properly, but even the publisher concedes a fatally flawed paper was mistakenly published. Continuing to boost this turkey does nothing for your credibility, in my view.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150527225837/http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/05/science/politics-reasserts-itself-in-the-debate-over-climate-change-and-its-hazards.html?pagewanted=2
https://www.int-res.com/articles/misc/CREditorial.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20110719032339/http://coast.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/storch/CR-problem/cr.2003.htm
“I notice you do not try and challenge Soon and Baliunas on the merits, in my opinion, it is a brilliant paper and well ahead of its time. You are entitled to your opinion, so is von Storch. In any case, the hockey stick is now completely discredited and Soon and Baliunas has stood the test of time. “
And black is white. Surely von Storch’s opinion carries some weight, as an editor of the journal? Ultimately he, half the editorial board and the publisher agreed it should never have seen the light of day. Not sure this counts as standing the test of time.
As for the problems with S&B, here are a few … a central issue is that the paper made up it’s own definitions of the MWP and LIA and only recorded ‘anomalies’ so it would for example laughably count warm or wet conditions in one region from 800 to 850 and dry conditions in a separate region from 1200 to 1250 as both demonstrating the Medieval Warm Period. Ho ho.
Secondly, many of the scientists whose work was cited took violent disagreement to the way S&B misrepresented their studies…
“Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography commented that “the fact that [the paper] has received any attention at all is a result, again in my view, of its utility to those groups who want the global warming issue to just go away”. Malcolm K. Hughes of the University of Arizona, whose work on dendrochronology was discussed in the paper, said the paper was “so fundamentally misconceived and contains so many egregious errors that it would take weeks to list and explain them all.” Peter Stott, a climatologist at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, said “Their analysis doesn’t consider whether the warm/cold periods occurred at the same time”.
S&B also failed to validate their proxies against temperature (oh, the irony), they made no attempt to show that regional temperature changes were a proxy for global change and they used the whole of the 20th century as a base period while comparing it to low-resolution proxies, which meant they were unable to support their conclusion that late 20th century warming was anomalous.
Many of the authors whose work S&B had misused published a rebuttal in EOS. No editors resigned.
Sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy
https://www.sgr.org.uk/resources/stormy-times-climate-research
My description of the controversy you refer to is above. I stand by it and the validity of S&B. As for your specific criticisms:
That was the point of the article and a major reason why I consider it brilliant.
When has this not been true for ground-breaking work?? This is not a criticism. Opinions are opinions, facts are facts.
A co-author of MBH, hardly an unbiased source, we will stop there.
That was the second main point of the article!
The linear correlations of proxies against temperature are a major source of error in reconstructions! They are rarely linear and R^2 of these correlations is often extremely poor! Further, the correlations are made in the instrumental era, and not valid for the past 1,500 years as shown in the NRC and Wegman Reports, as well as in S&B.
You obviously miss the whole point of S&B. I suggest re-reading it and you will see why the MBH hockey sticks are now discredited, and that S&B were correct all along.
BTW, wikipedia is not a valid climate change source, it was corrupted by William Connolley who rewrote 5,428 climate articles to disparage skeptics. He’s been fired, but a lot of his garbage is still out there. As for Clare Goodess’s tantrum it is addressed in my previous comment.
You seem strangely incapable of writing a sentence that does not contain an error.
“The linear correlations of proxies against temperature are a major source of error in reconstructions! They are rarely linear and R^2 of these correlations is often extremely poor!”
What are ‘linear corrections’? As you have read the NRC report you will be aware that they discussed this exact point and correctly declared R^2 as a useless metric in the context of assessing skill in climate reconstructions.
(As an added benefit, you can now chortle at the amount of effort and words expended by McIntyre and Montford on the meritless r2 statistic)
Further, the correlations are made in the instrumental era, and not valid for the past 1,500 years as shown in the NRC and Wegman Reports, as well as in S&B.
You need to explain why a correlation works for one period and breaks down in another. Neither the NRC, Wegman or S&B support this assertion.
BTW, wikipedia is not a valid climate change source, it was corrupted by William Connolley who rewrote 5,428 climate articles to disparage skeptics. He’s been fired, but a lot of his garbage is still out there.
Baloney. You clearly do not know how wiki works. He did indeed make a large number of edits, but they were on topics ranging from Aesop to XAP2. Over a decade ago he was given a temporary topic ban, after a dispute with sceptics, but never fired. Facts are facts.
https://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/01/04/a-childs-garden-of-wikipedia-p
John Phillips, The proxies are not thermometers, each proxy must be converted to a temperature with a function, typically linear and typically with regression. Thus, the R^2 of the function is a major source of error, everyone acknowledges this, but it clearly went right over your head.
The only data we have to make these functions is the modern instrumental record, but proxy functions created today, do not necessarily work in the past before we had thermometers, especially the tree ring functions, since CO2 affects growth.
Your comment conflates this with the argument over what statistic to use to evaluate the quality of the principal component results. You obviously understand very little of the process.
First each proxy is correlated with temperature in the modern era, then MBH combined them with principal components. S&B and many others, including me, believe both steps are dangerous. S&B prefer examining the raw proxies due to the uncertainty that a correlation developed today will apply 1,000 years ago. This is a problem discussed by both the NRC and Wegman groups.
The Wegman report comments:
One interesting technique is used by Christiansen and Ljungqvist that I like. They determine average temperatures by region, then average them. This helps preserve variability. Anyway, study up on it and then we can debate.
William Connolley was fired as a Wikipedia administrator in September 2009.
“Thus, the R^2 of the function is a major source of error, everyone acknowledges this, but it clearly went right over your head.”
Your ‘everyone’ excludes the NRC, who described R2 as meritless in this context. But do carry on with the bafflegab, it is amusing.
There you go, conflating two totally unrelated R^2 statistics. Please do your homework before commenting, you are making yourself look foolish.
A climate scientist explains
“This just isn’t that complicated. I find something I want to predict based on information that I have that I think is related to the thing I want to predict. I can create any metric I want to test the prediction in the validation period. That might be r2, RE, CE or the RMS error or anything else. Each of these is a measure of some different aspect of the prediction. I can also create a monte-carlo simulation using random noise to examine the distribution of that statistic using my reconstruction method to determine what significance would imply (i.e. how large or small does that statistic need to be to exceed 95% of the random cases). By doing that, you can find under what circumstances your method is skillful. The aspects of the reconstruction that show skill (in this case the long term mean, but not the year to year variability) are things that are worth pursuing. This is very general. If you don’t like a particular metric for some reason, or you think that one other metric is more useful, then fine, publish a paper showing what you conclude from the data. It really isn’t that important.
[…]
” the NAS Chapter 9 deals with the issues there very clearly. The basic point is that when you get to the relatively sparse networks further back, the reconstructions don’t have fidelity at the year-to-year variability. If that is something you care about (i.e. whether 1237 was warmer or cooler than 1238), then you are out of luck. If instead you are interested in whether the 13th Century was cooler than the 12th C, it (r2) is not the right metric to be using.”
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delusion/comment-page-4/#comments
William Connolley was fired as a Wikipedia administrator in September 2009.
Having admin privileges revoked <> fired. It had no impact on his ability to edit articles, as you implied. Your wiki ignorance runs deep.
This quote from the Wegman report summarizes the problem with MBH quite well:
In a nutshell, this is where they screwed up. S&B’s novel and simple approach gets around this problem, which is obvious with 20/20 hindsight.
Wahl and Amman showed that the PCA ‘problem’ had a negligible impact. But I repeat myself.
And Wegman is hardly an example of diligent scholarship, containing as it does text copy-pasted from wikipedia amongst other places, and, in an attempt to inflate credentials, extensive and unattributed copying from a dendrochronology textbook by Bradley.
John, I notice Soon and Baliunas, 2003 has 273 citations on Google Scholar, obviously your opinion is not shared by most. The average paper has perhaps 2 citations?
Counting citations? Really? Ok, I’ll bite. Mann Bradley and Hughes (1998) has garnered 2528, MBH (1999) 2424. That makes the MBH papers 8 times ‘better’ than S&B, right?
But ’tis a silly game. Citation does not imply agreement. Just look at the first citation of S&B in Google Scholar
“We have thus far emphasized the work of historical climatologists who have combined detailed information and rigorous statistical techniques in order to develop long, continuous, and well-replicated series. Despite these extensive research efforts, anecdotal evidence concerning the last millennium based on factually dubious beliefs is still rife. We note three specific examples that are often misrepresented in terms of their relevance to past climate: (1) the freezing of the River Thames in London in past centuries, (2) the cultivation of vines in medieval England, and (3) the settlement of Iceland and southwestern Greenland about 1000 years ago. It is not unusual to find any one of these examples (often referred to as anecdotal information), and indeed, in some cases, all three simultaneously [Cutler, 1997], incorrectly presented as evidence of large-scale warmth or cold in popular accounts of past climate change. Examples can also be found in the peer review scientific literature [Soon and Baliunas, 2003; Soon et al., 2003]”
Cited simply to refute. Because it is dross.
John Phillips,
These quotes from the NRC report get to the heart of the matter:
“An inherent difficulty in validating a climate reconstruction is that the validation period is limited to the historical instrumental record, so it is not possible to obtain a direct estimate of the reconstruction skill at earlier periods.” page 92
“an important aspect of a more general finding of this committee, which is that uncertainties of the published reconstructions have been underestimated.” page 113
Bravo, Andy May !!
A brilliant take-down of the uber sleazy Oreskes and Michael “Piltdown” Mann.
Wow, what a hatchet job by Scientific American, beginning with:
“If you’d heard only that a scientist who served in the Trump administration and now regularly appears on Fox News and other conservative media thinks climate change is a hoax, you’d roll your eyes and move on.”
so the assumption right from the beginning is that Trump and his team and Fox News are all idiots- hey, maybe that’s true, but not the way to start a serious discussion in a science magazine
“…if you look into the hockey stick articles I list of above, you will see that tree rings are affected by the atmospheric CO2 concentration, which means modern tree rings are not comparable to ancient ones, oops!”
I still can’t find any “science” that can determine temperatures from tree rings. A few years ago I asked a professor who I was told is an expert- and all he did was recommend a book on dendrochronology- and that book just showed how to age the wood, nothing about temperature. Certainly you can’t tell temperature by the thickness of a ring as many other factors influence growth. If anyone here can give me a reference to any science on this, please do so.
From the NRC report:
As to the problems with tree rings recently and the 20th century “divergence problem” see:
Briffa, K., Schweingruber, F., Jones, P., Osborn, T., & Vaganov, E. (1998b). Reduced Sensitivity of recent tree-growth to temperature at high latitudes. Nature, 678-682. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/35596
All I know after 48 years as a forester is that a lot of variables effect tree ring size and density so I think tree rings as temperature proxies is absurd.
“During the second half of the twentieth century, the decadal-scale trends in wood density and summer temperatures have increasingly diverged as wood density has progressively fallen. The cause of this increasing insensitivity of wood density to temperature changes is not known, but if it is not taken into account in dendroclimatic reconstructions, past temperatures could be overestimated. Moreover, the recent reduction in the response of trees to air-temperature changes would mean that estimates of future atmospheric CO2 concentrations, based on carbon-cycle models that are uniformly sensitive to high-latitude warming, could be too low.”
Wood density has a lot to do with how fast the trees are growing- faster growth means less dense wood. But how fast they grow has everything to do with species, health of the tree, age of the tree, how dense the forest is, amount of water in the soil is available, animals eating the foliage, etc. And probably temperature too- and probably many other variables we have no idea about.
When it mentions that there is a “recent reduction in the response of trees to air-temperature changes…”, how do they know that unless they assume that trees used to be more responsive? Can they prove it?
When I’ve argued against tree rings as thermometers in the past – some people mentioned ice cores as temperature proxies. Maybe ice cores work but I haven’t studied that and I doubt that they’re as accurate as claimed.
Or this … https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2009/11/13/0903029106.full.pdf
Naomi Oreskes is as brilliant as she is beautiful.
Meanwhile, a tweet by Judith Curry being slammed by Mann et al: https://twitter.com/curryja/status/1397901896380211200
And it’s being discussed on “RealClimate”: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/06/unforced-variations-jun-2021/
See item #3.
Scientific American’s June issue has an article, “A Tapestry of Alternatives” subtitled, “Making peace with the biosphere will require building communities and relationships that are focused on sustaining life- human and nonhuman”. So if anyone doesn’t understand that the climate hysteria is wedded to a push for Utopia, they aren’t paying attention. The item isn’t yet available online unless you’re registered then you can download it. In the article I see the image I’ve attached. In the text next to the image showing values- it says, “Indigenous peoples and others have lived by similar values for centuries, and they are also being embraced and asserted by people in industrial societies as solutions to global ecological and social crisis.”
First of all, indigenous people have a history of war and pillage as bad as non indigenous people. I’ve read reports by anthropologists who describe ancient skeletons with skulls smashed by weapons and they are not uncommon. War and violence isn’t new. And the only reason indigenous people didn’t effect their local ecosystems as much as non indigenous people is that they didn’t have the tools to do so- other than fire which was universal. Idealizing indigenous peoples is childish. They were/are no better nor worse than non indigenous. But look at that “tapestry” of values. It’s fine to fantasize about Utopia, but in a science magazine?
The article wants us to think indigenous people were all nature loving socialists.
Ah, yes, the delusional myth of the noble indigenous peoples. There are innumerable takedowns of Rousseau’s “noble savage.”
Among them:
S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Tribe in American History (2010) and
Francis Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America (1865-1892).
The Iroquois (a/k/a the Five Nations) completely obliterated the Algonquins in what amounted to a successful case of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The Comanches, Iroquois and Algonquins were masterful, accomplished torturers with a well-developed ability to inflict horrific suffering. They frequently enjoyed the thrill of slowly burning their victims alive.
I could be wrong- but it’s my understanding is that slavery from Africa couldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for native, indigenous African slavers grabbing other indigenous people and selling them to the Arabs and later Europeans. The Native Americans here in central New England were terrified of the ferocious Mohawks. But by comparison, wealthy populations seem more peaceful and benign. And you need cheap, abundant energy to be wealthy.
They live in a fantasy world with no grasp of history. They’ve bought into the “Noble Savage” concept fully. They would be among the first to starve to death in their “utopia”
Scientific like Fauci is a doctor, I guess.
Since SA was sold to a German publisher, it has become neither scientific nor American.
You took the words out of my mouth (or off my keyboard).
Unscientific Americans
In figure 2, I’m glad to see a linear regression, however no R-square value reported, which is a guide to tell how much the data fits the straight line; at least I didn’t see it upon quick browsing. This is what I was inviting you to do Anthony; on my side, both in research and in pharmaceutical data for quality control and validation processes, I use further analysis to study trends in data through more geometrical analysis; I adapted the method from math analysis of chemical reactions and have proven it useful in an unpublished study that I conducted with brainwaves to differ normal behavior versus sick.The mere observation of wave patterns as in a simple regression from the raw data, as in figure 2, or even simpler observation of frequency/wavelength as it happens for EEG, is NOT the most accurate/best approach to address the interpretation of the data; a more rigorous analysis re-organizing the data, and rather than observing the trend of the raw data, it is order in such a way that more options beside linear, such as quadratic/power/logarithmic/exponential behavior can be more appropriate to study normality versus deviations. I don’t see that sort of more profound studies whenever I see environmental/economical/political data, and this is for me another source of incompleteness in the conclusions of whatever they call significant warming and CO2 emissions/concentrations; I still agree with the valid scientific questions of “CO2 causing permanent warming” that have been put forward by many scientists; the claim appears
to me that they are giving CO2 properties beyond its capabilities based on molecular structure, as compared to the biological world of substances like steroids, which are relatively small, but do have the capability of causing permanent and significant changes at very low concentrations. I’m also still awaiting for a definite consensus of independent scientists that can make the so-called climate change qualify for a Nobel Prize recognition, the ultimate scientific acceptance of an issue. In pharmaceutical science, FDA requires us to ensure the cleanness and safety of drugs to have in place quality control analyses and validation tests, which are tests to ensure that the tests are suitable for the conclusions; we have to implement 2-3 levels of testing to prove our findings true with very complex math/statistical approaches that many make a living as consultants for the industry, using certifications such as Sigma Xi. Now, why is the government pushing us to ensure the veracity and validity of drug testing through layers of testing and expensive costs to do so, but we in return cannot ask the government to adapt their same approach to the issues such as climate change/political conspiracies?? It’s called double standard!
Thanks. JBVigo, PhD
Sorry I meant to refer to Figure 1
Jimmy, R^2 is a test of linearity. The purpose of the line was simply to derive a trend. I knew the data were not linear already.
Twelve authors to write the bogus SA review of Koonin’s book.
Forty years ago, SA was an enjoyable read and informative. Can not remember the last time I read anything in SA.
Twelve? If he were wrong, one would have been enough.
Anything that starts with the obligatory photo of black steam coming out of a stack I automatically discount.
We stopped subscribing to Scientific American years ago when they ran that special issue on GMO food and printed only what the companies producing the GMOs claim publicly. They even lied and said the FDA had tested these foods. The FDA never tests anything themselves. There were quite a few untruths like that which would have been apparent to anyone who fact checked. They devoted an entire issue to promoting GMO foods whit nothing other than material issued by the companies that produce them.
They have done similar with Warming and Climate Change propaganda. They slip little insinuations and false factoids into articles which are irrelevant to the subject of the article but promote the belief in the Climate Warming Theory.
It is no longer a magazine of science.
Andy,
While reading “Unsettled”, I was particularly interested in the conversation with Hans Joachim Schellenhuber who seems to have invented the 2 degrees C warming.
It led me to think about the issue of “carbon pollution”.
In “Green Zero”, his recent 2021 Quarterly Essay contribution,the just retired Chief Scientist of Australia Dr.Allan Finkel has firmly stated that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant nor is it toxic although it is a greenhouse gas.
In his terms it all comes down to the enhanced greenhouse effect.
In Australia since 1996 we have had a list of pollutants the National Pollutants Inventory(NPI) with 93 elements and compounds declared pollutants, not including C or CO2.
In 2018, the Department of Science carried out a review of the NPI.
It showed there are now 2 categories of pollutants being “non-greenhouse pollutants” ( namely the original 93) and “greenhouse gas pollutants”.
The latter seem to originate at the UN pursuant to Kyoto and the Paris international covenants.
My question is, who determined that CO2 is a pollutant and when?
I appreciate that the EPA has its endangerment finding and that the phrase ‘carbon pollution’ appears no doubt in various UN reports.
Any answer?
Herbert, This is described in detail in my latest book, Politics and Climate Change: A History. But two events caused the endangerment finding. First the Supreme Court made a very faulty ruling in 2007 that said the EPA decides what is a pollutant and what isn’t, no checks no balances. Then Obama was elected, and they ordered the EPA to say CO2 was a pollutant. It was done, and it has not been undone to date. But it is obviously wrong.
Andy,
Thanks.
In the last two weeks I have bought your book on Kindle but yet to read beyond early part.
I have got caught up in reading “Unsettled” and other trivia like exercise, housework and gardening.
It’s amazing what you can find if I use the Index to your book!
Pp152-153.
Off now to read the book and answer my own question.
Thanks again.