Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
As with many of my meanderings through scientific landscapes, this one starts with “I got to wondering …”.
In this case, I got to wondering how well the Central England Temperature (“CET”) matches up with the temperature of the planet.
In part, I was wondering because I keep reading that the Little Ice Age, which bottomed out in about 1700AD, was just a European phenomenon. I’ve often wondered if just a part of the world could cool as much as it did in the Little Ice Age without the rest of the world cooling as well.
The CET is one of the longer temperature records. It’s a curious record in that it’s made up of a combination of temperature records of a changing variety of stations in the general area of Central England. It stretches from 1659 to the present. Here’s the more recent part of the CET record (seasonality removed) and the Berkeley Earth global temperature record.
Figure 1. Monthly Central England Temperature (CET) and Berkeley Earth global temperature.
Hmmm … looking at that it seems that there is very little relationship between the two. The R^2 (lower left corner) is a measure of the closeness of the relationship, varying from R^2 = 0 (no relationship) to R^2 = 1 (total agreement). Pondering the question, I realized that the problem is that over a short period of time, months or years rather than decades or centuries, the temperature in a small area of the planet like Central England varies a lot more than the temperature of the globe.
So what I needed to do was to adjust the short-term variance of the CET to match that of the Berkeley record, while leaving the long-term variations intact.
To do that I first took a LOWESS smooth of the CET data. That gave me Figure 2.
Figure 2. Full Central England Temperature record, along with a LOWESS smooth of the CET. You can see the coldest part of the Little Ice Age around 1700AD.
Then I subtracted the LOWESS smooth from the recent CET data (from 1850 to the present to match the period of the Berkeley Earth data). This left me with just the short-term (months to years, not decades or centuries) variations in the CET data.
I also did the same to the Berkeley Earth temperature data, to determine the short-term variations in that data.
Once I had both sets of short-term variations, I adjusted the average size of the CET short-term variations to match the average size of the corresponding Berkeley Earth short-term variations. Finally, I added the LOWESS smooth back in to reconstruct the original CET data, but with much less short-term variations.
I then used a simple linear regression on the CET data to give the best overall fit to the Berkeley Earth data. Figure 3 shows that result.
Figure 3. Central England Temperature, variance adjusted, compared to the Berkeley Earth global temperature.
This was a big surprise to me, and surprises like this are what keep me doing science. I did not expect the temperature of a small part of England to be in such good agreement with the global temperature. The R^2 is 0.67, much larger than the previous R^2 of 0.07 shown in Figure 1. And since the Little Ice Age is clearly visible in the earlier part of the CET record shown in Figure 2, this greatly ups the odds that the Little Ice Age was a global phenomenon.
Now, I’ve also heard the claim about US temperature records, that the US is only ~ 2% of the global area and thus we shouldn’t expect it to be similar to the global record. So I used the same technique to compare the Berkeley Earth US record with the Berkeley Earth global record. Figure 4 shows that result:
Figure 4. US temperature, variance adjusted, compared to the Berkeley Earth global temperature.
Now, the US is much larger than Central England, and thus as we might expect, the agreement with the global temperature is even better than that of the CET. The R^2 is now up to 0.76. Over the last 170 years, the US temperature has been doing very close to what the global temperature has been doing. Who knew? Certainly not me.
Next, here is the correlation of individual 1° latitude x 1° longitude gridcells, variance-adjusted as described above, with the global average temperature.
Another surprise. The land masses generally correlate well with global average temperature, as does much of the ocean … except the North Atlantic, which is negatively correlated with the global mean.
Finally, with all of the above in mind, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the Little Ice Age was most likely a global phenomenon.
And that was my scientific surprise for today … how was your day?
My very best to all,
w.
A few years ago, I was looking at how station distance from the equator affected temperature data over time. The Berkely Earth data at the time gave the following result:
Source:
File Generated: 16-Mar-2019 19:51:19
Dataset Collection: Berkeley Earth Merged Dataset – version 2
Type: TMAX – Monthly
Version: LATEST – Breakpoint Corrected
It might be interesting to see some peer reviewed global temperature reconstructions so that we can better assess whether or not the MWP or LIA was globally synchronous and with what magnitude.
Hey there bdgwx:
Here are just a couple for starters:
Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia
PAGES 2k Consortium
Nature Geoscience May 2013
“There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age”
No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the preindustrial Common Era
Neukom et al. Nature 2019
“Here we use global palaeoclimate reconstructions for the past 2,000 years, and find no evidence for preindustrial globally coherent cold and warm epochs”
MGC, please read Steve McIntyre’s analysis of the various PAGES2k studies at his Climate Audit. In general, a number of PAGES2k studies are piles of crap. They have over 70 people around the world submitting their various proxy reconstructions at different times. Depending on which proxies they cherrypick (ex post screening) for a particular study they can include upside down proxies, invalid stripbark pine proxies, obsolete proxy series (ignoring those updates by individual proxy developers) & etc. A recurring problem is the use of invalid statistical methods and hiding unfavorable statistical validation results.
If you haven’t read the following you don’t know what you are dealing with:
The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montfort
Blowing Smoke by Rud Istvan
A Disgrace to the Profession by Mark Stein
Thank you. I was not aware of Neukom et al. 2019. I now have it in my stash though.
As soon as anyone cites PAGES2K, I know they can be safely ignored. See McIntyre’s analyses of that rubbish. Go here for links to 19 posts on the subject.
w.
Can you provide a global temperature reconstruction that you do not consider rubbish? Loehle 2007 maybe?
McIntyre himself claims that Pages 2k made revisions that addressed at least some of his objections. Updated reconstructions published by Pages 2k since then still find the same results. As do many other researchers.
This is very reminiscent of McIntyre’s objections to Mann’s original hockey stick study. The North Report which investigated Mann’s work actually agreed with McIntyre’s criticisms of Mann’s PCA method, yet also concluded that it was only a small influence on end results and Mann’s conclusions remained valid.
Despite McIntyre’s objections this time, Pages 2k conclusions also remain valid.
Your vague handwaving is meaningless, tedious, and boring.
McIntyre claims PAGES2K made revisions? To what? Where?
“Pages 2k conclusions also remain valid.”?? Which conclusions? About what?
Not sure why I bother even answering you. The First Rule Of Pig Wrestling is looming larger.
w.
re: “McIntyre claims PAGES2K made revisions? To what? Where?”
Thanks for demonstrating, Willis, that you haven’t even bothered to read for yourself the Climate Audit references that you posted.
YOU made the dang claim, not me. So answer the question or STFU.
w.
Here are few that I’m aware of.
Shakun et al. 2012 – Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation
Marcott et al. 2013 – A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years
Kaufman et al. 2020 – Holocene global mean surface temperature, a multi-method reconstruction approach
Osman et al. 2021 – Globally resolved surface temperatures since the Last Glacial Maximum
bdgwx,
Does it not excite your curiousity when you disciver that some of these authors have had papers retracted and others asked to retract for clear scientific reasons?
An average reader might conclude that this topic sits in a nest of scientific discontent. Geoff S
It always excites my curiosity when publications get retracted or rejected. That usually means there is an egregious mistake. Usually the journal will post a note on the publication if it is retracted. And there is usually a note on submissions that are rejected. I didn’t see that note on any of these publications. I did a google search as well and I still don’t see a retraction notice and they obviously got accepted. It is possible I’m just not looking in the right place though. Can you post a link to what you are looking at?
Is whining about “peer review” all you know how to do?
This analysis by Willis, while quite interesting, does not support the existence of a spatially coherent, global “Little Ice Age”, as many here would like to imagine. His analysis does demonstrate tight correlations between locations on the globe in the current era, but in the current era only, and not during any other eras.
Besides, the scientific literature already contains lots of research evidence demonstrating that the tight correlations seen today are unique to our era and are not observed in other eras.
Neukom et al, Nature 2019, as just one of many examples, states that they find strong evidence that current climate change trends are “unprecedented in spatial consistency within the context of the past 2,000 years.” Many others have found similar results.
The notion that this particular analysis supports a “global Little Ice Age” is unfounded, unwarranted, and is already contradicted by the preponderance of evidence found in the scientific research literature.
Politically motivated pseudoscience is the enemy of scientific enquiry.
And being motivated to eliminate the little ice age, creative minds backed by government money set out to stitch up a theory that it was only an ice age in an insignificant part of the world.
So if you were trying to get that pig to fly of course you’d spin the yarn of unprecedented spatial consistency. It just sounds so sciency.
Hello again Forrest –
I provided evidence from research references to back my statements. In contrast, you delivered nothing but unsubstantiated conspiracy theory drivel and childishly made fun of the carefully selected vocabulary that research scientists used in their publication so that they could very precisely convey their conclusions.
Who exactly is the enemy of scientific inquiry here?
I’m severely disappointed. I expected so much better from you.
You provided tendentious GIGO CACA.
Actual paleoclimatological research shows the same patterns in Southern, Northern, Eastern and Western Hemispheres of centennial and millennial cycles. The physical data also provide explanations for these regular cycles.
So sad to see WUWT cultists like Tillman pretending that research published in some of the most prestigious scientific journals in the entire world are “GIGO CACA”, while also pretending that never-checked-for-accuracy, mere back of the envelope “analyses” by amateur hacks on some propaganda website are the “gold standard”.
So ridiculously juvenile.
Prestigious journals publishing pal-reviewed lies.
Please use your real name, MGC, so that we might evaluate your scientific credentials, or lack thereof.
Compare your work with mine, for rating whose is juvenile.
The scientific fact is that earth has cooled for six years and two months since February 2016, despite higher than ever CO2 levels. This after flat global temperature between super Los Ninos of 1998 and 2016.
No GHE for 24 years means that CO2 is not the control knob on climate, as was already known from the 32 years of cooling after WWII to 1977, despite steadily growing CO2.
“Prestigious journals publishing pal-reviewed lies”
Merely because you say so, Tillman. Every major scientific research organization on the planet says otherwise. I’ll accept their word over yours any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
re: “The scientific fact is that earth has cooled for six years and two months since February 2016”
Most of the GHE warming goes into the oceans. The oceans have not cooled one bit. And last I looked, the oceans were part of the earth. Your claim is therefore false.
MGC May 8, 2022 8:19 am
Not true. There are a host of peer-reviewed papers pointing out huge problems with the peer-review process.
You should know by now that you really need to do your homework before making claims here.
w.
Willis, ocean sea surface temperatures are not in any way a valid representation of accumulated heat content in the oceans.
“you really need to do your homework before making claims”
Translation….”I don’t like your data. I prefer my own”
This is getting embarrassing.
Dear MGC, Tell us your understanding of how the oceans (at any depth) are warmed…More specifically, tell us your understanding of how the oceans (at any depth) have ”accumulated heat” since 2016….
Mike, sorry that you are apparently unable to accept simple facts.
Temperatures at just the surface of the ocean cannot possibly represent an adequate characterization of the thermal state of the ocean depths.
This should be obvious even to a grade school child. Why is this difficult for you?
Never said they did sunshine.
So is that your answer tot the above question then?
I think you might have stumped him.
Irony alert! Shields up!
Projection alert!
mgcricket resorts to the same ad hominems repeatedly and uses the same false claims.
Representing mgcricket’s desperate attempts to slime or diminish the comment/commenter. Reflecting mgcricket’s inability to respond factually and scientifically.
mgcricket relies upon “hand waving” and projecting leftist beliefs and malfeasance as sins of climate realists.
Sorry ATheoK, but most of the GHE warming does go into the oceans, just as I stated. This is known scientific fact.
The oceans have not cooled one bit; they’ve continued to accumulate heat. None of your juvenile ad hominem screeching changes these easily verifiable facts.
Try looking in the mirror. If you are lucky you might grow up one day.
”…and is already contradicted by the preponderance of evidence found in the scientific research literature.”
Like Michael Mann?? Who had to dream up that so as it didn’t contradict his fraudulent hockey stick!
hey there aussiecol –
Sorry to see that you are not aware that Mann’s “hockey stick” study has been corroborated over and over and over again over the past quarter century, by many different researchers from many different nations using many different techniques.
What, your WUWT propaganda puppet masters never apprised you of these facts?
Lordy! How can that be?
OMG LOL!
Now you’re just being blatantly stupid.
The hokey stick has been discredited over and over and over again using not only proxies but written accounts of historical observation. (LIA)
Sorry Mike. Baloney. Pure baloney. You’re just blindly parroting the anti-science propaganda that your WUWT puppet masters have spoon fed you.
Numerous proxy research studies over the past two decades (Marcot, Moberg, Hegerl, Ljungqvist, Pages 2k, Neukom, and others) have all found results very similar to Mann’s original work.
The “written accounts of historical observation (LIA)” you speak of are predominately from just one small portion of the world (Europe) and do not adequately represent the entire globe.
The trick fixed it so that your “studies” are fish wrappers not science … you know it and still act like your team never got caught … shameless …
Really? Here we are years and years later, and yet we have ignorant folks like Dark Lord still actually believing this horse manure nonsense about scientists having been “caught” in the so-called “climategate” so-called “scandal”.
I’m ashamed for you, Dark Lord. So out of touch with reality.
MGC,
After Climategate, I was one of the scientists who wrote to some of the subsequent inquiries.Here is my submission to the Russell inquiry, for which I did not even receive the courtesy of an acknowledgement of receipt.
Do tell me which mistakes I made in it.
Geoff S
http://www.geoffstuff.com/russell.doc
Problem with old file format.
Pls try this:
http://www.geoffstuff.com/russell.doc
Hey there Geoff –
Here’s my take: numerous research publications since “climategate” have only further reinforced the conclusions about climate reconstructions that East Anglia scientists had come to by that point in time. The weight of all that accumulated evidence leads me to believe that the objections in your file to those conclusions were, for whatever reasons, unfounded.
And I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to comb through your file in detail to try to find what those reasons might be.
Pure bovine excrement.
MGC, clearly you haven’t done your homework. Climategate was indeed a scandal. How do I know? Because I was the man who made the first Freedom of Information Act request to Phil Jones, who then lied through his teeth to me about it. Jones and all of them are convicted by their own words. I’m mentioned by name in the emails, emails that allow us to see in their own words that indeed they were lying, cheating, and double-dealing.
The full story of my participation in Climategate, and the scientists’ reprehensible and at times illegal actions, is here. Unless you can point to any errors in what I’ve written, you can take your claims that the scientists were innocent and that it wasn’t a scandal and firmly place them up where solar panels won’t work …
w.
Willis –
Did these scientists act poorly? At times, absolutely. That much has long been admitted.
However, and I know you will disagree, I support their point of view that the FOI requests eventually turned into something “more to inconvenience than to obtain useful information”.
I also have to take some issue with a statement you made in that post from 12 years ago that you “respect actual scientists”. Though I haven’t spent much time on this website, I’ve already seen multiple examples from you of clear disrespect of actual scientists. In fact, I’ve pointed some of these out to you already.
Lastly, if we really want to talk about “scandal” and “illegal actions”, #1 on the list is the hacking and stealing of their email records.
MGC May 7, 2022 9:32 pm
No, they didn’t “act poorly”. They acted vilely, unethically, and at times illegally.
Clearly, you didn’t read what I wrote. They were already planning to lie and cheat before the first FOIA request arrived.
I respect actual scientists greatly. However, there are a host of people out there with PhDs working as scientists who are scum. Michael Mann, for example, illegally deleted emails under a FOIA request and pilfered my idea and published it as his own. And Phil Jones refused to reveal his data because someone might find errors in it. Those folks I don’t have ANY respect for.
Google “tu quoque”. It’s a known logical error that you’re guilty of here.
I’m sorry, MGC, but the scientists involved in Climategate are proven by their own words to be pond scum … and you are defending them?
There’s a poem about your choice of the Climategate conspirators as your company …
w.
Second topic, and which is really the point I was talking about to begin with:
Have the conclusions derived from the East Anglia scientists work ever been established as “fraudulent” ? No. In fact, it is just the opposite. Numerous research publications from all over the world over the past decade have only further supported their research conclusions.
Dang, MGC, miss the point much?
We can’t say if their conclusions are fraudulent because they REFUSED TO REVEAL THEIR DATA!!
Duh …
W.
The fact that multiple researchers over the past decade, using a variety of different techniques, have found similar results, is good evidence that their conclusions were and are not “fraudulent”. But apparently you’d prefer to just pretend that ain’t so. Whatever.
MGC,
You might ask yourself why the PAGES people (when last I looked) have no examples of proxies from mainland Australia, a somewhat key geography in looking at global climate history. There was one from Tasmania, a couple from New Zealand.
Now, Australian Universities and CSIRO have been hotbeds of support for global warming. David Karoly has been a leader, sad to find a paper he co-authored with Joelle Gergis and others from PAGES was retracted. One would have imagined many teams from our abundant universities combing Australia for proxies, particularly those that pass screening tests as reliable indicators of global warming as the current fix seems to require.
What do we have? Crickets.
It is my uninformed opinion that they have done many studies; but they did not find any or many that showed what they were looking for, namely global warming by proxy T measurements.
Why else is the Australian mainland lacking in published proxy papers? It is almost the same area as USA48 and has lots of trees with rings, even had M Mann resident at a university.. Geoff S
I see 9 proxies from Australia in the PAGES2K database. [PAGES2K Consortium 2017] [data]
bdgwx –
If you look closely, all 9 of those Australasia proxies are either from New Zealand or Tasmania; none are from the Australian mainland itself. This is what prompted that unhinged “didn’t find what they were looking for … as the current fix seems to require” conspiracy theory twaddle from Geoff S.
MGC,
The “fix” to which I refer involves pre-screening of proxy data to see if it has a chance to give a result. Described in more detail here:
https://climateaudit.org/2014/11/22/data-torture-in-gergis2k/
If you have actual knowledge greater than a style of trolling, you might advance a reason why there were no proxy studies from mainland Australia. I would find it very hard to accept that none were done before PAGES2K. I am searching for an explanation of this drought of proxy T papers from the Australian mainland.
Also.in case you and others are not up to speed on the retracted Gergis paper, here is a reminder.
Gergis Australian hockeystick is back: How one typo took four years to fix « JoNova (joannenova.com.au)
Geoff S
That climate audit reference provides no evidence of any so-called “fix”.
This is one of the problems with many contrarians claims. They say there is an issue with such and such evidence, but they usually do not come with a proposed fix and the application of that fix to see just how different the new result is. There is no way to tell if the issue had a significant impact or not even if it was a valid issue. I call them “nuh-uh” arguments and it is why I often ask for an alternative to what is being criticized. In lieu of not being given an alternative we have no other choice but to form positions around the consilience of evidence that is available.
Does the fact that there are no non-coral proxies on mainland Australia compromise PAGES2k’s global temperature profile significant? Maybe. But unless someone provides an alternative to PAGES2k with the missing Australian mainland proxies we have no other choice but to use what we’ve got just like how it works every other discipline of science.
Your definition of a choice should not be binary. In science, if data is not fit for purpose you discard it. You find another way to get the information you need. You don’t just shrug your shoulders and say “Oh well, it’s all we got so we’ll use it anyway. That’s not science, it is pseudoscience! It is what is practiced by mathematicians, not physical scientists.
The fact that no one can get funding to provide better data is a telling observation on the state of climate science today.
Goofy Gorman bleats: “That’s not science, it is pseudoscience!”
Sorry Gorman, but its those silly, zero supporting evidence “Nuh Uh because I say so” so-called “objections” to actual science from you and your fellow WUWT fools that are the real pseudo-science nonsense here.
Yes, bdgwx, the contrarian “arguments” are so often little more than what I like to call “Nu Uh because I say so” objections, which are hardly worth serious attention.
I’ve really liked your method of asking for an alternative to what is being criticized. Seems like most all the time the “response” to that question is nothing but crickets … which is in itself quite telling.
Yeah, I see what you’re saying about them not being mainland Australia. I think that means the coral records just off the coast would not count either since they aren’t on land.
Bdgwx,
You are wrong and I am right.
Read that paper you referenced, then give me the name of one location that is on mainland Australia.
Now be a good lad and apologise.
Geoff S
Here is at least one paper from the mainland. In fact, not far from home, at Mt Baw Baw. It was in the original Pages2K set.
But there is a reason why tree proxies are not abundant. You need long-lived tries where growth is limited primarily by temperature, ie at the tree-line. That means only far SE Vic/NSW, or Tasmania. There isn’t much in terms of distance between them, and Tassie has more suitable trees.
Nick, I just read the paper. (Your link is broken). Not one word about Baw Baw. And it only covers 31 years!?!
Nor is there any temperature reconstruction. All they say it is MIGHT be of use in a reconstruction.
Sorry, Nick, but that’s pathetic.
w.
Willis,
“Nor is there any temperature reconstruction.”
No one said there was. Geoff’s query was:
“You might ask yourself why the PAGES people (when last I looked) have no examples of proxies from mainland Australia”
and these authors provide one. It is #Aus_25 in the original PAGES2K , titled BAW BAW, and they link it to this paper, as presumably the authors did when they archived it. The spreadsheet entry in PAGES2K said:
Proxy #Aus_25
Region: Australia
Area:
Site: BawBaw
Lat=-36, Lon=148
Type: Tree ring
Measurement: Tree ring width
Sign relation: Negative
Resolution: 1
Ref: Brookhouse, M., Lindesay, J. and Brack, C. (2008) The potential of tree rings in Eucalyptus pauciflora for climatological and hydrological reconstruction. Geographical Research 46(4): 421–434.
It’s true as I noted that the paper is about Kosciusko; presumably that is another mainland example that they didn’t archive.
Thanks, Nick. I just read the paper. I couldn’t find the name “baw baw” in it anywhere. Can you point it out?
Also, claiming that 31 years of tree rings are a “proxy” is a ludicrous abuse of English.
w.
Willis,
“Also, claiming that 31 years of tree rings are a “proxy” is a ludicrous abuse of English.”
I cited the paper because, as noted above, it is the one cited as reference in the Pages2K database. But the archive that exists there is of Baw Baw and has about 200 years of data. When Pages2K first came out, I wrote an active viewer which graphed the data and summarised the metadata in the spreadsheet. The plot for Baw Baw is below, in black. You have to click entries, first for Australia, then for BawBaw, to see this::
Again, Geoff’s query was why there seemed to be no mainland tree-ring proxies in Pages2K. This example clearly answers the question – there is at least one (#AUS_25). Whether the paper cited in Pages2K as reference (about Kosciusko) is well-linked is another question. I presume the citation is for the methods description.
Read the dang paper, Nick. Here’s the opening of the Conclusions section:
Why didn’t they use all of the data?
So yes, to no one’s surprise who has seen the mountains of garbage shoveled into PAGES2K, I’m sure they did use 200 years of data that even the authors of the underlying study wouldn’t stand behind … it’s not uncommon in the Mann-alike clones.
w.
Willis,
“Why didn’t they use all of the data?”
You still don’t get that they are describing a different site in NSW, which they describe as:
“Tree-ring width data used in this study are derived from full stem, cross-sections from two treeline sites – Blue Cow and Mount Perisher (BC and MP in Figure 1)”
The proxy site which appeared in the original Pages2K depository was at Mt Baw Baw, hundreds of km away in Victoria. Same species of tree, though, and so I suppose the paper is cited in Pages2K as having demonstrated the use as a proxy.
Nick Stokes May 8, 2022 8:56 pm
Nick, let me remind you of your claim:
Now you are claiming that that paper, the pape that you linked to, actually has nothing to do with what you were talking about … which is fine, I suppose, but how about you blame yourself for the error and not me?
And you STILL haven’t provided any source for the purported Mt. Baw Baw data, which makes it impossible to determine if your new claim is correct or not.
w.
Willis,
“Now you are claiming that that paper, the pape that you linked to, actually has nothing to do with what you were talking about … which is fine, I suppose, but how about you blame yourself for the error and not me?
And you STILL haven’t provided any source for the purported Mt. Baw Baw data”
I noted here, immediately following my original comment, that the paper was about Kosciuszko, not Baw Baw. It still qualifies for Geoff’s query about mainland proxies. But more significant is the inclusion of the Baw Baw set in the original Pages2K paper, which links to the paper I linked. I of course gave a source for the data that I graphed. It is the original Pages2K paper, labelled as Database S1. It is a 5284 kb XLSX file, so I would strongly recommend you use my viewer linked above, but you can work through it if you prefer. Again, we are talking about proxy #aus_25, BAW BAW.
PAGES2K is NOT the source of the Baw Baw data. It uses some data from somewhere, but the link it provides is NOT to the Baw Baw data.
So we’re still in mystery as to the source, as I pointed out. And all you’ve done is to provide another reason to distrust PAGES2K, they can’t even identify the source of their own data.
w.
Willis,
“PAGES2K is NOT the source of the Baw Baw data”
It was my source. But the data is also archived in the NOAA repository here.
Thanks, Nick. Been there, done that. I’d followed the PAGES2K link back to NOAA, and from there until it runs out.
The NOAA repository links it to three papers—the one you linked to, Brookhouse 2006 (which doesn’t mention BawBaw), Brookhouse 2005 (which doesn’t mention BawBaw), and Neukom & Gergis.
I thought I’d finally found the source, because N&G actually mention “Baw Baw” … but here’s what they say about it.
“Used to reconstruct streamflow” …
So we are still left with PAGES2K using as a “temperature proxy” an untethered bunch of numbers which as best as I can tell were used to reconstruct streamflow … climate science at its finest.
w.
Nick, thanks for a rational, reasoned explanation for a lack of records from the Australian mainland. I’m so tired of seeing folks irrationally jumping to off-the-wall conspiracy theories that have zero backing evidence.
MGC,
All we need now is a peer-reviewed, accepted paper published in a high quality science journal that lists the reasons, with data, why there are essentially no temperature proxies in PAGES2K, from the vast Australian mainland (excluding retracted papers).
Don’t sceptics like you require that level of publication to make a valid point? I do not think that Nick’s unsupported guesses are formal enough. Geoff S
Hey there Geoff,
If you want to characterize Nick’s rather cogent explanation as merely an “unsupported guess” that was “not formal enough”, that’s fine; but then I can only imagine in wonder what an appropriately comparative description should be for your “they didn’t find what they were looking for” speculation that was offered on the same question.
Geoff,
“All we need now is a peer-reviewed, accepted paper published in a high quality science journal that lists the reasons, with data, why there are essentially no temperature proxies in PAGES2K, from the vast Australian mainland”
The paper I cited comes pretty close:
“Eucalyptus pauciflora Sieb. Ex. Spreng. dominates the alpine treeline – the climatic limit of tree-dominated communities – in the Australian Alps. Like treeline ecosystems throughout the world, the position of the E. pauciflora treeline appears to be sensitive to temperature (Slatyer and Ferrar, 1978). Despite great edaphic and biological differences, treelines in the world’s high altitudes and latitudes – including the E. pauciflora treeline – generally occur where the mean maximum air temperature of the warmest month is 10°C (Costin, 1967; Körner, 1998). Consequently, the position of the E. pauciflora treeline may be highly sensitive to changes in mean temperature.”
There are very few parts of the vast Australian mainland “where the mean maximum air temperature of the warmest month is 10°C”.
I think there is a further difficulty. The snowgum forests on the mainland are subject to bushfire, and are very badly affected. Much of Victoria’s alpine forest was burnt in 2003 and 2006, and has only partly recovered. There are much better forests in Tassie, where the King Billy pines can live to a great age (though now also increasingly damaged by fire).
For those actually interested in the myriad of problems with the PAGES2K Australia data, see here.
w.
Is there an alternative to PAGES2K that has these problems addressed that we can use for comparison?
For those actually interested in the myriad of problems with McIntyre’s analysis of Pages 2k, this comment found at the reference that Willis provided is worth a read:
“McIntyre … has never shown assembled proxies himself and combined them in his own graph. He has never acknowledged that -despite the limitations- it is clear that the current temperatures and speed of temperature increase are unprecedented in the Common Era. In the past 20 years, he has not presented any credible arguments to question or invalidate that overall conclusion.”
I agree. McIntyre’s objections seem to be, in large part, a lot of ankle biting. Despite his criticisms of certain individual bits and pieces, the overall conclusions have remained steadfast.
MGC is so stupid that he thinks if I point out a problem with say a house door that won’t close, it’s not a valid objection unless I demonstrate that I can build a better house …
Look, Mister “I Don’t Have The Albondigas To Sign My Own Name”. There is NO requirement that someone falsifying a scientific argument be able to provide an alternative. None. If I provide evidence that Mann used the Tiljander proxy upside down, his claim is falsified without me needing to do one single additional thing. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong, regardless of what else I might do or not do in that or any other arena.
And in that regard, here’s my analysis of Mann 2008. Don’t bother responding to it unless you have the courage to QUOTE something you think is wrong, and then show (demonstrate, not claim) what is wrong with it.
Because anything else you might say about it is just you jerkin’ your gherkin, and nobody is interested in that.
w.
Your house analogy is a good one, Willis. Let’s continue it a little further:
You want to pretend that simply because you’ve pointed out that a house door fits poorly and won’t shut, that makes the entire house unfit to live in.
That’s how I see the “skeptical” objections that have been raised concerning historic climate reconstructions.
I looked at the coordinates of the 9 “Aus” entries. They are all on Tasmania or New Zealand which I agree is not the mainland. I’m following what you are saying now. And I’m guessing the corals don’t count either since they are not considered the mainland since they aren’t on land? I’m sorry.
bdgwx,
The corals are troublesome because there are few if any available/reliable/pertinent records of surface sea temperatures to allow a good calibration with coral properties.
Also, see Bill Johnston’s work on an 1891 scientific survey up and down the GBR, showing in great detail how the temperatures were the same then, as now. No warming means no way to calibrate with coral properties.
Trends in sea surface temperature at Townsville, Great Barrier Reef | http://www.BomWatch.com.au
You cannot be doing valid science if you simply ignore this work. You are not being scientific if you toss it aside and say “My mind is made up, the waters in the great Barrier Reef are warming and have been warming for many decades.: That is not proof. Geoff S
Thanks for the link. Yeah, I’ll start researching that. I know almost nothing about coral proxies or many of the non-tree proxies for that matter.
Geoff S
So sad to see you immediately jumping to some kind of nefarious conspiracy theory “conclusion” for which you have nothing but unsupported conjecture and zero definitive evidence.
What published climate reconstruction research of the Australian mainland that I was able to find immediately refutes your wild conspiracy theory twaddle that “they did not find any that showed what they were looking for … as the current fix seems to require”. See these examples:
1- Global warming in the context of 2000 years of Australian alpine temperature and snow cover McGowan et al 2018
“The current rate of warming is unmatched for the past 2000 years”
2- Australasian Temperature Reconstructions Spanning the Last Millennium
Gergis et al 2016
“the warmest 30-yr periods occur after 1950 in 77% of ensemble members over all methods.”
“the most recent instrumental temperatures (1985–2014) are above the 90th percentile of all 12 reconstruction ensembles”
“The reconstructed twentieth-century warming cannot be explained by natural variability alone”
So much for your juvenile conspiracy theory twaddle.
You REALLY need to keep up, MGC. The Gergis paper has been withdrawn because of errors.
w.
Willis, the paper I cited is not the withdrawn Gergis AMS 2012 paper.
Indeed so. The paper is in J Climate here.
That J Climate paper lists 13 sites for coral studies. Only 2 are near Australia, Ningaloo WA and Havannah east of Mission beach, Qld. Others are miles away, two barely even in the Southern hemisphere.
My comment about SST being non-pertinent for calibration relates only to Havannah, in this case.
It remains the case that, for reasons unstated, the vast Australian mainland is under-represented in proxy temperature studies in PAGES2K. That was my original point and it stands, despite some desperate trolling. Geoff S
After you read it, be sure to read the companion paper here. Sadly, Nick is recommending that you read and believe absolute garbage from a lying, cheating author. Reprehensible.
w.
No, just pointing out that despite your assertion that it was withdrawn, it is published and there in the Journal.
So to be clear, Nick, you were NOT claiming that there is any value in Gergis’s paper, just that it was republished?
Is that supposed to impress us? So what? Lots of garbage gets published, and the reworked Gergis paper is certainly that.
w.
Nick,
Thank you for joining in with good spirit.
I shall now deliver the checkmate to you, using a technique that you often use, pedantry.
You did not read my initial assertion well enough. I wrote “You might ask yourself why the PAGES people (when last I looked) have no examples of proxies from mainland Australia”. See that partenthetic “when last I looked”? You do not know when last I looked. When I did look last, I saw precisely what I reported.
Care for another game? Geoff S
MCG wrote “So sad to see you immediately jumping to some kind of nefarious conspiracy theory “conclusion” for which you have nothing but unsupported conjecture and zero definitive evidence.”
I have no idea why you think I promote some kind of conspiracy theory. Somewhere in this discussion, I referred to the topic by noting that it does not take a conspiracy theory, just people in high places telling government employees and academics on grants and teachers to use certain tools to influence the citizenry.
Sorry, Mr Troll, you just lost out big time by making stuff up. Geoff S
Sorry Geoff, but your excuses ring hollow. Certain implications flash in big red lettering in between the lines when your discussion starts right off the bat with a phrase like “as the current fix seems to require”. That was what my “conspiracy theory” comments were aimed at.
The word “fix” in this context has clearly nefarious implications: “to influence the actions, outcome, or effect of by improper or illegal methods”. (Merriam Webster)
GS –>. Do what I did and just quit feeding the troll. When he had nothing scientific to add, I grew tired of his antics. I would recommend you do the same.
re: “nothing scientific to add”
A more or less perfect description of most every Gormanian post.
Since the concept of a “global temperature” is scientific nonsense I’m not sure this proves anything … comparing real local measures to made up fantasies … obviously a fun exercise in data manipulation … try a random number generator (using the supposed global average/variation) against the global fantasy and see if it too doesn’t match after torturing it …
Is the idea of a global temperature “scientific nonsense”?
Well, yes and no.
Suppose I have a swimming pool. I buy a dozen thermometers and I mount them at various depths in the pool. At some point in the summer, I read them all, average them, and call that the “average summer temperature” of the pool.
Then I do the same thing in the winter, and to no one’s surprise, I find that the average winter temperature is much lower.
And if I do that every month, I can watch how the average temperature of the pool goes up and down with the season.
Is that “scientific nonsense”? Perhaps … but it can also be very useful information, information that behaves as expected, warmer in winter, cooler in summer, and surely more accurate than just using one thermometer in the pool..
On the other hand, TDL above is right that in a very real sense you can’t average temperatures. Why? Because temperature is an intensive property, not an extensive property.
Volume is an extensive property. If you add two one-liter containers of 80°C water together, you get two liters of water … but they’re not at 160°C.
Why? Because temperatures don’t add like volumes do, they’re an intensive property.
And to average a number of items, first you add them all together, and then divide by the count … but you can’t add temperatures, there’s no physical meaning to that.
So it’s best to consider an average temperature as a useful approximation but to be aware at all times that that is all that it is.
Regards to all,
w.
The Central England Temperature Record, despite moving about in location slightly from time to time, is probably a good general record of temperature in its area from 1659 to the present. The Berkeley Earth Global Temperature Record, however, has received a good deal of fingering since 1980 for various political reasons.
There’s actually not much “fingering” with BEST since they use the scalpel method as opposed to homogenization like what the others do [Rhode et al. 2013].
BEST is trash before 1980. It doesn’t show the Early Twentieth Century warming.
Say what?
w.
Interesting analysis, but a have a few observations.
Here are the annual CET Temperatures for the first 80 years (avoiding 1740 which was the coldest on record.)
The switch that happens in 1699 seems quite remarkable.
Willis,
I have 2 kind of technical questions based on your description of how you processed the data. Her is what you wrote:
Once I had both sets of short-term variations, I adjusted the average size of the CET short-term variations to match the average size of the corresponding Berkeley Earth short-term variations. Finally, I added the LOWESS smooth back in to reconstruct the original CET data, but with much less short-term variations.
I then used a simple linear regression on the CET data to give the best overall fit to the Berkeley Earth data. Figure 3 shows that result.
So question 1: How did you adjust the short term varaition of the 2 data sets to match, on average?
Question 2: What does it mean to ‘use[d] a simple linear regression on the CET data’ to best fit the Berkeley data?
Thanx in advance …
Q1: You take the data, and subtract the mean. Then you divide by the standard deviation of the data, and multiply it by the standard deviation of the data you are matching to. Then you add back in the mean of the data.
Q2: I fear an explanation of linear regression is beyond the scope of a comment here. You might read about it here, or google the term.
Regards,
w.
Possibly it depends on your study discipline, but correlation coefficients R^2 of the 0.7 type are often rejected as being too vague in some scientific work. As you display, Willis, there are contributions to R^2 from different effects, one being the high-frequency wriggles and the other the overall structural shape that you show with the LOWESS smooth.
Two straight lines of similar slope will give an R^2 of 1.0, rare in nature, so some of the exercise here involves moving away from that low frequency correlation effect to high frequency effects like wriggles that might show more about natural variation.
In my field of geochemistry we did not look much at an R^2 that was below about 0.8 or better, 0.85. The way the math morks, these are big jump ups from 0.7.
But, you can only use such data as there are. Autocorrelation is also a bugbear. Geoff S
Thanks Willis for this illuminating finding and at odds with climate orthodoxy that holds that regional climates are almost independent of each other.
The global colour map must have required a matched correlation curve-fit for every area pixel on the earth – quite an effort! I guess some efficient R code automated the process?
Notably Greenland appears to have a normal and unexceptional correlation with everywhere else – it’s only the North Atlantic south of Greenland that is anti-correlated. This suggests that the GISP ice core reconstructions for Greenland – which show recent warming to be a tiny fraction of Holocene temperature variation – are likely a reasonable approximation to the whole northern hemisphere at least. Warmists dismiss Greenland climate as if it was the far side of the moon, in their attempts to iron flat the Holocene, turning the GISP reconstructions (a fractal mountain range) into the Shakun-Marcott one (a squat dumpling or sausage).
On my MacBook Pro M1 machine, the R code to create the map takes about three and a half minutes to run. I could probably parallelize it to run on the multiple cores of my machine … but that would take me longer than three and a half minutes.
w.
The impact of the solar minimum is clear in this image, which shows the temperature difference between 1680, a year at the center of the Maunder Minimum, and 1780, a year of normal solar activity, as calculated by a general circulation model. Deep blue across eastern and central North America and northern Eurasia illustrates where the drop in temperature was the greatest. Nearly all other land areas were also cooler in 1680, as indicated by the varying shades of blue. The few regions that appear to have been warmer in 1680 are Alaska and the eastern Pacific Ocean (left), the North Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland (left of center), and north of Iceland (top center).
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/7122/chilly-temperatures-during-the-maunder-minimum
According to this pattern, Arctic air flows into western North America now.
Here’s what that looks like at Nullschool:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/500hPa/orthographic=-109.58,43.00,264
Hot air is being pumped into the center of the U.S because of the circulation pattern.
What effect do constant circulation systems have on temperature, especially from fall to spring?
The decrease in galactic radiation since early 2022 indicates a slow increase in the strength of the solar wind magnetic field in 25th solar cykle.
“What does global mean temperature tell us about local climate?”
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsta.2014.0426
Thanks, Willis, interesting read. The blue blob must coincide with the infamous “Labrador Triangle!”
By venturing into Trendsville, all of the Usual Suspects** seem to be Hiding the Decline.
**With apologies to Sydney Greenstreet…